Cimorene

💚 I mailed the first 4 post cards this morning! Sorry if a card with nothing on it but a quote from my list of favorite quotes seemed a little abrupt. I didn't have much room left after the quotes. I tried to start with an intro once and ran out of space for the quote. 😅 And bearing in mind that I periodically see someone ask who on their flist sent a card, they're all signed "Cim" or "Cimorene" for the sake of recognition.

💚 Turns out that getting very stressed and distracted by Anubis and Tristana's detente and forgetting to groom Rowan for nearly 20 days was bad. There were lots of incipient mats, which means when I finished with him Monday evening he had several conspicuous nearly-bald spots! (No painful ones though.) I already knew that every two weeks is manageable but really a bit too much. He hates being caught to groom him so I always feel bad, even though he enjoys it once you get going.

💚 The Feliway is here, but it can take quite a while before any effects are seen, so no news on effectivity. However, Tristana still growls a lot but she seems less scared and more annoyed and they've both taken to taunting each other through the various gates and bars. She seems genuinely annoyed and he seems to be having a great time, as if she were a young and earnest Twitter progressive and he were a troll. Even when she's free to do what she wants in 3 rooms with play structure, food, beds and people and bunnies to interact with, she'll choose to crawl into the little corner where she can see him rattling the bars on the other side just to growl at him.

💚 I finally have started a project I've been meaning to make for YEARS, an oversized thigh-length "grandpa" Aran cardigan (refers to the oversize fit and deep V neck) in black tweed with Saxon braid cables, inspired by this stranger's project (ravelry members only link). I picked my own source pattern and chose the yarn to match, only I didn't get gauge, even going down a whole mm in needle size; so I had to completely redo the math and also remake the charts from scratch. I've been in a cable haze for about five days.

See, I strongly believe that a sweater should have continuity in cables. It looks stupid to have one cable on the back and sleeves and then a different one on the front. The best Aran designs use multiple cables on front and back and then repeat some of these on the sleeves, but a lot of people (unwisely, IMO) make cardigan fronts without the main cable from the back because it was centered on the back, and two of it won't fit (including my inspiration garment up there). The very best Aran cardigans have a center back design that's split in half neatly down the front sides, but this only works with some motifs - you can't split the Saxon braid without cut edges. I can fit one on each side of the front, but I equally wanted the back design bigger, so I spent a long time trying to make a similar-looking 8- or 10-strand braid (the Saxon braid is a 6-strand braid variant), but I wasn't satisfied with any of them. I did get a 4-strand variant that looks quite nice, but ultimately, after ~10 hours with a pile of 8 highlighter colors and 12 pages of graph paper, decided to have the back braid flanked by two mirrored 3-strand braids instead. I will use a 4-strand braid on the sleeve, though, probably, instead of a Saxon braid.

She's old hat now and the others aren't afraid of her anymore, although Tristana is still a bit anxious. Snookums has told her off firmly a couple of times, and more recently has licked her when they were both on the sofa with us (causing Luci great confusion, and Wax to block him with her hand so he couldn't lick Luci's ears too much). The bunnies and Luci have 100% lost interest in each other. Yesterday I saw Tristana sneak up silently behind her and very carefully sniff her butt without disturbing the floof so that Luci wouldn't know she was doing it. OHkay you tiny little weirdo!






I mentioned last time that because they started letting her sleep in their bed, she makes it impossible to sleep if you don't let her in the bed, so we gave in last time. Snookums is a grumpy old man, and Tristana already spends like half the night out playing in the house and just comes to nap on us occasionally. So not only are Luci and Snookums both waking me up extra times in the middle of the night, there are a lot fewer cats to hug when it does happen, so I'm pretty disgruntled, even though it's nice to have a dog snuggling on your feet.

Wax has been reading the tags and comments on the Tumblr summary post of the Ana Mardoll Works for Lockheed Martin contoversy for thirty minutes or so. A little while ago she read out "Making bombs is no worse than mining ore" and just now she read out "Is working for Lockheed Martin morally okay if they give trans people healthcare?"

