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!
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.
OMG! Do you hear that thunder!!!
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!
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.
Time to hang out on my little blanket.
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 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.
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)
Hannah: Where are my bunnies?
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…
As some of you may have guessed by now, chickenitis is personal with me. Here’s our family story.
My nephew was a type 2 diabetic who had a rare, and very severe, reaction to the medication that he took to control his blood sugar last year. He sustained major organ damage at that time, the worst being to his kidneys and liver. He made lifestyle changes hoping that his liver would heal, but by this spring it became apparent that he would need a liver transplant. He broke the news to his extended family in a text message this April, and my sister requested that I make them all emotional support chickens. I pulled out some yarn and got to work.
Not long afterwards he went on a trip to Hawaii that was paid for through friends; the last picture I saw of him was a selfie taken while standing in the ocean.
My nephew in Hawaii early this May.
A few days after that picture he was home again, returning early from the trip because his health was declining. Soon after his return he was in an emergency room, and two days later my sister let me know that his condition was critical and that he was nonresponsive. He did manage to rally and fought on for more days in the hospital, but when it became clear that his kidney function was too marginal to allow liver transplant surgery, he was moved to hospice care and arrangements were made to allow him to go home.
Shocked by the speed of his decline, horrified that the bottom had fallen out in the city of his mother’s birth, Honolulu, Hawaii, I bundled up the two emotional support chickens that I had ready to go and express shipped them to his home. I worried that they wouldn’t make it in time.
They did not make it. He died the afternoon before they arrived.
The next morning, I woke up to a text showing his swollen-eyed girlfriend hugging the chicken that I had knitted for him.
The emotional support chicken that I sent, hard at work.
It was heartbreaking, but I was grateful that the chicken had arrived for her right when she needed it, and happy to see she had claimed it. My sister kept the second chicken, the reddish-purple one knit from homespun, for herself. That chicken quickly became a true emotional support huggable. She took it with her for the memorial barbeque with his friends. She slept with it. The chicken traveled into the mountains on the day that they buried his ashes, along with those of a beloved dog, near a waterway where he used to camp. Raspberry brambles were planted on the site in living remembrance. In my mind, the color of the chicken is linked to the color of the future berries that will come from those plants. Bittersweet memories of a wonderful man gone too soon, a living memorial of berries, and a knitted chicken all somehow linked by the sorrow that has been placed to rest in the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest.
The chicken went to another memorial gathering yesterday in San Diego with my sister and niece.
Emotional support chickens are just… cute little knitted chicken shaped pillows to hug. They are also symbols of love and support when you need those things desperately. They are something to cling to in bad times. Sometimes they are all a knitter can do for another person in need, and sometimes they are just what that person needed.
My nephew and I dancing at his sister’s wedding in 2002.
Now you know why I will never, ever decline a request for an emotional support chicken. Two more requests came this week. I have a spreadsheet and everything. For these people, in the memory of my nephew, for my sister, I will knit every single one of them a chicken.
These big fat bumblebees have been coming to the little garden by the deck every single day this week. I just love them! They are so fat and slow. They are fuzzy and look just like a cat toy, right? They come right up to the wire to climb into the flowers, and I got my paw out and onto one of them this morning; he just bumbled off to another flower. These guys are awesome!!
The bumblebees love these flowers!!
The Mother of Cats is doing much better and hasn’t worn her wrist braces in days. She finished up the knitting on one of her Emotional Support Chickens (ESC) and then spent a couple of days sewing them up. One chicken was done Saturday morning, so she took it to her Frayed Knots knitting group to show it off to the other knitters.
Isn’t this kind of a sweet little chicken? Her colors look like the colors of the garden where the bumblebee hangs out.
The Mother of Cats wanted to show off the chicken because it has been a big hit with her scleroderma support group and at the Kaiser infusion center last month. Everyone wants a chicken!! Like… four of the members of her support group want one, and she figures that the infusion center should get a least a couple. The Mother of Cats is kind of thinking that lots of people who are having a hard time (like, the families at the Ronald McDonald House, or at other infusion centers) would like a chicken. Yeah. It was a good idea, but she lost control, and things went crazy really quickly… the chicken got passed around and people hugged it. And hugged it. One lady wanted to keep it. The Mother of Cats got requests for FIVE more chickens and was asked to think about teaching a chicken knitting class for some of the ladies. One of the ladies swore that she could get chickens sold at craft shows up north (in Boulder, Colorado) and the money could be used to buy items for the personal care packages that are created by the Frayed Knots volunteers. Another lady asked for the pattern so she could start knitting chickens too…
Yeah. A little out of control. The Mother of Cats now has a spreadsheet going with 17 chicken requests on it.
So, the Mother of Cats got cracking and sewed up two more chickens. Now she has three done and ready to go out the door. There are two more little ones knitted that need to be sewn up, but her wrist voted NO!
Today she wound up a lot of yarn (luckily, she had bought all the yarn earlier in the month…) and she is torn about what color to knit next. Maybe it is time to make a chicken that is knit in all solid colors. Should she use some fluffy alpaca? She still has some beads that can go onto another chicken. Whatever… she needs to just get to work knitting and somehow the chickens will all find a home, right? Obviously, the need for emotional support chickens is real.
Unless there are bumblebees. They are almost as good.
This is Hannah, signing off.
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
I woke up to a text this morning: another request for an ESC. A pink one, please.
The Mother of Cats brought me this wonderful new box this week. I love this box!!!
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.
I bet if she ate some tuna with avocado, she would feel better…
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?
I do have to admit, I love my chicken. She is really nice to sleep with.
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.
Behold the zebra yarn. It gets that name because the undyed yarn is white with black stripes.
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.
That’s all for now. I’m going to take a little cat bath and then it is time for a nap. Later on, around 2am, it will be Miller Moth Time!!!
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.
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 