Squirrel Stuff I Bought For Other People: Pop-Up Squirrel Card

I found this ridiculous card at a store near my place of employment about a month ago. I immediately knew I needed to purchase this for my favorite squirrel, B.

Of course, this was in early November, so B's birthday had passed as had our anniversary. My birthday was coming up at that point, but you can't buy a card for yourself for your birthday (that's just ridiculous). So I got the card for B just because, even though clearly I was going to get more joy out of it.

Selfish? Maybe. But I like to think that he gets some joy out of the joy I feel from squirrel stuff.

Squirrel Stuff I Own: November 1995 National Geographic

So as I may have mentioned before, I got some good squirrel stuff for my birthday (most of it from my mother, it seems!). This one is particularly exciting.

What's that you say? "But Casey, what do fish have to do with squirrels?" Well, my little friends, behold the table of contents, what is that on page 98? An article titled "In Praise of Squirrels"?!?!

This is a great article. It was written by a woman who spends 78% of daylight hours observing her squirrel friends in her backyard. She has named them, and regularly feeds them and observes their interactions while eating. She feeds walnuts to her favorite one. She is living my dream.

Of course the article isn't just squirrel anecdotes; she beefs it up with lots of interesting facts about squirrels. And the pictures are wonderful!

Baby squirrels! Of course this magazine is from 1995, which is the most interesting part. There is an advertisement for Windows 95! And all the pictures of cars are clearly dated. It's fantastic on so many levels.

Squirrel Stuff I Own: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk

Well, I had a birthday the other day. I share my birthday month with lots of cool people, including Britney Spears and Taylor Swift. (I'm sure there are others, but those are the two coolest people I can think of so I think I've proven my point.) It's the best month for a birthday.

Okay, now that I've thought about it I have a lot of good friends who also have birthdays in December and they are awesome too, but there are too many to name and I don't want to start playing favorites here. But you know you who are.

My mother gave me this book for my birthday this year.

I am way excited about it. First, because it has both a tree squirrel and a ground squirrel on the cover. Two types of squirrels! On the cover! Also it is by Dave Sedaris who is always good for a laugh. It occurs to me that I probably should've read this book before posting about it, but I haven't because I'm saving it for my Christmas travel. I'm pretty sure it will be funny, though, so let's just go with that.

Found Squirrels: National Cathedral Squirrel

We also went to the National Cathedral while were in Washington, DC, last month. Would you believe that they have at least one squirrel included in the exterior sculptural program?!?!

My thanks go to B for locating this guy for me. It was a cold and windy day and I hadn't yet started wearing my warm winter coat so I was a little out of sorts. I was totally going to walk by him! I'm losing my squirrel touch in my old age, but it's nice to know that my spouse is keeping an eye out for me.

Found Squirrels: Natural History Squirrels

Over Thanksgiving weekend B and I went to Washington, DC, to give thanks for tater tot hotdish with some friends of our down there. We stopped by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and it was a dead squirrel bonanza in there!

Some of you may recall that my record of taking decent pictures of living squirrels is spotty at best. (They move really fast, especially when you're chasing them. It's not my fault.) Turns out taking pictures of dead squirrels is way easier.

See, there's no way I could've captured an image of a chipmunk like that in the wild. But as long as someone kills it, stuffs it, and sets it up for me I have no problem. I sense that there are photojournalism awards headed my way!

Of course, sometimes they set them up in very strange positions. Like the prairie dog above (for the slow kids in class, let me reiterate: a prairie dog is a type of ground squirrel). What is that prairie dog doing? Worshiping the sun god?

But I've saved the best for last...

OH MY GOD IT'S A FLYING SQUIRREL ATTACK! DUCK AND COVER, DUCK AND COVER! How would you feel if you saw that fuzzy little missile headed straight toward your head in the forest, huh? You would be terrified, as would I. But don't worry, it's dead, just like the rest of the squirrels in this post.

Wow, I just realized that this is probably the first post in this blog that has pictures of all three types of squirrels!

Squirrel Stuff I Own: Squirrel Stamps

I went to the post office today to buy stamps for my Christmas cards, and recalled that I had completely forgotten to post about an excellent gift I received in the mail almost two months ago.

Squirrel stamps! (And a raccoon, a creature which seems cute in children's books but is actually completely terrifying in real life, or at least terrifying where I'm from because they're larger than most second graders, but we'll let that slide.)

