Can someone call PETA? This may be cat abuse.

The Mystery Knitted Cat Thingamajig? It's ugly. The stitches are fine and straight and the tension is even, and the fabric is dense and fluffy. But there is no denying the obvious. It is God-awful ugly. We're not talking about your normal handmade kind of ugly, but we're talking 1970s macramé plant holder created by a third-grader in remedial art kind of ugly.

Yet I persevere.

I cast on for the second half of the Awful Ugly Mystery Knitted Cat Thingamajig this morning on the bus. I intend to finish this project because ... ? Frankly, I have no good reason at all except DAMMIT, I SHALL FINISH YOU BEFORE YOU FINISH ME.

(Knitting is difficult for the mentally unbalanced. We take things personally. We talk to our knitting. We wonder why it betrays us so when things go awry. But it's cool ... I'm working on it in therapy.)

My hours of knitted stockinette will eventually turn into an object so tacky my cats will most likely never go near it. They're snobs. No one scratched up the secondhand futon, but when the restored vintage Kagan sofa arrived? CLAW CITY. (By the way, you should have seen me with the tin foil on the sofa. I taped foil all on the sides and back for weeks, to deter scratching of all kinds. Then I switched to big clear sticky tape panels, and then finally after months of living like a crazy grandma with her plastic-covered furniture, my sofa was unveiled and has remained scratch-free. The things we do.)

If my cats don't use the Mystery Knitted Cat Mistake, I am not above soaking it in catnip spray to lure them. In fact, I'll feed them tuna in it. The good tuna, too, from Trader Joe's. Someone is going to use it. There may be a cat pan and some cat litter in it by the end ... but dammit, THEY WILL USE IT. Or I will sell them on eBay, all four of them and their little pile of homemade knitted crap, too.

Also, by the way, next project? Something that uses a pattern. I'm so bad at The Math that my first piece of Mystery Knitted Crap ended up way too big but I improvised and also... there may be hot glue involved. I'm just saying.