It’s been a little more than a week now, and so far things are looking up in 2025. Here are the highlights of the week:
It’s an Emotional Support Chickie!!
That’s right. A new pattern came out for Emotional Support Little Chickies that are just the right size to put into your pocket to take with you on the go. Yay!! I bought some cheap multicolored yarn to make a bunch to send off to the organizations that my community knitting non-profit supports. These guys would make the day at one of the cancer infusions centers, or maybe at Ronald McDonald House, or they can even ride along on the ambulances that respond to mental health crisis calls.
Then a present came in the mail from a sister. A Pink. Zebra. Striped. Furblet. It makes noises. It has one little CoalBear pretty darn concerned…
Isn’t that the cutest thing? I burst out laughing when I opened the package and saw what it was. Mateo, however, is not laughing!
Speaking of new things, do you see this new winter coat that Mateo is sporting?
I also have been ignoring the few little knitting projects that were still active at the end of the year. It’s a new year, I need new things!!! I casted on and started a pair of new arm warmers that are coming right along. New is good, right? Look at how bright and happy these colors are.
I found this yarn in the stash, and these warmers will be soooo cute with all of my grey sweaters.
I kind of used a pattern to get me started on these arm warmers, but after I had looked at the notes to see what size needles were used and how many stitches were cast on I just took off and did my own thing while checking for the size from time to time. I mean, look at those things: how hard does it have to be? If you crave some of your own, those needles are size 4 (3.5mm), I cast on 48 stitches using DK yarn, and when I got close to my wrist (these are knit from the elbow down towards the wrist) I decreased twice to get the stitch count down to 44 stitches before the wrist ribbing. I put a marker in the decrease rows so that I can make the second arm warmer match. See, easy!! But fun. And new.
The other big new is the new car! I took an Uber down to the Subaru dealership the second day of the new year, and after 5 exhausting hours I drove home my new Subaru Forester. Yay! New car is good!! Exhausted and stressed to the max, I made the last turn towards home in the dark of the early evening, and there ahead of me, enormous in the western sky as it just began to tuck itself behind the Rocky Mountains for the night, was the new moon.
I took this picture the next evening. The moon is a little bigger than the tiny sliver of a moon that I saw when I brought the car home, but you can see how new it still is. That is Venus right next to it. New Moon, new car.
It’s been a pretty good start to the year, don’t you think? I went yesterday to get some medical testing done, and everything is looking pretty good. Yay! 2025, let’s do this!!
My African violets are also starting out the year right.
Maybe it is my age, but this year just went by in a flash. Here are the highlights.
I knit 151 hats that have all been donated to the community knitting non-profit organization that I belong to.
I knit 26 Emotional Support Chickens.
I completed several pairs of socks and one sweater, the La Prairie cardigan.
I learned how to make fingerless mitts on my Addi Pro kitting machine and I made39 pairs that are still waiting to go to Kaiser Rheumatology.
I read 57 books that had a total of 23,218 pages.
Quite a few of the books featured octopuses…
My knitted cat with some of the octopus books,,,
Whew. That was kind of a lot. I also put out a bird feeder this year, enjoyed a lot of wildlife in the yarn, grew plants in pots on the patio, and then successfully moved several of them inside to hang out with me in my craft room. I left all of the wildlife outside to the disgust of one little CoalBear cat.
So, it was a productive year, but there were challenges of course. I started the year in a monster fibromyalgia flare, fought my way out of anemia, developed sudden tachycardia attacks over the summer, and then finished up with a bad scleroderma flare that was exacerbated by injuries from an auto wreck. Nothing absolutely horrible, but it was kind of one thing after another all year long. Sigh.
Somewhere out there is my car, Stumpy. I took this picture the day I signed over the title and accepted the settlement from the insurance company.
Today it is the start of a new year. Today the African violets in my garden are blooming, and I have finally recovered from the injuries I sustained in the car wreck. Today things are finally starting to look up.
Hello, 2025.
PS: Did you miss pictures of Hannah and Mateo? Here are some of the bests of the year.
