Recycling Afghans & Kitty Convention

I mentioned in my catchup post that I'd bought some afghans recently from the thrift store in order to recycle the yarn.  Before I ever bought any afghans, I recycled one of my own.  I had most of it torn apart before vacation, but had a few squares to finish when I got back.

Here's what the afghan looked like before.  This afghan was made by me long before I was a quilter and it got a lot of use.  I really liked the pattern I made up, but it was coming apart in a number of places and needed more repairs than I was willing to do.  I decided that recycling the yarn to make cat mats or a new scrap afghan would be the best use of it at this point.

And a close-up of the block pattern:

And here's what I had after everything had been torn apart:

Rather than wash all of this yarn to get the kinks out, I spent a lot of my TV watching time last week winding it into numerous larger balls that should relax the kinks if left that way for awhile.  I didn't tie the yarn together like I did for the cotton yarn scraps I wound into a ball because I don't yet know what I'm going to do with this yarn and if I do anything other than my cat mat pattern, I don't want knots because there will be nowhere to hide them.  I ended up 14, four inch diameter balls of yarn from the pile of scraps above.  That is quite a lot of yarn that I now have to use for something else and it didn't cost me a dime!

Now on to the kitty convention.  I walked into our bathroom last night and this is what I found going on in the separate toilet room.  I've never found all three of them in there at the same time.

I'm assuming they were looking for bugs, crickets, etc. to play with.  It's also scorpion season here and so far the score is Cats - 4, Laura - 2, and Scorpions - 0.  Sassy has found two and Echo and Tyrone have each found one.  Of course we don't let them play with them or try to kill them themselves, but they are really good at spotting them for us so we can arrive with a shoe to take them out.  We seem to get quite a lot of the crickets, scorpions, etc. in the area of this bathroom and I think they come in through the vents and are attracted to the water.  Tyrone is always staring at the ceiling near the vents in either the toilet room or the master bathroom, so I'm guessing it's because he sees stuff come out.