Goldie has taken to waking me between 5:00 and 7:00 AM every morning - he’s been doing it for a week now and it’s beginning to irritate me.  I could understand if he was hungry; Jade sometimes gets antsy if I sleep too late and her breakfast is correspondingly tardy.  She’ll sit and mew plaintively until she’s fed.  But Goldie?  He’s not especially hungry.  He’s not racing around just for the exercise and he’s not trying to get into a difficult-to-access sunny spot.

“Be vewy, vewy quiet…I’m hunting gerwbil…”

Coco Puff doesn’t seem to take any notice of him, however.  If she even knows he’s there, she couldn’t care less.  He can’t get at her no matter what he does and she isn’t inclined to worry about it.  Smart little girl :)

I’m two thirds of the way through phase three on the blanket squares.  I could say that better, eh?  I’ve done the third color rounds on 20 of the blanket squares, leaving 10 more to do.

This is the final real color round.  After this, each square will get two rounds of black to sort of tie everything together and then all the squares will be sewn together into a blanket. 

I’m still thinking about a border.  It will have to be black because I’m going to be completely out of most of the other colors and I swore when I started this project that I wasn’t going to buy more yarn - as I had to with the Skipping stones blanket a couple of years ago.  So far things have worked out pretty well and while the end’s not in sight quite yet, it’s getting closer.

This has been a really enjoyable project.  In the past, I have generally avoided multi-colored crochet projects - especially ones involving squares because I was imagining doing one whole square at a time.  You know, starting with one color in the center, changing to another color on the next round and so forth out through however many rounds there were in the square.  The idea of stopping and starting seven or eight times just to make one square was appalling to me - not to mention the ends-weaving hell it would be!

But the assembly-line kind of procedure has worked wonderfully, one color at a time on each square, and then on to the next.  Not only has this given me the opportunity to play with color in crochet in a way I haven’t done before, it has actually improved my work.  See when I’m crocheting - especially when I’m crocheting squares - my tensions starts out loose and tightens up as the project goes on.  You can see how this might not be such a good thing when my first square is 12” on a side and my last square the size of a postage stamp!  The assembly-line thingy has helped me to conquer that - all my squares (at least to their current state of completion) are the same size!  This means my gauge hasn’t been wandering from behemoth to miniscule and I have more consistently sized squares :)

This is a good thing :)

The degus have settled in wonderfully well and we have grown fonder and fonder of them.  It has been interesting to watch as they (clearly!) grew fonder and fonder of each other as well.  They play together, groom each other, are affectionate with one another and are very clearly a bonded pair.  It’s nice to know that one’s pets won’t engage in bad behavior but lately, we’ve begun to suspect that something else is going on here too.

See, Butch (there in the foreground) has been slowly but steadily expanding a-midships.  I mean to say that Butch seems to be getting fatter while Sundance (in the background) maintains a relatively sleek size and shape.  They both get the same food in the same proportions so it seems unreasonable that one should fatten and the other shouldn’t.  Can you think of an obvious reason why one critter should be apparently gaining weight, when under identical circumstances, the other of the same-type critter remains perfectly normal?

Sigh…we’re beginning to suspect that we’ve been had and that Butch, contrary to what the breeder assured us, is female. And that the amazing, expanding middle might be explained by an impending family.  I guess we’ll see - Butch might be a Bella after all :)