It’s been kind of a tough month. I had a bad flare and couldn’t knit, I suffered through an annoying 30-day heart monitor test, and then there was Thanksgiving. I’ve been slowing clawing my way back from the flare over several weeks, and finally last week I started to feel pretty much like myself again. I even made several hats on my Sentro knitting machine using a power screwdriver to turn the crank for me.
This actually works better than you would think. 🙂
I pruned and fed the plants in the indoor garden. Gosh, they really look a lot nicer. Look at how nicely the lavender plants cleaned up.
The miniature roses had gotten pretty bushy, and I kept seeing some aphids on the new growth. I aggressively pruned the plants back to remove more than half of the growth, sprayed the plants well with Neem oil, and then gave them some fertilizer. They look somewhat sparse now, but the new growth is good and I’m not seeing aphids. I really needed to get the size of the plants under control anyway as they were getting close to the top of the growing space under the grow lights.
There aren’t any new rose buds yet, but I think that this was a good course of action to manage the aphids. Some of my other plants have started to put out blooms, the African violets being the stars of the month.
So, the indoor garden is looking pretty good, and the difficult month was finally coming to an end. My wrists still hurt, but I was definitely on the way back to “normalish”. I decided to head out to buy a fast-food hamburger treat for myself Tuesday evening. I love these little trips out of the house; each one is a little adventure that really perks me up.
This trip was really something, a surreal adventure that is still playing out.
I had just cleaned out my car (Stumpy) a couple of days before, and before I left on my outing, I gave him a fast little vacuum job and brought in the trash cans from the street. Gosh, Stumpy looked good! I took off to the hamburger joint where I scored my favorite burger, some onion rings, and a chocolate shake. This is a lot of fat and salt, and I was going to have it anyway!!! Did I mention that my server looked just like Dylon on The Great British Bake Off? He gave me a coupon for free ice cream if I completed an online review of the food/service. Yay! Free ice cream!! On the way back I sneaked some onion rings from the bag as I drove past the high school where I used to work. It was early evening, and there was a car parked along the street above the sports stadium and field, the driver packing things into the back of his car. Someone finishing up sport practice, I thought to myself as I went by. Still looking at the school, I remembered how much I loved working there, how much I loved the kids, how much I loved the greenhouse attached to my classroom…
I had to stop at the light at the intersection by the school, and I remember that I was very focused on the oncoming cars before I started moving with the green light because… high school intersection… crazy new drivers… must be careful…
The light changed, I slowly started out, and there was a sudden flash of light and movement to my left as I crossed the intersection. I was hit by a car that had run the red light; poor Stumpy was sent careening across the intersection and ended up dropped onto the median of the street I had been crossing, now facing directly at my old classroom and its greenhouse. Kind of ironic, right? The collusion alert system in the car immediately activated and there was a voice checking on me and calling for emergence responders. A witness arrived soon after to help, and a teenaged girl started directing traffic. The witness was a Lacrosse coach, and I wondered if he was the driver packing up his car when I passed him by the sports field. The fire department arrived with paramedics who got me out of the car (taking my car keys out of my hand and leaving them with the car), into an ambulance, and off we went to the nearest hospital with an emergency department: I had some serious chest pain going and my blood pressure was something else. “Don’t worry,” said the paramedics.” We got your food for you out of the car”. Did I mention that this was a little surreal? “Did you know that you were hit by a Humvee?” Yep. Surreal.
So, I had a great little emergency room visit. I had some testing that determined that I wasn’t having a heart attack, but I did have a couple of broken ribs. The interactions with the trauma physician were kind of hilarious as she didn’t quite know what to make of my CT results… “you have a lot of interesting structures in your lungs,” she told me. “You seem kind of dry… you need to drink more water.” Whatever. It must be the diuretic that my doctors prescribed because they are more concerned about some other things going on… like pulmonary edema… and heart failure… somehow, she focused on the wonky kidney results and didn’t notice the rest. Have I mentioned surreal? I had called my son to come get me home because I didn’t have a car or door keys any longer, and he packed me up and got me out of there at that point. Five hours after picking up my fast-food, I finally started home again with my son, a little wobbly, drugged up on pain killers, and still in possession of my hamburger. I ate a couple of the cold onion rings in the car as he drove through the night…
I’m pretty sure that my poor car Stumpy is totaled.
