One thing about blogging – it allows us to document and share all sorts of ephemera that would otherwise slip away unnoticed by anyone else. Sometimes that might be for the best, but usually, it’s those fleeting glimpses into your lives that really help me feel close to all of you. Hopefully that isn’t just me! 😉
Allow me to present the Stumbling Over Chaos “But since I wasn’t blogging then…” contest. Think of something that happened before you started blogging, something that, had you been blogging, you would have shared with us. Describe that event in a comment to this post before 5 pm CDT (ack!), Monday, March 19. (If you don’t blog, this contest will be particularly easy!)
What? You want me to start? Ok. Back when the Chaos Kitty was a wee kitten (only about 8 pounds or so, instead of the strapping 16 pounds he is now), he started to climb my long summer weight bathrobe (made from a nice textured t-shirt material), which was hanging on the back of my bedroom door. It was winter or early spring, so I wasn’t wearing that bathrobe and didn’t pay any attention to it. After the weather started to warm up, I pulled the bathrobe from its hook to discover that it was now a swiss cheese style bathrobe! Apparently, when an 8-pound kitten repeatedly climbs stretchy, lightweight fabric, there are dire consequences for said fabric. My poor bathrobe suddenly wasn’t good for covering much of anything and I had to throw it away. Now, if I had been blogging back then, I would’ve thoroughly documented this (although I would’ve been dressed underneath the robe, sheesh), as I have documented other tales of Chaotic naughtiness, but since I wasn’t blogging then…
And since I wasn’t blogging back during the memorable summer that I went on over 30 coffee dates (oh, the magic of internet dating… heh), you’ll all just have to wonder what the blow by blow on that would’ve been like. A hint – I went on maybe two second dates and no third dates. The tagline for my blog? Not joking!
Anyway. Winners will be selected by random number and there will be an assortment of prizes. No non-knitters will be forced to take yarn, unless, of course, they’re interested in learning to knit.
A bag of Briggs & Little Atlantic in mulberry (10 skeins, 1350 yards total):
“The tags make excellent snacks!” -M
“But what I really want is to get into that bag!” -M
A skein of Sunshine Yarns sock yarn in Denim:
“This looks like a fun toy, too…” -M
A skein of Trekking XXL, color 144:
“…or this…” -M
A skein of Dicentra Designs superwash sock yarn in Kingsfoil:
“You are so mean, not letting me play with these, Mom!” -M
A copy of Knitting Rules!, autographed by the Yarn Harlot herself to “Friend of Chaos”:
“Stay away from this one, May, because it’s all about me.” -C
I would have put the pictures of Rootbeer, a reddish alpaca, on my blog. (Maybe I will someday.)
Way back in the 70s I had spun some alpaca, then moved on and sold my wheel to concentrate on babies.
Stopping on the side of a country road a few years ago to take pictures at the alpaca farm reminded me how much I wanted to get back to spinning. And now I have.
I know that’s not funny, but neither is my blog. I’ll leave that to others who do it well. 🙂 I’m sure enjoying all the great storytelling on this post.
Great contest and I’m thinking of a million things. But, I’ll go with this one:
A few months after we bought our house, I awoke in the middle of the night to yelling and flashing lights. Looked out the front window and saw 6 squad cars and the entire street bolcked off. At the shady house across the street were cops hiding behind the trees, guns drawn and a guy with a megaphone shouting “Rodger, come out with your hands up!”
Rodger never came out. We sat there watching for 20 minutes trying to decide if this was really cool or if maybe we picked t he wrong neighborhood. Finally they stormed the place and came out without Rodger, whoever he is. Thr next week the house was up for sale. A really nice lady lives there now.
Similar to you, I was once crazy enough to agree to date anyone…and I mean anyone brought forth by family or friends for an entire year. It could have been it’s own blog.
I’d have blogged about the time I went grocery shopping and lost my car keys. I had just purchased $150 of groceries.
