Hi. I’m Hannah.
The Mother of Cats started out the week being really busy. She worked in her gardens, she knitted on her chickens, and she even did some yummy cooking. I know it was yummy because I dragged off some of her steak when she wasn’t looking. I mean, it was a big piece; if she shared more, I wouldn’t be forced to take matters into my own paws like that. After a couple of days of sun and knitting fun, though, everything came to a screeching halt.
The Mother of Cats hands got all puffy and she had to put on her braces. I hate the braces because it feels funny when she pets me. She also gets crabby when she is wearing the braces because she says everything hurts. Poor Mother of Cats.
Anyway, after spending a whole day reading books and doing laundry, the Mother of Cats bounced back and headed out to the yarn store. I think it was a little crazy of her, but we couldn’t stop her. The yarn store had put some videos showing off the yarns on Facebook, and she pretty much lost all control.
Look at this yarn!!! She had to get teal colored yarn because it is scleroderma month, and the store chose teal as the color of the month (!). As she explained it to Mateo, when the universe puts teal yarn out on sale, you just do what the universe wants. She also got the pink/plum yarns because she loves them the most. I tried to sleep on the yarns, but she got a little cranky about that. Silly Mother of Cats. When is she going to learn to share? Anyway, she says that the yarn is for MORE CHICKENS!!!!! She is going to share this yarn with some people, so why not me too?
Just when I thought we had reached the height of ridiculousness, more yarn arrived in the mail. This yarn, evidently, just had to be bought because it is… ZEBRA yarn.
So, I can truthfully say, the Mother of Cats seems to have bought all the yarn. It seems a little crazy for her to lose all control like this when SHE CAN’T EVEN KNIT right now, but that’s the Mother of Cats for you. She believes that the world needs more chickens, and she is going to get them knitted after a few more days of rest. In the meantime, she gets to read her books, play with us, and take pictures of her roses. More of her rose plants started blooming this week and they are looking pretty good.
Well, that’s about all that is going around here except for the really big news if you are a cat. IT IS MOTH SEASON!!!! That’s right those crazy miller moths are back, migrating through our back yard, and Mateo has been steadily catching them and bringing them into the house to play with. Then it is fun, fun, fun all night long!
The moths like to hide in the umbrella shade, and when the Mother of Cats opens it up, he grabs them. Then, when it is about time to go to bed… bazinga!!! There’s a moth for me to chase up on the ceiling. This is so much fun. The Mother of Cats isn’t completely on board with all of the moth fun, but I’m sure that if she ate more tuna (with avocado!) she’d be a better fan of moth-o-mania.
This is Hannah, signing off.
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
- I’ve had swelling and tendonitis like this before, and the only thing to do is to rest the tendons and wait it out.
- The chicken pattern is the Emotional Support Chicken.
- I have 4 more chickens knitted that I need to sew up.
- My scleroderma support group met today and 4 people asked me for a chicken. Well, I did offer. There are days when you really, really need a chicken to hug.
- My latest blood results are in, and I am finally back in the normal ranges for iron levels, and my anemia symptoms are better. I’m at the dead bottom, but I will take it! Still eating steak, tuna, peanut butter, and taking iron supplements. Did you know that there is iron in avocado?
- The miller moths migrate west every year across the plains to the Rocky Mountains for the summer. My yard is on the flight path.
- Almost all of that yarn came from Spun Right Round. I love the quality of the yarn, and you can see how wonderful the colors are!
- I tried to knit while wearing the braces. Nope. Not happening.
- The beautiful apricot rose is Easy Does It, and this is its second year in my yard. The pink rose is a mostly wild rose that I bought a looooong time ago at the hardware store, and the chicken is with the Princess Alexandra of Kent rose.
Yarn, Books & Roses 
Well, Hannah, they’re lovely photos of you and Mateo in moth mode ! 🙂
HIGH IRON CONTENT
nuts and seeds, dried fruit, wholemeal pasta and bread, legumes — such as mixed beans, baked beans, lentils and chickpeas, dark leafy green vegetables — such as spinach, silver beet and broccoli, tofu.