…and the phone rang. The police finally called. They were with Stumpy, and he was now in the parking lot of the high school where I used to work, right outside the door I used every morning next to my old classroom. We turned around and headed back to the police at the accident scene to make my statement and to get the house keys out of the car. The police officer was wonderful; she was still making her way through all the calls and witness reports, but it absolutely looked like I had been hit by a driver who illegally ran the light. She made the arrangements for the car to be towed and stayed with it for me. I ended up hugging that officer and giving her an audible book recommendation. My chocolate milkshake was in the Stumpy’s cupholder, still cold with the straw in it, and I took it back. Of course I did. As we drove away the officer was doing a search for the book I had mentioned to her. Goodbye old classroom. Goodbye Stumpy car that I loved. Thank you both for all the good times.
Surreal.
Aftermath: My wonderful insurance has stepped up and is handling everything. My neighbors are telling me not to worry about the rental car yet: they will drive me anywhere I want to go. The CT scan at the ER picked up on a couple of issues that I need to follow up on, and I already have new appointments with my doctors to do that: the atelectasis in my lungs is back, and something is going on with my thyroid. Who knows, this all might have been a blessing in disguise.
My wrists are strangely better, and I finished knitting my socks.
Slouch socks!!
My hamburger, when I warmed it up and ate it the next evening, was still delicious!
I found the coupon for the free ice cream when I finally cleaned out Stumpy in the tow lot Friday. I plan to leave a great review…
Stumpy was a 2018 Subaru Forester, and I can’t praise his safety features enough.
So, finally the heart results have come back. If you haven’t been keeping up with all of my latest and greatest developments in the slow-moving train wreck that is called systemic sclerosis, let me quickly catch you up.
Over the summer I started to notice that my Fitbit was alarming frequently because my heartbeat was high. My heartrate was jumping suddenly from a moderate mid-70s bpm to over 140 bpm: cue the panting! I’d have to stop whatever I was doing to lean over while I caught my breath, and then it would be over. Sometimes my chest hurt, and I was pretty sure that this was contributing to my fatigue.
All of this craziness happened while I was trying to make hats on my Sentro knitting machine.This is what I described to my cardiologist as my adventure on the stairs: I had watered the lawn, came indoors, walked up the stairs and was then suddenly profoundly out of breath.
I do have a long history of shortness of breath, and I’ve been diagnosed with several heart and lung issues that explained my symptoms: pulmonary hypertension, cardiac fibrosis, fluid around my heart, lung disease, and… yeah. I’ve been short of breath like this for a long time and I’ve just been dealing with it as my new normal. Still, the Fitbit was new data, so I sent an email to my cardiologist, and he ordered up a 30-day heart monitor test.
Behold: the fancy heart monitor.
Tuesday afternoon the results were in, and my cardiologist contacted me with the results. It’s kind of a good news/good news/bad news diagnosis. I have a type of supraventricular tachycardia called paroxysmal atrial tachycardia (called PAT for short). I had to do some google searches to understand those crazy terms. The commonsense translation would be: sudden onset rapid beating of my heart’s upper chamber (the atrium). In even more simple terms, my heart rhythm slips out of control suddenly and the upper chamber is beating waaay too fast. Here’s the good news: this is a pretty benign heart rhythm issue (no blood clots, heart attacks or strokes here!!), and it can be treated (probably). The bad news is… I’m stuck with it, and it is pretty unpredictable. The other bad news is that I should go on oxygen more often in the daytime as PAT episodes seem to be triggered when my oxygen levels drop. That’s why it hits when I’m folding laundry, or right after coming up the stairs, or when I rush to the door to answer the doorbell…
Hannah: Listen, the doorbell is enough to give anyone a heart attack!!!