You may be surprised to learn, despite my love of collecting (or squirreling, as I like to call it) that I do not collect stamps. This isn't to say that I don't appreciate stamps. I did just purchase beautiful angel stamps for my Christmas cards, and I'm a little giddy about them but my short attention span will ensure that I forget about them entirely in 48 hours. Stamps just don't have the consistent draw required for me to start a collection.

But squirrel stamps? Those are unforgettable. And so cute! Thanks very much to C and D who found these at a craft fair of some sort, thought to themselves, "Gee, don't I know somebody who loves squirrels?" and were thoughtful enough to send them to New York City to join my collection of squirrel items. You guys are awesome.

Found Squirrels: Guard Squirrel

So I recently found out that a close relative of mine who will remain unnamed is thinking of starting a blog. She's stated this desire before, but I think she may be serious this time. This means I'm going to have to step up my game if I want to still have the coolest blog in the family.

This shall benefit you, oh loyal readers.

Anyway, I'm far too lazy to actually "step up my game" in any way that would require me going outside more frequently, so I started to get a little nervous. What was I going to post about? A series on my favorite cereals? Reviews of old SNES games which would be funny since nobody cares anymore? A diatribe on B's newfound love of the food processor?

Luckily, y'all were rescued when I visited my blog folder and discovered A WHOLE SQUIRREL ABOUT WHICH I HAD FORGOTTEN TO POST.

How could this happen? This little guys has been sitting in that folder for over a month, waiting for his moment of glory! I came upon him when my family was visiting and we were walking through the Village (as I recall, this squirrel was somewhere near Gay Street, heh).

I have seriously lost my touch if I'm letting squirrel gems like this go unpublished for so damn long. So here's hoping that I make like a flying squirrel and... hmmm... that particular simile is going nowhere.

Found Squirrels: Squirrel of Squirrels

This is absolutely the most unusual squirrel I have ever featured in my blog.

And Jesus said, "Let the little rodents come to me..." Credit goes to my mother for seeing this squirrel at the Episcopal church in our hometown. She also gets photo credit too, and lots of mother points for volunteering to be the weirdo in the church taking pictures of the squirrel stained glass window.

Seriously, does anyone out there recall any scene from the New Testament in which a squirrel was mentioned as a companion of Jesus directly before his crucifixion? I used the online searchable Bible and could find not one squirrel.

Don't get me wrong, I'm rather excited to see a squirrel in religious imagery. I've found all sorts of squirrels carved into the walls of banks, but my many years of closely studying relief sculpture in churches around the world has unearthed nary a rodent (although Saint Francis of Assisi often has a squirrel companion, at least when depicted on medallions).

But seriously, this is just strange.

Found Squirrels: Ancient Playground Squirrels

I found this little dude on the gates of the Ancient Playground by the Metropolitan Museum of Art!

There is a beautiful little iron gate that leads into the Ancient Playground (I think they recently renovated this playground?) and it's based on a few of Aesop's fables. Four little squirrels stand atop the gate, keeping watch over the wee children of the park. Well done, New York City Department of Parks & Recreation!

Squirrel Stuff I Made: Amigurumi Squirrel

I finished this little guy last Sunday.

He didn't turn out quite how I wanted. I'm really terrible at sewing body parts together, mostly because I have no patience for it, not because I lack sewing skills (remind me to post sometime about how I had to take sewing classes when I was a kid and I made a really ugly vest).

Anyway, he's still pretty cute.

Calvary Cemetery

B and I took a walk many weeks ago to Calvary Cemetery. Actually, Old Calvary Cemetery. The one nearer our house is the New Calvary Cemetery, annexed by the church when they realized that they needed more space.

The Old Calvary Cemetery is really nice, really quiet and calm and there was a nice breeze the day we were there.

New Calvary is pretty terrible. Two highways (the BQE and LIE) intersect New Calvary, and as a result it's just constantly roaring with traffic. It's also on a long piece of flat land, so doesn't have much character. Old Calvary has much more character and is placed on some nice rolling hills.

And of course there is fantastic sculpture, as always. I do enjoy cemeteries, even if that makes me weird.

Squirrel Stuff I Own: Holographic Squirrel Bookmark

I received a new squirrel item from my mother last week and it is VERY exciting.

Now, to you the picture above may seem blurry, but to me it seems awesome. Do you know why? Because not only is this a squirrel bookmark, it is a HOLOGRAPHIC squirrel bookmark! (I'm assuming that that is why the picture is blurry, and not because my ability to take pictures of bookmarks is substandard. I've never tried to take a picture of a holographic thing before so I didn't really know what to expect.)

This bookmark is so cool. If you angle it upward, the squirrel appears to be munching on the nut. But if you angle it down...

Well then it looks like the squirrel is checking out his surroundings! I'm sorry these pictures are a little lame, but trust me, the bookmark is awesome. I even brought it to work the day after I received it so I could show it to all my coworkers. (They were probably less impressed than I was, but they're nice enough that they put up with antics and told me it was a very cool bookmark.)

City Hall Ghost Station

It was B's birthday not too long ago. He's a difficult man to buy for, largely because despite his many interests and hobbies he isn't a big fan of acquiring "stuff." I often try to find activities for us to do together for his birthday. (One year I got him a large stack of back massage "coupons" that were good for a year, but boy did that almost destroy our marriage. A wife can only give so many back massages in a week before she starts to wish that her husband would just start a damn extramarital affair with a Swedish masseuse to take the pressure off.)

But I digress. This year, I think I came up with a pretty fantastic outing for the two of us, a tour of the abandoned City Hall subway station in Manhattan!

New York City is home to many "ghost stations." Many of the stations closed down when they lengthened the trains back in the day, making the spacing between some subway stops untenable. The City Hall station was closed for this and many other reasons (you can visit Wikipedia article if you're interested in the full history). This station is special in particular because it's quite grand. It was meant to be the "jewel in the crown" of the New York City subway (although I question the sanity of the person who referred to the hot, crowded, and often vomit-filled NYC subway system as a crown). The Transit Museum does tours every couple months, so I signed us up in honor of B's many years on this earth and last Saturday we went!

We arrived early, of course, because I'm insane, and ended up meandering through the parks around City Hall. Turned out to be an excellent place for squirrel watching, and there are even some black squirrels to be seen! More on that in another post, perhaps. I haven't spent much time in that part of town, but I am always surprised at how nice it is when I'm down there.

After killing some time, we descended into the Brooklyn Bridge subway station, where we were checked in by a Transit Museum employee and ushered onto a waiting 6 train. Here's the thing about this City Hall station, it's built as a loop, and while the station itself is abandoned, the loop is still used by the 6 train to turn around and head uptown again. Apparently this is the easiest way to access the station.

It is rather dark down in the station, so I had a lot of trouble getting a good picture of the whole thing. This one is probably the best.

You can see that unlike the rest of the New York City subway system, this station has some beautiful arches throughout. And those lights that didn't come out very well in the photo are actually chandeliers. Chandeliers! In a subway station! The insanity!

One of the most beautiful things about the station was the skylights. This oculus was on the mezzanine level, where one would have paid their fare back in the day.

And down on the actual platform they had three sets of arched skylights as well.

It was really cool. The station itself is really pretty small, and there isn't a whole lot to see down there, but we did manage to spend a good hour down there as a tour group. They had an historian around to talk to us about the history of the station, and he had some interesting things to say. It was definitely a great little foray into New York City transit history, and I think B was pretty happy about his little birthday activity.

Riding A Storm Across the Mountains

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about where I was exactly a year ago. A year ago, I was on my honeymoon with B, covering many thousands of miles in this, the world's coolest vehicle.

That's a 1987 Volkswagen Vanagon Westfalia, for those of you who don't know (affectionately referred to as "Westy" by those of us who do know). The top pops up to create sleeping space, and this genius little vehicle has a stove, refrigerator, and all sorts of random storage space.

But a day ago yesterday, we were not in this vehicle at all. And in fact we were using our own legs to propel us up a mountain and to one of the quickly disappearing glaciers in Glacier National Park in Montana.

I recommend that you click on that picture above to see the enlarged version, if you can. It's absolutely stunning. Montana is stunning. When I was in college I took the train home from Saint Paul, and I still treasure the memory of seeing the Rocky Mountains rising out from the flat fields of wheat... it was one of those moments that reminds you just how incredibly small you are in the grand scheme of things. What forces could possibly have lifted so much rock from the prairie?

But let's talk about feeling small... the hike to Grinnell Glacier made me feel so small. The picture below was taken from our lunch site at the glacier.

We had started our hike at the far end of the second lake you can see. I don't remember how far it was to reach the glacier, but I do remember thinking that at least one of us was not going to survive the trip back down. It was a long hike.

But what an amazing journey. Maybe I'll post about our honeymoon in further detail this month. It's certainly been on my mind a lot. Our lives have changed quite a bit in the past year, since we're now happily ensconced in Queens and are both gainfully employed. Of course, I miss the mountains, as always. This is the curse of having grown up in the West.

Found Squirrels: Subway Squirrel

I found this lovely piece of squirrel art the other day while we were on our way to Governors Island on the N train.


I spied it through the dirty windows of the train and, without actually telling B what I was doing or why, I just walked right off and onto the platform. Luckily, he followed me and immediately understood when he saw me standing, wide-eyed, in front of this mosaic.
Here's the closeup. I think it's just exquisite. As an added bonus, we got to wait in front of it for like 10 minutes while we waited for the next train (B probably did not see this as a bonus). I should probably add that this was at the 8 St-NYU stop on the downtown platform.

Volkswagens on Governors Island

We went to Governors Island again last weekend. Getting there was quite the trial! First, we woke up late because it was Sunday and we're lazy. I had neglected to mention to B that the Volkswagen show was over at 4 PM, and so at about 1 PM when he said, "Hey, when do we need to leave to get to the Volkswagen thing?" we had to rush out the door.

I won't get too detailed in my description of our travel difficulties, but here's what happened:

1. Took the 7, switched the N at Queensborough Plaza within seconds. Nice.

2. At some point we discover that the N does not actually go to the South Ferry station, that's the R. Oops, our fault. We get out at 8 St-NYU anyway because I'm distracted by a mosaic squirrel. Successful transfer to the R.

3. On the R train they announce that the R is not actually going to South Ferry this weekend. We get off at Canal Street and debate whether to take the 4,5 or J. Decide on the 4,5.

4. Then a 6 train shows up! But we can't take that! But wait, we can! Because this weekend the 6 is magically going to Bowling Green!

By the time we got out at Bowling Green it was POURING rain. We got out and RAN to the Staten Island Ferry terminal where we purchased awesome yellow ponchos (2 for $5!) and then continued to the Governors Island Ferry terminal.

We are very dedicated to our love of Volkswagens, apparently.

Since the weather wasn't so great, the Volkswagen festival was pretty sparsely attended, which I thought was great. We were able to check out the cars pretty easily, even if there were only probably 30 or so cars. There were a TON of beetles, and just a few vans (and only three or so of those were Westys). It's really a cool place to have an event like this; you're right on the water with the Statue of Liberty behind you, a nice big green field, quiet... I do like Governors Island.

Probably the coolest thing was the Westy that had been converted to serve beer. Note the two taps to the right of the slotted window. Those were functional taps connected to kegs of beer in the Westy! How cool is that?

Here's the whole beer garden set up with the converted Westy. This was pretty awesome; I think B wants one now. The beer was tasty, but warm since they had run out of ice for the kegs hours ago. But seriously, how popular would we be if we had one of these? We would get invited on everyone's camping trips!
It was a very nice little Sunday trip out to Governors Island, and I hope they do this Volkswagen thing again next year and maybe open it up to water-cooled VWs too.

Connecticut Adventures

We traveled to the tiny state of Connecticut this weekend (that's right, I just called it tiny) to visit my friend M. We rode Metro North, and even got a train with a bar car, but as it was before noon they sure weren't serving.

We went to Connecticut to see the meerkat exhibit at the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk (actually Southern Norwalk which I've been informed is referred to as SoNo). You may be asking yourself, "Since when are meerkats aquatic?" There is no good answer to this question, but it should be noted that meerkats are ridiculously cute and the stars of a show called Meerkat Manor which I believe is popular with the under-10 set (and me). Clearly bringing these little weasels to the aquarium is a good way to drive up attendance rates in the summer. (Note on scientific inaccuracies in this blog: meerkats are actually a member of the mongoose family, not the weasel family.)

Turns out meerkats move WAY too quickly for my camera, so this picture of the giant inflatable meerkat on the roof of the aquarium will have to suffice for this blog.

