Well I'll start off with the happy stuff first. Had a telephone call from my landlord last night and he has said that he is going to renew our tenancy to December 2008 so that means I wouldn't have had to get rid of Mabel after all. I will get round to posting a pic of Mabel's smaller addition in the hope that someone can help identify her.
BAD NEWS
After doing some touchy feely on Gibber and Ish on Saturday night I found a lump on her stomach near her girly bits that I wasn't too happy about. I finished work early yesterday and took her to the vet. It turns out that she had breast cancer :( I booked her in for surgery for today and am just back from collecting her all safe and sound. The vet has said though that there is everything likelihood that the cancer will come back. We lost one of our first pair of rats to stomach cancer when we lived in London so I knew what I was looking for so am amazed that it went for so long undetected. In order to save a young lady's modesty I'll not be posting a pic of her operation scar.
KNITTING
One of best friend's requested me to knit a scarf for her grandmother's 90th birthday (which is tomorrow). I got the yarn from Texere a few months ago. It is the Artesano Alpaca in Flamingo colourway. I went through my stitch pattern books until I found something that I liked. It is an archway lace pattern of a 14 row repeat. I had a few false starts as I had written out the pattern incorrectly with one too many YOs as I wasn't intending on carrying the book round with me just for one pattern. Once I had finally worked out this I was away and on with it.
Here is the scarf pre-blocking:
The deadline I had was to get it to her on Monday 16 and I was really worried that I wasn't going to make it. In fact I sent her a text asking for an extension on Saturday night but I managed to plough through it, get it washed and blocked. Here is the finished object:
