Path of Bruin
How odd to be awakened this morning by my husband calling from the newsroom to tell me to keep the dog, cats and kids indoors. A bear had been sighted in our town. A big, black bear.
Apparently early this morning the bear was seen not far from our house, rambled around the Seton Hall area for a bit, then ended up in Newark (perhaps he was just a Booker fan and wanted to celebrate? We’re pretty happy here for Cory!) and was shot in Irvington (2 miles from my house) this afternoon. My kid’s school is on the Irvington border – how surreal.
And – even more odd – it was the SECOND bear shot in a major urban area in NJ in the past week. Speaking of shooting, we had a people shooting in SO this week in front of the Cluck-U Chicken joint – very close to our home – someone jumped out of an SUV and shot another guy. Minnesota is looking even better.
A few years ago I woke up to a deer on our front lawn – a buck – a BIG buck. And we’ve seen deer in our back yard, but this is our first bear.
I took the bark collar off of the dog.
Thank You
Thanks to everyone who commented so kindly on my last post. I thought long and hard before posting it – always afraid that someone would say, “She’s just being SO sensitive…” Recently I’ve read critiques of my blog (which sort of makes me think – why? What’s the point in a blog critique? Either read it or don’t – but I digress ) and I’ve been accused of TMI – too much information.
A valid point, but this is me, folks.
Thursday
Tomorrow I do my least favorite thing – pose for a photograph – and then I have lunch with a friend so all of the make-up will be put to good use. A local friend who’s a portrait photographer is going to take some pictures of the kids this Spring (I won her services at our school auction) so I also hired her to take a picture or two of me so that MAYBE I can get a really good one for the book jackets. I wonder if I can just pose behind a bunch of knitting needles…?
Tomorrow Hannah and her class go to Sandy Hook (a seaside park which is just phenomenal, lots of beaches and beach-y terrain) and it’s supposed to rain. Damn.
Hannah had a good day at school. The principal and I spoke, he had Hannah and one of the, ahem, more vocal kids into his office and – as Hannah put it – “I wanted to say, ‘Thanks, second dad!'” when he read the kid the riot act about showing respect to the-boy-who-made-her-day-so-rotton.
And, yes, Hannah does understand that keeping one’s cool is worth quite a bit, and it’s something we continue to work on. Life is work! I had promised her earlier that if she keeps her cool through the year she can get her ears pierced in June. We’d slated that for her Bat Mitzvah, but so many of her friends are all getting pierced that this seemed a painless way to give in a bit, and also get her to work for it.
Romantic Knits
Swatching is going really well – I swatch a bit, then I check gauges and work up my schematics. Once that’s finished I pull out the worksheets and do up a preliminary pattern, then let it set for a bit while I move on to something else. During a quiet time (?!) I pull out the worksheet again and look it over, see the glaring errors that I didn’t see earlier, and try to make corrections. This is the point when I’m pretty much ready to send the patterns to test knitters so they can look them over before I send the yarn (don’t want someone to be terribly surprised!) so if all goes well by this weekend I’ll be in touch with many of my knitters.
It’s been a slower process than I thought it would be this time around – and I’m afraid it’s going to drag out a bit, too, so if I said I’d be in touch with you, don’t despair!
Off to bed – we buried another bunny (courtesy of Butkis, who’s trying to prove that he may be 14, but he’s still the great orange-and-white hunter) and put up another headstone. I smell a Stephen King novel coming to life in the backyard. Wonder if the bear smelled it, too…