Tell me again why I have dogs?

I should have seen this coming.

When we chose our newest dog Runner from the Lanark Animal Welfare Society, we saw right away that he liked playing with stuffed animals; stuffies the staff at the shelter called them.  There was a grotty little stuffed bunny in the dog run and it looked like his most favourite thing in the whole world the way he carried it around with him.  I almost asked if we could have it.  I was prepared to add a few bucks to the bill to make him feel more comfortable.

You see, I don't give my dogs stuffies.  They have rope bones and balls, rawhides, pigs ears and all the sticks they can carry, but no stuffed animals simply because there is no glamour in cleaning up puked up stuffing.

What does this have to do with knitting you ask?  Well, I left my knitting unattended one day in October when Runner was obviously missing his stuffed bunny.  It was laceweight yarn, neatly wound into a cake.  I got up one morning and it looked like this:

Actually, it didn't look this good; I couldn't find the ends.  I don't think the bill for the dog had cleared the Visa yet so I wasn't prepared to throttle him but truthfully, it was my fault.  I did leave it unattended.

So I packed it up into a bag and put it away.  Today, I had calmed down enough that I was prepared to take it out and have a look at it.  I did obviously find the wound up end this time; and believe it or not, it only took me 80 minutes to wind this mess back into a ball.  There were two breaks in the yarn.  All things considered, I got off lucky.

Needless to say, I'm now absolutely militant about putting my knitting away when I'm done.