Are you eating them things too, Marilyn ? I adore that kind of trail-mix combo of nuts, seeds and dried fruit ! And you can find lots and lots of ways to cook tofu in various yummy ways.
I should love to be able to buy some of that zebra yarn – it’s GORGEOUS !! Do you know yet what you plan to make with it ??
And just like that, you have arrived at the heart of my iron and calcium problem. I absolutely LOVE all of those foods (except the tofu), and I will get really, really sick if I eat any of them. Especially the beans, seeds, and dried fruit. I have even tried to put spinach into smoothies… nope!! The problem is complex, and very common in scleroderma patients. I have gastroparesis, which means my stomach doesn’t smoosh food into the gloop that normal people have. I am on acid blockers that make it hard to digest protein. Take a look at how fat and swollen my fingers are; the skin is extremely thick and hard with extra collagen, and the same phenomenon is going on in the lining of my intestine, which makes it hard to absorb my food. The food that I can’t absorb is used by bacteria to party, party, party… the byproducts of the food consumption by the bacteria causes inflammation, so absorption is even worse. The type of anemia that I have is what they call anemia of chronic disease; the swelling from intestinal inflammation just makes it even harder to absorb nutrients. Believe it or not, one of the main topics of conversation at my support group meetings is… how can we stop losing weight? It is hard when all you can eat is rice, chicken and yogurt drinks (lactose free, no sugar added, of course). The malnutrition problem is so bad I know patients who just get their iron by infusion, which is where I think I’m headed.
I would absolutely love that trail mix!!!
I did make quinoa this week and that was okay, so a win for me!!
The zebra yarn is going to be socks. I have the matching non-zebra yarn in the darker colorway that I am going to use to make armwarmers. My hands had better get over this bout of tendonitis soon, cause I have weeds to pull and yarn to knit!!
Certainly looking that way – the infusion way. Sighhh …
Yeah, I enjoy quinoa too.
SOCKS for that super yarn, Marilyn ? – not a beautiful cardi, or sweater ? Unless you get about in shorts and socks, they won’t be seen. [sob !]
I live in the land of Birkenstocks…
Marilyn, I hope your hands are improving. Hannah, I am pleased to see you showing some empathy for The Mother.
Hannah: Well, she is the source of tuna. And avocado boxes.
🙂
Rest those tendons, Marilyn. Hannah, take care of the Mother of Cats. And stay off the gorgeous yarns! I know it’s hard. Yarn is scrumptious.
They are already better and I was able to knit for the length of one television show tonight. 🙂
What beautiful yarns. At least something pretty to look at and dream about while waiting on the swelling to go down in your hands.
I actually have them lined up on my craft room table so I can admire them endlessly while I read my book. I keep shopping the stash to find accent yarns to go with the ones I bought to make the chickens. I’m already better so knitting days are right around the corner again.
I have to say, I absolutely LOVE your cats. Of course, you probably already know I have become the crazy cat lady in my neighborhood, but I guess it could be worse:)!
You can never go wrong with cats. I would be absolutely lost without my cats…
Hannah, ask Mom about a thing called “retail therapy.”
And Mom, you don’t suppose knitting all those chickens contributed to the tendonitis, do you? Anyway, take care of yourself. Rest those wrists. Looks like there’s a lot of knitting in your future.
Retail therapy is a wonderful thing when everything hurts and I think that I was kind of gutsy to buy something associated with the activity that I was unable to do. I like to believe that I was being aspirational… if I buy the yarn the knitting will return.
The chickens are easier for me to knit than some other things like the cardigan that I parked, but I’m sure that they still did contribute to the problem. The bigger issue, I think, was working out in the garden and pulling weeds.