I parked right in front of the store so when I was finished shopping I unlocked the tailgate on my station wagon and then went around to the side to buckle my 2 daughters in their carseats. Then I pulled the cart back around the car, put the groceries in the car, close the tailgate, put the cart back by the store, got in the car, went to start it …. no keys. Just had them. Unlocked the car. Now they have been sucked into the black hole where laundry socks go.
Get out of the car and look on the ground. Nope. Check the cart. Nope, no keys. Climb over the back seat to the cargo part of the car and look for the keys. Nope. Empty every bag thinking maybe I dropped them in there by accident. Nope. Climb back over the seat and open the doors checking around the floor, car seats, and kids. No keys.
It’s been 10 minutes, I’m almost in tears, my ice cream is melting, and it’s August so everyone is hot and starting to whine about going home.
I get out of the car, look on the ground again. Open the front doors and look on the seat, on the floor, in the map pockets on the doors. Now it’s 15 minutes and I am crying.
And as the ice cream melts I’m sobbing and the girls are sobbing along with me. I look up and OMG my keys, on the top of the dashboard where I must have tossed them while putting my daughters in their car seats.
We drove home and had milkshakes from our melting ice cream.
heehee, I can’t believe I’m entering this contest. ahhh the things you make me do Chris!
ok, I think I would have blogged about the day my husband and I found out I was pregnant with not one but two babies. how we couldn’t stop laughing nervously hours later…
I would have blogged about how my neighbor’s incredibly obese, crabby cat used to come into my house via the cat door. Fattie would scarf down all the cat food, then stand at the door meowling until someone let him out. It turns out that his immense girth broke the cat door each time he came through. In the end we decided that our cats were best off as indoor kitties.
Oh this is easy…..hands down it has to be the day I found out I was pregnant with our surprise baby–our other kids were 10 and 13 at the time. Yeah, I ran the gamut of emotions that day…..well, the entire nine months. Tons of blog fodder was missed by three short years.
I don’t blog, and that’s probably because I’d end up blogging about really boring things like homework and books I’m reading. I might have had some funny stories about things our puppy did last summer.
Wow, the contest really bring people of the woodwork, don’t they?
Back in February of 2003 DH and I drove down to a small town between Fort Collins and Loveland and picked up this adorable and sad looking dog from a rescue. We took her home on a one week trial. Her name was Wilma, but we didn’t much care for it and it didn’t seem a good match for this dog, so we changed it to Emma because we had read same syllable rhyming names were the way to go if you renamed an animal.
Well, little Emma (who was full grown, but always kind of looks like puppy) was picky and not eating her food (hard to believe that now), so twice a day I was grating up carrots and apples and mixing them with yogurt and some of her kibble. I was gradually upping the kibble and reducing the other stuff. She stayed in the kitchen in her kennel unless you pulled out the harness and leash and then she’d sit by the door and wait for you to take her out on her walk. At the end of the week she had wormed her way into our hearts and we decided we’d keep her. So, it was off to the vet where we found out that her incision was infected and that she had worms. Poor thing! So, we fixed her up.
For weeks she never left the kennel unless I was on the kitchen floor ready to brush her or I was going to take her on a walk. I called my mom up probably several times a day crying that I was a bad puppy mom and that she didn’t like me and what I had I gotten myself into, LOL! It was like I was a new mom, but without the hormonal swings, LOL!
We eventually made our way together. I remember finally coaxing her down into the basement where my studio is and where I tend to spend the vast majority of my time during the work week. I took some Kraft singles and broke them up and trailed them down the basement stairs about every third step, LOL!
I probably would’ve blogged about the completely unromantic way DH proposed to me. No bended knee, no romantic location, just an unlit part of a backstreet in front of a couple of rental places complete with metre high unmown grass…
(Heh. I was there that day with Peeve. Except I missed the restaurant. But yes the Dalai Lama did swan into the hotel! He may be humble but he stays in the best hotels and has about as much securityw ith him as the US president.)
