I don’t know how I’ve failed to mention this before, but I’m on Twitter as @cassinator. Feel free to add me!

Just a little round-up of fun links I found today.

+ Simple crochet circle garland from Quilt While You’re Ahead: I feel confident enough in my crochet skills to try this and use up some of my scrap yarn.

+ Totoro mittens!: Available as a free download on Ravelry (link goes to Ravelry page).

+ Zora cardigan on Knitty.com: Perfect for a Spring Break trip to San Francisco in early March.

+ “Knit Rodeo” cards by LocalGringos on Etsy: The cowgirl kinda looks like Patsy Cline.

And if you’re able to give, please consider donating to the International Red Cross to help Haiti. The Yarn Harlot posted the “Knit-Signal” and I am, too. If you knit (or crochet), please consider posting the Knit-Signal and encourage other knitters to donate. As a grad student I can’t offer much, but the minimum donation on this site is $25, but I figure: a.) I’ll have a roof over my head tonight. 2.) I’ll have clean, running water today. 3.) I can forgo groceries or eating out tonight with the assurance that I’ll be able to get food tomorrow.  4.) I won’t NEED $25 today.

Even for me, $25 isn’t an amount of money I throw around lightly. There are other sties where the minimum donating is $15 or $10. I just hope that you are able to do something to help.  And please, pass on the Knit Signal. Correction: You CAN donate a minimum of $15 at the icrc.org website- just enter 15 in the “different amount” box.

It’s a beautiful day here in Atlanta, and I’m all the more thankful for it! I hope things are well where you are.

Oh what a tricky winter it’s been! Around Thanksgiving I mentioned that my grandmother (my only living grandparent since my other grandmother passed away over ten years ago) had a massive stroke. On Christmas Day I flew to St. Louis & waited 8 hours for a little propeller plane to take me to the Marion, Illinois airport to see my grandmother, uncle, and my parents who’d driven up from Atlanta. I sat waiting for this tiny plane all day without food because the airline told us a plane could be ready at any moment and we were so far away from the main terminal that I was too scared to leave. By the time I made it to Marion I was hungry, tired, and seriously grouchy. We visited my grandmother in her nursing home, but she was really out of it. In the morning she’d had pancakes with my dad, was talking to people, and generally doing very well. As the day wore on, she started drifting in out of consciousness and finally my mom decided to have my grandmother admitted to the ER. The next morning I learned she’d had another stroke. My mom and uncle were exhausted from staying up in the ICU with her so my brother and I took turns all weekend in her hospital room and amazingly she was able to talk for awhile, knew who we were, and wanted to listen to music. It was such a miracle that she had the ability to speak and read- she kept reading the calendar and white board on the wall with the nurses’ names. At the end of my short visit, my grandmother was trying to drink from a straw and was sitting up in a chair again. It was amazing!

I hate to put all of my personal issues out there on this blog, but I haven’t been able to think about much besides my family and work over my break from school. I made an attempt to take a few days to relax (all this snow & ice in Atlanta helped- we couldn’t leave the house for two days!), but I found myself working more in my three week break than I did over the semester.

I want to post more in 2010. I decided not to make any resolutions this year about blogging or knitting (I don’t want to be disappointed!), but I have already started to make a conscious effort to put out more positive energy into the world. I plan to knit more this year and try more service projects that involve knitting.

All this to say- I’m here! I’m breathing! Despite being snowed in all weekend, I’m feeling great and ready to work hard at school and my life in 2010!

Soaring above the clouds in the tiny Cessna between St. Louis & Marion. Exhilarating!

Our tiny two-prop plane.

My seat was directly behind the pilot’s seat- I could’ve reached up and flown the plane! (But I don’t think our pilot would’ve appreciated that.)

I bought bananas from Your Dekalb Farmer’s Market thinking they might quickly brown with the intention of baking something with them. They were about an hour away from black death this evening so I ran by a local chain grocery to grab some pecans, and found some peanut butter swirl chocolate chips at a major discount so I was like, “OH YEAH” and made some “Elvis” cookies! (I took pics with my iPhone, so apologies for the graininess.)

I based my cookies on this recipe from Simply Recipes: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/banana_cookies/

All I have to say today is:

I’ve been reading this voraciously over the past few days between two days of presentations, studying for a major quiz, babysitting, and generally trying to stay sane before Thanksgiving. I’m almost finished, but I’m reluctant to get to the end, because I don’t want it to be over! I’m not sure if I’m exactly the intended audience for any of Cory Doctorow’s other works, but this Young Adult novel is BRILLIANT. Pleeeeeease, Cory! MORE MORE MORE. I cannot wait to put this in my class library when I start teaching. I hope I’ll have a few students who read it and want to talk to me about it. I want everyone to read this book! Seriously, I will let you borrow my copy if you ask nicely. Just, please, go find a copy and read it already!

