Midnight Knitter

The Scleroderma Chronicles: True North

It has been quite a week. Something happened that put me into a snit that made me think about priorities all week long. Actually, several things are happening all at once and it has taken me days to sort things out. Let’s start with the snit, okay?

These are the chicken sisters, and even though they are really cute, they are the focal point of the snit that has made me rethink my priorities.

I started making emotional support chickens to give to people who needed… well… emotional support. People who are dealing with grief, or anxiety, or an uncertain future, or struggling with medical challenges. I want to send something to people like me who are dealing with something significant and life-altering that is also mostly invisible to other people. The chicken says (Ba-BOK!!!) I see you… I am here for you… give me a hug. That is the mission. It falls under the overarching mission of Knit Out the Yarn Stash Before I Die. Hey, I have a lot of yarn, so there is a sense of urgency there for me.

Well, the day I took a chicken to my knitting group seeking to enroll others to knit chickens things kind of backfired. As in, people begged me to make them chickens. Ugh. I couldn’t say no, because all of these ladies are making/giving things for others in the same circumstances as the people I gift the chickens to. I signed on to knit 5 chickens with the understanding that each chicken would require a cash donation to Frayed Knots. I knit some chickens, posted the pictures, and it was a chicken free-for-all as people reserved the chicken that they wanted.

Here they are, the first chickens looking for a new home.

Four chickens were grabbed right away. Then the problem arrived. One of the members of the board wanted the little raspberry and grey chickens, even though they were already adopted out. The words “those chickens are gone” did not work. She absolutely had to have those chickens. It was a close thing, but I did have enough yarn left over to make the two new chickens.

When I sent her the pictures of the finished chickens and told her they were done she was greatly disappointed that I hadn’t also made a black chicken that we had mentioned while she was debating her options. (Listen, she decided on the two chickens instead of that black hen, so this was a shock!) I told her that I didn’t have the yarn to make that chicken in the stash. She told me that she would buy the yarn. I was like… NO!!! Please do not buy me any yarn!

Overarching mission: Knit Out the Yarn Stash Before I Die

Which has kind of been on my mind since my heart is kind of acting up right now. I am having sudden attacks of extreme breathlessness with chest pressure and dizziness. My oxygen levels seem to be okay, but my Fitbit has been sending me alarms when it happens. My fatigue has gotten much worse and it kind of hurts to breath sometimes.

The really crazy Fitbit shot with lots of peaks happened when I tried to knit a chemo hat on my little knitting machine. I mean, making hats while trying to control the cats is stressful enough, but the constant Fitbit alerts are just piling on at this point!

See the quality help that I’m getting while making the hats?

I seem to do much better if I wear oxygen while working with the machines, and I get fewer alerts while working on the smaller knitting machine making fingerless mitts.

So, it was a week of internal conflict. The lady who wants a black chicken is still not happy. My heart is not happy. My yarn stash is not shrinking, and somehow the joy of knitting chickens is gone when I have to make them in the exact colors that other people want. It is a chore when I don’t get to be creative, especially when I know that the chicken is going to someone who just wants a chicken, as opposed to someone who needs a chicken.

Hannah: On Friday the Mother of Cats pulled herself together, reset her priorities, and took some action!

Friday morning, I woke up, made my latte, sat outside with the cats, and decided to push the tiller over and return to a course of true north. I will remember my overarching mission statement, and I will do the things that help other people like me: people with chronic conditions that are isolating and mostly invisible to others. I will spend my time doing the things that feed my own creative spirit and my need for a sense of purpose.

I emailed my rheumatologist to ask if she would like fingerless mitts to give to other rheumatology patients. The answer came back in less than an hour: Yes, please!!!! I have my purpose again, and knitting out the yarn stash is back in business.
I emailed my cardiologist to let him know what was happening and attached the Fitbit pictures.
I took down a sweater (La Prairie) that has been languishing for months and started in on finishing the first sleeve. Gosh, it is going to be cute. Time to knit for me again!
I packed up the chickens to deliver to Frayed Knots. Those chickens are the last ones that I will knit for people who want chickens.
Saturday, I handed the chickens over to the head of Frayed Knots and asked her to please explain to the lady who desperately needs a black chicken that I’m done knitting them. The words I used were, “I’m not in the chicken knitting business, I’m in the emotional support business.”
I then sat with another member of the group and helped her knit her way through her first chicken. Suddenly, two other people wanted to learn. Yay! I am there for them!! Eventually, I am going to get some chickens into infusion centers for the patients!!

I have two little bracelets on my wrist with the Fitbit.

What was it that helped me pull things together Friday morning while drinking my morning latte? Those two little bracelets on my wrist in scleroderma teal. The little silver spoon was given to me by another patient, and it symbolizes the balancing act scleroderma people go through to manage our fatigue. We are “spoonies”. I need to remember to be ruthless about managing my own energy and resources. The teal beaded bracelet has a silver strip that says, “Remember Who the Fuck You Are“. Yes. I need to remember to not let other people run me over with their needs, because… limited resources. I need to set my own priorities with my limitations and needs in mind. I also need to remember to be brave, to face down the monsters, and to let my doctors know when new symptoms appear.

Just like that, I found my way again.

True North.

Hannah and the CoalBear: Lavender and Roses come Inside

Hi. I’m Hannah.

I’m basking in the lights of the new plant shelves!

The days out on the catio are getting a little cooler now, and there are leaves falling off the trees. Mateo really likes to chase the leaves! And the bugs. Okay… he chases everything that moves, basically… The squirrels are waaay more busy than usual, and I haven’t seen a baby bunny for weeks and weeks. There are lots of birds at the feeder that are kind of new, and sometimes there are tons of birds in the trees. The Mother of Cats says that the birds are flocking, and that there are changes coming.

Do you see the box that I am standing on? It was pretty long and a little heavy.

The Mother of Cats pushed that long box up the stairs and then she got out some tools. Yay! I love to help out with projects!!!

Look at all of the stuff that was in the box!

It took her a little while, but the Mother of Cats put all of those pieces together to make some shelves with lights. Oh. That’s kind of cool. I really like sleeping under lights like this, and shelves are always fun!

Then the Mother of Cats brought in all of the plants from the deck to come live under the lights in the indoor garden and on these new shelves. Look at what happened!!! There is no more room for me on the shelves! What was the Mother of Cats thinking of?

She brought in some of the plants from the deck and put them on my shelves!!!

After she brought in the first plants, she started messing around in the indoor garden so that she could make even more room for plants. Then the really big lavender plants came inside along with all the rest of the rose plants.

Now almost all of the plants that were living on the deck are now in the knitting room with the Mother of Cats and me. I love the plants!! Some of them are starting to put out new buds, more roses and lavender blooms are on the way, and the room smells kind of nice. Pretty cool, right? The new shelves even have a bar to hang plants from, there is a timer for the lights, and there is a shelf to put all of the knitting project boxes on the top. We are ready for winter now!!!

This week the Mother of Cats and I sat by the lights, smelled the lavender, and sewed up all of the chickens that she had knitted in September. So much fun… I like to chase the yarn while the Mother of Cats is sewing. This is what the finished chickens look like:

Didn’t I do a good job helping out? All of these chickens will go to their new homes this week. Bye chickens! It was nice to know you!!

This is Hannah, signing off.

>^..^<

Note from the Mother of Cats: the lavender plants aren’t hardy enough to survive a Colorado winter, so indoors they came! Yay, lighted shelving!! These came from Amazon.

A Stash Full of Memories

Last week I pulled out all of the chemo hats that I had made on the Sentro knitting machine during the month to get them ready for donation. It wasn’t hard work at all; I just needed to tie off the ends, weave them in, stuff the hats into bags, and then complete a label for each hat. Piece of cake.

The only problem was the number of hats: I made 40 hats this month.

Here’s the deal. All of these hats were made from yarn that has been lurking in my stash for years. Okay, maybe I shouldn’t call my yarn room a stash… it is more like a carefully curated collection of treasured yarn acquisitions. Yarn that was the extra skein for a sweater I knitted. (Have you ever knitted a sweater? You always buy that extra skein!!) Yarn that was bought for a fade that didn’t quite work out. Yarn that I bought because… did you see that color!!! Yarn that I bought as a greatly used staple color (AKA purple or grey). As I finished off each hat, I remembered the name of the yarn, sometimes the colorway, what the yarn was made of, where I had acquired it, and the project that I had meant to use it for… hat by hat, I was filled with the memories of past outings with friends, knitted projects, and various hopes and dreams of the yarny variety. So many memories, now made into chemo hats.

See that green hat? I used that green yarn to make my knitworthy niece the Mando mitts. Actually, my niece wanted the mitts so badly she bought the green yarn and had it shipped to me. Look at how cute those mitts are!!! I bought that hot pink multicolored yarn while on an outing with friends to yarn shops up in Loveland and Ft. Collins in Colorado. We ate lunch together out on the patio of a yarn shop with an attached restaurant: best day ever!!

The yarn for these two hats was leftover skeins from two sweaters. The rose-colored yarn came from Western Sky Knits, and I bought it up in Estes Park at the wool market there one June; I used that yarn to make Rannuculus. The darker rose yarn was bought at my local yarn store one February as their “yarn of the month”; I used that yarn to make a VNeck Boxy sweater that winter.

The blue yarn is named “Cloud Atlas”, and I just loved it! I made some Geology Socks from the yarn, and I’m pretty sure I made some fingerless mitts also. The purple is called “Empower Purple”, and I bought it because… well… don’t you feel empowered just looking at that yarn? I hope that the two hats that I eventually made from the skein will make their recipients feel dang empowered!!

It took most of the afternoon to get the hats all finished and bagged. All that yarn and all those memories, carefully finished, bagged, and tagged. Last Saturday I handed them into Frayed Knots, and eventually they will make their way to one of the infusion or cancer centers in the Denver/Aurora area here in Colorado.

May all of their new memories be good ones.

Note from Midnight Knitter:

It was a crazy end to the day as I finished up with the hats. There was an owl calling as the sun set and twilight arrived: when I took a small break to go water outside, I could see him sitting on top of my neighbor’s chimney silhouetted against the dusk sky. Between hoots from the owl, I could hear huge transports from the nearby Space Force base passing over my house as they clawed their way into the sky right after takeoff. It was kind of a surreal experience between the avalanche of memories, the owl calling in the dusk, and the roar of planes in the dark.

Do you see how low that plane is? I took this picture earlier in the summer, and you can see why it is hard to get a shot. The planes are so low I can’t see them until they are right over my yard! I’m pretty sure these are C-130 Hercules. That owl is a great horned owl, and I think that he and his friends are responsible for the recent decline in the bunny population in my neighborbood.

Thoughts on the Eve of the Harvest Supermoon (and Partial Eclipse)

This is a story of slavery, starships, books, rainbows, genealogy, and freedom. It all started while I was working in a research lab at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla, California. This was my first job after graduating from UCSD with a bright shiny degree in molecular biology, and while it was an entry level position, it was a great job for me.

I should tell you about this lab. The head of the lab was a leader in his field, and the lab was filled with interesting people from around the world. I got to experience great new foods and cultural ideas; this lab was full of immigrants and foreign nationals doing fellowships. I learned Ukrainian curse words, inappropriate Brazilian gestures, ate Mexican and German food, and played pranks on a Canadian MD/PhD because… well, you had to know him. This man deserved to be pranked on a regular basis!

The street I used to live on in Imperial Beach, California.

I was a California girl, raised just above the border with Mexico, and I had attended public schools with classmates of all backgrounds and ethnicities. I had also lived in Japan for two years. My friends from high school spoke Spanish. I was so focused on myself, a young wife and mother, battling for first a degree, and then a career in a world where women were openly discriminated against, that I wasn’t very racially aware. For me, it was like everyone was different, but it was everywhere, and it wasn’t a big deal, right? I was making my way by refusing to acknowledge the barriers and doing what I wanted despite them. It was 1977.

Then this show called Roots, adapted from the book of the same name, was on television. I knew about slavery, but I never really understood. It was devastating. I was devastated. It was hard to face a Black-American coworker in the lab after an episode that showed a main character, Kunta Kinte, getting mutilated to prevent him from attempting to escape slavery. We talked the next morning, fighting tears, about that episode. I’ve never forgotten that show, the talk with my co-worker, or the actor who portrayed Kunta Kinte, LaVar Burton.

Time goes by, and LeVar Burton became Geordi La Forge of the Starship Enterprise in the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. I’m a big science fiction fan, and of course I’ve watched everything Star Trek. I absolutely loved the show, and the characters that I liked the best were Geordi and Worf. I was miffed that Geordi had to wear his stupid visor and was happy when we finally got to see his face again. The franchise has been robust, and I’ve seen a lot of Geordi over the years. Yay, Star Trek.

There’s Geordi at the back with the ~~stupid~~ visor.

Like many other young parents of my generation, I let my kids watch Sesame Street and Reading Rainbow on television. There was LeVar Burton again, making books fun. That was great, since I was a big reader myself, and even though I read to my boys and took them to the library regularly, it was wonderful to get reinforcement from a television show too.

I really wanted to read this book because a student had once told me that I needed to read Ta-Nehisi Coates. I take it seriously when teenagers tell me about a book or author that had a big impact on them.

Time goes by, the boys grow up, and the husband and I go our separate ways. I keep reading books and watching Star Trek. I joined a book club, and mentioned a book that I would like to read called The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates; another member of the group said that we should only read books by authors whose names we could pronounce. Oh, it was on! I bought that book and read it on my own. I thought about the book. I blogged about the book. As a small part of the plot, it described landowners of large plantations moving from Virginia to Tennessee as the land failed. I remembered that some of my family had started in North Carolina and then moved to Tennessee, so I googled to see if there was a plantation with the last name of those people. There was, and they were slave owners. I had been told that my dad grew up on a farm. I was thinking “Little House on the Prairie”, but maybe that was all wrong. Of course it was. How unbelievably naïve I was. I was told that the farm failed because of mismanagement; was it because the slave labor was gone? I had a huge Water Dancer moment, and it was crushing.

I got a subscription to MyHeritage through my local library a few weeks ago and began to chase down the ancestral links on my father’s side of the family. Generation after generation I chased them back through time from Tennessee, to North Carolina, to New Jersey, to New York, to New Amsterdam, to the Netherlands, and finally to France. Huguenots. The name is in the Huguenot registry. They left France for religious freedom. My ancestors who came to the New World landed in New Amsterdam in 1663; the last name of my immigrant ancestor was Cossart. That one family gave rise to the entire line in the United States, and over time different spellings of the name emerged. The spelling that is used in my family is Cozart.

I did an image search for the name Cozart. So many faces and names. Several are notable individuals, and many are black. All of these people are somehow connected to me either by our genes or the institution of slavery.

And there she was: Stephanie Cozart Burton. The wife of LaVar Burton.

Once again, I was in tears, facing my coworker the morning after seeing that episode of Roots, crushed that I hadn’t understood the existential evil in America’s past. My ancestors came to America for opportunity and freedom, and then engaged in an appalling abuse of other people.