You know, at first I couldn’t think of a single thing. But once I thought of one, I thought of several.
Like when my oldest kitty Charlotte died very suddenly at age 18. And how my sweet co-workers took up a collection so I could go to the shelter and get a new kitty (although they got their money back, because Harley found me before I went to the shelter).
Or how it was so amazing when I got Lasik, and could wake up in the middle of the night and see the clock — all the way across the room!
Or about the very best concert I ever saw: Robert Earl Keen at Gruene Hall in July 1999, despite the 100 degree temperature and no A/C.
Gosh, I may have to actually blog about some of these things!
I would have blogged about the transformation of our house. We’ve been here about 5 years and when we bought it there were some serious crimes against humanity going on in here. Pastely textured wallpaper in the kitchen making it look exactly like a gynecologist’s office. Super high shag carpet that was grey, ten years old and matted down AND had cutouts added of purple orchids and a center diamond of black and white. When I ripped it up it came apart in my hands – nasty! My husband had to rebuild every toilet in this place – there are 5! – and we had to replace every switch, outlet, light fixture and railing. Seriously – we bought this house because it had “good bones” and that’s about all we got (once we stripped off all the crap that is). It’s been a long hard road of work on our part – and now we are on the final phase. Contractors are coming in to install the new kitchen and then we work on the bathrooms. We should be done in another year and a half. Sigh.
Ooo! I thought of another one! I would have blogged about the greatest concert I’ve ever been to. I’d only just heard of the band and found out they were playing in Chicago for the first time in 10 years. So I bought a ticket last minute and went the next day. Right before the show started a band rep asked me if I was alone (I was) and moved me up to fill an empty single seat in the front row, where I got to sit with the friends of the band and, during 3 songs, get on stage and dance with them!
You’re lucky I wasn’t blogging when my kid was born! It would have been nothing but baby photos and complaints about smelling like baby puke. LOL
I would have blogged about the time (3 years ago) I was recovering from abdominal surgery. I knew how to knit, but was doing a lot more beading than knitting at the time. My mom visited for 2 weeks to help M take care of me. She brought her knitting with her; she was trying something new: socks! In the afternoon we would sit at the dining room table while I beaded and she knit on her sock. We marveled at how the heel turn worked, how the sock back in the round for a gusset looked like a papoose that Indian women used to carry their babies on their backs, how the toe really shaped to fit a foot. It was all new and really cool. Several months later, when I had more beaded jewelry than I new what to do with, I started my own handknitted sock. And the rest, as they say, is history.
When I was growing up, we had one dog and only one dog – Kramer the Crazy – who was adopted while I was in high school. The entire extent of my cat ownership was a single day when I was around four years old. My dad brought home a little black cat and didn’t check with the landlord first. No pets. The nameless black kitty found a home on my great uncle’s farm and I was told he ran away.
So, when the Mr. and I decided it was time to make our family a little larger, my initial thought was a dog. My one and only cat was mean and therefore, all cats were mean. Now I realize I was just a shitty four-year-old and any cat would have been mean to a shitty four-year-old. Seriously, what cat likes to have its tail pulled? Due to our complete lack of a yard, we logically decided that an indoor cat would be a better fit for our tiny, little condo, even though I was completely unaware of how to raise a kitten.
The first night I was home alone with Kally, she sat at the other end of the room and kept her eye on me incase I did anything that would be of interest to her, completely normal cat behavior. I called the Mr. near tears and said, “I don’t know what to do, she’s just STARING at me.†He had to explain to me that she’s a cat and that’s what cats do, they stare at you. Every now and then, he’ll say “she’s just STARING at you,†in his best impression of my near-tears voice.
Oh man the one story that would have made the Purling Sprite headlines was the “I love you story”.
