Nipfaced, and the Search for the Wooly Grail

This is my cat:

This is my cat on drugs:

Here are some of the interim steps:

I know, it's a bad catmommy that will get her cat nipfaced and then take photos of her to post on the internet. I'm sure KPC (Kitty Protective Services) will be knocking on my door sometime very soon with a stern warning. I'll tell you one thing, though--this cat's a cheap date. I sprinkled some catnip on this giant pet pillow in the hopes of encouraging Ed to sleep on it instead of attacking and attempting to strangle every area rug in the house in the process of making "a comfy spot" and he sort of sniffed it, sniffed it some more, walked away. Miss Thing, though? Drunk off her ass in about half a minute, and she stayed that way all afternoon.

Since we're the sort of trailer trash who actually would corrupt an innocent animal for a Kodak moment (okay, no trailer anymore...but someone commenting here pointed out that you really can't take the trailer out of the girl, and I think this an excellent point...definitely worth stitching on a $4.99 pillow from Walmart in bright orange acrylic yarn), we spent the morning prior to compromising our cat's dignity by driving around and looking for garage sales.

You folks in other parts of the world will have to clue me in as whether this is a peculiarly American phenomenon, or if it makes perfect sense to you to drive around looking for people to give money to so that they'll give you their junk that they don't want anymore--because they were just waiting for some dumbass to pay to take it away so they don't have to haul it to the dump. I can't explain the fascination with them, except that in the back of my tiny mind, there amongst the dust bunnies and the cobwebs, lingers the fantasy that I will walk into someone's garage and find a mammoth box of wool and cashmere and alpaca and llama--and the person manning the sale will just want to get rid of it and say cheerily "oh, I reckon you could have the whole box for $10". I realize this is about as likely as me driving by a yarn store without stopping, but a girl has to have dreams.

That said, I mentioned this fantasy to Mr. K (I read somewhere that men like it when you tell them your fantasies....it didn't seem to do much for him, though) and even as I spoke, I realized the fatal flaw in the plan. Specifically, anyone fiber-obsessed enough to acquire a stash of that size and quality isn't likely to sell it off in a garage sale. I've only ever really found any nice yarn at an estate sale, and it wasn't a mammoth box of cashmere so much as a few balls of reasonably nice wool attached to a started sweater the size of a wooly hula hoop.

Turns out that not everyone has the ability to just "eyeball" the number of stitches to cast on for a sweater. (Either that or the lady was actually knitting covers for tanker trucks--I swear, I held that started sweater and spread my hands to their fullest extension and still couldn't quite get it to full size. I'm 5'8 inches tall and your arm span is supposed to be the same as your heighth....so by my reckoning this sweater was shaping up to be about 70 inches in diameter.)

Still, I wander through stacks of warped tupperware and grimy stuffed animals and hairy Christmas ornaments (they say only cockroaches will survive at the end of the world--I disagree. That angel hair stuff will be here looooong after the cockroaches) and mismatched shoes and trashy romance novels and fake flowers and doilies (I'm not sure why every garage sale has doilies--I never see anyone buy or make them, but they appear in garage sales as if by magic...maybe they come with the permit?) and puzzles missing 3 pieces and clothes so far out of date that they're a year or two away from coming back into style and I keep thinking this will be the day the treasure will appear. This stupid, happy-go-lucky certainty that the barn stuffed with manure must contain a pony is, by the way, the reason I do not gamble.

All of which leads me to this snippet of overheard conversation at a sale in Issaquah, where a youngish man was digging through boxes of stuff in search of his own version of the wooly grail, and he suddenly called out to his son: "Hey, Sam. Come over here--remember the other day when I was telling you about records? This is what they look like!"

Yeah, Sam--that was back when no one owned a computer because it filled a large room and you actually had to wait an hour for a baked potato and dinosaurs roamed the earth. Could I feel any older?

Tomorrow I promise some more photos of squares, including another one of Lynn's megasquare which, as it turns out, spells L-O-V-E if you're not a dork and actually turn it around the right way. Sorry about that, Lynn. I must have had an extra helping of stupid with my cereal. It's beautiful, and I love you for it.