Done and done

My dog sweater turned out more like a dog poncho.

 

I made the over part too wide and the under part not wide enough. Live and learn.

 

 



 

 

My rows. So neat and tidy if I may say so myself. I won't show a picture of the edges. Let's just say it took me about 45 minutes to realize I was doing it wrong, and another 20 minutes to actually figure out how to do it right. By then I was already well into the project and I just went with it. It is a sweater for an animal, after all.

 

She loves it though (she doesn't love it.)

THIS IS HOW YOU SELL STUFF

We had Penny shaved a couple of weeks ago when it was still 110 degrees, but the poor thing's fur isn't growing in fast enough as the cooler temperatures approach, and we don't plan on turning on our heat this winter at all. For these reasons, I went down the rabbit hole of dog sweaters on Etsy.

I've been known to crochet an amigurumi and scallop-edge a burp cloth or two, and the more I looked, the more I thought that maybe, maybe (BIG HUGE MAYBE) I could try making one myself. I ran across this pattern which seemed like the most perfect dog sweater on earth and on a whim messaged the shop owner, a darling lady named Toni, just to see if she thought a semi-beginner could make it. She replied that it was probably a bit too ambitious for me. Long story short, this listing was posted to her shop 36 hours later:

WELL I GUESS I'M MAKING A DOG SWEATER!!! lolololololo oh crap wish me luck.

Poolside

It was in the 70s yesterday!!! And the day before that was the first time since the end of March that I drove to work without the air conditioning on! I don't think we're completely finished with the upper 90s, but the end is in sight. And while I'll always argue that the miserable Phoenix summers are a perfectly fair price to pay for the glorious winters, I can freely admit that the only thing that got me through were these frequent pool days at my aunt and uncle's house. I tried to refrain from the Penny-swimming-zomg-so-cute photostream taking over my blog completely, but now that it's cooling down I'ma go ahead and dump everything today in one fell swoop.

Shake face!!

Jon pointed out that she looks like that terror dog thing in Ghostbusters:

Jon got stung by a bee :( His first time ever, and apparently it hurts REALLY REALLY REALLY BAD NO SERIOUSLY, GUYS, MOST PAINFUL THING EVER.

Also, this:

Happy nightmares! And this:

I consolidated all the best video bits into one minute-and-a-half long montage. IT'S WORTH WATCHING. (If the quality is horrible, try clicking the little gear-looking icon at the bottom and choosing a higher resolution. I can't for the life of me figure out why YouTube doesn't default to the best available quality, but whatever. That'll help a lot. Just kidding, I moved it over to Vimeo.)


Pool Days from Jessie Jensen on Vimeo.

Fun with Screen Capture: Internet Comments Edition!

Like many people, I sometimes go online. Strangers say the darndest things there. I take pictures of conversations, store them all in a folder on my desktop, and forget they ever existed until months later (today) when I go looking for blog fodder. 

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First, comments on photos in Waterton Lakes National Park's really cool Facebook album of wildlife captured with motion-activated remote cameras:  

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Second, two comments on the YouTube video of the tro-lo-lo-lo-lo guy:

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Last, a conversation about figs. Jon bought a flat at Costco and we had no idea how to go about eating them, so I took to the internets. This website was helpful, and the resulting discussion was sheer delight. There were all of these people, seemingly desperate for information on figs, some asking really stupid questions, and many of them sharing a little too much about themselves along the way. Here are the best ones.

 [SHEESH, Milon, ask your DOCTOR, not the fig lady!!]

Sacking the Tach: Part 4 of ?

See also:
Part 1 of ?
Part 2 of ?
Part 3 of ?
Part 5 of FIVE!!!
Hearpdate
Stuff I Distinctly Remember Saying During the Operation
The last post about my heart (I promise this time)

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The last I’d broadcasted about my heart was that my surgery was unsuccessful and that the doctor instructed me to continue wearing that awful monitor for another month, which I did despite the blisters and rashes the sticky patches left all over my body.

I exercised and drank lots of caffeine (doctor’s orders, and it was amazing) and watched scary movies and I did finally catch an event, on the very last day of service. I wouldn’t know for another few weeks whether it was enough for the doctor to work off of, though, because the window for my 30-day follow-up appointment fell during my trip to Idaho, and they couldn’t fit me in until a couple of weeks after I got back. I worried myself sick during those several weeks – while I was wearing the monitor, since I had a such limited window to catch a substantial TACH ATTACK!, and in the weeks afterward, wondering if it was going to be enough to prevent the doctor from putting in an implantable long-term device.

The appointment was full of good news! My doctor was really excited by what he’d caught on the monitor. He asked me jokingly, “Why couldn’t you have done this before the FIRST procedure??” He also found a related, underlying condition on my monitor. Nothing scary, just another annoying tachycardia that’s brought on by exercise. That one can’t ever be fixed because it originates too closely to my natural pacemaker, but the takeaway was that THAT was the reason why my first procedure failed. So it was a relief to have some answers, even though the answer was, “The surgery didn’t work because you have another condition, and this one is incurable.” :\

Anyway, long story (involving billing and insurance and me being scared) short, I’m going in again on Friday, November 2nd. Same hospital, same doctor, but this time he’s better equipped with what he needs for a successful surgery. So.