Hannah’s commentaries always put a smile on my face. The swollen hand looks painful, I hope it goes down soon so you can get to knitting with all that beautiful yarn. The roses look so delicate and lovely. We suddenly have moths everywhere here too. I’ve killed three in the past week. I try to leave all the critters alone—even the black widow spider that greets me at eye level when I’m taking out the trash, but when moths start hovering around my knitting and yarn I have to do something about it.
I bought some of that “zebra” kind of marled yarn a few years ago—undyed—and knit socks with it. It looks like scribbles/writing. Nice effect. I hope you get some good reading done while you’re healing.
Wool moths are really small… like maybe a quarter of an inch long with swept back wings. I had an outbreak many years ago that I got under control using heat (stuffed that yarn into black garbage bags that were left out in the summer sun) and traps designed for wool moths. I understand completely your sense of panic seeing a moth near wool!!
I am enjoying my reading time and I have been knitting just a little bit every evening now, but being careful to not overdo things. I have been staying out of the garden too as I suspect that pulling weeds is what started all of this off.
I’ve made some other socks with zebra yarn and I really like how it holds up, not to mention how cute the knitting looks like. I wear a lot of black, so the black in the yarn just makes it automatically work.
Hannah: Thank you. I try to tell it the way it is. Send TUNA. It is an emergency; she only feeds me some ONCE A DAY!!!!!!
I heartily endorse yarn shopping at the epic level – well done! (And brilliant job selecting that perfect avocado box. Not that you needed avocados, but it IS perfectly Hannah-sized and that’s the important part.) You and I have very similar color loves. 🙂
I hope all that swelling and pain goes away relatively quickly. My hands are like that when my RA flares up and I am not very good at waiting until things settle down, so I hope yours doesn’t hang around too long when there are chickens to be made!
I got the avocado box when I picked up my grocery order at Cosco. How lucky, huh? They filled everything on my order, loaded the car for me, and gave me the perfect box while they were at it!
I am doing better with the hands, but the general flare goes on. It feels like every single tendon is under attack, but my hands and feet are the worst. It is hard to wait for things to calm down. I’m sorry about the RA; it is a just horrible disease, but they have made progress with treatment I hope, just like with scleroderma. Several of my family members had RA. I had to be special I guess.
I love the yarn and the roses! But not the moths. Moths that come indoors are my enemy. (Moths who stay outside I have a tentative truce with. Too bad if it’s not the fault of these moths that they are brought inside against their will; moths indoors are still the enemy.) (And yes, I know that not all moths eat yarn, but I don’t know which are which.)
Unfortunately, I do know what wool moths look like. These miller moths are of the army cutworm variety, and they are a major pain every single June as they migrate through this part of the state. The worst part is, they sleep hidden away all day long, and then emerge when you turn out the lights in the house. They tend to end up in the bedroom because… last light on in the house… and there I am, trying to go to sleep with crazy cats trying to corner and capture the moths.
Ugh. No fun.
Rest can be incredibly frustrating. I wish you luck. You picked up some beautiful yarn.
I’m finally coming out of it now and back to Chicken knitting again. As you said, resting up is very frustrating, but there just isn’t any shortcuts whith pissed-off tendons.
I read this the other day and got side tracked looking at Spun Right Round website and forgot to come back to comment. 😂 oooh there yarns are so pretty and I Loooooove that fade set you’ve bought and the zebra ones. Yummy colours. Take care and enjoy the pinky purple gorgeousness.
I completely understand! The yarn is really nice. I bought Squish DK and it is just fabulous!! I’ve never had any trouble with bleeding or the dye coming off onto my fingers while working. She does a really nice job.
You found some beautiful yarn! Your roses are gorgeous, and so is Miss Hannah 🙂 I hope you can rest and heal so you can get back to knitting those chickens!
After about three days of wearing braces and resting I woke up and it was over. How crazy is that?! I’m glad to back to knitting.
I’m so glad! I;m sure it feels great to get back to knitting 🙂
It does!!