[Yes! It's back! Some of you oldschoolers may remember our Wiener-free Weekend series where we feature stories from wonderful bloggers who simply aren't as blessed/cursed as we are with our dachshunds. Don't hold it against them...Our first triumphant return to the series kicks off with this post from Andrea.]

Yesterday afternoon, I received a call from my husband that made me go limp and fearful to go home.  See, he hurt his ankle a few days ago and has been nursing it back to health over the last few days.  Our grass was getting out of hand, so I suggested his 9 year old nephew, who likes to cut grass, come over and cut ours for the week so that Mike doesn’t have to put the pressure on his ankle for as long as he’d need to be on his feet to cut our yard.  It’s not a huge yard, but it’s not tiny either.  So when my SIL and nephew came over to do the chore, they put our dog, Calypso, of whom I’ve promised an updated picture for the blog, in our bedroom.  This is often where we squirrel her away when we have people over.  She’s a big schweetie, but she’s also a big lug with a puppy’s enthusiasm and she’s a bit of a handful.  After yesterday, though, I may rename her Marley, after the worst dog ever.

So Mike is telling me over the phone that when he got home the grass was nearly done and things were fine until he went upstairs to free the Bumpass hound (a nickname from A Christmas Story that we often call her because of the chaos she leaves in her wake) when he saw it.

“Honey, don’t be too mad.”

“Uh oh.  What’d she do?  Pee on the bed?  Chew on a shoe?”

“She, um… well… she got into your yarn.”

My body went limp.  My yarn stash is virtually unprotected, a situation which will be remedied this weekend when I shuffle some clothes and free up a storage tub for it.  The yarn is in plastic bags under my bed, and in my closet on shelves of our closet organizer, sorted either by project or by color.  My most expensive yarns are in a shoebox on one of the higher shelves so I was confident they were okay, but I was worried first about a sweater’s worth of yarn I had stashed under the bed.

“Who can we give her away to?” I asked Mike, only half joking.  I asked him to describe the yarns in the massive tangle, and he said it looked like three or four balls worth, and he told me the colors.  Okay, so it wasn’t the sweater yarn under the bed.  It came from a precariously perched, i.e. a big bag stuffed into a too small spot for it, bit of yarn for a baby blanket.  Mike said the yarn itself didn’t look damaged, but it was awfully tangled.  He’d put it on the bed and shut the door to keep the cat from going at it, too.

“I can deal with tangled.  I can get out most tangles.  I just want to know if the strands have come unplied.”  He said it didn’t appear so.  So at the end of the day, I was conflicted with a desire to get home as fast as the speed limit would allow and to prolong having to face the mess as long as possible.  Upon entering the room, I came upon this scene (and if you’re a knitter with an affinity for yarn, you might want to look away).

That’s three skeins of knitpicks palette yarn for a baby blanket and a skein of yarn that I can’t remember its origins for a blanket I’m making Son.  While the monetary value of the yarn isn’t all that much (probably about $12 worth of yarn there) it’s still yarn, and I can’t help but hurt.  All yarn is my friend.

The accused:

Don’t be bamboozled by her cute face and happy disposition.  She’s a destructive force with a long list of victims, including the frame of our bed, a pair of shoes or three, a grill cover, a hose attachment, an electrical cord, the corner of our couch, the insulation on piping to our air conditioner, books, two kids pools, two wiring harnesses on our old camper that plugged into the car for the running lights to work, and now my yarn.  We’re thinking of breeding her so that she can start to pay us back for some of the destruction she caused.  Don’t let her fool you.  Behind that innocent looking face and playfulness lurks a tornado, a Tazmanian Devil intent on making the most of time spent unsupervised.


It took me two hours to untangle the mess, and for those of you nearly crying over the state of the yarn, you can relax.  I saved all but maybe two yards of it.  Even the brown yarn, which had its guts spilled all over like some disemboweled blanket.  It’s now resting comfortably in a ball after its procedure to untangle it,  and the attacker has been relegated to her place in the backyard at least until the end of the weekend, not coincidental at all in relation to my putting my yarn in tubs.