Way to go Chewy!

Chewy, queen of the squirrel-obsessed, blew me away this week.

For the first (and fingers-tightly-crossed hopefully not last) time she actually stopped trying to climb the tree from which a squirrel was taunting her and instead decided to go say hello to my neighbor. That may not be much for a normal dog, but Chewy is not exactly a "people" person. She's a Chow-mix rescue that I adopted 4+ years ago -- and she came with issues. People issues, dog issues, riding in the car issues, you-name-it-issues. I'd love to know what happened to her in her before-me life because there was a whole lot of fear packaged in that furry body. It's only been in the last year or so that she's started behaving as if she believes that maybe, just maybe, not all strangers are bad and something to be wary of. In the last 6 months she's actually started soliciting back-scratches from the regulars at the dog park. So, for her to RACE up to my neighbor -- who she'd hardly let touch her until that moment -- tail-wagging and SMILING. And give up a squirrel to do it? Wow!

On the knitting front, I finished the Whiskers and Paw Prints socks. They're pair 13 for the 52-Pair Plunge, pair 4 for Summer of Socks. I didn't follow the pattern very faithfully -- need to make them bigger so I opted to increase the number of pattern repeats so I could keep using smallish needles. That worked fine until I got to the toe. The original pattern calls for making the underside of the toe look like a paw print. I couldn't get the paw print looking right with my increased stitch count. After 3 visits to the frog pond I finally gave up and just knitted them plain. Still like the idea though...

And finally, the Footzey Foos are done too. I'm having a hard time figuring out what to call these. Somehow "Pattern 39 out of that Japanese Knitting Book with the 500 patterns" seems a bit unwieldly. Too bad I can't read Japansese -- maybe the pattern really has a name.