This is a pivotal time in the US. We are in the election of my lifetime, deciding if America is for all Americans, with liberty and justice for all, or if something else happens. Some people want to control lots and lots of things, including access to healthcare, the right for all Americans to vote, what people are allowed to read, and what they can learn about in school. People whose ancestors came from other lands demonizing new immigrants seeking the same promise of America that led Jacques Cossart here in 1663. I suspect that The Water Dancer is a book that some people would like to ban. I wouldn’t have started to piece all of this together without that book. I wouldn’t have started to understand who I am, and where I came from on my father’s side, and the burden of my past. For all of us, our freedoms are fragile, and the loss of them is possible in the turn of an election, a court ruling, a change in policy, in a loss of funding…

Standing in the gap is a woman of Jamaican and South Asian descent. An American who believes in Freedom.

Vote, my good people, vote.

And read. Learn about the past, explore new ideas, expand your horizons, and think for yourself.

Make it so.

Notes and Additional Thoughts

If you are reading this early in the day on September 17th, you might be able to catch the harvest supermoon with its partial eclipse. Here’s some info.
Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation divided the research and clinical portions years ago. The entity that I worked at is now Scripps Research.
That first job was doing the antinuclear antibody (ANA) tests in Dr. Eng Tan’s lab: he was a pioneer in the field. Now I have been diagnosed with two of the autoimmune conditions that I did ANA tests for as a new college graduate.
I didn’t “catch” those conditions in the lab, as I already had symptoms as a teenager and while I lived in Japan.
About Japan: I lived in the city of my mother’s birth, Yokohama. The US Navy sent us there; later on, they sent us right back to the place where we had gone to high school.
Are you hearing the theme music to “The Twilight Zone” yet?
This what that music sounds like!
Why are you still reading?
Go outside and look at that harvest supermoon!!!

Hannah and the CoalBear: Days of Bugs and Yarn

Hi. I’m Mateo.

Life has been crazy here. The Mother of Cats spends all of her time playing with yarn while listening to audiobooks, which is…BORING!! So boring. It’s all fine for Hannah because she likes to hang out with the knitting machine while the Mother of Cats works on it, but I need action! I need excitement! I need BUGS!!!

See what I’m talking about? They can do this for hours at a time!

I like to go upstairs to bite on Hannah at least twice an hour to make sure they don’t forget about me, because… did I mention that I have needs? All of this out-of-control knitting is making me go crazy. I seriously need a trip out to the catio and a bug hunt EVERY SINGLE HOUR!!!

Especially after dark, because that’s when the really interesting bugs come out. I like to catch these guys and then I take them inside to play with them. So much fun… until the Mother of Cats catches me and takes my bug back outside. Why is she so mean to me? I worked hard to catch that bug, and then she just takes it away? Does that sound fair to you?

Luckily, she has discovered these treats that she gives us when we came back in at night. These treats are so good it is almost worth leaving all the bugs outside!!

Anyway, let’s talk about the yarn and the knitting. Seriously, I think that we need an intervention!! She has three of the cranking knitting machines now, and she has been steadily producing hats and fingerless mitts every single day.

Do you see this? She now has 34 pairs of fingerless mitts, and 41 hats. All of these knitted things go to her community knitting non-profit next week, and then she will be starting all over again. She is so excited about all the knits and keeps talking about reducing the stash, but this is just CRAZY, right? I think that maybe she should take the knitting machine outside. I need bugs. I need bunnies (don’t you think that the bunnies want to play with me? I’m a good boy. I would never ~~eat~~ hurt one of the bunnies…) There is always lots of fun things to see outside!

Then there are the chickens!! She knitted four more chickens this month (that haven’t been sewn up and stuffed yet), and she mailed away two.

This hen was mailed out Thursday. Why does it have a crown? WHERE IS MY CROWN???

Okay, I guess that is all for now. I feel a lot better for having gotten this off my chest. I’m going to go hunt down Hannah and see if I can get her to chase me around the house for a while.

Hannah: That would be a big NOPE, little guy.

This is Mateo, the CoalBear, signing off.

>^..^<

Notes from the Mother of Cats:

To be fair to Mateo, there has been a lot of interesting action out in the yard lately. The bird feeder is drawing lots of action with a constant parade of squirrels and birds stopping by. The bunnies travel right along the catio as they transit to the front yard, and you already heard about the bugs. This week Mateo was transmitting extreme concern about something in the back tree, and when I walked out to see what it was, a huge bird erupted out in a crazy swirling tumble of flapping wings and vanished from view as it crossed my yard. Like, maybe it was an eagle? A golden eagle? Did it grab one of the big fat doves at my feeder? I’ve seen them in the neighborhood, but how crazy to have one in my tree!

I’m suddenly unable to watch television but listening to audiobooks while cranking out hats and fingerless mitts on the knitting machines is working great. I’m totally reveling in the constantly growing pile of hats and the obvious dent in the yarn stash. By using the machines for the hats and mitts I’m able to get the chickens knitted without hurting my wrists and hands too much. That chicken pattern is the Emotional Support Chicken, and the chicken in the picture is my 24th one. I found the pattern for the little crown here.

I learned how to make fingerless mitts on the knitting machine, which involves making a thumb hole while the knitting is on the machine. That new skill set off a whole new stack of knitted goods. I’m thinking about another post showing how I do it.

