Alien Barbecue

I know it’s been a while since I’ve blogged on a regular basis. This year I have no resolutions to amend that fact. I have to be prepared for a lot of changes this year, so I’m leaving myself open for all kinds of possibilities by not making any promises which I’m not sure I can keep. H.E. has taken up some new work endeavors, and it could mean moving again and more travel. We also have a kitten in the household, and in less than three months she has managed to take over our lives.

The kitten — who is a black and white tuxedo cat that we’ve named Sox — is likely the biggest reason why I haven’t kept up with my old activities. She’s more catlike than Cat, meaning she’ll actually play with keyboards and balls of yarn; so it’s been difficult to work at my computer or at my newfound hobby of knitting. I’ve had to put a lot of that aside. She’s also in a biting phase — practicing her skills in hunting and killing the wild deer, no doubt — so even if I resort to writing or drawing by hand, on actual paper, I’ll find I have to stop abruptly when the movement of the pen suddenly attracts her, or I risk getting mauled by the little tigress in the black morning coat.

Plus, she’ll eat almost anything, so in her third week here, she got really sick — so sick that she stopped eating and drinking altogether, and we had to take her to the vet to get hydrated via a catheter. Turned out that her potassium levels were high, and the vet suspected renal problems; he kept asking us if we had any plants in the house that she may have eaten, but our thumbs are so black that even fake plastic flowers die a horrible death — so no, we couldn’t even look to that as a cause. It took an entire week before she started feeling better again, and we still don’t even know what she could have possibly ingested to make her so ill. Probably she ate her own farts, which — I’ve got to tell you — are kind of deadly. She’s cute as all heck, but she’s got worse gas problems than my late grandmother ever had, which wouldn’t be such a huge problem if she (the kitten, not my grandmother) didn’t love sleeping on my neck and chest so much with her Kim Kardashian cat butt right under my nose.

Let’s not even mention the grief the kitten puts Cat through — the older cat is every day on the verge of a mental breakdown now that there’s another ball of fur with teeth and claws in the house.

So that’s where I’m at right now.

Next week, I’ll be flying back to Maryland for a few days. Next month, I’ll be doing another workshop with Anne Cain, Crocodesigns, and Christine M. Griffin. After that, taxes. Joy, oh, joy!

Here’s to hoping you’re all having a great year so far…

I’ve been researching my family tree. I’ve always wanted to do it, but what finally spurred me on was Nikki’s announcement that she had tracked her family line back to 100 A.D.

I don’t expect to be able to go as far back as that. Nikki had a head start, what with her aunt already having given her generations of information on their family. Meantime, I don’t think much of my family were the types to write down all their family information in the backs of bibles — names and dates of births, marriages, and deaths. Most were working people, so there probably wasn’t much incentive to track the family name like many old money families do. Plus, a lot of my family came through the Philippines, and records there just aren’t as good as they are in the states or in Europe. And I don’t think many of my family in the 1800s did much churchgoing, since churches are famous for keeping great records on their members’ pivotal events and there wasn’t much on my family in those records.

Still, I was hopeful. I wanted to track at least my maternal grandfather’s line to the United States and see if his family were recent immigrants from Europe. Long before my grandmother died, I asked her for as much information as she could give me, and she was able to give me some names and dates. I wish I had asked her sooner because even then I think her memory was going. But I signed up for a membership at one of those genealogy sites, where they give you access to a huge database of historical records and documents, and I used what I had, and somehow or other I managed to find out via the Army enlistment records that my great grandfather came from New York to the Philippines, probably for the Spanish-American war.

I also found out that he had dark blue eyes, dark brown hair, and a ruddy complexion, and he was six feet tall. He was born nearly 100 years before I was, but I often imagine what it must have been like for him in that strange tropical land, meeting the woman who later became his wife. She must have seemed exotic to him, as I imagine she was dark-eyed and dusky. He continued to be counted in the United States for census and voting purposes for at least 20 years, but he stayed and lived in the Philippines to have a family.

