Hi. I’m Mateo.
It has been a pretty darn boring week for me. It has been snowing and cold, and the Mother of Cats has NOT been letting me out as much as I would like. I can see the bunnies and those horrid squirrels all running around outside, but do I get to spend time on the deck, belly flat against the wood, slowly creeping up towards the wire, digging in my back claws, dreaming of the rush towards that big fat bunny in the garden… NO. I hardly got any time out at all. The Mother of Cats was full of so many excuses that involved snow, wind, cold… whatever. If the bunny can manage, I’m sure that I’d be fine. To be fair, I guess I should admit that things have been a little extreme lately weather-wise. Check out today’s weather and what the City and County of Denver had to say about it.
The Mother of Cats has been home and staying busy reading and knitting this week. She cleaned up the yarn stash early in the week and I have to admit, there is a lot of yarn. This is what the stash looked like when she was done.
The Mother of Cats has been making decisions for the new year (she calls them resolutions, but that’s a crazy word. The better phrase would be The Wishful Thinking List, because that’s what it really is), but she seems almost perked up now that she has organized herself for the coming year. She wants to read 50 books, knit 50 hats, plant milkweed in her garden, and maybe convince the jade plant to bloom. That’s it. She has decided that she will only knit and work with yarn from the stash this year.
The Mother of Cats still has some projects that she needs to get finished up with, so she is also working on them for a couple of days each week between the hat knitting. This week she focused on some socks that were started last year, and this evening she got them finished.
She has also been cranking out the hats and PICC line covers since the start of the year. This is what she has managed so far:
So, that is all that has been going on around here. (yawn) Maybe I can get Hannah to get up and chase me for a while. Maybe the laser light will come on pretty soon. Maybe I can find one of my chirpy toys. I think that they are all under the bed… what?… don’t you keep your important stuff under the bed?
Or maybe I’ll just take a nap…
This is Mateo, the CoalBear, signing off.
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
There are some other projects lurking in the wings, but I don’t want to commit to them. I bought another quilt pattern, and I pulled out my little tabletop loom too. Those are just side projects and I really plan to commit to producing hats for the community group that I knit for. Last year there were more than 900 hats donated, and somehow, we have acquired even more requests in the last few months.
All of a sudden, everything that I’m reading and watching has Asian (and publishing or Chinese triads) elements. It was a compete accident: I had put holds on the books in my library months ago, and they arrived in my inbox withing a couple of days of each other. While I was reading Yellowface, The Brothers Sun appeared on Netflix. Synchronicity, right?
These are two really great books, and I really, really enjoyed The Brothers Sun. Thanks to synchronicity, I kind of understood common references (snakeheads, the one-child policy of China, auctions in publishing…) as they popped up in each book or episode of The Brothers Sun. Whew. There were common themes too, such as the relationships between children and their mothers, the struggle to find your own way, racism, the debt we owe to each other and our family, plagiarism, bullying, deaths, you name it, these media sources had it.
Now I’m reading The Maid. Would you believe that there is some bullying and a death already? Of course there is!
I also have to share this picture that was posted on Facebook today of an old newspaper picture of my high school gymnastics team. How fun to see my younger self now that I’m old and walking with a cane. 🙂
Yarn, Books & Roses 