Although it is not always possible to tell from the cooler temperatures that spring is here, another leading indicator is my dog Clooney’s undercoat which has begun to show up under sofas, chairs, and tables.

Today, in an effort to have the expanse of time needed to vacuum up the bits of undercoat that have accumulated in the rooms of the house where Clooney is allowed, I took him to a nearby doggy day camp, and while my dog was busy playing with his pals Buckeye, Chloe, Duke, Ziva, and Tori, I spent a good portion of my morning chasing after what appeared to be dust bunnies on steroids.

Eventually, however, I tired of vacuuming, and got back to one of the crochet tasks at hand:

blocking the yellow cancer awareness ribbons.

Yesterday after I had finished weaving in the ends of seventeen of them, I realized that blocking would give them a more finished less bedraggled look, so I soaked about a third of them in warm soapy water, rinsed them, rolled them between two dry towels, and then pinned as many as I could onto two of the pieces of my blocking kit:

I would have done more, but I was out of pins.

With both vacuuming and blocking chores attended to, I then worked on making more of the solving cookies needed for the cookie-dough-ku.

Yesterday as the sun was about to descend, I had gotten this far:

which was 15 cookies shy of the number needed to completely solve the puzzle.

Today, using a small assortment of yarns along with 5.0 and 5.5 mm hooks, I made a half-dozen more crochet cookies, leaving me just nine cookies shy of a completed project:

I don’t know exactly when I will finish this project, but it is so close, I can taste it.