His father and mother stayed in New York. They were both born there, so that was probably all they knew. They lived in Cayuga County with their kids, and through the U.S. census records that I accessed, I watched as they aged and as the kids grew up and moved out. I know where one of their sons went (the Philippines, of course), but I don’t know what happened to the others. The census was taken only every 10 years, and because of a fire, the 1890 census wasn’t available.

In any case, I became even more fascinated with the generation before that. I watched as they, too, stayed pretty much in one area in New York, living and working as farmers/grocers/laborers, as the children grew up and out of the house. My great-great-great-grandfather lived to be in his 80s, at least, and probably in his 90s. He and his wife had five kids, and from 1850 to 1900, I watched the census records show the aging of their children, and as one child moved out, another was born. Then, sometime between 1870 and 1880, my great-great-great-grandfather’s wife died, leaving him a widower, and in 1880 the only child left living with him in his household was the youngest. By 1890, the youngest had moved out and gotten married, and my great-great-great-grandfather was left to live as a boarder among strangers.

That made me so sad. I wanted to go back in time, visit him regularly, and keep him company in his golden days. I could have knitted him scarves and grilled him for more information for the family tree.

So this is how I’ve been wasting my time, looking up my family and imagining all the drama of their lifetimes. Suddenly I can see how writers are able to write biographies about people long gone. You just get sucked in, wondering what they must have felt, how they must have managed, and it’s almost like you know them personally.

Anyway, I’ve hit a brick wall with my great-great-great-grandfather. The 1840 census records aren’t as detailed, and the ones before that are even less so, so I haven’t found anything about his parents yet. I know he was born in New York around 1818, but for all that I know, his parents could have been born anywhere. New York? In which case, they and their parents before them might have been early colonials, and wouldn’t it be ironic if I turned out to be one of those snobby daughters of the American Revolution, “my family came in on the Mayflower” types? Or they could have come somewhere from Europe, typical immigrants, in which case they could have descended from knights or lords, and I could be one of those “my ancestors were aristocrats/royalty” types. There were certainly many of the aristocracy with the same family name. I honestly don’t know. The possibilities are endless.

However, through various directories, I did manage to find out that my great-great-great-grandfather was a farmer and had 96 acres. That probably wasn’t a great big deal back then, but in these days, that’s a lot of land! I wonder who has all those acres now. Too bad they didn’t stay in the family. I’d probably be a rich girl.

And here we go again, with more imagining…

I haven’t been working on any major crochet projects lately. The last thing I completed was a blue, gray, and white baby blanket for my sister’s friend, but I completely forgot to take a photo of it before I sent it off.

Still, I haven’t stopped crocheting altogether. I just haven’t started anything big because I have so much leftover yarn from my earlier projects. So I’ve started practicing a few things with the leftovers.

For instance, here’s a sampler I did in various crochet stitches with the yarn leftover from the hooded baby afghan project.

I also decided to try my hand at some Tunisian crochet and knitting. So here’s what I’ve done practicing that with more leftover yarn.

The yellow piece with the blue heart is done with the basic Tunisian crochet stitch and some basic cross-stitch embroidery. The pink is my first serious attempt at knitting, using the basic garter stitch. The blue — well, the blue is my attempt at knitting something a little more complex.

This is called the diamond seed stitch, created with a pattern of knit and purl stitches. It doesn’t look that great or complex, but remember, I’m new at knitting. This is just a practice piece for me. Heck, those aren’t even real knitting needles — they’re extremely cheap plastic ones that came in a starter kit, and I plan to buy some good ones eventually.

Probably the biggest thing I’ve been doing with leftover yarn though is making dolls.

The one on the right is the first doll I ever made — done with basic single crochet stitches and filled with polyester fiberfill. Not knowing what I was doing, I ran out of the yarn mid-way through the project and used a similar color of yarn in a different weight to finish it off, so when I worked on the second doll, I planned a little bit better. I knew I didn’t have enough yarn to do the doll in one color, so I tried to make it look like it’s wearing a pink sweater and shoes and blue mittens and pants. Plus, I’d gotten myself a bag of safety eyes in various sampler sizes. And voila.

Bunny rabbits.

I still have a big ball of leftover white yarn, so I’ll probably make more of these little guys…