Some of you who have been following my blog for a while know that I am a huge fan of Murderbot.
Like, I try to channel Murderbot whenever possible. Murderbot struggles with social situations. Murderbot is painfully aware that he is not like other constructs and absolutely knows that he is not a human. He pretty much is unique in most settings. (If he was a human, you might consider him a zebra). Murderbot is a total bad ass; often terrified, roiling with self-doubt and uncertainty, he takes action to protect what is important, and keeps moving forward. There might be some violence and murdering, but he gets the job done. He also watches media entertainment whenever possible. His favorite is a serial called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Do I have a Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon tee shirt? Umm… yeah.
That’s why when I finally recovered from my injuries (car wreck) enough to drive last January (2025), I put on a Murderbot audiobook, opened up the sunroof, and placed my emotional support chicken on the passenger seat next to me. I can do this, I told myself! I did it, channeling Murderbot every single time I stepped into the car again until I had moved past the trauma and was a confident driver again.
I would have taken a cat with me if I could have. Mateo, in his January winter coat, declined.
That was how the year 2025 started. I still listen to one of the audiobooks in The Murderbot Diaries series every single time I go out in the car. The last year was just epic in its awfulness. It was difficult on all fronts, and it felt like I just couldn’t catch a break all year long.
My scleroderma flared with new, significant complications that just kept coming. I had tendonitis for months. I developed bacterial overgrowth in my GI tract (SIBO) that stole my energy as I steadily lost weight for months. My cat almost died. My sister died. My son died. I had a serious fall and caught covid at the emergency room. In the aftermath of my covid infection, I developed dysautonomia and new cardiac symptoms that kept me close to home and on oxygen more days than I wanted to admit to. For a couple of weeks, I mostly stayed in bed and on oxygen as moving around just a little caused dizziness and chest discomfort. Did I read Murderbot while I was bed bound? Of course I did. Finally, as 2025 came to a close, I realized that most of those symptoms were much better and that my heart was settling down.
My son’s fingerprint and a bead that he gave me for Mother’s Day.
There is a media serial mentioned in one of the Murderbot books called Cruel Romance Personage: the title, an approximate translation from an ancient language, puts Murderbot off so much he has never watched it. One day I realized what a correct translation would be. Cruel Romance Personage would be more correctly called… Heartbreaker. That is the perfect description of 2025: Heartbreaker.
While I was struggling, I bought lots of new pillows. Hannah has claimed them.
I finally got into the office to see my cardiologist last Monday. We talked about new treatment options. We talked about quality of life decisions within the context of a fatal health condition (PAH). We talked about resiliency. I asked if he thought that my heart had been damaged by my covid infection. Probably not, in his opinion, since I had recovered. The more likely scenario was that I had sustained heart damage from Broken Heart Syndrome, and I am now well on the way to recovery. I have follow-up testing in a couple of weeks.
Of course. How on point for 2025.
I’m supposed to avoid stress. (Ha. Are you listening, 2026?) What am I doing with my time? I’m knitting, reading, and weaving of course. I’m learning new things, I’m picking up new causes. I’m producing new things. I am moving forward.
I’m in the part of my new sweater (another Weekender Crew) that is just stockinette all the way with a slipped stitch every now and then. I’m alternating skeins so I don’t get too much pooling, but the work is still… kind of mindless. Not mentally challenging. Okay, I am bored. No creativity in sight here, even though I want to get the sweater done… eventually. To make things worse we are experiencing unusually warm weather here in the Denver area and I’m not wearing any of my sweaters. I stuffed the sweater into its bin, parked it on a shelf, and started on some small products.
I decided to start on the mitts to match the grey/dusty purple sweater that I just upcycled. Yay. Let’s do mitts, kitties!!!
I decided to make a mitt that offered some options. It has a ribbed top that should go under the lace on the sleeve okay, and then a little panel of lace to match the ones on the body of the sweater. At the edge by my hand is a picot edge that matches those of the lace on the sweater. Cute, right? Sometimes I want a mitt that comes way down over my hand, almost to my knuckles, so I didn’t sew down the picot edge and knitted a long inner lining that can be pulled out. The final bind off is I-cord, giving a smooth finish to the bottom of the mitt. Yay! I like this mitt a lot. Did I cast on to start the second one right away? Well… no… that would be boring, right?
