The Wooliest

It's so humid right now that everything is completely stuck to everything else, and we are sprawled around on the furniture sweating heartily and trying not to touch anything, so naturally I am knitting an enormous, thick, wooly, cabled pullover. I'm not sure what it is about me, but this is what I do. This is the least seasonally appropriate thing I could possibly be making right now. I did try to bring things around to summer by attempting to use a zucchini as a nostepinne because the vandals farmers down the street have given us a gigantic armload of zucchini and I am looking for uses. I'm sorry to get your hopes up, but sadly a zucchini cannot be used as a nostepinne. (I can't share the photos of the failed attempt--suffice to say it was pretty funny, and that a zucchini, no matter how you hold it, just looks naughty.) What else to do with eight zucchini? Why can't cantaloupes grow with that much enthusiasm? I could eat cantaloupe until I turn into one and roll away.

This yarn! Oh my goodness. This is Cascade Ecological Wool, more of my share of the spoils from the Great 70% Off Sale of 2012. I know you're wondering how there can still be anything left from that magical day, but if you had seen the four 50-gallon bags I carried out of that place...I'm rethinking the stash now, too, more about this later...anyway, just look at that gorgeous, lightly plied, handspun-looking stuff! Oh, my heart. It is fluffy and plump and soft, and somehow light and thick at the same time, and it is so hot right now, I don't even...why? Why did I suddenly think I want to make some kind of weatherproof fisherman's sweater out of the woolliest yarn I can find? Yes, that's what I want to have draped all over my lap as I boil in my own sweat! I told you I liked the heat. There's always room to be a little bit warmer.

Exhibit, Catdog in summer: is this dog having the best life ever, or what? We sit on the porch together and she enjoys a small snack of ice cubes, until the sun gets to be too much, even for her--and this is the dog who will press her face against the fireplace until I worry about brain damage--then she comes inside, gets up there on the couch, stirs all the pillows around until she's happy she's found the fluffiest one, and then flops down with a snort. I point the fan at her and, after a quick sniff of her Frito-scented feet, tiptoe away, leaving her to her peaceful dreams. Back to the knitting.