This unemployment thing is suprisingly busy.

And leaving little time/energy for blogging. Sorry. BUT - I have a new Supergirl Picture!



It's an action shot, obviously - note the blurry kicking leg. This was a failed settling down for a nap. Her Aunt Girlchild, upon seeing this picture, said, "Aw, she is too smart to fall for that napping BS!" (When Girlchild was a baby, we called her The Thing That Never Sleeps.) Me, I want to leap into my car and drive up there to snorgle those chubby baby arms and legs. The elbow dimple just about slays me.

The days are flying by! I've been going through the closets in the back bedrooms - mostly boxes of photos and papers and stuff accumulated over 30 years, and in many cases wondering why the hell we put it in a box back in...1992? and then moved it 4 times without ever thinking about it. Time to think about it.

I'm only doing my wildlife volunteering thing one morning a week, because I have WORK to do here and can't get sucked into cute baby animals as a substitute for the work of my own life. Last week I was concerned that I would have to give up the wildlife rescue work. I came home from my morning session with a knot in my back, under my right shoulder blade, that nagged so much it interfered with sleep and just about everything else for nearly a week. It finally eased up on Sunday, and I went back to the rescue on my regular morning.

One of the long time, semi-pro volunteers knew it exactly, because she gets the exact same pain. It's caused by 'possum feeding. Which makes sense - the first couple of weeks we had 3 or 4 feeders on the shift so I fed fewer baby 'possums, and had a twinge of soreness later and it went away the next day. The last couple of weeks, there were only 2 of us on duty and just as many 'possums (roughly, um, 30?) - anyway, that explains why I was more sore than ever last week - instead of feeding 8, I probably wrangled 15, and they were in a different room, so I was standing instead of sitting, and it was awkward. You have to hold them and squeeze a syringe of formula so they can lap it up, and it's just an odd posture you never assume any other time in the day. It seems like nothing, but obviously it causes a kink in the upper back if you're not used to it.

After I was diagnosed with a Repetitive Opossum Injury, I began mixing up my feeding posture - switched hands, switched my body weight, held said small marsupial higher/lower, and stretched between critters. My back was fine this week. What would also help would be going down to the pool after the rescue morning and swimming a few laps to work the kinks out. Anyway, I am not quitting my rescue work - I enjoy it, and my back is toughening up. Now that I know it's not a function of heavy lifting (the wee critters being fed are about the size of hamsters to kittens) I am not concerned with doing any long-term damage. This is like a cramp, and I can stretch it out and avoid it if I pay attention.

And, for the 3-4 people here who actually still think this is a KNITTING blog (heh), am I knitting? Yes, I am. I forced myself to Step Away from the Washcloths, and cast on a really cute linen bag (you can always lure me with a really cute bag, and a really cute bag in linen, and I'm so there). Best of all, it is a stash-busting pattern! I have enough remnants and this-and-that of Euroflax to make, I think 3 of these suckers. Apologies to non-Ravelry readers for Ravelry link, but I can't find it anywhere else: Medano Beach. It's easy and fun, though I tweaked it a bit at the start, because I couldn't see a good reason to cast off the remaining stitches before beginning to pick up. I added 2 more rows of my A color, so it began and ended on the same color, and then switched to B and started picking up stitches. My round starts at the start of the B color, instead of halfway through the first round. I cannot figure out why this won't work, so I'm going with it. And "going with it" is, after all, the theme for the year.