Hey, do you see that little gnome? I bet I can snag it with my claws and then Mateo and I can HAVE SOME FUN!!!
This has been kind of a busy week already. The Mother of Cats cleaned out her yarn stash (I helped, like… a lot!!) and then she cleaned out her quilting projects and put most of them into a big box that she mailed off to a cousin. Bye quilts. She has been doing a lot of cleaning and stuff, which is kind of fun for Mateo and me. We love the chaos!! We love all of the yarn moving around. We love our new cat beds!!!
My favorite bed is the one that looks like a giant TUNA CAN!!! Can you believe it? I can snooze in a cozy little tuna can bed that even has a cover on it while I dream of tuna. How cool it that? Mateo kind of tries to sneak into my bed when I’m not looking, and he even messes with me sometimes while I’m asleep, so the Mother of Cats bought him a second bed that looks like a bowl of ramen. Does he sleep in his bed? Yes!!! Yes, he does. We are two happy cats at the moment since it is cold and windy outside, and we have to stay in because the wind is kind of scary and we don’t like the sounds that it makes. Besides, all of the bunnies are hiding too, so it is kind of boring…
The Mother of Cats also got some knitting done. Here is her first sock!
The Mother of Cats says that this is a scrunch sock.
Doesn’t that sock look warm? The Mother of Cats is slowly knitting away on the second sock and hopes to have the pair done before the end of the week. She is kind of anxious to have it done because she is all motivated to make more socks after cleaning up her yarn stash because… she found some mini skein yarn sets for fun socks!
Here is one of the yarn kits with the new book that she bought along with our fun cat beds.
She says that she is going to make doodle socks. What? Seriously, do socks sound fun to you? She should knit me some doodle mice to play with. Maybe a little doodle sweater to put on MATEO because he will hate it and that will be seriously funny. He deserves to have that happen to him because last night the Mother of Cats glanced over at him just in time to see him ripping the comb off the head of MY CHICKEN that she gave me to groom. What is up with that little idiot cat?!!! He had pulled lots of yarn pieces out and was clearly trying to rip the chicken open. What is wrong with him… does he think that he can actually eat the chicken? Sigh. The Mother of Cats took it away last night and put it on a high shelf where he can’t get it.
Bye chicken. I will miss you so much. Good thing I have a tuna bed to sleep in.
I have three mini-skein sock kits from Moonglow to knit. Yay. Lots of doodling ahead! I’m chomping at the bit to start designing some socks, and I can see some posts ahead.
I have also been working with the indoor garden and there is another post in there, too. What will I be writing about? Well… pruning geraniums, battling aphids, and an unhappy lavender plant. That’s just the upstairs plants! Who knew indoor gardening was so much work?
Because I have been down with tendon issues I have been clearing some books from my reading list. Oh. Another post.
Are you sensing a theme here? I also am waiting for the results of my heart monitor test and MY KNEES ARE KILLING ME. You already know about the bad boy wrists. I have a scleroderma post slowly brewing too. It is hard for me to type because… bad boy wrists… but I’m getting there. Hopefully there will be some more writing in the near future.
I just love the color of this rose! Oh. Do you see the aphids?
What a week, what a week. The Mother of Cats had been sad for days and days because she could not knit. It has been awful. She kind of moped around and didn’t take good care of the CoalBear and me. She forgot our TUNA one night!!! Her hand had been slowly getting better, but her knees suddenly got cranky and she hadn’t been going up and down the stairs so much. She tried to read a book, but she decided it was boring. I finally moved into bed with her and tried to groom her, but she just hid under the covers, so I groomed one of her sweaters to make it fluffy. Why did that make her cranky? What is wrong with this Mother of Cats? Maybe she should eat more tuna…
Look at what the Mother of Cats did!!! She gave me a chicken to groom and sleep with. My very own chicken!!! I love my chicken, yes I do. The week was starting to look a little better when…
The Mother of Cats found a leak under the kitchen sink. No. This is bad! There was a lot of commotion, and then this scary man came and worked on the pipes and replaced the garbage disposal. (Mateo the CoalBear told me: I DID NOT come out of the closet for the whole day!) The Mother of Cats had to do some cleaning and laundry, and I was hoping that things were getting better. Then it started snowing and snowing outside…
There is almost 2 feet of snow there on the catio. Once again, my informant is Mateo, because there was NO WAY I was going out in that stuff.
So, the Mother of Cats had to go out and clear snow. I was a little worried, but she wore her braces and got through it without her wrist getting any worse, and she seemed to be walking a little better. Hey. Maybe the week was starting to turn around?