I pulled out the cat arm warmers because they are kind of the poster child mitt for NOT BORING, right? Over the last three days I got those little mice knitted in, and then I did the paws. Yikes. The paws required 4 colors of yarn for several rows. NOT BORING!!!! I learned a few things about yarn management while working on these, and in a nutshell, the most important one is to cut the yarn off the ball so you have a length of color that you can easily pull through tangles with the other colors. It is a lot easier to catch floats when you have a manageable length of yarn with no ball of yarn in sight, too. The knitting was really slow and kind of a nightmare until I figured that all out, but the last half of the paws went pretty quickly. Do you like the paws?
They look that way because that is what Hannah’s paws look like! Cutest toe beans ever!!!
Like everyone else on the planet I have been reflecting on the last year (thank heavens it is finally over) and thinking about plans for the next one (goals are good, right?) It’s a lot, and it definitely involves lots of yarn and books. As I planned this post I thought about what has been going on lately in my life and the world around me, and I finally thought about a plant that I brought in from outdoors this fall. It was a beautiful bougainvillea when I brought it in, bushy with lush green foliage and not a bloom in sight. I thought about leaving it outside but I finally dragged it into the dining room in front of a large window. Over the next few weeks every single leaf on the plant fell off. “Are you kidding me,” I asked the plant. “One little shock to your system and you give up the ghost?” Yes, I do talk to my plants.
The plant has replied by putting out new growth and blooms on every single little branch. It is literally covered with the tiny green buds of new growth, and the blooms, just now starting to grow out, are going to be something else. This plant is going to look amazing in just a couple of weeks.
There is a lesson here, somewhere.
May you all have an amazing New Year.
PS: I bought a new loom!!! Also, dysautonomia continues. May I present to you Crazy Heart 2026.
I caught covid for the first time last summer, and I continued to test positive for almost a month. What a mess. As I slowly recovered, I simultaneously felt better symptom-wise than I had in quite a long time while also developing new symptoms that are now creating struggle.
That sounds kind of crazy, and I probably should unpack things a little. Let’s start with the better, okay?
Hannah: I wonder what she is thinking about all the time…
Last October I had a terrible flare of symptoms that caused extreme joint pain, fatigue, brain fog, digestive issues, and… I WAS UNABLE TO KNIT FOR MONTHS!!!! I struggled to read. It was hard to do even basic things. My GI tract was in full revolt. I began to wear knee braces every day, pulled out the walker, and pruned my diet down to a few reliable items that were safe to consume (lactose free yogurt, I’m talking to you!!) I began to lose weight at a steady clip of a pound a week.
The hand under the hot pack was last year, and you can see the damage that was left behind on my current hand on the right. Last year my rheumatologist tested me for lots of things and I don’t have gout, or pseudogout, or rheumatoid arthritis, or any other thing except common osteoarthritis: no signs of inflammatory arthritis. I thought that was crazy talk at the time, but it’s hard to argue with negative test results even though I feel like I am dealing with obvious inflammation (swollen joints too sore to touch, right?). Anyway, after a year of struggling to knit or even type, my symptoms went away as I recovered from covid and I have been knitting up a storm (well, sweaters, actually, but you understand what I mean). It has been great. I can knit all day if I want. I can literally stay in bed all day, knitting happily along, ordering in groceries and enjoying my books… in bed. I am full of creative energy and am making tons of plans that involve my sewing machine and the looms. I’m wanting to buy another loom (that I can use in bed). Really, things are going great. Fabulous. I’ve even restarted my physical therapy routine, and my mobility has improved.
Oh… why am I in bed? Well… in the wake of covid I have developed worst dysautonomia. I struggle to control my body temperature. My blood pressure crashes when I eat. My heart rate goes bonkers without warning. I’m too cold all day long, and then I can’t sleep because I’m too hot. “I’m so sorry,” said one of my doctors. “This is very difficult to treat or control.” Fabulous. I do want to point out that many of my symptoms are greatly improved, my latest lung testing showed even more improvement, and I feel stronger than I have in years. The hope is that I will get better in time, and in the meantime, the cats are happy to hang out with me as I fuss around the house.
I was just sitting and reading when I got very dizzy suddenly and sure enough, my stupid heart decided to go into overdrive. Another adventure in dizziness caused me to check my blood pressure; for me, that is very low pressure. After another 2 hours I was back up to 128/72 and feeling more like myself. My doctor has advised me to just eat little snacks all day and to drink lots of water if I eat an actual meal.