Why wait on a new drug? Well… I’m just now recovering from a pretty bad flare that hit my tendons, wrists and knees with paroxysmal fury. Paroxysmal is a great word, don’t you think? What is really crazy, my heart symptoms improved while I was down with the flare, making me wonder if the two are somehow connected. I want to wait to start a new medication until after my rheumatologist has a chance to sort out what is happening with my poor wrists and knees. I am suspicious about calcium being involved somehow, and the treatment for PAT involves calcium channel blockers. There may be no connection if there are different pathways involved, but still… calcium is the multi-headed monster of the moment with new calcium deposits appearing on my arms and legs, osteoporosis, and a previously floated notion that I might have pseudogout (which is caused by calcium pyrophosphate crystals in joints… wrists and knees being hit the worst… and my knee x-rays showed that I had calcium deposits in the tissue around my knee…). My cardiologist is okay with a delay in treatment with the understanding that I need to contact him if things get worse.
I just love my doctors!
So, here is the lesson from this adventure. Data really changes a conversation. Having that picture of my Fitbit made a huge difference; after months of explaining that I had sudden shortness of breath things changed with the one email and attached photo. The results of the heart monitor test have now returned a data-driven diagnosis that helps me understand what is happening and makes treatment possible. It is helpful to email your doctors (instead of making phone calls…) as you have a clear record of your interaction. Google with abandon!! Rely on the advice of your doctors; they went to medical school after all, but try to be an active partner in your treatment plan.
Dang. There is another diagnosis on that growing list… no one will believe me so we should just keep this quiet. Paroxysmal Atrial Tachycardia.
In the meantime, the cats are keeping their eyes on me!
Postscript: I forgot to mention, that of the three types of supraventricular tachycardia, PAT is the one that is the least common. Figures. Once a zebra, always a zebra!!
It was the third day in the Intensive Care Unit following my lung biopsy. I was sitting up in the bed, rocking all of my tubes but finally off the high flow machine, drinking a Starbucks latte and chatting with a visitor. The nurse came in the door and stopped short, taking in the scene of me, the Starbucks, and my visitor. “I don’t believe it!” she exclaimed. “They just told me all the things that are wrong with you, and I walked in here expecting to see a gravely ill person. Instead… here you are! Not what I expected!”
There I am, day three post-surgery after ditching the high flow machine for a regular oxygen line.
“Yeah, I get that all the time,” I told her. It’s the curse of chronic illnesses… you adjust and stop acting sick. Your condition is invisible, and it is too exhausting to explain to people what’s wrong when the list of diagnosed conditions is… well… exhausting. Seriously, if you say more than a couple of things it starts to sound like you’re just making things up. It doesn’t help when the diagnoses sound fake to begin with (systemic sclerosis associated interstitial lung disease… it’s called SSc-ILD for short, but still… sounds like something invented in a science fiction novel, right?). It invariably gets worse if people start to share back some rheumatic or autoimmune conditions that they know of (like fibromyalgia or Raynaud’s), and you are compelled to say… “Oh, I have that too…” See what I mean? Attention-seeking hypochondriac is sure to cross their minds. I mean, I would wonder that… It is much easier to cover up as much as you can and act normal.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Several patients in the support groups that I belong to have been struggling with family and friends who are unable/unwilling to accept the diagnosis. They don’t want to hear about it, they don’t want their lives to change, and there is no support. There has been heartbreak and tears, to be frank. Others in the groups have shared that their families also refuse to accept the seriousness of their condition(s) because there have been years of struggle to obtain the diagnosis, and after so many doctors have said that it’s all in your head, or, you need to control stress better, they kind of believe that. From the perspective of these family members, their scleroderma family member is just trying to milk the diagnosis for attention. To make it worse, some patients (and this is exhausting, believe me) start to list all of their symptoms as if to justify their diagnosis. It is a little desperate, and more than a little heartbreaking.
Hannah: the Mother of Cats is making a new patient in her Zoom support group an emotional support chicken!! Her family is unwilling to become involved as she grapples with the implications of her new diagnosis.