The Scleroderma Chronicles: Supermoon Zebra Update

This morning, I dragged myself outside to the catio and just sat there for a while warming my joints and charging up for the day. Sometimes I wake in stunned astonishment at how bad I feel; this was one of those days. The cats, confused by the change in routine, finally stopped begging for tuna and came out to check out the wildlife. Things were certainly busy in the yard this morning!

The bird feeder was open for business with a steady line of little birds waiting for their turn at the feeder parked in the low branches of the tree. Higher up in the upper branches a blue jay was calling back and forth with the other jays in the neighborhood. A bunny napped shamelessly in the middle of a patch of dirt at the upper end of my yard (why do I have a batch of dirt? Bunnies!!! They dig and roll in this dirt. I love the bunnies more than I love the lawn…), and a pair of doves napped nearby in plants escaping my garden. There were grasshoppers in the catio to Mateo’s delight. Squirrels ran along the fence as I baked and recovered; there was a slight breeze and the day was cooler. Time to water the flowers and go in.

Japanese beetles in my roses! The HORROR!!!!

There were Japanese beetles in my roses!! Very cute, and very not wanted. I drowned those guys in a bottle of soapy water. Bad beetles, bad. No matter how well things are going, there is always something to deal with, right? I was completely recovered and ready-to-go by the time I went in to deal with the tuna-starved cats and my latte machine.

Not a bad start for the day, right? Bake in the sun when you need it, enjoy all the pleasant things happening around you, and take immediate action to deal with stuff that is unacceptable.

It has been another tough week. Having gotten through a huge round of doctors’ appointments and testing, you would think I could just rest up for a few days and recover. Not so much. It is stressful waiting for test results, especially since my cardiologist was openly concerned when I saw him at the end of July. I felt dizzy and struggled with vague symptoms like a sore throat and stiff neck for a few days, and then finally began to face the reality that something more than scleroderma might be going on.

What pushed me into action? Well… the very last medical test was MRIs of my bad boy knees, and the technician who worked with me was concerned that the pupils of my eyes were dilatated more than they should be. There was concern and lots of questions about my medications. “No,” I insisted. “I’m not taking any drugs that weren’t prescribed.” I finally got out of there and immediately forgot about the incident because I had just spent an hour in an MRI machine that looked like a giant sandworm from Dune and made some of the same noises, too!

Then the next day, I fell over sideways while combing my hair. I tried to put on my shoes, and I fell over again to the same side. Huh. That is kind of unusual. I checked my eyes in the mirror, and yep… those pupils looked pretty dilatated. I called in to my health provider, and I was sent to Urgent Care. The words “this might be a brain bleed” got my attention, so I filled up the cat food and water dishes, put a phone charger into my purse, and off I went.

Listen, going to urgent care or the ER is kind of risky if you have a rare disease or two. Either the doctor has never had a patient like you before and just refers you on to a specialist, or the doctor is kind of excited to get his/her hands on you because when will another patient like this come along? They want to do something!! Sign me up coach! I’m just trying to represent here!! You can literally see it on their face and in the sparks in their eyes.

The urgent care doctor was the second type of doctor.

Sitting in the exam room I could hear the zebra laughing…

My eyes were fine when he checked them, and we concluded that what was happening was probably a transitory effect caused by one of my meds. It seemed reasonable, so I was okay with that. Great. I’m out of here, no brain bleed for me! Nope. Nope, nope, nope! He had a real, live zebra here, and he wasn’t letting it slip away!! He felt that while I was there, I should have a lot of tests run to rule out a hypothetical infection that was pushing me over the edge and causing all my fatigue, dizziness, headaches, etc. The stiff neck was concerning. No one should fall over while combing their hair… Sigh. It is hard to argue against such reasonable observations… I didn’t even mention that it hurt to breathe, but there was that, too…

I approved some testing, declined others, and off to the x-ray machine and lab I went. Everything was negative, but he decided that I should go though a course of wide-spectrum antibiotics anyway since I was immunosuppressed, and something clearly was not right. Fine. I’ll do that. My whole life is “not right” and antibiotics make my unhappy gut even more unhappy, but he was so earnest about helping me: I took the plunge and started the pills.

I just want to note that it is hard to score antibiotics if you feel sick with vague symptoms, but being a zebra got me special treatment. I’m still processing that because most of the time my symptoms are dismissed. My knees have been hurting for years and doctor after doctor has just blown me off because the joints seem fine. They are swollen, but my inflammation markers are normal, so nothing is done… My knee x-rays were normal, so this time I requested MRI imaging, which is how I ended up visiting that Dune machine, meeting a nurse upset about my eyes, and now, landing me in urgent care. There is some type of zebra paradox here: specialists who disregard symptoms that set off actions in mainstream health professionals, and special treatment that normal people don’t get because… zebra.

Anyway, I took the antibiotic. It was a strong one that I had never taken before… and two days later I was better! Even my gut has improved. The headaches have stopped, and my dizziness is fading into the background. My chest pain is gone. Yay antibiotics. Yay earnest young doctor in the urgent care facility. He’s written me two notes following up on the test results, and I’ve let him know that I am, indeed, much better.