We did an awesome job of cleaning the entire downstairs of our house a month ago or so before the family overnight visits, and we also did a good job of keeping it that way more or less for a couple of weeks, but we are now once again at a stage where there would have to be several hours of sweeping and vacuuming in the livingroom alone to catch up with the bunny detritus. Bunnies scatter a lot of hay and a lot of dry and odorless little poop pellets everywhere. Also yesterday I brought in some little branches so there are big piles of maple seeds and leaves all over the middle of the room. I KNOW it always happens but still every time the main living area looks good for a couple of weeks I'm like "YES, we're FINALLY adulting correctly and have turned over a new leaf and are going to live like this forever!!!" Wax has another vacation coming up soon and we should tentatively have at least one set of people visiting (the younger goth lesbian cornish rex breeders who sold us Tristana, whom we have invited to meet Snookums and see her glorious and tiny final form). We talked about having over my work pal from the Red Cross store, Ella, who now works at Ikea, but she's recovering from covid-19 now, so she should do as little as possible for the next while.

As most readers of my blog will be aware, we moved to our current small island town (ca. 11k people) about 40 minutes out from Turku a few years ago, and were immediately blindsided by everything about the move going wrong, a pipe exploding and flooding the basement and breaking our hot water heater, and then my MIL dying suddenly and leaving the house half-renovated and all the money tied up in probate until well into the pandemic. So, obviously, we never got around to doing a lot of the things we intended to do 'when we got settled in', including: getting a new GP (both); getting tested for ADHD (me); finding a knitting circle (both); finding a pottery class (me); finding an early music class (me); finding a yoga class (me); finding a way to volunteer for the set dressers in the local community theater (me); starting to go on forest hikes regularly. We still haven't done any of that, not even the ones that weren't specifically kneecapped by the pandemic. Another thing we haven't done is find some way to keep up with local events. There's a free newspaper every month, but it's mostly ads and human interest stories, so... I've never remembered to look at it for information before I use it to line the bunny litter boxes. We just never remember to check, and we don't know anybody at all in town because of all the above stuff we never did, and the other thing we haven't got to do since we moved here was go to the county farm fair, where there are sheep and goats and llamas and chickens and horses you can pet and local crafts and things, because until this year it was canceled because of the pandemic! (The indoor-nature of the pandemic was a delayed piece of news around here.) And we didn't actually realize that it was going to happen this year or know when, but it was Saturday and we missed it. Wax had to work anyway, but I could have walked down there I guess. I might have. Probably not, but on the other hand... animals!

Speaking of animals, the cats are still horribly oppressed by having their ears cleaned and medicated and they hate it. Here's a 7-second video of Tristana helping wash Snookums's ear the other day.

Tristana hanging out outside in my lap and in her favorite spot, in the shadow of the hedge and looking out at the street; Snookums warming his belly in the sun; and the bunnies hanging out together on their floor cushions including the first and only time I've seen a bunny in this hilarious bunnyslug pose (absolutely the flattest bunny!) and Rowan's floofy feet. Oh! Also Tristana helping us bake banana bread.

Since waxjism did most of the work in creating our window screens, I've been trying to get her to post about them. She reacts with complete blankness, as if she can't even hear me, so probably that's a no go, but here's a picture of Tristana helping out (Tristana must ALWAYS be included in any situations or activities) and also a picture of Chief Inspector Japp in the bunny fort under the plant table.




Tomorrow the movers are coming to take our (current) little old lady tenant's stuff. She originally told us the moving was going to be completed on the 29th and merely "suggested" that she come back to do "cleaning" in the apartment "in the following days", and later even confirmed this date schedule, but when we told her the Ukrainians were planning to move their stuff in on the 30th and simply help her out with the scheduled cleaning, she responded it would be totally fine if they wanted to come help clean, but she couldn't have them putting any of their stuff in the apartment at the same time because there "wouldn't be room yet". So... in other words... "cleaning" was always code for "moving out so much stuff that there won't even be space for a suitcase or two"? This is annoying, but not entirely unanticipated. I seem to remember that when she moved in, she was still making trips back to her old apartment for a few weeks with additional loads of stuff. So we told them that if worst comes to worst, they could sleep in our downstairs guest room Thursday, and that they could put stuff in the garage in the meanwhile and we'd help them move it up the Friday. They said that wasn't necessary though - the guest room, that is. They can wait till Friday. (Rental contracts start on the first of the month, so Friday it's legally theirs regardless - I'm far from convinced that all her stuff will be gone by then.)

We retrieved the bits of the futon-sofa from the garage and discovered our first attempt to identify the correct assembly instructions misfired. (There wasn't a clear label.) I DID manage to find the correct instructions eventually, though, which is good, because it was looking slightly intimidating without them. We should be able to put it together tomorrow, hopefully, and give it to our new tenants on Friday.