By Thursday she was wearing a compression wrist brace and started knitting a little sock. So cute, right? Now after knitting for three days, it is starting to look cute, and I’m thinking that it could use a little grooming. Nope. The Mother of Cats keeps it zipped up in a project bag where I can’t get ahold of it. Don’t you think that the sock would look better if it was a little fluffy? As I’ve discussed before, the Mother of Cats is not good at sharing her things…
Do you see how I am sharing my chicken with Mateo? He’d better not groom it, though!!
This is Hannah, signing off.
>^..^<
Note from the Mother of Cats:
The beautiful sock yarn is from Spun Right Round and the color is called Ugly in the Morning. The name kind of fits the week. The background yarn is a black and white zebra twist yarn dyed in the colorway. Perfect, right? A zebra with lots of colors shining through. I’m making a pair of Scrunch Socks in this fun yarn, and every day I am able to knit a little more as my wrists recover and my flexibility returns. Yay for resiliency.
Talk about resiliency: My indoor roses are blooming!
I’ve been spending a lot of time in my box keeping my eye on the Mother of Cats lately.
Life has been so boring lately at Casa Mother of Cats. Last week the Mother of Cats noticed that she had a sore lump on her arm along one of her tendons. Then her wrist started to hurt. Then her arm and hand started to hurt a lot and her wrist got swollen, so she put a brace on it. I hate the brace because it is clunky when she pets me. I was already unhappy about the brace when she got worse, and her wrist and hand hurt so much that she couldn’t even get our tuna open!! THE HORROR!!!! She stopped letting us outside and just laid around sleeping and ignoring us. While this was going on the weather changed outside and I didn’t even get to go out to see what was happening.
All of the leaves fell off of my tree, and it suddenly got really cold. Most of the birds that were hanging around the feeder disappeared, but that darn cute dove and the bunny look like they are planning to hang around forever. We love to play in the dead leaves and to watch the doves, but did the Mother of Cats let us out all morning like usual? No. She did not. She just dumped out some tuna without even mixing it up properly and went back to bed. This is not the care that I am accustomed to receiving!
She spent a couple of days immobile with heat packs on her wrist over the brace, and then she had to put a brace on her other hand and said it hurt to walk. The Mother of Cats was completely broken at that point! She was such a baby about getting up to give the CoalBear and me our tuna and cookies. I had to just insist that the late-night tuna snacks arrived on time. I had to actually MEOW to get her up and moving. Lazy, lazy, broken Mother of Cats.
Slowly the Mother of Cats got better, and yesterday she managed to function without her brace all day. Today she finally wove in all the ends on her new sweater and tried it on. I tried to sleep on the sweater while she was doing that and chased the ends (hello… I’m a cat!), and it was like she was finally returning to normal. Oh. Look at that sweater. It is kind of cute. She doesn’t look all that broken today; maybe I’ll start getting better care again! Maybe she will let me out onto the catio later tonight so I can look for bunnies and even that scary raccoon.
In the meantime, I guess I’ll catch a nap.
This is Hannah, signing off.
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
I have had severe flares of tendonitis before, but this one took the prize! Once it got going the inflammation affected all my other joints and even my breathing. Whew. Glad it is over: it’s been 10 days without knitting!!!
Do you know how hard it is to open a package of tuna or a bottle of Tylenol with only your left hand?
I binge watched Dopesick during the worst couple of days and ended up tearing the house apart hunting for some oxycontin that I thought I might have left over from my lung biopsy adventure. No oxy, only Tylenol. Sad me.
A friend told me that there is an insurance code for “knitting injury”. I kind of laughed every time I thought wistfully of knitting and was prevented by… bad wrist, bad!!! I had to laugh every time I considered heading into urgent care with my pretty sad knitting injured wrist…
The sweater is La Prairie by Joji Locatelli. After blocking and finishing it is everything that I hoped for.
I’m slowly easing back into knitting by using the little knitting machine to make hand warmers…
While I was cut off from knitting, I read several new books of the science fiction persuasion. My reading challenge for the year is almost completed!
There was a huge flock of blackbirds that hung out in the backyard this week; there were so many that the CoalBear was a little worried about going outside. The days are getting colder and there are dead leaves in the catio for Mateo (AKA the CoalBear) to chase. The grasshoppers are all gone, and the squirrels are stealing food from the birdfeeder and storing it in the planters on the deck. Those squirrels are really getting out of control: one of them now barks at us from the garage roof, hanging off the rain gutter, and when that happens, we’re too scared to go outside. Bad squirrel, bad!!
Look at what’s happened to our tree!!! It is a kind of funny colored…
It was sort of a busy week. The Mother of Cats had two appointments and left us alone for hours. Then she was busy most of the rest of the week finishing up knitting the sweater that she has been working on. I love this sweater! It is fun to sleep on, and chasing the yarn is great. The Mother of Cats, however, was not very good about sharing the sweater, and then she took it off the needles, tried it on, and then packed it away on a shelf where I can’t reach it. Why does she do these things?
