yarn

Le sac à tricot

~ iamthesunking ~ 26 Comments

Merde, merde and thrice merde: Zooplus have sent me the standard post-Brexit “Due to high volume of orders …” let-down email. So Louis Catorze may receive his Thrive in the next few days, or he may not. This is not good.

Meanwhile, Catorze is a rampant screaming machine, and he’s eating faster than I can sift. Thank goodness the second dose of appetite-enhancing medication is optional; if this is his behaviour on just one pill, there’s not a chance in hell he’s getting the other.

After a mammoth mega-sift at the weekend, I have managed to figure out that we have enough of Catorze’s food to last until Wednesday. So, if the Thrive doesn’t come before then, we will be trapped with a starving psycho hell-beast who would think nothing of tripping us down the stairs, then eating us alive, feet first.

So we had to devise an alternative plan … and, much as it hurts me to admit this, we were forced to hunt down the last remaining packs of the obsolete Lily’s Kitchen Marvellously Mature and buy them from an off-grid, Dark Web vendor. We know it was wrong, we were drunk when we did it, and we felt dirty afterwards. But the thought of him not liking the Thrive and us not having a back-up – or, worse, THE THRIVE NOT COMING AT ALL AND US RUNNING OUT OF FOOD ENTIRELY AND HAVING TO GRECO HIM WITH BRANSTON PICKLE – was just too much.

In other news, to cheer myself up from all the cat food chaos, I decided to treat myself to a knitting bag, because my knitting stuff was strewn all over the dining room table and Cat Daddy was starting to complain about it.

Cat Daddy: “What kind of bag did you end up choosing? What does it look like?”

Me: “It’s blue, with skulls on it.”

Him: “Skulls?” [Snorts with laughter]

Me: “What’s wrong with that?”

Him: “Well, it’s just that … knitting is the least goth activity ever.”

Me: “Well, would you rather I’d got one with flower pots on it? Or cartoon bumble bees? Or kittens playing with balls of wool?” [I wasn’t making these up; I had seen all of the above during my quest for something cooler.]

Him: “Evil kittens maybe. Black ones. With fangs.”

Well, this is the closest I was able to get to a knitting bag with a black, fanged devil-kitty on it. And, naturellement, our mutual friend is doing what he does best i.e. exactly the opposite of what we want:

So much is wrong with this photo.

Plus de place à l’auberge

~ iamthesunking ~ 24 Comments

The Yuletide season is a time for thinking of those who are less fortunate. And, in the spirit of this philanthropy, Louis Catorze has decided to offer his Château to another living creature as a warm refuge on these cold winter nights.

Despite Catorze’s best efforts to sabotage my knitting, I managed to complete one scarf of the set of two and I have now begun the second. However, I came downstairs yesterday morning to discover this:

Ugh.

Oui, Mesdames et Messieurs, this is snail juice. AN ACTUAL SNAIL HAS SLITHERED ON MY WOOL. And you won’t be surprised to learn who was responsible for bringing the snail into Le Château. I can’t prove that it was him, but I know it (which is starting to become a very common refrain when it comes to crimes of the Catorze kind).

Now, I realise that I should probably have put away my knitting. However, in my defence, of all the catastrophes that could befall unput-away knitting, I don’t think any reasonable person could have foreseen this. Had Catorze trashed the scarf and trailed wool all around the place and out through the Sureflap, yes, I would have taken full responsibility for not learning my lesson from the first time. But this? COME ON.

Before the “Maybe It Wasn’t Him” brigade start piping up, trust me, it was him. The little sod is very well known for having all manner of wildlife hitch a ride on his fur when he comes in from outdoors, and he really is so slow that the slowest animal on earth could slither up to him and climb aboard. The fact that the snail juice is only on the wool, with no trail leading up to it, is highly indicative of said snail having been brought in and deposited there – as opposed to coming in of its own accord – and, somehow, scooped away again. Unless snails can switch on/off their juice at will?

The lack of trails also means there are no clues whatsoever as to where the snail may now be. So it’s highly likely that we will find its gross mess elsewhere at some stage. This is not good.

Anyway, I am now having to cut off the snail-juiced parts of the wool and attach on a clean part of the ball. This isn’t great because, as most crafters know, the fewer knots that are in a piece of work, the better. And I now have even less time than I had before, to complete a task that was already on a very tight deadline. But, if my maths serve me correctly, if I manage to knit 852 rows an hour between now and the 25th, I might just about make it.

Here is our mutual friend – all charged up from having climbed into a box of tissue paper at 2am that same day and thrashed around like a shark attack victim – giving his usual number of hoots, which is none:

“Pas mon problème.”

If you fancy some more gastropod-related fun and games, please see below:

https://louiscatorze.com/2016/04/03/la-limace/

https://louiscatorze.com/2017/09/18/les-escargots/

https://louiscatorze.com/2019/08/12/la-joie-est-un-escargot-rampant/

J’adore la laine

~ iamthesunking ~ 9 Comments

I am in a race against time to knit a set of scarves by 25th December. A late start (my own fault, I know) and a series of wool catastrophes have resulted in me running way, way behind schedule. Obviously this means I could do without any individuals larking about with my knitting. That goes without saying, non?

Imagine my dismay, then, when I came downstairs yesterday morning to this:

Why?
Also: how?

My first thought was that Cat Daddy must have had too much wine the night before and somehow ended up tangled in the wool. Cat Daddy was shocked and a little insulted when I asked him this but I still maintain that it was not an unfair assumption, especially as there was an empty wine bottle and glass on the worktop (see first photo).

This only leaves Louis Catorze, and he’s supposed to be ill. He’s also not supposed to be on the worktop, and I’m profoundly disappointed that my mastermind idea for keeping him off – placing him there to give him his medication – seems to have run its course after many, many years of success.

Anyway, I have now lost precious knitting time by having to instead spend it untangling the mess, and the chances of our friends receiving the scarves by Christmas are diminishing faster than our hopes of a Brexit deal. The culprit is relaxing on his daddy’s lap, without a care in the world:

Catorze is all out of shits to give.