Without Leave

Sorry for being AWOL last Friday. I was tending to a hurt finger.

Now, there are all kinds of neat reasons why one could have a hurt finger. It could have been used to plug the hole in the dike that kept the water from flooding the town. It could have been injured from knitting or writing too quickly. It could even have been strained from flipping the bird to too many annoying drivers.

But no, mine was hurt because it was munched on by a cat.

A kitten, really. The furball in question is some few months old, and ready to go in for spay/neuter time*. But instead of pulling out the carriers and trying to trap them in those - and accidentally getting any one of the 10+ other cats out front - we thought, “oh, hey! They are all so excited about food, and so used to us by now, that we can just reach down and grab them!”

And so I did.

And so it bit me.

It scratched a fair amount, too, but the bite is the bad part. (I didn’t take pictures, because you really don’t need to be grossed out by it.) Suffice it to say that the first knuckle of my left index finger is still swollen and probably has a minor infection. The nail of same finger was punctured in two places, and there are several other puncture marks and two nice gashes on the ball of the finger. Kitten or not, it has a very efficient mouth for tearing up muscle.

(Right, so we’ll post a pretty picture to distract you from icky injuries.)

Now, the point of this long ramble about me being cat-injured is this: Many of my blog-readers are cat fans. Some of you may have been in situations where you could have been bitten. BUT I don’t know if any of you know just how important it is to SEE A DOCTOR if when you do get bitten by a cat.

Even if this is your indoor cat and so you don’t have to worry about rabies, there is also Cat Scratch disease to worry about. (It’s not only through scratches, though.) Plus, there is just regular infections. Because cats have such sharp teeth, they often leave puncture wounds, which are hard to clean and can easily get infected. Go see a doctor. Get antibiotics.

This site here has some good information on what to do if you are bitten by a cat or a dog. Seriously, people. If this happens to you, take it seriously. We don’t want to hurt the hands that knit, or those that write.

This has been a public service announcement. Thank you for listening. And now… on to the knitting!

There has been much work done on the Swan Lake Stole. I have now finished the first half, and started the second half. This is very exciting news. I also tweaked the pattern to add beads to the eyelet row before the center panel, as shown in the picture below. To do this, I knit the eyelet row as charted, and then on the WS row I placed a bead on every stitch to either side of the YOs. It looks pretty good, if I do say so myself. I had seen someone else on Ravelry do this, and liked it so much that I worked out a mod for it.

And for proof, so that you know I really did start the second half:

*See, Lorraine? I am trying not to turn into the crazy cat lady.