Okay, so I was a big fan of Meerkat Manor for at least the first season until my favorite meerkat died after bravely defending the baby meerkats from death at the paws of the neighboring tribe. I wasn't able to watch again after that (it was really upsetting, shut up), but I have maintained an appreciation for meerkats. I was really surprised at how tiny they are! In the show they keep the cameras at about ground level, so the meerkats seem pretty tall. They were only probably a foot long counting their tails! And so adorably rambunctious.

There were a lot of interesting things at the aquarium. One of our favorite exhibits was the jellyfish, which were AWESOME.

Jellyfish are just the WEIRDEST creatures ever. I do not understand them at all, but I loved watching them float around in their tanks. It probably helped that the aquarium was piping in a mix of psychedelic Enya and fantasy movie theme music in this exhibit. We watched the jellyfish for a long time.

There was also a giant sea turtle. I did not know that sea turtles could get that big, and I'm honestly a little freaked out now and unwilling to talk about it.

I would like to end this post by stating that I spent the rest of the evening in Connecticut kicking ass at James Bond on Playstation 2, but that would be a lie (the part about me kicking ass, I mean).

Better than squirrels?

Those of you who know me in real life know that I have a wide variety of interests beyond rodents. I'm really pretty obsessed with the Space Race, and with space exploration in general. So when my friend E, who lives in Washington, DC, suggested that we could see the space shuttle out at the Smithsonian, I was pretty excited.

This happened like a month ago, actually, and I've been struggling to write a post about this in my head for weeks now. Today I finally decided that I didn't really need to write a real post concerning the space shuttle. It's AN AWESOME SPACE SHUTTLE and I really don't think that me trying to explain aspects of it is going to make this post more interesting.

I do want to say that the space shuttle was WAY bigger than I had imagined, for some reason. Possibly because I had a toy space shuttle when I was a kid and the little astronauts that came with it were clearly not to scale.

Also, you know how in the news you're always reading about tiles falling off the shuttle? Well I was strangely surprised to find that the shuttle really is covered with tiles! The whole thing!

Anyway, I was way excited. I'm told that this museum we went to had other things in it as well, but I can't remember them at all. They weren't the space shuttle.

Squirrels in the News: Rocky Mountain Marmots

There's an excellent little snippet in the New York Times today about how global warming is affecting marmots in the Rocky Mountains.

Observatory: Some Like It Warm (If They're Marmots)

The warmer weather makes it more difficult for the marmots to shed their Christmas and Thanksgiving weight gain, and marmots now are 3/4 of a pound more on average than they were when the study started back in 1962. (Side note: How do I get an awesome job like that, weighing and observing marmots in the Rocky Mountains?)

Also, the size of the marmot population has exploded recently. Apparently the combination of fatter marmots (I love fat marmots!) and shorter winters has led to a tripling of the population in this area in just the last decade.

I would also like to recommend, while I still have your waning attention, that you visit the marmot entry on Wikipedia. That profile picture just cracks me up.

Squirrels in the News: Wenatchee Squirrels

This article was sent to me by my mother a few weeks ago, but I never blogged about it. It's from a newspaper called the Wenatchee World, Wenatchee being the "big" town in the area where I grew up.

Squirrels: Locals love 'em, but the state doesn't

This article is about an invasion of fox squirrels in East Wenatchee, and the state government's concern that they are an invasive species.

Perhaps this calls for some background. You see, we didn't really have squirrels in the small town where I grew up. We had one that I can remember, and we saw him pretty infrequently. One day the power went out at our house for a couple hours due to a "rodent incident." And we never saw that squirrel again.

So you can imagine how incredibly excited I was when I moved to Minnesota for college and found that my campus was just bursting at the seams with rodents! And they were relatively friendly rodents too, always interested in the last bits of a bagel you were munching on your way to class. I loved them dearly, and this is when my love of squirrels really surfaced.

Other people think I'm crazy. "They're pests!" they say. "They're rabid half the time!" say others (not true). These people grew up with squirrels all over the place; they don't know how good they had it. I've only had eight years of enjoying these ADHD little rodents.

And I should note, that the squirrel population in my hometown has started to rise again. There is a particularly large grey squirrel who has taken up residence near my mother's home, and she is very excited about it. It's genetic, people!

