Aren’t we just flying? Two posts this year already, whee!

The trip to Maryland was fine, and in hindsight, timed perfectly. We missed their snowiest winter of all, and so I sit here in California, typing, while our friends there are completely snowed in. The funny thing is, we went there so H.E. could show me the worst about living in Maryland, so that I could see that it really isn’t all that bad — his way of selling me the idea of getting a house in a state with actual seasons. They’d had a bit of snow there before we arrived, and some of it still hadn’t melted in a few piles here and there, and I thought, “OK. He’s right. Not bad!” Then this extreme weather happens, and all I see in the news today is ice cold snow piled many feet high! Temperatures in the teens! And now I can’t get warm, when I’m not even there.

While we were there, our cat sitter text messaged H.E. one day and asked, “By the way, did you know Sox was a boy?”

A what?!

OK, background story. We got Sox from one of H.E.’s friends, who owns a menagerie of cats and dogs. The guy and his wife, their lives are just completely overrun by animals, and they love it. They’d finally managed to bring in a neighborhood cat who’d had a litter of kittens twice before, and they ended up getting the cat fixed and nursing the kittens. Around that time, we were looking to get a second cat anyway because Cat is so old, H.E.’s afraid that if she goes while there is no backup cat, I’ll be completely inconsolable. His only requirement was that the new cat be female, to lessen the complications bound to spring up with bringing two strange cats together.

So anyway, H.E. visits his friend regularly, and when Sox came up to him and purred on his chest while he was there, he was sold. His friend assured him it was female, and one night H.E. came home with Sox in a box. I fell in love immediately.

Then Sox had the balls to turn into a boy. Literally. Another one of his litter mates, whom they thought at first a boy, then a girl, then again a boy, seems to have gone through the same confusion. As much as H.E.’s friend loves animals, his animal husbandry obviously has tons of room for improvement.

Oh, well. Right?

It’s too early to get Sox fixed; we’ll get it done around March or April. But I wish we had known earlier. We might have named him differently. Not that Sox doesn’t still work; it’s a sexually ambiguous enough name. But we might have gone with Tux for Tuxedo, or even Fred Astaire, to go with his dapper suit. Then again, had we known he was a boy, H.E. might not have ever brought him home. So there’s that. He’s still as sweet as ever (Sox, not H.E., though H.E. has his sweet moments, too), and he sometimes acts more like a puppy than a cat (again, Sox, not H.E., though H.E. is a bit like a puppy dog, too). I still can’t get much knitting done; I have to wait until we put Sox in his room for the night to knit, so that’s very little time.

Speaking of which, I managed to finish my first actual knitting project — a many-shaded red scarf with fringes on the ends. I did it in a very soft and thick yarn that was simply fun to work with, and I wish I’d taken a photo of it before I gave it as a present to the wife of one of H.E.’s friends in Maryland (they took us boating in the Chesapeake Bay when we went to Maryland last September). That’s TWO craft projects I forgot to take pictures of now, the first being the blue, gray, and white baby blanket that I made for my sister’s friend.

Seems I’m taking less and less pictures now. I have to amend that.

In the meantime, I have to get writing. I have a workshop coming up this weekend, and I’ve barely started. If anyone’s interested, I’ll be here:

http://www.creativedirection-workshops.org/

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