The last of the test results that my scleroderma care team ordered have come in, and it looks like there may be some adjustments to my care in the future. My pulmonary hypertension is under control, but my heart failure has gotten worse. The steroid injection in my hip has made a huge difference, and I am walking better, but my knees hurt more. There is, indeed, something wrong with my knees; I don’t know if they can do anything about it. The words on the report are

Which is commonly known as “runner’s knee”, and is an overuse injury in most cases. Not in my case, obviously, since I can hardly walk! I have edema in the bone, and in the cartilage, and there is calcium being deposited in the soft tissue which is a response to… you guessed it… inflammation.

That dang zebra is rolling on the floor laughing!!!

It has been quite a week. I pushed for more testing, paid expensive copays to get it, and have gotten validation on the bad-boy knees. I understand a little better why the cardiologist was concerned, but the news isn’t as bad as he anticipated, so the outcome (Class 3 HF) isn’t as bleak as it could be. I learned a lesson about not ignoring symptoms, and the zebra outing to urgent care worked out much better than I expected. I turned in 43 hats and 7 chickens this week to my community knitting group, and yesterday I bought a bushel of roasted green chiles. A tough week in some ways, but also a good week. A week of crazy zebra-related events, knitting, and even green chiles.

Tonight is the blue supermoon, a rare event, and kind of special. Knitting in the light of the blue supermoon is the best way to end a day that started baking in the sun.

And if you have a crown, tonight is the night to wear it!

Shine on, supermoon, shine on.

Hannah and the CoalBear: Has it only been a week?

Hi. I’m Hannah.

Do you like my trout? It is stuffed with catnip.

Things have been just crazy here at Casa Mother of Cats. Like, it has been the week from hell and I haven’t been getting as many outings (and cookies) as usual. It suddenly got really hot again. There is smoke in the air and the Mother of Cats won’t let us go out in the daytime. It is so hot it is hard to sleep! The Mother of Cats has been making lots of trips out of the house, and when she gets home, she just lays around and refuses to play with us. Sometimes she plays with her knitting machine, but I can tell that her heart isn’t in it. She just reads books, knits, and watches the Olympics. Fabulous. Mateo is driving me crazy because he wants to go outside all of the time, but the Mother of Cats is like… NO!!

We do get to go out in the late afternoon or after dark and then we chase bugs in the dark. The Mother of Cats likes to eat her dinner outside, and it is usually cooler then.

Mateo goes crazy when he finally gets to go out. All those bugs!!! He wants to chase all of them, and I think that maybe he has been watching the Olympics with The Mother of Cats because this happened:

Yeah. That is a pretty high jump that he made. The Mother of Cats measured it, and he made a diagonal 6-foot jump to get up there, and then he jumped straight down 8 feet when the Mother of Cats tried to safely recover him. She thinks that he was trying to get into the tree, which isn’t a very good idea because…

This guy has been hanging out in the tree! The Mother of Cats thinks that this is a Sharp-shinned Hawk.

Anyway, since The Mother of Cats has been watching the Olympics, she thought that this would put everything into perspective about how high Mateo was when he jumped up to the top of the catio supports:

That boy can jump!! He’s not in the run for a medal, but he did pretty well in the dismount, and he did stick his landing!

Today the smoke is better, and it isn’t quite as hot as it was last week. The Mother of Cats worked on finishing up all the hats that she made in the hot indoor days, and here they are all packed away where I can’t mess with them.

This is 23 hats all finished up and ready to go to Frayed Knots. I helped with all of the sewing!! That knitting machine has made the Mother of Cats hugely productive!

Now she is back to knitting chickens again. I love chicken knitting!!

She mailed this chicken away last week to a lady who is having surgery in a couple of days.

So that’s all the news of the last crazy week.

That’s right. It is raining outside. Yay. The house will cool down and we can all go outside now.

Bug Chase Time!!!!!

This is Hannah, signing off.

Notes from the Mother of Cats:

This has been the longest week ever.
I saw my doctors at the end of July, and they ordered a lot of tests and procedures. I’ve had a steroid injection into my bad-boy hip, X-rays and MRIs of my knees, bloodwork done, and tomorrow I go for an echocardiogram. Six trips in all. Every single trip out of the house puts me back into the heat and smoke, which isn’t good because… you know, crappy heart and lungs. There was a lot of smoke last week because Colorado experienced an outbreak of wildfires among the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and all that smoke headed east towards my area of the world.
Late Thursday night (like near midnight) I opened the doors to let cool air into the house. I locked the screen door for safety and THE KEY GOT STUCK!! The front door couldn’t close with the key in the lock of the screen door, the house was filling with smoke for some reason, and there were sirens sounding nearby making me wonder if we had ANOTHER fire. After using lubricant on the lock, consulting YouTube videos, and then finally resorting to a hammer, I got the key out. Exhausted, the cats and I went to bed in a hot smokey house. How hot? 85 degrees Fahrenheit hot.
After that adventure I’m back on oxygen 24/7.
I met a lady getting ready for major surgery on one of my trips; that chicken got shipped off to her. It was another trip out of the house, but totally worth it.
The hats on the knitting machine are the simplest ever: 120 rounds of knitting, and then gather up both ends and secure them together which produces a doubled knitted fabric like a Musselburgh hat.
I bought ANOTHER KNITTING MACHINE that is perfect for knitting wristers with lighter weight yarn. I don’t have a problem. Really, I don’t.
I just found out that I can knit an OCTOPUS with my knitting machines!

