Had a rather mixed day yesterday; some of it very nice, some of it frustrating, and some of it just neutral. One of the first things we did was take Sadie to the vet. As you can see in the picture, she has been scratching at her head again and has dug in some pretty nasty wounds. Believe it or not, she did all that damage in just one week. We took her to our usual vet's office rather than her old one. The doctor agrees with us that it is allergy-related. She gave us more antibiotics to keep the open sores from getting infected, and a topical ointment to keep the itching down. We are to bring her back in about a week, at which point she (the doctor) is likely to start her (the dog) on antihistamines. We had to put an Elizabeth collar on the poor dog to keep her from scratching at the wounds & making them worse. This also prevents the other two dogs from licking off the medication.
While Sadie was at the vet's getting her medications & a bath, Ralph & I went to archery. There aren't any classes right now as the park is having their yearly battle with the City to get their insurance, however people can still go and shoot at the regular target area. Incidentally, this is where the archery competitions were held when Los Angeles hosted the Olympics a few decades ago. Anyway, he had a nice time shooting and I enjoyed sitting in the sun & knitting. Afterwards we drove through the park a bit (El Dorado is *huge*) and took some bird photos, including this. What we've got here is a great egret, a snowy egret, a male mallard, and a flock of coots. I chose this picture because of the variety of birds in it. We also saw a small turtle sunning itself on a rock in the stream.
I'm actually making pretty good progress on the new socks. I didn't like how the pattern looked with the Bearfoot Gold Rush, so I frogged that and started over using Lorna's Laces in Lorikeet. It's also a rather busy yarn for the pattern, however it's better than the Gold Rush was and now that I'm a ways in I'm really starting to like the effect. The sock will have the lace pattern going up the front and a mock cable up the back. With the two different patterns and the rather busy yarn colors, I am calling these my Chaos Theory socks.
The frustrating part of the day was when we got home. At some point, the masonry blocks we had in front of the access under the house got moved so of course when we got home the dogs were under the house amongst all the dust & mouse yuck. Ralph doesn't remember if he moved them while the storage unit was being built, or if the Roomies might have used them to raise the trailer, or exactly when or how they got moved, but it was not pleasant to come home & discover the dogs were under the house. Ralph had a hard time finding enough blocks to wall off the opening again. I'm just glad Sadie was with us--it would have been horrible if she had gotten in with all that dust & mouse yuck with open sores on her head.
I also had some issues with my socks. The pattern starts with 25 stitches on the front needle, increases to 33 on row 2, then decreases back down to 25 over rows 4-10; the last 6 rows are 25 stitches. Somehow, even though I counted and had 25 stitches at the end of rows 10-14, when I got to row 15 there were only 24 stitches on the front needle. I had to tink all the way back to row 11, plus have Ralph read out the pattern while I counted off the stitches on the needle, before I could find the error & was able to fix it. What really got me is that several times I would find a dropped stitch, put it back on the needle, and *still* only have 24 stitches. Thought I was going to go insane!
Today is turning out to be a better day. At least, the morning has been nice. I got two more pattern repeats done on the socks without making any errors. Ralph fixed us a tasty breakfast of fresh buttermilk biscuits (NOT from a can) with Knott's Berry Farm blackberry jam & butter, and some sausage patties. We're going to do a bit of housework & then go do something fun; maybe take the dogs to the park.
I like the turtle's socks :)
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