And sometimes you learn that something new whether or not you want to.

Today I learned two things: First, no matter how much of a hurry I think I am in, it will ultimately save me time if I track down my dog Clooney’s Kong and fill it with peanut butter to keep him busy while I am gone.

Second, WD-40 is very helpful in removing ink stains from carpet.

When my son and I left the house to run some errands today, we did not plan on being gone very long, and we weren’t, but it was still long enough for my dog to get bored, track down a ball point pen, and chew it. Until today, I had been lucky on two counts: one, he never swallowed anything and got hurt, and two, despite chewing at least one pen a month, there had been no major ink incidents.

Today, my dog managed to avoid injury, but my carpet did not.

Fortunately, I found this video about how to clean ink from carpet:

and after 20 minutes of effort, I had a lot of the stain up.

So after I had made some in roads in my effort to get the ink up off the carpet, I resumed my work on the cookieghan, finishing up a cookie I had begun several days ago, and completing three more:

I then collected these four cookies and the others that had accumulated since I last updated the cookie bar graph on June 30, 2012:

and laid them all out for a new group photo:

There is still a lot of work to be done, but each day, I get just a bit closer, and when I am not crocheting cookies, I am keeping my fingers crossed that I can get this done sooner rather than later.