My cardiologist wants me to wear compression stockings now. Look at these cuties!!

Hannah and the CoalBear: Chickenitis becomes Crankitis

Hi. I’m Hannah.

Do you see this nice little blanket that the Mother of Cats made for me?

The Mother of Cats was cleaning up the yarn stash and found a little bin with all of these crocheted squares. Here’s the thing: the Mother of Cats had been knitting a chicken out of Noro wool yarn, and I wanted to help her… like a lot!!! I kept climbing into her lap so I could give the yarn a good grooming, and she just WOULDN’T let me help her the way I wanted!!!! I just love, love that wool yarn! The little squares that she found were made with the same type of yarn, so…

She crocheted the squares together one evening to make this blanket!!

The Mother of Cats has been knitting some chickens; she has two finished but not sewn and stuffed yet. Kind of cute colors, right?

These chickens look a little sad, don’t they. Sad, unstuffed chickies.

Why aren’t those chickens stuffed yet? Well… it is because of the knitting machines that the Mother of Cats bought. The new machine is large enough to make a hat.

The Sentro machine is the one that she uses to make the hats. Lots and lots of hats. The machine works when you turn this little crank on the side, and she has been cranking and cranking like crazy during the heat of the day. I hate the heat, so I just sleep on the coffee table next to the machine while she works. Hey, there is a fan blowing on the table! The Mother of Cats just needs to work around me because I am so cute, and I also have claws! Not that I would ever use the claws on the Mother of Cats… Anyway, she is making a couple of these hats every day and they are starting to pile up in the donation boxes. I like the hat machine, even if it gets used on my coffee table, because there is a lot of potential for fun.

It has a string hanging down under it that waggles around while she turns the crank. Yay! Cat toy!!!

This weekend the Mother of Cats pulled out the little knitting machine and spent hours trying to make some wrist warmers. It got a little ugly. She couldn’t get the machine to knit the sock yarn that she wanted to use. She watched lots of YouTube videos. She tried at least four different yarns. She hung weights on the knitted fabric attached to the machine. She forgot to give me my TUNA!!! Finally, today she tried one last yarn and bingo: it worked!!

Success! She needs to sew the stitches from the inside and the outside of the wrister together (she calls it Kitchener Stitch), but she has the lightweight wristers that she was trying to make.

She is pretty sure that she knows how to get the little machine to make more wristers, so the weekend ended up on a high note. That’s a good thing, because there certainly was a lot of cranking… the Mother of Cats has contracted CRANKITIS!!

Well, that’s all for now.

This is Hannah, signing off.

>^..^<

Notes from the Mother of Cats

Hannah’s blanket is made from the squares that I made following the pattern for the Square Scramble Sack.
The little knitting machine is an Addi Express Professional machine.
The big machine is a Sentro 48 needle machine. I bought the Sentro after seeing some hats that another Frayed Knots member had made using fingering yarn. Just what I needed! I have so much yarn in the stash that I need to get put to a good use.
The lighter weight yarn that worked in the Addi was Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. It is smooth, one ply yarn that isn’t very elastic. I think that it is about sport weight, but the manufacturer lists it as DK weight.
The Addi machine is more robust than the Sentro, but the Sentro is very easy to work with and quieter than the Addi.
The Addi machine is not knitting the fingering weight yarn yet, but I haven’t given up all hope. The Sentro, however, is knitting the fingering weight yarn with no issues at all. Since the Addi requires a heavier weight yarn, I tried making wristers using (duh) heavier weight yarns. I knitted with a worsted weight yarn, switched to a sportweight silk blend yarn, pulled one end of the tube up through the inside, and then closed the stitches with Kitchener stitch.

Pretty slick, right?

It’s exciting to crank away and get so much yarn that was languishing in the stash put to good use. This is fast, too. I can get a hat done in less than an hour.

Chickens are taking flight…

It has been kind of busy lately at Casa Hannah and the Coalbear. I’ve been meeting people for chicken hand-offs every few days. I built a new coffee table, worked some in the yard, and then there is the heat. Ugh. The heat. We’ve been trapped in a heat dome for days, breaking records day after day, and the cats and I are all suffering a little with it. It is harder to breath in hot air, but my joints are curiously okay with all of this. I stay outside until noon each day letting my joints bask in the heat, but predictably, the cats abandon the deck/catio long before then. I find them stretched out on the cool tile of the kitchen when I come in, waiting for their tuna. The cats are absolutely over this heat!

Hannah: Maybe it is a little cooler in here…

Before I talk about the yard and the heat, let’s talk about the chickens! I’ve been meeting up with people for a chicken handoff all week, and these chickens have all flown away to their new coops. Here are the chickens that left this week:

That’s right. Five emotional support chickens flew out of here, and tomorrow I hand off another teal chicken knitted to match the one in the picture. My favorite ESC in the whole bunch went to my son: it is made with handspun yarns from sheep that he and I met when we worked a shearing day for the Rocky Sheep Company years ago.

The black/grey marled yarn is from a sheep named Petunia, and the jet black is from a sheep named Clint (Black). I used some Malabrigo Rios for the red bands because it is too darn hot to dye yarn right now! Isn’t this a spunky looking chicken?

