Almost FO

I finished the last row last night and started--or so I thought--the castoff. Um, yeah. That didn't go so well. I thought it was a perfectly normal castoff, but the way it's written, I just can't get my mind around it. So I tried one, it wasn't right, and put it aside to ask Claudia about it today.

This isn't a good representation of the beauty and color of this yarn, but with the flash, the brown was far too red. It need sunlight, and it's pouring again today. I finished it last night after the sun went down, of course.

I was knitting this from one huge (500 grams) ball of yarn, all from one hank, which was a bear to wind into a ball by hand. I didn't want any ends to weave in. Chester decided to change that.

Chester the Cat is very very naughty when it comes to yarn. He doesn't play with it and get it tangled in knots. He doesn't grab it like Zippy does and drag it down the hall, completely unharmed. He's a Stealth Yarn Cutter. He sneaks up when I leave my knitting for only a minute and chews the yarn in half, then sneaks off. I usually don't know it's happened till I come to a wet section of yarn and realize that something's amiss.

With this knit, I've been extremely careful to keep the yarn out of Chester's reach. I don't leave it sitting for even a second. I've kept the yarn in the plastic bag in a Sephora bag, pulling out just enough to knit with. But in one unguarded moment when I pulled out too much, he cut it.

(Why is Blogger turning photos on their sides? I don't have time to delete and reupload this morning.)

So there are a couple extra ends to be woven in. I hate weaving in ends.

Damn cat.

Ticketmaster

I hate Ticketmaster. Their "system" to discourage scalpers from getting all the good seats has pretty much turned into a huge moneymaking venture for TM itself. Once you get into their ticket-buying page, you have to type in a two-word "security check", which slightly slows down those of us who just want two decent tickets, but it doesn't appear to stop the scalpers.

My sister, Betty, said that once you actually buy tickets, you get an option to immediately sell them on Ticketmaster's Thievery TicketExchange site. As you might imagine, these tickets aren't resold at face value; they're jacked up, especially any in the front sections of the arena. Tickets in those sections start at $260 (face value is $120 plus TicketMaster's "convenience charge" of $18+ for each ticket) and go up to $449. (They're just as bad, or worse, on ebay.)

This is how TM "protects" the ticket-buying masses. This way you can be sure that you're buying a genuine ticket instead of a counterfeit one, since they hold the tickets and send them to the poor sap tired, crazed fan person who buys them.

The American Express Gold Card presale for Neil Diamond went on sale last Friday. Betty is a die-hard ND fan; once before she, Joan, and I had tickets, but not great ones, (they turned out to be pretty great for Joan and me, though), so the day or two before the concert, Betty went on ebay and bought a front-row ticket. Joan and I were to the side of the stage but on a higher level, and we had a good view of the band, the stage, and Betty. We so enjoyed watching her enjoy the show!

So, back to my story before my lunch gets cold: Tom has a Gold Card and graciously donated it for the cause. I informed my boss that I was going to take about half an hour of personal leave (she laughed) to try to buy tickets. I spent 45 minutes trying to find something decent, but nothing came up that I was willing to buy. I finally gave up out of frustration and hunger. The only sections that were selling that I ever saw were across the stadium.

However. TicketExchange was already showing tickets in the front sections, for the prices listed above. How did they do that? I'm a fast, accurate typist; I mistyped the security words twice in 45 minutes. Many times I got a page that says, sorry, no tickets available. So, here I am with a very fast internet connection and a decent computer, and I couldn't get a ticket anywhere near the stage.

We both tried throughout the last week, but only those far-away sections were available.

Have you seen the commercials for American Express, bragging how they got tickets to a sold-out concert? Lies. Tom called AmEx and asked about their tickets for the ND show. They gave him a number to call, and guess what? That person told him that TM handles that; they have nothing to say about where the tickets are. He told her that the seats were crap and they should be ashamed to put their name on the presale. She wasn't any help.

So this morning was the start of the ND fanclub presale. Betty, after nearly having a stroke when nothing decent showed up in the first ten minutes, finally got two tickets in the back of section 2, which is center in front of the stage.