This year’s Dragon*Con acted as a great trial run for me. I vaguely remember my first (and prior to 2009, my only) Dragon*Con two years ago and that’s probably because I had to work both Saturday night and Sunday morning so I didn’t do much. I dressed up as Leela from Futurama one day, but that’s about it. This year’s Con was a much more serious attempt at attending panels, making new friends, sitting next to celebrities (Malcolm McDowell, fools!), hiding alcohol, and figuring out how to stay well-rested. I failed in the latter item as it took nearly 15 hours of sleep on Monday to recover.

On Friday I saw a bunch of stellar costumes to start off the weekend:

This Nurse Joker wasn’t messing around. It usually makes me giggle when people are in character, but this dude had it DOWN. The voice, mannerisms, everything. Best Nurse Joker I saw all weekend.

I refer to this guy as “Man Leia.” I have another pic of him trying to lick himself.

This gal did an excellent job on the Johnny Depp version of the Mad Hatter. Really loved the hair and eyebrows!

A walking, talking TARDIS!

Dr. Mrs. The Monarch gets checked out….

A huge lucha libre group. Check out the guy’s pose on the front left!

So yes, the costumes were fun and there are many more on my Flickr site. Sadly, I didn’t take any pictures during panels because I didn’t know we were allowed to, but now I know for next year and will make a point to take pictures during big panels and try to get pics with panelists.

As far as panels went, I attended several from the Young Adult literature track and enjoyed them very much. I especially liked the religious themes in YA lit panel and look forward to next year’s YA track. Jason and I attended an voice acting panel with several famous voice actors including the guy who did Roger Rabbit’s voice, the current voice of Porky Pig, and Vic Mignogna (who is 47 years old?!?!). That was quite the interesting panel- I didn’t know who most of those guys were at first, but they were all so funny that it didn’t matter.

I missed a lot of great panels though due to working half of Sunday and then needing sleep like crazy. I’m a little sad, but mostly I just feel like it’s good prep for next year. We definitely plan on getting a hotel room at the Marriott, stocking it with booze, and taking naps as needed. No more of this schlepping back and forth to East Atlanta on the MARTA business.

Another great event from the weekend was meeting up with some fellow-crafty-types at the Marriott on Saturday:

From left to right: Renee, Alexia, Dot (aka Nancy), Jessi, and Misty

You can follow theses ladies on Twitter: @obajoo, @emberlexi, @DotatDabbled, @jessidee, @mistyg

They are all amazing crafty ladies- you may know Renee from the great blog The Domestic Scientist (she’s had several items featured on the Craftzine blog!) When I fix up my blog’s appearance I’ll add a special place to link to their blogs.

And finally, I ran into a local hero of mine: Lucky Yates of Dad’s Garage fame!

I talked to him for all of two seconds and totally gushed like an idiot (look at my giddy smile in that pic), but this was a major fan moment. I’m a little surprised at myself as I used to interview famous musicians at the radio station and always prided myself on my composure, but damn, even Jason said I was acting stupid silly. I think I actually forgot the name of the neighborhood I used to live in (Inman Park) and Lucky finished my thought for me. Major stupid silly, I tell you.

We had a great weekend and now I have all sorts of inspiration and ideas for next year. I’m already plotting costumes (Hank Venture as The Bat, Duck Dodgers, and Futurama just to name a few…), plotting tactics, plotting mini-events (more crafting, anyone?). Why, why, WHY does this only have to be one weekend out of the year?

But there are some fun events coming up to keep me occupied: Oktoberfest/JapanFest on Sept. 19/20, GreekFest/my birthday the weekend of October 3-5, and HALLOWEEN! Yes, I am totally succumbing to the marketing tactics of Michaels, Target, and every grocery store in Atlanta.

I miss all of my new friends already, though, and hopefully we can all get together before next year’s Con!

I don’t have much time to write a great Dragon*Con update, but I did want to add this for the ladies who met up at Pulse Bar next to the “Geek Crafters Unite” sign:

“Penis….NOOOOOOOO!”

I got a MacBook Pro for school (how did I ever live without it?) and today I made my first video with iMovie about our sweetie Nugget. It totally looks like a memorial video, but I assure you that this kitten is alive and well and wreaking havoc in our house. The footage is mostly of the first week we got her when she was just a little, well, nugget of a cat. My favorite part is at the end when she falls asleep- too funny!

Nugget from Cassie Smith on Vimeo.