When I moved to Utah I had a boyfriend from Salt Lake City, he would come and visit me up in Logan (about a 2 hour drive). He was going down in Salt Lake to school and I was attending school in Logan, so it was a long distance relationship. We would see each other every now and then and got all sappy and mooshy around each other.
As time went on, I started hanging out with more guys and one guy in particular–just as friends, nothing serious.
One Saturday the boyfriend from Salt Lake called me and we were on the phone for a good hour or so at the end he said the obligatory “I love you” and I of course promptly said “I love you too Sam”, except his name was Ryan. Oh I felt like crap! I still remember my face turning all red and getting the urge to hang up the phone as quickly as possible.
Needless to say, Ryan and I never made the cut, but today I am happily married to Sam :)–almost 6 years.
I spent six months living in Rome in college, and that would have made for great photos and stories had I had a blog at the time.
The one experience I would have wanted to blog, for the catharsis, is the time I witnessed a pedestrian get hit by an SUV on the way to class when I was in college. She got dragged 40 feet, and when the guy finally stopped, I ran into the road to get the traffic to move into the other lane. It was a terrifying experience, but there were amazingly six or seven witnesses who helped out in other ways, and all stuck around to give statements to the police. Sadly, the girl never regained consciousness and died the next day. Over a year later, I had to go through the whole deposition/pre-trial stuff, and was blessed to meet her family and find out more about a stranger who changed my life in more ways than I would have thought possible.
Hmm… I’d have to blog about the summer before I went to College, when I worked on a road crew as a flag-girl holding a stop sign for a paving company. I got an amazing tan, made friends with a biker gang, had random strangers stop to propose marriage to me and all kinds of truckers would bring me drinks and snacks from time to time. I also ended that summer with a mouth like sailor, which went over a bit oddly when I arrived at Art College looking like a beach blonde with a mouth like a merchant marine. I didn’t even have to try to stand out 😉
I wish I would have been blogging the first time I dyes yarn with Koolaid. It was a disaster and I hate the smell of it all. The yarn came out pretty cool but I hate the whole process and it was not what I wanted it to look like. Norma recently knit a hat for Dulan with that yarn!
Love the site. Found it looking for the lyrics to Shaun the sheep for my father-in-law (big Wallace and Grommet fan). I particularly liked the stories of the cats! I will be back.
Keep up the good work
Regards
Paul
Fun contest! OK, here goes…
Had I been blogging before I was actually blogging, I would have posted about the amazingly cute pygmy goats I saw in a little village/town in Austria. You could buy yarn by the kilo there, but I wasn’t knitting yet either.
I would have blogged about the experience of adopting our daughter, Cieara. The whole process took about a year, and was both happy and frustrating. She came to live with us when she was 8, and we just celebrated her 7th “Gottcha Day”! I remember that time as being incredibly stressful as we impatiently waited for the gears of state government to slowly turn. I definitely would have blogged it!
I wish I had been blogging when I first learned how to knit. Cause it would have been funny to see photos of me tossing my yarn and needles across the room in frustration!
I’d say it had to be when I shaved my head a few years back.
I wore it much better than Britney does. 🙂
I live in the South, which is home to a fun little delicacy called grits. They are made of corn and go well with lots of butter and sugar, even though some people say salt.
About 10 years ago, I had gotten a big thing of grits and was going to transfer them from the package to another container. Being that I tend to make messes, I made the container swap over the sink.
I was pouring from one holder to another when I noticed that there wasn’t as much as I thought there would have to be, considering the size of the original container.
Well.. there was a hole in the original packaging. This hole caused prob about a half pound of grits to go down my sink.
Grits expand in water, so you can only imagine the issues I had. My sink was so clogged that it was making other sinks in my apartment clog. It was a MESS.
The plumber laughed loudly when I told him what had happened. Totally mortifying. It was eventually fixed, but the pain is still there when I see grits.
This little adventure would definitely have made my blog, along with pics of the grits, the sink and the plumber’s butt lines and his laughing face!