Today she blocked the sweater, and it is covered up with towels so I can’t lick the wool which is one of my very favorite things to do. As soon as it comes out from under the towels, however, I will have my way with it!!!!
In the meantime, the Mother of Cats is back to working on her blanket that was packed away for months and months and months. Look at how cool this blanket will be!
The Mother of Cats says that this is the next big project that is getting done.
So, that was kind of the whole week: abandoned for hours, knitting, and crazy animals that make going outside kind of scary. I’m going to go pester the Mother of Cats for some extra tuna and then I’m going to go take a nap.
Mateo: I’ll hang out with the Mother of Cats in the indoor garden while Hannah’s asleep.
This is Hannah, signing off.
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
The sweater is La Prairie by Joji Locatelli. This was a challenging knit with lots of elements to juggle at the same time: a charted pattern, color changes of yarn, and lots and lots of bobbles!! I had to make modifications to the sleeves as I worked to conserve some of the yarn colors, and I still may need to rip back the cuffs and knit some more to make the sleeves longer; I’ll know the sleeve length better after blocking is done. This is absolutely an individualized knit.
All my sweaters are safely put away in plastic lock-top bins. Sorry, Hannah.
The blanket is the Nectar Blanket by Ysolda Teague. It keeps growing on me, and I’m now thinking about hunting around in lace books to look at different options for the edging. The original pattern calls for a garter stitch edging, and I keep thinking that I need some more lace… I may need more yarn, too…
The appointments were to get my pulmonary function test done, and then a follow-up appointment with the pulmonologist. I have gained back more lung volume, and he is really happy with my progress.
I took my little purse-sized emotional support chicken with me to the testing appointment. Then we went to the grocery store and Starbucks.
Do you see all this yarny goodness that I’m cuddled up with?
The Mother of Cats has taken down the sweater that was in time out (I wish that Mateo was in time out… he has been annoying all day!!) and started knitting on it again. She was a little worried about coming back to a project after so many months, but it turned out to be kind of easy for her because she had made so many notes on the pattern and even made a big knitting aid to help her keep track of the yarn colors, the pattern, and the decreases on the sleeves.
All the numbers refer to the chart rows for the pattern. The dark boxes are the decrease rows, and the numbers to left side are the yarn colors. Whew! It’s enough to give me a headache!! Maybe some tuna will help…
Anyway, she spent the week knitting away on the first sleeve and got it finished in the middle of the week. Here’s what it looks like:
Pretty cool sleeve, right? The pattern goes down the outside of the sleeve, and the Mother of Cats is soooo happy that she doesn’t have to knit too many bobbles.
She’s now working on the second sleeve and really worried about running out of one of the yarn colors. She keeps weighing the ball of yarn and saying things that I think are inappropriate for kitty ears under her breath. Poor Mother of Cats. I never stress. Well, I only stress a little. Okay, I am in the closet for hours every time a stranger comes to the door, but that is just good sense, right?
The worries about the yarn are pretty bad, so I’ve been hanging out with the Mother of Cats while she knits on the second sleeve.
Anyways, the sweater is coming along well, and I think that it is one of the comfiest knits that she has made in a while. I just love taking naps on it!! Isn’t the color nice? It really makes my coat shine.
This is Hannah, signing off.
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats: That sweater is La Prairie by Joji Locatelli. I’m now in a rush to get it done before the first snow of the season. Next week is going to stay warm, so maybe I’ll pull this off!
After a phone call and then a few email exchanges with my cardiologist it was decided that I needed to wear a heart monitor for the next 30 days to rule out atrial fibrillation (AFib); evidently that is a systemic sclerosis thing, and I’m high risk to develop it because of other things going on with my heart. I did not see this coming, but it absolutely matches my symptoms.
Look at this heart monitor!!
That heart monitor is just fabulous!! The whole thing is taped on, I can wear it in the shower, and there are no leads to worry about coming loose. The monitor is blue toothed to a phone that I need to carry at all times, and it is transmitting to both the company that owns the monitor and my doctor. If I have another event while wearing it, I can send a message immediately to my doctor on the phone. Isn’t this technology fabulous? Of course, nothing has happened while I’ve been wearing the monitor, but I still have 28 days to go…
Mateo: I am not annoying!!! Hannah should be the one in time out because… hold on… I’ll think of something… she hogs all the tuna!
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.
Cute fingerless mitts, right?
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.
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!!
Time for me to catch another nap.
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.
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.
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!
It was an eagle!!!Definitely an eagle!!!
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.
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
Grade II, both knees.
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.
All My Chickens
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!
Yarn, Books & Roses 