A picture is, indeed, worth a thousand words

But sadly, I haven't any pictures for you today, so you'll just have to sit here & listen to me babble incessantly. More picture-taking to come in the near future, though! I've quite a pile of projects on the needles right now, so I've got lots of pictures to take. Work is progressing nicely on the alpaca sweater for my mom, and even though it's on ungodly tiny needles (size threes, and while that's rather big for socks, it's pretty daunting for a whole freakin sweater) with a gauge of 8st to the inch, I really am enjoying it. The fabric is beautiful, and the cable looks really nice, if I do say so myself. As much as I like the speed & quick satisfaction of chunkier yarns, I'm beginning to think that I may be a fine-gauge sweater convert. Anyhow, I'm about 3/4 of the way done on the body, and then all I'll have to do is the sleeves & pick up & knit a collar, assuming I can finally decide what I want that to look like. I think a large part of the enjoyment factor comes with having started this sweater back in August...if I had allowed myself less time, I'd definitely not be liking it as much.

In other news around the Front, I've gone & done something completely weird, yet cool...I got a job. Seriously. I'm the new knitting instructor at my local Michael's! How cool is that? I'm less than enthused about the whole prevalence of fun fur thing, but whatever, they're paying me for it. My first beginner class starts soon, and while I will be repeating the beginner class regularly, I also want to throw in a few small project classes here & there. Any ideas, using only materials that can be purchased at Michaels (bummer, I know), are really welcome!

Also in the news this week, from the Department of Meow...Tipsy had a seizure of some sort not long ago. A loud noise set it off (the loud noise being me hollering at a kid, now how guilty do I feel??), and she lost all control of her eye movement (nystagmus is what it's called...basically, her eyes moved back & forth very rapidly, and she lost almost all balance completely). This lasted for twelve minutes, and upset me greatly. I mean, I knew she was a "special needs kitty" when I adopted her, her foster parents were very clear on that, but sheesh! That was scary! I did a bunch of research, and was oddly vindicated when she visited the vet the next day & he confirmed my suspicions of peripheral vestibular disease. The bad news is, it's likely caused by a lesion on the right side of her brain. The good news is, the treatment was relatively inexpensive, and has helped tremendously. She gets drops in her ears twice a day, which she hates with the fire of a thousand suns, but her head is on straight now! She's not tilted at all! It's kind of weird to see, really. Anyway, while the seizure was really freaking scary, I'm rather glad it happened, because it made the diagnosis MUCH easier, and she otherwise might have gone untreated for ages. Poor kitty. She is feeling perfectly fine, though, aside from despising her meds, so I'm a happy camper.

Sadly, I managed to miss most of Socktober, though I did get at least one pair of socks finished anyway. I don't have a picture of them, but sooner or later I will. Eventually. Ahem. I finished my Booga Bag, which was sent to the lovely LkManitou (check out her blog...*she* has pics of the booga bag, even though I'm too much of a weenie to remember to take them myself!) for the October Knitted Thing swap. In the same swap, I was lucky enough to receive a superwarm pair of pretty red Fuzzy Feets! Fuzzy Feets of my very own! Mmmm...thank you, Valkyrie!!