I don’t quite have the hang of iMovie yet so I’m probably gonna go buy a cheap video camera to take silly videos with and then mash them up into silly iMovies! My favorite part is picking the music; I chose this sweet little Kimya Dawson song because Nugget is so wee and the song is about feeling a particular size- literally and figuratively. I don’t think Nugget thinks she’s a little cat at all- she constantly harasses our two other adult cats and tries to bully them. But like the little girl with the curl, when’s she’s good, she’s very, very good and when she’s bad, she’s horrid!


And pssst! Word on the street is Pulse Bar at the Marriott Marquis in the ATL at 1pm on Saturday. Pass it on. More Dragon*Con info coming soon!

I’m going to pretend like I didn’t disappear for months there and get back into the swing of things.

Like fleas. Why start with fleas you ask? Because of this precious baby:

This is Nugget our sweet baby kitten who was the runt of a litter born in our backyard. When we found her, we immediately took her to the vet where she was promptly given de-worming medication and estimated to be about 4-5 weeks old. She ate well for us, was frisky and inquisitive, and gained weight like a champ. And then on Thursday we noticed a major flea infestation in my craft room where she currently lives. Jason bought some chemical flea killer and we cleaned the heck out of that room as it is the only one in the house with carpet. We gave Nugget several baths with Dawn dish soap and Jason meticulously went through her coat with a flea comb. Well, yesterday, Nugget was listless and sleepy all day. I definitely knew something when I picked her up in the evening and she was rather warm. I took her temp and sure enough it was 104.1, much too high for a kitten. When we took her to the vet he tested her for FIP, FIV, & leukemia and thankfully all were negative; however, poor Baby still had a plump belly from worms and was extremely anemic due to all the fleas. Nugget spent the night in the vet ICU.

So today I set out on a mission to learn about all the flea-killing methods out there and thankfully many of them are not all chemical-based, although some of the steps I took were drastic:

+ New vacuum cleaner: I purchased a high-power Eureka vacuum that knocked my socks off when I started it up this afternoon. After using this, I’m kicking my old Hoover to the curb- ADIOS! The vet and several online sources (including an NPR article) said that vacuuming plays an important role in managing fleas. You need to vacuum at least once a day for several weeks and dump the bin OUTSIDE in a trashcan to prevent fleas from re-infiltrating the house. You can also spray the inside of a bag or vacuum canister with flea-killer or cut up flea collars and put them in there.

+ Borax: The fleas in Atlanta (as well as mosquitoes, roaches, and other insects) have swamped us badly this year. Many of my neighbors have been complaining about the prevalence of pests this summer which may be due to the early rain we got in May. A neighbor suggested sprinkling Borax on the carpet (with kitties far, far away for awhile), letting it sit for several hours, and then vacuuming it off. The kind people at Village Hardware in East Atlanta also suggested putting a few tablespoons in the wash to kill fleas in clothes.

+ Brewers yeast: I have yet to try this, but another neighbor mentioned using brewers yeast (not the same thing as nutritional yeast) as a bathing agent (kind of like taking an oatmeal bath for poison ivy) and even adding a little bit to the kitten’s food. My dad said that a place like GNC might carry some and I plan to check during the week.

+ Dawn soap & a flea comb: The vet said to bathe the kitten daily for at least a week with Dawn soap (we use Johnson & Johnson’s baby shampoo on her head) and to run the flea comb through her hair every night until she’s at a stable weight to physical get fleas off her body. She’s too underweight for any flea meds so we’ll have to do this by hand until she’s big enough.

And now for the good news- Nugget came home from the vet this evening sans fleas and she’s currently in the recently cleansed craft room for the night. I have yet to lay down any Borax and I’m working all day tomorrow so I’m playing this by ear. I plan on trying some of the above methods later in the week- spare no expense! (And yes, a 24-hour stay in the vet ICU is expensive, in case you were wondering!)

And thankfully, many bloggers had positive, optimistic things to share that really lifted my spirits and helped me get through this scary weekend. If you’re in need of a lift, check out San’s blog at http://www.san-smith.com: She’s a fountain of cheer this week (and per the usual).

In other news, my best friend got married in July- I was her maid of honor, didn’t have the ring during the ceremony, and got to sing the “Lord’s Prayer” immediately following the ring fiasco! Turns out she had it in a bag and forgot to take it out, but it’s all good because the same thing happened to her parents and they’ve been married for almost 40 years. I have to take good luck signs whenever I can these days!

I also finished my first semester of graduate school and got all A’s! Huzzah! And when my student loans come in, I might get to plan some fun for myself… we’ll see!

Speaking of school- August, where did you come from and why so fast?

Babies and knitting go together like Nutella and my mouth. Like cherry and Diet Dr. Pepper. Like Cassie and a yarn store. You get the picture. So how stoked was I when I received a conversation from an Etsy customer with a picture of a baby in my knitwear!

Those cheeks! Please excuse me as I curl up on the floor in a sugar-induced coma from the sweetness of those pudgy cheeks.