Then there is the more insidious problem: what did you do to make this happen? I have been asked that, and it usually is followed by advice about things that I can do to control my scleroderma and the resulting lung/heart complications or even how to make myself get well. The implication is, if you don’t do this (herbal treatment, sunshine, exercise, wacky stem cell injection), it is your own fault that you are sick!! It happens to a lot of us. It eats away at self-confidence, and makes me, and other patients question just how sick they really are.
I, and a lot of others in my extended scleroderma community, feel like fakes a lot of the time. Like, almost all the time!
I mentioned that to my pulmonologist last week on the phone, and he was really direct in his response: do not fall prey to imposter syndrome!!! This is really happening to you, you are dealing with it very well, but you need to remember to take care of yourself!
I need this picture on a shirt!
I had never thought of imposter syndrome in this way, but I think that his point is well made. Maybe I should have a poster made with this written on it. With some sunflowers and a tuxedo cat for interest. Every person diagnosed with a serious chronic condition needs this, because it is easy to just trick yourself into pretending that you are “better” and then the bad decisions get made. Like going off your meds. Or partying like it is 1999. Or eating all of those things that are essentially forbidden at once! There has been a rash of wailing patients in my online support groups who say things like… I went off my meds and started treating myself with natural remedies, and now [insert new symptom that has them terrified] is happening. Yep. That is imposter syndrome, hard at work. No wonder my doctor was so firm with me.
Because the point that he was making is that I am pretty ill, and I need to own it. I’m in a very small group of scleroderma patients who have the full battery of the more serious systemic sclerosis complications: pulmonary hypertension, interstitial lung disease, and diastolic dysfunction. I am being treated aggressively for those conditions, and I am doing really well, but they haven’t gone away.
I finally pulled myself together to check what the survival rates are for patients with two of my concurrent conditions (SSc-ILD-PH) and discovered that there are recent studies that looked at patients being treated with the same drugs that I am on.
This study, done in 2009 with patients on the same drug regimen as mine, showed the 3-year survival rate to be 39%. Oh, oh. Not an imposter any more.
This study, published in 2011 has a 3-year survival rate of 47%. Oh. That’s better.
A huge study done in Germany and published this year, shows that scleroderma patients with ILD-PH had the worst outcomes: the 5-year survival rate was 79%. Gosh, that is a good-looking number!
I see a trend. Do you see a trend? It looks like things are getting better and that survival rates are going up. I have to admit, when I saw that first 39% I almost panicked and stopped searching, because… I was diagnosed and started treatment for pulmonary hypertension and diastolic dysfunction exactly 3 years ago. The ILD diagnosis came in a few months later. The clock is ticking, and I am one of the 39%… talk about imposter syndrome: how can I be this functional when the majority of patients like me are already dead?? I’m a fake, an imposter!! That can’t be true, it is not true, and that new data shows what is happening: it looks like the treatment plans of today are really making a difference. My pulmonologist feels that the drug that I’m taking to control my lung disease is a game changer, and that drug was only approved for use with scleroderma patients within the last decade.
For some reason the term 39% Imposter has stuck with me. That’s me. I’m not really all that sick, because only 39% of me is pretending to be sick. Or well. Whatever works today. I’m thinking about a tee shirt with the slogan. I’m rocking the imposter persona. Maybe a shirt that says 39% Imposter and 100% Survivor…
I mailed back the heart monitor last Monday and now I’m waiting for the results. It has been a difficult three weeks because the flare just won’t go away, my wrists and knees are being bad boys, and now I have painful heart palpitations. Sigh. It is always one thing after another.
The new season is hard upon us now in Colorado. The leaves are gone from the trees, there is snow on the ground in the shaded areas along the back fence, and the only birds around lately are pushy doves at the front feeder terrorizing the squirrels (the squirrels deserve it, in my opinion. Go bad doves!!). The cats are suddenly friendlier, and Mateo, now very soft and fluffy, is growing in his winter cat.