There are such great stories here in your comments!
I think I would have blogged about my fabulous trips to Alaska, it is such a beautiful place and it would have been nice to share some of my photography from there. Too bad none of my photos are digital and I don’t have a scanner, sigh.
Or on a knitting theme, the time my mother taught me to knit. My first project was a cotton dish cloth. I asked my mom how I was doing and all she had to say was “you’ll loosen up”. Little did I know that cotton was an absolute nightmare to knit with no matter if you’re a beginner or not.
What would I have blogged about? Ummm….
My three gorgeous kids (alhough I do that now – but they did lots of stuff pre-blogging too 🙂 )
The tramping (hiking) trips I used to take pre-having-kids. New Zealand is such a beautiful place to live.
I’m sure there would have been a post about the time my boyfriend (now hubby) and I went camping out in the middle of nowhere in a little park campground with long-drop toilets etc and he had a stress reaction that brought on shingles and we ended up being nearly stranded by floodwaters – only the Ranger rounded us up just in time. And somewhere in there there was an incident with a slightly scary neighbour and an axe – but that’s a whole other story.
Gosh – I actually did have a life back then, must remember that more often!
No idea if this will get in on time given time differences but only found your site today (enjoyed the visit!)
EnnaVic (in New Zealand)
I do like the idea of this contest, too! It took me awhile to think of what I would post, since most of my life is mundane.
Most likely, everyone would have been privy to my trek through Europe. I was gone with one of my closest friends for a month, and we went to seven countries, but only spoke the language in three! I hated Paris, since we were there during the summer of 2003. It topped 95 degrees Fahrenheit every day we were there. I also learned how to use an Italian washing machine and figured out the transit system everywhere.
great contest! it’s been fun reading all the stories.
i would have blogged about how i was in my last semester of college (after 13 years in and out) working full time, learning to knit, and training for my first triathlon all at the same time. i still don’t know how i did it or where all that motivation went.
i moved in with my bf early in our relationship, some may say a little too… but we had been living together for a good two months when my usual “i want a kitty!” whines started up again.
i love having a cat in the house and i had been missing it since my baby shawn had “run away” the year or so before, and my other baby zachery passed of cancer the year before that.
the space we were sharing was much too small and his parents didn’t really want us to have a pet, so i’d resigned myself to waiting.
until i got this mysterious phone call from a close friend.
“are you home?”
“yes…”
“good. i’m coming over. and i have something for you.”
i thought it was my helmet, or maybe a pair of sneakers i’d left there a few weekends before. needless to say my interest was piqued. what could have been so important?
well… she calls back when she gets in the driveway and i make my way out.
she’s standing at her car door holding something out to me in her hand. “do you want this?”
the smallest, scruffiest, cutest little bundle of gray and white fur ever was hanging there limply, as kittens tend to do.
talk about melted heart.. she thrust him into my arms and he just fell right asleep.
they were pissed that he was so calm with me but had been scratchy scratchy with them.
br was horrified and demanded they take it back but how could i let go of such a little thing? it took a lot of begging and pleading and pouting but…
that’s the story of how we got the temperamental pain in the ass that is napoleon!
Before I was blogging I would probably would have blogged about picking up a copy of Alice Starmore’s knitting book, The Celtic collection. I thought I would give fair isle knitting a try and knit the Lindisfarne Sweater as my first project. For the first time I actually went to a yarn store to buy wool yarn. Hundreds of $ of Shetland wool in 14 different colors. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time but looking at it now, I can’t think what possessed me to knit anything that complicated for my first fair isle project.
i started blogging a year after i planned my wedding. i definitely would have blogged about how much i hated planning a wedding. how stressful it was to have your future nieces as your bridesmaids when you weren’t sure their mother liked you, why oh why did i need to make my invitations (i’m actually glad that i didn’t read blogs back then either, because i would have stressed that my invitations weren’t good enough), etc.