I’m too little for my big jeans, too big for my little jeans, and WHOLLY unwilling to buy more jeans.

Last week, Jinx had to go in to get his shots. I brought his smelly carrier into the living room and he said “PLEH!” but didn’t go too far away. He had some treats and even deigned to eat a couple from off the edge of the carrier.

Then I picked him up and tried to put him in the carrier, and he lost his composure.

It’s so funny: he chews on me and claws on a regular basis, but apparently only when he’s in a good mood, because despite howling, hissing, and fighting, he didn’t claw or bite at all about going in the carrier.. After about 15 minutes and a lot of trauma, he was in and we went around the corner to the vet.

(If we lived in a place that was walkable, the vet is *totally* walking distance. But perhaps that would be even worse than the car.)

He was so miserable, much worse than ever before at the vet. He tried to hide behind the computer monitor. He tried to climb into my bag. After he discovered that he could fit either his front end  or back end in my  bag but not both and then moaned, I picked him up, and he put his paws around my neck and his his head.

Dr. Jim came in and gently tried to pull him away, and that was the only  time Jinx put his claws out – straight into the neck of my shirt so he could haul  himself back toward me.

Poor buddy. All he had done were weight, temp, and shots. But as Dr. Jim pointed out, his last visit involved x-rays and having to hang out all day, so he probably thought he was in for more of the same.

Five minutes after I let him out at home, he was in my lap. What a sweet boy he is: not a vindictive bone in him.

But we really really really need to start taking some rides in the car until he learns that it’s no big deal.

I know, I’m a terrible blogger. I will never “maximize my blog traffic” or “build my followers” if I keep posting once every 9.4 months.

Usually, when I”m boring on the outside, it’s very interesting on the inside, which = writing. Lately, though, I’ve just been boring. I have, however, been knitting like a crazy person.

An example of part of it:

(catapult for scale)

That’s my pile for Pine Ridge.

When I was 16, I went to the Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux Reservation on a church trip. We stayed for 10 days on Red Shirt Table, where we ripped out the guts of the Episcopal church’s parish hall, rewired it, insulated it, and sheetrocked/painted so they could use the parish hall during winter.

I’ve never worked so hard. Every day, a little old lady would bring up a paper grocery bag of fry bread. Father Two Bulls arranged for drum singers and  a small powwow. They put up a tipi behind the church, and to be inside it at sunset was like being inside the sunset.

Every morning we watched the sun rise over the Badlands.

That trip changed me forever: the land, the work, the poverty, the people – their generosity and their lack of bullshit.

The people of Red Shirt, many of whom were single mothers raising not only their own kids but those of lots of their relatives, lived in uninsulated cinder-block houses. So any damn thing I can knit to help keep them warm, I should.

A few years after I went, my dad did, and he had a similar experience. Words were not his forte, but we shared a language of expressions, sighs, and waved hands, and I know his time on the rez meant as much to him as it did for me.

Today is his birthday, so it’s a good day to pack up that box and send it off. I hope it’s received with half the joy I have in sending it.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes shot:

A certain Mr. Jinx likes to stick his cold wet nose into my business.