(And other stuff, too. But first, the shetland.)

I was digging through my fiber bin yesterday, and found some shetland in progress on a spindle, as well as some singles stored on metal knitting needles, patiently waiting to be plyed or finished. I worked on the shetland for a little while, and just had to snap this picture of Boh, laying on my left foot, back arched and ears-a-flapping, directly underneath my spindle.

This is shetland from A Verb For Keeping Warm in the Fruit Loops colorway. I have a little bit left to spin of the brown and red section, but the spindle was getting heavy, so I wound it onto the niddy noddy and set the twist. I did the same with the stored singles from the other half of this bump, which was much bluer/multi-colored.

Picking up my spindle yesterday felt sort of funny after all the wheel spinning I’ve been doing, and it took me a few yards (or 10) to get back into a rhythm. Soon I’d like to work on thicker, even, low-twist singles on the wheel, as I really like the way these smaller skeins of shetland turned out. (The thinner, more uneven yarn on the right is the earliest spindling in this picture, before I was doing things like making plans for the kind of yarn I wanted to spin. Fun to be able to see my progress in these side-by-side singles.)

Yardage: 145 yards of the reddish-brown shetland, 88 yards of the blue-multi shetland, and 96 yards of the thinner blue shetland. (I found a new way of doing math that is a bit easier than the 32 and 36 inch increments: Total number of strands x 5 (my niddy-noddy is 1.5 meters, or 5 feet) and then divided by 3 (3 feet =1 yards) = total # ofyards. Thanks, ravelry!)

Progress report on my Beatles’ song-inspired CMF colorway:

Bobbin #2 is moving right along. The colors are hard to capture when the light is wierd, but these pictures are pretty accurate — I love that chunk of super-bright turquoise on the right!

After the dilly beans, I decided to keep on tackling the zucchini that is taking over my fridge. Last night, I made a big batch of summer squash and zucchini pancakes.

They aren’t super pretty, but they were VERY tasty. It’s a good thing I made a hearty meal, because about an hour after I had settled in with my knitting to watch an episode or two of the second season of Mad Men, a fairly large bat began flying around my apartment. (Story to follow. If you don’t like bat stories, stop reading now.)

It is unclear how he got in, which is a little disturbing because my landlord had called to say that the folks upstairs had seen a bat in the basement. (The house is on a hill, and my apartment has great natural light on three sides, but is technically the finished side of the basement because of the building’s orientation. The idea that there is a way to move between my bright  and cheery apartment and the dark and scary basement is not encouraging.)

It is roughly roosting time, and while I have shared open-air spaces with bat families before (see posts from last summer), I am not that interested in sharing my in-town, rather small apartment with a winged rodent (as my father calls them).  I trapped the bat in my bedroom, shut the door, and packed some fabric at the base of the door so that the bat would not be able to squeeze underneath. I got out my headlamp, grabbed a dinner knife, and went outside to pry the screen off one of the bedroom windows to give the bat a clear escape route. And then I waited.

And waited.

I finally opened up the bedroom and took a look around, and it appeared that the universe had righted itself. So I replaced the screen, and went back to my evening plans. And then Boh started to bark in the direction of the 1960s-style dress I have hanging on my bedroom wall. I went back in the bedroom, only to find my bat peaking out from behind the Jackie O-inspired wide neckline of the dress. I closed the door, repried the screen off the window, and watched through the window as the bat yawned and found a cozy spot to take a nap. This bat was serious about moving in.

I called my dad for advice, and in between comparisons to a situation in which he’d had to deal with a hummingbird trapped in the garage (NOT the same thing as a bat in the bedroom), reminders of  a summer vacation we’d taken when I was a baby that involved bats and netting over my crib at night, and a lot of laughter on his part (“Well, do you think it is a vampire bat? How big are its fangs?”), he recommended broom warfare and gave me a pep talk.

At about 11 o’clock last night, I put on my raincoat, pulled the hood up over my hair (to prevent any sort of accidental touching of the bat or entanglement in my curls), barged into the bedroom, and took a golf-like swing at the wall, sweeping the bat towards the window, and likely disorienting it with the force of the blow.

It landed, stunned,  in a plate full of shiny jewelry on a shelf near the window. I picked up the plate and set it on the ledge, and gently poked the bat with the broom bristles until it flopped out the window.

And, that, my dear friends, is the complete story of Rooster vs. Bat, 2009.

That (hopefully) concludes our bat content for the year. More knitting, spinning, and cooking to come!