Work Out - A pet update

By Nancy Leasman

Neytiri has gone home to St. Paul (see February’s Work Out column). She was a quiet house guest for a month, required trail camera monitoring for her people to find her (behind the furnace), and caused a bit of a scuffle to be caught. Since then, she has settled in and seems to appreciate her surrounding, including her people.

So, our house is petless. No cats, no dogs, no fish, or birds. The closest thing to a pet is the robotic vacuum cleaner. I named it David.

David lives in a corner of the dining room, in a convenient spot where I can poke him and tell him to get moving. He does a fair job but is inclined to get stuck under the couch, under a bed, on a thick rug, or in the bathroom. When he gets stuck, he says, “Error.” I’d rather he said, “I’m stuck! Come save me!” because that’s what you have to do.

Since we have no pets, I can leave my knitting projects out and nobody sits on them, chases the yarn ball, or gets tangled in the trailing fiber. Occasionally I drop the project to the floor beside my rocking chair when I get up to take care of some little job. Knitting does that. You think of other things you need to do while the simple contemplative nature of twining yarn occupies both fingers and brain.

I was contentedly knitting one, purling one, for the ribbing of a hat, when it occurred to me that I should activate David. Though we have no pets, the dust bunnies were still piling up. I put my knitting project on the floor beside the chair, went to the dining room, and set David on his way.

I suppose I got distracted by other things. That happens, too, since one little job often leads to another. I didn’t hear David call, “Error,” but at some point I realized he had gone quiet. I went looking for him, figuring I’d have to fish him out from under the couch. But, no, David was sitting happily by my rocking chair, chewing on my knitting!

He wasn’t actually chewing. He had stopped, after tightly winding the yarn around his little twirly sweep thing. (I just looked it up: it’s called the edge-sweeping brush.) David had tinked a few stitches (that’s knitter speak for un-knitting or raveling, otherwise known as backward knit-tink) and wound lint and hair into the yarn.

I was tempted to cut the loss, but found I was able to loosen the yarn from the edge-sweeping brush and extricate the mess from David’s grip. I cleared the schmutz from the yarn and assessed the damage. Knitters learn to ladder back, or undo stitches down into the knitted piece, to fix mistakes. It wasn’t really too much of a job to use a crochet hook to pull up the few rows of undone knit stitches on the outside and purl stitches (which were knit stitches on the inside) to repair the tangle.

While David was on his back, I took out his roller brushes and cleaned them. I emptied his little dust collection bin, and set him off to finish his work. The hat was no worse for being strung along.

Niera, the tiny kitten that found me on a walk a couple years ago (see Senior Perspective “Work Out” April, 2024), has lived with her person (child # 4) in Minneapolis for the last two years. She came to visit over the weekend.

Niera sat quietly on a chair while I showed her person another knitting project. It’s a circular shawl which I am knitting and beading for added visual interest. The yarn is a fine lace-weight pinky lavender made of baby alpaca and silk. Without any sound or fanfare, Niera chewed through that irresistible yarn trailing from the project to the ball!

I may not have any pets but they still manage to knot-up my work.