Content Warning for pet death. Not gruesome, but sad. Skip the first paragraph if you don’t want details.

My daughter’s guinea pig died last week. He was sick for a couple of months, so it wasn’t a total surprise. We’d had him on medication but what he really needed was surgery but he died a few days before we were due to take him in. My daughter was devastated, but we all took comfort in the fact that he passed quietly, in the company of his favorite people and his “brother” piggy. He wasn’t afraid and hopefully wasn’t in too much pain.

My daughter’s remaining pig is healthy and seems pretty happy, but we’re all spending more time with him because guinea pigs are very social and we don’t want him to be lonely. My daughter has also been craving more companionship and distraction, so we’ve been hanging out a bit extra. On Friday her siblings had to work, so I took her out to bowl and play pool. I am a bad bowler and an even worse pool player, but both games are fun even when you suck.

I also started a new knitting project. I had treated myself to a sweater’s worth of yarn from a favorite indie dyer, Crow and Crescent, and decided to make the Catboat Cardigan pattern. I’ve had my eye on it for a while. It’s got enough cool detailing to be fun without being beyond my knitting skills, and it’s something I think I’d wear a lot. So far it looks great with this two-toned yarn. The colorway is called Antares. In real life it’s a touch more muted than the photo makes it seem, more of a dark raspberry bordering on plum. I wear mostly black and gray, so this is a pretty bold color choice for me, but I think it’s dark enough that I’ll still wear it often.

On an entirely different note, this month was an extra special dark moon for us, since we live right in the path of last weekend’s annular eclipse. My husband is a space geek and a hoarder of useful items, so he already had a pair of eclipse glasses stowed away in a desk drawer. We all took them up to the balcony and passed them around so we could get a good look at the event. I even held them over my phone’s camera to try some quick photos. They’re no masterpieces, but I’m excited I got anything at all. I also took some shots of the cool shadow effect caused by the eclipse. I get little chills looking at the sharp crescent and ring shadows; I don’t know why but I find them intensely fascinating and just a bit surreal.

It’s hard to top an eclipse, so I think I’ll just leave you here for this week. Until next time–Corvus