Yesterday I cleaned up and sorted out all of the yarns again, and I’m ready to launch into more chicken knitting just as soon as I finish the chemo hat for a scleroderma patient participant in a CAR T-cell therapy clinical trial in Seattle: that needs to go out the door this week. Whew. Lots and lots to knit. I feel pretty motived because a thank you note was emailed to Frayed Knots by a cancer patient thanking me for the “wrist warmers” that she received. I think that she must have been given two PICC line covers, but that note made me realize that I need to be even more productive. As if to nail home the lesson, a couple of the people that I met up with this last week mention how much they struggled with cold and painful hands. Yeah. I need to get cracking on wrist warmers.

I bought a cute little knitting machine that is perfect for churning out wrist warmers!! This is the Addi Express Professional Knitting Machine, and it was on sale. Yay!!

Okay, I bought a big knitting machine that will make hats too. I need to have some way to use up all of this yarn that I have stashed away, and now that I am knitting chickens like crazy, I feel bad that I’m not producing hats and stuff for Frayed Knots like I was. Hopefully, these machines will let me step up my game some.

Hannah: Mother of Cats!! Talk about how hot it is and mention all the birds in the yard!!!!

Okay Hannah: back to the heat. For some reason the potted flowers on the deck are doing exceptionally well in the heat, and the yard is full of life. I’ve been making an effort to keep the water trays full, and the bird feeders have become quite popular. Look at what the flowers have been up to:

The single flowering spear in the middle is the Spanish Lavender finally starting to bloom. I’d almost given up on it, but both plants have suddenly sprouted those buds. All of the potted roses are covered with blooms, and the other lavenders have all started a second blooming. There is so much life out in the yard I replaced a window screen so Hannah can spend the early evenings watching for bunnies. (Why did it have to be replaced? One word: Mateo)

In the mornings the cats and I hang out on the catio watching the wildlife. Here’s the view from behind the chicken wire:

I especially like the blue jays that are hanging out in the yard, but there is a constant line-up for the hanging feeders. So fun. Cheap cat entertainment while I’m drinking my morning latte out on the deck/catio.

Hannah: Finally! Today it started to cool off.

As Hannah has pointed out, the heat breaks today, and it will be closer to normal temperatures for the rest of the week with rain possible each day. I’m hoping that this is the Colorado Monsoon arriving at last, certainly my lawn is hoping that there will be rain on the way.

Bye everyone. It’s time to fill the bird feeders again.

Note: Who’s getting these ESCs? My family, of course. Several have gone to systemic sclerosis patients. One went to person who retired earlier than she had hoped to, and another went to a person coping with a serious genetic disease. Two people are struggling with anxiety. One to a cancer survivor whose chemotherapy triggered scleroderma. I still haven’t gotten any chickens knitted for the infusion center…

Must knit faster!!

Hannah and the CoalBear: Life Behind the Wire

Hi. I’m the CoalBear.

It has been really, really hot here. The poor Mother of Cats woke up on a Monday and… she couldn’t stand. Like, her knees didn’t want to work. It took her WAY TOO LONG to get downstairs to give us our morning tuna, so it was kind of a hard start to the week for us, too. Here is what she thinks happened:

The air pressure in the Denver area dropped like a dead moth overnight, and for some reason that made her knees misbehave. She was very upset with the weather. Good thing the pressure came up again, but… it was hot. Really hot. Hannah and I do not like hot even a little bit. We slept all day, day after day, and we only went out on the deck in the mornings and evenings to look at what was going on in the yard.

The bunnies are always my favorite, but there have also been lots and lots of birds. The Mother of Cats saw an American goldfinch, and there were chickadees, blue jays, robins (lots and lots of robins!), and even tiny birds called bushtits. The Mother of Cats was so excited that she ordered a birdfeeder for the birds from Amazon and went out and bought some food from a store near me. A BIRD STORE!!!! Why didn’t she take me? I like birds… she never lets me ~~catch and eat~~ play with fun things.

Do you see what happened? The feeder is soooo cute because it has a cat face, but that didn’t stop the squirrel from moving in. He was so mean to the bird feeder (he knocked it down!!!) that the Mother of Cats had to make a move the feeder to a new place on a tree closer to the catio (which is a good idea in my opinion…) and put the food for the squirrel on a little platter for them. The food has special worms in it for the robins, but maybe the squirrel ate them too. Anyway, everything was going great until late one night…

Hannah: Ummm… is there something going on in the back yard????

Hannah and I rush downstairs to the big window down there to look out into the yard, and there was a big, fat raccoon climbing over the fence!!!

Now Hannah and I are really worried about going out onto the catio, and we will only do it if the Mother of Cats goes out with us. That raccoon looked mean! Really, really mean. I’m just a little fluffy cat…

So that’s all the news from around here. The Mother of Cats is still taking it really easy, and we take turns watching over her. She got some more chickens knitted up and they are kind of cute, but she put them into boxes and mailed them away this week. Bye, chickens! Watch out for the raccoons on your travels!!

That’s all for now. Hannah and I are watching the Mother of Cats while she types this, and after she finishes, I think that I will catch a little nap.

This is Mateo, signing off.

>^..^<