Scleroderma, this is not funny at all! Oh, well. At least I can now knit and read…
I do want to back up to my bad-boy hands that gave me such a terrible time for most of the year. When I saw my rheumatologist in November she checked my x-rays from last year and then took a long look at my wrists and knees. My wrists are significantly worse than they were a year ago (but causing minimal problems at the moment… go figure) and she decided to order up some specialized testing to take a better look at the joints. Today I drove to downtown Denver to get specialized ultrasound imaging of those wrists. The technician was just wonderful, and she explained what we were seeing on the screen as she stopped to take pictures. There was a lot of obvious damage, fluid in the joints, and calcium deposits in tendons. “You’ve really been going through a lot,” she said. Finally, some validation. It was hard to not feel hopeful as I walked out of the clinic. On the way back home, I stopped at my favorite yarn store for a little yarn therapy action, and that was when the day turned into a “Thoughts on the Night of the Last New Moon” post.
In a nutshell, this is my situation. I feel better, and I am happy, but I am dealing with significant difficulties because my autonomic nervous system is refusing to behave itself. There is no easy fix. My joints are a major ongoing problem with no end in sight, because I can’t do many of the traditional remedies because of my scleroderma. I want answers! I want cookies! I want yarn!!
I walked into the yarn store.
The first thing that I see is a stack of my favorite cookies!!! Yay! I put four boxes into my shopping bag.
Then I saw great yarn that I needed to have. Yep. Into the shopping bag they went with reckless abandon. I want these yarns; my stash has been feeling a little peckish. Obviously, it also needed to be fed. Then my phone toned the sound that told me an incoming text had just arrived, so I sat down on a loveseat right in the middle of the DK weight yarn section and read the message: the radiologist had already read the imaging from my wrist ultrasounds and the results were available.
Active synovitis of the joints in my wrist. Inflammatory arthritis. Ironic, since I’m feeling pretty good at the moment with minimal pain. I wonder what that wrist would have looked like a year ago. It is such a huge relief to finally have a lab result that validates what I have been telling my doctors (and experiencing) for years. There is value in sticking to your guns and asking for more testing. Evidently this type of imaging is new, and it identified the problem that the standard imaging techniques failed to see. I don’t know what can be done to help me, but the relief is immense.
As I drove home, buoyed by the cookie haul, the shiny new skeins of yarn, and a sense of success and validation, I took a different route, passing by a large lake just south of my home. In the sky above me a flock of white pelicans wheeled in the sky, huge white birds with black bands on their wings. My heart soared with them.
More little glimmers:
Through the entire outing my stupid autonomic system behaved itself and I didn’t get dizzy even once!! 🙂
I delivered chemo hats to the infusion center at the facility where I had the ultrasound done. I have a little collapsible wagon that I use to roll the bags of hats to the department were they need to go. People laughed and joked with me as I rolled through the hallways (one lady insisted on pulling the wagon for me on my way in), adding to the overall good feelings of the day.
Remember me mentioning last spring that I was following some bald eagles in Big Bear, California online? Every day I checked the eagle cam to see if the chicks, Sunny and Gizmo, had taken their first flight yet. This week the parent eagles, hard at work preparing the nest for the upcoming chick season, were visited by 2 juvenile bald eagles who in high probability (because of the behavior all the eagles are exhibiting) are their girls from last season: Sunny and Gizmo. It is just wonderful to see them back even though the parents aren’t going to let them come near the nest much longer.
It really is the last new moon of the year tonight.
The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is zooming past earth tonight. It has been fascinating to follow over the last few months as its behavior has led to loads of speculation and lots of data collection. Safe travels, little guy.
This isn’t a glimmer, not really. We are in the middle of a high wind event that has forced communities to shut down west of me and the power has been cut to those residents. I feel grateful that there hasn’t been a fire since the risk is enormous at the moment, but I feel bad for everyone impacted by this. Thankfully, we are also experiencing record breaking heat.
I fell and injured my right knee last summer. It still hasn’t healed, and it is getting a MRI next month. Fabulous.
I am planning another post about the yarn and knitting.
Don’t you think that I should treat myself to another simple loom that will be easy on my wrists?
Mateo: Don’t you think that my silver ruff is a glimmer?
Yarn, Books & Roses 