The picture on the left is the summer version of Mateo. His tail is thin, his ruff gone, and I always worry that he is losing weight. Nope. He’s just missing a ton of fur! The other two pictures are examples of the winter, full-coated little furry monster. Right now, Mateo is eating non-stop and getting fluffier by the day. Obviously, winter is right around the corner!
I’ve been slowly bringing in all of my outdoor plants that I thought I could overwinter in the house, and after spending some weeks in the garage, the last of them moved in a week ago. (Why did they have to languish in the garage for a few weeks, you ask? Well… hopefully, some of the bugs gave up and moved on. I want to mention that my garage door has windows in it, and protects the plants from frost, so it is a suitable transition zone.)
Here’s my craft room with the grow light mounted shelves. Happy plants! The largest plants on the left are the lavenders. They are just hanging out and I’m not sure if I should prune them, or what. I may have to do some investigations on the internet…
Most of the plants that were on my deck outdoors in pots are now in the craft room on shelves equipped with grow lights. The plants adjusted pretty well after their move, but I’d like to unpack what happened with them a little.
The geraniums decided to go to sleep for the winter while they were in the garage and most of the leaves turned yellow and started to drop off. I let them adjust to indoors for about a week and then pruned out all of the yellow and sad leaves, which removed more than half of the leaves on the plants. I could see that the plants were putting out blooms before the pruning started, but to my surprise I discovered lots of new growth emerging on the stems down by the base of the plant. All right then! A week after the pruning (and some fertilizer) there aren’t any new yellow leaves, and the plants seem to be thriving.
I pruned the miniature roses right after they came into the house about six weeks ago, and after that they put out new blooms and filled out with lots of growth. Yay. Looking good! Umm… where did those aphids come from!!!!! I had looked at the roses carefully before bringing them in, but to be truthful, I was looking for Japanese beetles. Who knew that aphids lay eggs and go dormant in the fall? To make things worse, those little guys can reproduce like crazy if there is even one because they can reproduce asexually. Bad aphids, bad!! Even worse, these aphids had wings and could fly!!!
Operation Dead Aphid immediately commenced. My mother used to have us whip up soapy water and then put the suds onto the rose plants, which does work pretty well, but since my plants were so filled out, I went with Neem oil. The cats don’t munch on the plants, so I felt pretty safe using this, and there was an immediate drop in the aphid population. I have to respray every week as new growth emerges, but I’m happy with the dramatic drop in population. After the current round of blooms are gone, I plan to prune back hard so I can get a better spray onto the plant. For other insects that came into the house with the plants I have the little bug catcher that going. If you haven’t seen one of these before, it is a fan with an ultraviolet light that attracts insects that then get pulled into the device where they are caught onto sticky paper. Yay! No little flies or gnats. No!! Just no!!
This jade plant was grown from cuttings off a plant I bought over 20 years ago.
My jade plant was pretty overgrown last spring with heavy leaves pulling the stems over sideways. I pruned off the growth that was causing the problems, staked the stems, and then put the plant out onto my front porch where it braved the weather over the summer. I brought it back in a few weeks ago, pruned off new growth that was, once again, pulling the stems sideways and then then removed the stakes. Look! A plant that can stand up on its own now. Maybe someday it will bloom…
I almost left the bougainvillea outside to die because it didn’t bloom even once all summer long. I left it so long the leaves began to yellow and drop before I had a change of heart and brought it in.
The plant has continued dropping the summer leaves, but there is new growth emerging at the ends of stems and along their lengths. Okay. I guess we will go with this. Maybe it will bloom? It’s another adventure. The blooms, if they ever happen, are a really cool pinky-orange that will look great in the room. Do you hear that plant? Bloom or die!!!
So that’s it. The plants that made me happy last spring and summer and now inside with me for the cold seasons. Take that winter!! Bring on the wind and snow.
I have secured an endless summer for myself and the cats.
A hidden benefit of the change in season: In the 5th autumn of her life, Hannah has suddenly decided that she is a lap cat after all.
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.
Yarn, Books & Roses 