And meanwhile I guess we will be sleeping in our downstairs guest room, which is just the dining room, because that's the room where there's enough empty floor to put a double/queen mattress, and also the coolest room in the house: right now our bedroom is the hottest room in the house, and while it's bearable at night, it's not pleasant. It's just got warm enough the last couple of days to make us think sleeping on the floor would be preferable. (We also considered sleeping on the balcony, but we don't have a mosquito net yet.)

I have gotten back a lot of energy level in my couple of weeks' blissful freedom from gainful employment!

A week ago Wax and I even moved a bunch of furniture around, although we ran out of energy/time halfway through. Our multi-step plan was

• Swap the wall-length plant table from Wax's upstairs libroffice into the living room - into an empty space under a north window, but the genius part is that this space was the primary pathway in the bunny area and it still is, because bunnies like walking under a little roof more than out in the open. Done!





• Remove the bookcases from one wall of the libroffice (which was lined with two parallel bookcases). Half of them go to an empty wall in the bedroom; the other half go to fill in space on the opposite wall that had plants and a little cabinet in it instead of books. Done!





• The plants go down to the plant table and the cabinet goes into the bedroom where the maroon antique blanket chest was. Done!



• The maroon antique blanket chest and Wax's wfh desk setup go to the now-empty wall of the libroffice (which means rotating the desk setup 180° and moving it a couple of meters). That's where we ran out of time eight days ago, and yesterday we made coconut macaroons and root vegetable stew instead of doing it. I've mostly tidied the smaller stuff away now, but this is what it looked like when we finished last Sunday:





• Move the vintage iron single bedframe/daybed/bench up the stairs, from under the dining room window to under the libroffice window.



• The dining room table goes to where the Heteka was (now it's in the middle of the room and you can barely walk through the dining room, which has been kind of... extra furniture hangout since day 1).

I still had a lot of motivation all week, but because I'm possibly ADHD I couldn't really focus that into doing other stuff - painting furniture, steaming wallpaper, vacuuming behind the furniture - I spent most of the week backreading all 600+ pages of entries on the blog Retro Renovation (discovered some time ago, but never read in detail). This blog is concerned with restoring early and mid-20th century homes, and especially the more generic/middle class variety of them, to period-appropriate appearance, and it's a philosophy I agree with, plus I just find design history fascinating. Most of it is not applicable to our house though, except in theory, because the materials and appearance appropriate to our 1950 Finnish house are mostly quite distinct from those of a modest suburban house of this period in the US.

Of course, I grew up in the US (an 1890s double shotgun folk Victorian with Craftsman style), and my parents and sister recently bought an extremely typical 1960 suburban ranch house in Louisiana ( Read more... ).

My head is still swimming in midcentury architecture and furnishings. After I finished backreading the whole blog, I lost myself in surfing related interior stuff and added 200+ posts to my design blog (designobjectory) drafts/queue, and I had to stop myself there.

Tristana is now more or less a fully grown kitty and probably won't get any bigger (she is still pretty small), but she is nonetheless full of youthful vim & vigor. She's a bit like a child being raised by three grandparents - me, Wax, and Snookums - preferably three grandparents tucked up in bed in a row, like the ones in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. However, she seems to thrive on all the attention and be very good at entertaining herself. And in spite of her youthful zooms and her hours-long sessions of playing with pretty much anything, she's still detectably grownupper than before.

She has successfully made friends with both bunnies pretty much, and both bunnies have been known to play with her, or at least like... try to play with her, and kind of play parallel to her while she is also playing but without really understanding what the other is doing. She's also revitalized Snookums, who is pretty frequently tempted into playing with her. Today we saw both of them playing and Inspector Japp even briefly (sort of) joining in, and not for the first time!

Her newest toy is a piece of cardboard torn off the box of fountain pen ink I opened on Thursday, and her newest hobby is sitting on top of the upside-down armchair that's stacked on top of its rightside-up twin waiting for the rain to stop so we can carry them down to store in the garage. Tristana is pretty sure they're a new cat jungle gym. And they kind of are, just one that's not technically completely structurally sound. Yesterday we had to arrest a cat when they were play-fighting on top of them twice during Dune.



She is tiny enough to frequently squeeze her entire body under Snookums's chin and wrap around his neck like a foxskin stole but backwards, because that way as much of her body is in front of his face to demand kisses/grooming as possible (and it is a fairly effective strategem).