Squirrels in the News: The Genius of Squirrels

So the very same day that I posted the article about how squirrels keep cool in hot weather, I found this article in the New York Times about how amazing squirrels are.

Nut? What Nut? The Squirrel Outwits to Survive

Some highlights from the article, since I know that most of you won't actually click on it:

1. The article quotes a professor at the University of Arizona who is a squirrel expert. IT'S A REAL JOB! I took the liberty of tracking down his website. Not only does he teach an awesome course on small mammals, he also maintains a Groundhog Day website where he tallies the results from each groundhog. Also, I went to one of his student's website, and am now wondering why I bothered with classics when I could have been doing biology and zoology. Seriously, one of his grad students did a project on rodent density in alpine meadows. She counted rodents all day, wrote about it, and got a degree. HOW AWESOME IS THAT?

2. The Eastern Grey Squirrel is so successful that many consider it a pest.

3. Squirrels in a family will greet each other by nuzzling their cheeks together.

4. A squirrel's peripheral vision is as sharp as its focal vision.

5. If a squirrel knows it is being watched, it will sometimes keep the nut hidden in its mouth but pretend to bury it to fool would-be nut-stealers.

Lots of great stuff in this article, guys. I highly recommend that you actually click the link to read it.

Squirrels In the News: Sweaty Squirrels?

This article has some great information about how squirrels keep cool in hot weather. (Spoiler: it's all in the tail!)

Animals in Heat: Do squirrels and pigeons get all sweaty in hot weather?

I haven't been in the habit of posting links to squirrel news in this blog, but since I've been so terrible about posting lately I figured I should give my audience something.

Found Squirrels: Basket Squirrel

We went to a lovely wedding this weekend in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I'll have to put up the rest of the pictures from the wedding on Facebook when I get a chance, but I wanted to share my squirrel sighting from that wonderful day.

This little guy was carved into the basket of hand towels in the restroom at the reception venue. And let me tell you, it was not easy finding a moment alone in the restroom to get a picture of it. I spent at least two hours running back and forth to the restroom trying to get a photo (and let's be honest, I was drinking beer too so there were many reasons for the many trips).

Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn

So I'm a little behind in keeping this thing up-to-date. We visited Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn a few weekends ago. It's apparently quite famous, and has lots of famous dead people interred there (I think most of them were historic sports celebrities, and I'm just really not familiar with them). It was a VERY nice cemetery, probably the nicest I've ever been to. It was filled with trees, green grass, and lots of squirrels.

They have lots of great sculpture, and tons of family mausoleums dating back to the early years of New York City. I love peeking into the mausoleums for some reason. Some of them have chairs and flowers scattered about so you know people have been there in the last six months. And some look like they haven't been opened in decades.

But, as I said, the sculpture was awesome. They just don't make cemeteries like this anymore, it seems! And maybe I'm particularly entranced by it because where I great up nearly all the cemeteries just had the flat headstones, and they were nearly all the same. I was told this was to make mowing the lawn easier, but I'm not sure that's true. Anyone have any insight into this? Is it just the cost?

I did notice that in this cemetery, as in many cemeteries out here on the East Coast, there are big family plots, and a big family plot usually calls for a large and costly monument of some sort. Seems to me that back in Eastern Washington even if a family does have a whole plot, everyone still gets their own headstone and there isn't necessarily a large, shared monument. What sort of zany conclusions about culture can I draw from this?

Anyway, there were a ton of squirrels, but I didn't manage to get any squirrel pictures. We did walk on Nut Path for a bit, which was quite exciting for me.

This is still not a knitting blog.

So I recently took up crocheting, which seems (at least in knitting circles) to be the older, dirtier, and less popular sister of knitting. I kind of like it, because it's REALLY easy and moves along very quickly. I finished my first crocheting project a few weeks ago, a sushi scarf!

When rolled, it looks like a nice maki roll, with fish on the inside, caviar around that, and some sort of green thing (avocado? celery?) stuck in there. Of course, when you unroll it it just looks like some crazy color-blind person's crochet project.

Yeah, not very attractive. I made it for my friend M (of the swing blog; you remember him) who loves sushi and give it to him when he was here a few weekends ago. I do not expect him to actually wear it, for the record. It was a great first crochet project, and I think it's pretty awesome.

The pattern can be found here if anyone is interested.