You know, we'd boycott TM if there was any other way to get tickets to the shows we want to see. But they're the only game in town at most large venues, so we're stuck.

So we buy tickets and gripe about TicketThievery and go to the concerts anyway.

Mandy

Huntin' season. I hate it.

I mean, I can understand why it exists. If the animals are allowed to reproduce to the point that their environment can't support them, they get sick and die. Starving is a far worse way to thin them out, unless a shot doesn't kill and they have to suffer from it.

Then there are those who actually eat the meat. I can understand hunting for that reason. I've eaten deer meat, but I don't care for the taste or texture. But the reason that I won't eat it again is that deer are cute and I won't eat them.

I won't eat squirrel or rabbit for the same reason. I won't eat veal because the calves are kept confined and pratically immobile so they won't develop muscle mass, and, you guessed it, they're cute. Lamb and mutton, same thing. They're cute.

Beef? If I know the animal it comes from, I won't eat it. Otherwise, I don't have a problem with it because too many cattle stepped on my feet and kicked me in the knee.

I'm having a hard time justifying eating chicken and turkey. On one hand, we had chickens on the farm and they scratched up my flowers and ate the peas just as they were ready to pick. They pooped on everything. The roosters crowed early in the morning. I have no personal affinity for chicken as animals. I don't mind eating chicken and turkey if I don't know where it came from. I know, it's hypocritical.

What bothers me about poultry is the way they're transported to the slaughter houses. They're crammed together in little crates, stacked up on trailers and hauled to the nearest poultry factory. They can sit in those crates on the trailers for hours on end. When it's hot, those in the middle crates don't get enough air circulation. When it's cold, the crates on the outside are exposed to the cold air and any precipitation. Of course they're not given water. By the time they're hauled in, some are already dead. They look so pathetic and miserable. I find myself apologizing to them every time a truck passes. But I still eat chicken and turkey.

Even though I did know a turkey up-close-and-personal.

A few years ago, a turkey fell off--or escaped from--a turkey truck in front of our house. I was living with my daughter and her family at the time; they just happen to be vegetarians. The only vegetarians on the road. And the turkey picked our house as her new home.

She started hanging out in the back yard, sleeping next to the heat pump. We put out water for her and bought corn for her to eat, but she much preferred dog food. We had a couple of dogs in a kennel up against the house, and she'd meet me each time I went to feed and water the dogs. I'd give her some food and she'd be happy.

I named her Mandy. Don't know why; she just looked like a Mandy. Each time I took my little dogs outside, she'd meet me in the yard and walk around me, checking each hand for treats. If I didn't have any, she'd wander off and ignore the dogs.

Around that time I had to have reflux surgery. A few days before the surgery, we had an ice storm and school was closed. I lived upstairs and had a small deck and stairs to the ground, they were icy, but the dogs and Mandy had to be fed.

I started down the stairs carefully; I'd fallen 9 years before and broken my ankle and didn't want to repeat the experience. But I managed to slip and slide down a few steps, spraining my ankle in the process. Dear Mandy rushed up the stairs to me--and pecked at the food I'd dropped. Nice of me to feed her.

After 5 or 6 weeks, our next-door-neighbor, a real anal-retentive type, threatened to kill Mandy if she kept pooping on his newly-blacktopped driveway. This man would wash his driveway several times a week; he couldn't stand to have any dirt or mud--or turkey poop--on it at all.

So, to protect Mandy, we had to find a safer home for her. It's not that easy. We didn't want her to be someone's Christmas dinner; after all, she'd escaped that fate at Thanksgiving, and since she was a pet, she wasn't meant to be food. My daughter called the SPCA and talked to the woman on call, who just happened to be a vegetarian veterinarian who knew of a woman who took in escaped chickens, turkeys, and ducks. My son-in-law and I bundled Mandy into a plastic tub, put her on the front seat of the truck between us, and we drove the 25 miles to the SPCA.

I'll have to find the photos. Mandy sat tall for most of the trip, leaning forward and glaring out the windshield. People had to think we were nuts.

The vet hugged Mandy and told her what a beautiful girl she was. Mandy was used to the attention and took it as her due. I hugged her goodbye, told her that I loved her, and we left.

I still miss Mandy.