Her newest problematic habit is sneaking up on the kitchen counter and licking things. Which is fine, but Wax tends to leave the butter knife on the edge of the sink after she makes toast or a sandwich and then use the same one again later... but that's not gonna work any more.

Thank you to everyone for suggestions and sympathy last night!

Our friend the Havanese puppy is a little bit calmer today. I think it's fair to say that everyone in this house, both human and animal, feels like they slept about 10 minutes. The bunnies were locked up in their covered homes, so they were possibly happy - I didn't hear any thumping at least - but they'd've been aware of her because she spent the time that she WAS asleep on her blankie in the entry hall where she could see the door, I'm pretty sure. She paced and whined incessantly for about a few hours first, and after that we could still hear her periodically pacing around.

Tristana spent all of yesterday avoiding the dog from the top of the upstairs bookshelves or the top of the cat tree. She gradually got a big braver, though, and this morning she voluntarily came into the same room a couple of times, albeit very cautiously. Anyway, she didn't come to bed at all, uncharacteristically. Snookums usually spends the entire night in our bed except getting up to eat, but he didn't come to bed at all either: it looks like he mostly spent it near Tristana - upstairs in the library - while the dog only came upstairs a couple of times.

Also, in a state of sleep deprivation I left Inspector Japp's cage unlocked this morning (after taking the dog out, giving the cat insulin and treats, and letting Rowan out into the diningroom, which is protected from the dog with a baby gate) and he actually elected to come out and explore even though the dog was in the room! That exploration ended with him hiding in the cat litter box to escape from the dog though, and he's back at home, all locked in again. He wasn't panicking or anything, but then, Inspector Japp never really seems to panic. He's a chill little dude.

My canine pal is now apparently relaxed on the floor next to my footstool and about to go on another walk (not, however, in the rain this time).

We went to both the local spots looking for those handy pre-made raised gardening bed thingies yesterday on Wax's day off, and they were out, so now we probably have to make our own if we want some. The question is, will we get around to buying lumber and making our own? Particularly since waxjism is scheduled to work Saturday AGAIN, meaning the next time she has 2 days off in a row where we're both free and likely to finish a carpentry project is several weeks off? Perhaps we should just plant some lettuces directly in the ground this year instead.

If we could afford a proper glass greenhouse with heating and sunlamps, which is what would be necessary to grow lettuce and herbs all winter here, we could easily make use of one, because we go through a tremendous amount of salad greens and herbs year round because each bunny eats a bowlful of them each day. Admittedly it's not a LARGE bowl, but it's still more than you'd use for two people because bunny salads need to be almost entirely made out of leafy greens, but NOT anything in the cabbage family or parsley or spinach in high quantities. Root vegetables including carrots and most fruits have too much sugar to be given to them as anything but occasional treats and snacks, so all winter we have to keep stalks of celery at all times for when we unexpectedly run low on herbs and lettuce, so they don't become sad at having extra-small salads. The majority of the bunny diet is and should be made up of grass/hay, so the salads are for variety, flavor, treats, etc, but they are the highlight of the bunny day for sure.

Our tenant suggested we should build one of those pyramidal tiered thingies that lets you grow greens up and down the sides. Certainly a good idea to avoid using up too much footprint in the sunniest part of the yard... but that's an even more elaborate carpentry project, so I'm guessing we might get around to it, what, next year? We bought some herb and lettuce and arugula and sorrel seeds yesterday and we have the remainders of several that the bunnies have recently eaten all the leaves off of as well, and surely it would be more time saving to just stick them in the ground. We bought four bags of potting soil and we've got a ton of garden compost, hay, and bunny poop (an even better fertilizer than chicken poop, and utterly dry and odorless inside, so very convenient too, although I do feel guilty that we've thrown so much of it away over the years when we didn't have a garden and were too lazy to collect it).

We have a HUGE yard, with a lot of mostly flat area in the back, but it's rather... sheltered... by very tall hedges on all sides (that we failed to get professionally trimmed in time this year so we have to live with them looking wild and abandoned another year) and a row of enormous birches and evergreens along the back of the property and a mushrooming of ugly midcentury apartment buildings across the street to the southeast, which means that the part of the yard that deserves the designation "sunny" is actually rather limited and probably only has room for, say, five or six of those standard raised bed boxes left (we put in a couple of rows of berry bushes there last year).