Skip navigation

Tag Archives: yaris

I make! Ugly dog sweater edition

That’s right!  I made something!  Finally!

Well, I actually have made a few things but haven’t found the time to write posts about them.

WP_20130126_004

Anyhoo!  I recently crocheted a dog sweater for my ancient dog.  Choco is turning 17 tomorrow.  What comes after old fart?  Because that’s what she is.  And because she’s so old, she has a hard time regulating body temperature now.  Mostly, she just gets pretty cold.  I had put her in an old tshirt for awhile, but as she gets even older, a tshirt isn’t sufficient in keeping her warm.  Sometimes I’d see her wake up from a nap and look pathetically around while her ears were quivering from her shivering.  It’s…pretty pathetic.  When I knew she’d be sleeping for awhile, I’d cover her with a blanket.  But that doesn’t work so well when she wants to get up and do stuff, because then she drags the blanket with her and it kind of trips her up.  So I decided that making her something warmer than a tshirt took precedent over any other project I had going.

Did you know I crochet sometimes?  I do.  And my sister is more of a knitter.  We can both do the other, but we prefer to do what it is we do.  Now, my sister knits more than I crochet, because people request her to make stuff for them.  Mostly scarves.  That means she has all this leftover yarn overflowing the yarn drawer.

Generally, people don’t request me to make stuff.  Mostly because I make kind of useless stuff.  Amigurumi or hats with teeth (I believe more hats should have teeth…and eyes) or small stuff like that.  Generally I make small things because I don’t want to count stitches.  I lose count all the time and it’s tiresome to count and recount ALL THE TIME.  So the fact that I made a sweater for a mediumish sized dog was kind of impressive to me.  Stitch markers FTW!

Anyway, I also had a bunch of leftover (ugly) yarn from small projects that I made.  So I made a dog sweater.

Actually, I made my dog this sweater

dog sweater

in the XL size, based on the measurements around Choco’s neck.  (You will have to register with Bernat to see the pattern.  As far as I can tell, they don’t sell your email address to spammers and they haven’t bothered me about anything, so it seems safe.)  Choco is kind of a weird shape.  But because she’s such a weird shape, the collar of the sweater fits ok, but the rest of the sweater is waaaay too big for her.  It fits Yaris, but ends up being a little short.

So, as you can see, I didn’t bother with the stripe pattern.  Well unless you count my one big stripe of ugly, variegated yarn in the middle.  The red yarn is decent quality yarn that was left over from one of my sister’s projects.  The ugly, variegated stuff is not good quality yarn left over from one of my amigurumi projects.  I don’t have to buy good quality yarn because you don’t wear amigurumi.  I only buy good stuff if I’m making a baby toy or something.  I didn’t think Choco would mind the rougher yarn since she already has a fur coat and the yarn won’t rest against her skin.

Um…what else?  Oh, I accidentally half-double crocheted where I was supposed to double crochet, because I often get those two stitches mixed up.  I’m not sure why, but I do.  By the time I noticed, I had already gotten pretty far on the sweater, so I opted to just half-double crochet the whole way through.  I also decided not to add sleeves because I felt they were unnecessary.  Um…and later on I added a cinch for the waist because the sweater was just too big on Choco.

So, there you have it.  An ugly dog sweater.

I should get a restraining order

Monday and I have a rather unhealthy relationship…in that, Monday has the hugest crush on me and I can’t stand Monday.  Monday follows me around.  You would think that Monday would be satisfied to the one day a week a relegate for it, just like every other day.  But Monday is not pleased.  Monday will follow me around the whole week, days and days on end.  Why, Monday followed me around all last week and through the weekend too.

The past week, I had to be up at Clia’s from Wednesday to Friday.  That meant Monday and Tuesday were a mad dash to get everything ready.  Monday evidently felt that I need to spend more time with it and tagged along for the rest of the week.  Monday worked it’s Mondayish charms on Wednesday and my PM ended up being sick and couldn’t help me at Clia.  Thursday was marginally better, but not much because Monday had slowed work down so much we had to go back to Clia on Friday.  Now then, we had originally planned to use Friday as backup.  We weren’t really supposed to be up at Clia.  And we didn’t know that it would be necessary until late Thursday (which also included a somewhat emergent situation in the family while I was miles and miles away).  That means three consecutive days up at Clia.

In case you were not aware, my policy is that if I have to spend three or more consecutive days at Clia, I will get a hotel room nearby so as to minimize the commute and maximize the sleeping.  I didn’t know that I would be spending three days up at Clia until it was too late.  So…there was a lot of driving.  And in the midst of driving one of those days (most likely Friday), I drove over a nail.  And it punctured my tire.  And yesterday, my tire flattened out entirely.

And that’s when I found out that the dealership did indeed install the wheel locks on my wheels even though I had said not to.  That’ll learn me to not check other people’s work and think Monday is benign.

I was at the meeting hall when I discovered my incredibly flat tire with a nail poking out of it (it had actually been moderately flat that morning before I left, and I thought I would have time to pump it up and figure out what was going on later).  I was in the process of changing my tire when I realized that the wheel locks were installed on my car.  And the key was at home.  And that there was no way for me to change to the spare without the key.  I had to borrow my dad’s car to drive home to get the key and go back (with Yaris) to finish changing the tire.  Which we did.  And then after going home, I realized that the wheel lock key had been misplaced.  I cannot change from my spare tire back to a normal one.  Which I probably will have to buy (along with a new key).  Because I didn’t notice the flat in time and the sidewalls are looking pretty bad.  There’s a possibility that they can fix it, but it’s unlikely.

All of this cut into my time I was going to spend doing all the things I should have done last week but couldn’t because I spent all my free time on the road.

Also, a knife fell on my foot.  Wouldn’t it have been funny if it also completely severed my foot?  (It didn’t, it was just the blunt part of a butter knife, the most innocuous of knives.)

Monday is such a jerk.  I should file a restraining order against Monday.