Yet Another Farewell, and More Progress to Report

Sometimes things do occur in sets of three. This weekend, we said good-bye to the third pet within four months. And this one seems the hardest to understand. Sweet-pea and Max were our oldest cat and dog, respectively. Each had had their share of medical problems; neither was totally unexpected. But our poor Dybbie was only 5 years old and his loss to kidney failure was a surprise to us all.

Dybbuk and his brothers -- and their Mama -- came to us in the summer of 2004. Mama and babies had been hanging out under a shed in my sister's yard, sneaking food from the dog's food bowl. They came to us because they were semi-feral and more of us were home more of the time to help socialize them.

Dybbuk was the short-haired light orange kitten, always a little pale and freaked out, thus his ghostly name. Dybbuks are generally malevolent, and this Dybbuk never warmed up to most of the family. But he could be a sweet kitty on his own terms -- as long as you didn't try to pick him up or hold him or even look at him for very long. He liked to pretend to be a towel.

Dybbie, we hardly knew you. Yet you will be missed, by your cuddle-buddy Junior and by me.

Last Friday my camera crapped out and I couldn't post a picture of the Freecycled item that nobody wanted. Here it is:

I actually think they are kind of pretty, but whatever. I'll offer them one more time and then they become trash.

Today was back to the boxes in the front hall. The contents of boxes 5 and 4 went directly onto the bookshelves. I got a bit of a giggle out of contents of one of them, however:

College yearbooks. Heavy college yearbooks. Who would have thought, 35-odd years ago, that we would still be lugging these around the country? And caring so little about their contents?

The next box had an interesting description on its tag:

Really? This had to be checked out. Sure enough, when I opened up the box, I found contents that we are unlikely to eat:

I started to go through them to figure out whether there were any we want to keep, however "unlikely" that may be. But I decided to go back to my other project instead. There will always be time to look at books. I really want to finish Future Vet's sweater, however, and get it in the mail to him.

As you can see, major progress has been made. It's a little big on this model, but should be just about right (if a little loose) for Future Vet. All that remains is the hood, the underarm seams, and weaving in all those ends of yarn. The end is definitely in sight -- of both this sweater and the pile of 37 boxes that were in the front hall.