Hiatus

I love writing this blog. I love it nearly as much as I love all the people I've met doing it. Truth is, though, that I am having a bit of diffulty with the challenges in my life at present, and I find that I am not as funny or interesting as I want to be right now. I seem to have misplaced my optimism for the moment--something about my doctor thinking I'm a raging bitch even after admitting that I'm probably right (seriously--she actually admitted it, right after the lengthy and terse lecture about how there are REASONS for the tests she orders), my beloved Ed suddenly showing up with a strange lump that may be an injury and may be something more sinister but will scare me to death until we get him into the vet, another dear cat tipping my husband's computer monitor over and doing about $300 worth of damage (bent two jump drives, broke the little legs off the keyboard it landed on), and my husband finding out yesterday that a job he was sure he would get has selected another candidate. Oh, and waiting untold amounts of time to hear about nursing school and losing patience with jumping through hoops while hospitals are starving for nurses. That too.

In the name of kindness to you, I'm going to take a break from this blog for some period of time, currently undefined. The alternative is to whine endlessly about those things I can't change and that sounds pretty pointless, even in my current, overwhelmed state. I hope you'll still want to read when I return. I hope that I have something wonderful to say. I'm wishing all manner of love and joy your way. And knitting. Much wonderful knitting.

(The cow is courtesy of Jo in the UK, and it cheered me immensely when it arrived. Jo, I'm sending a huge hug and a moo right back at you.)

It Was Eggsactly Like This

I was one of those girly little girls who absolutely loved the business of dressing up for Easter. I would always have a painfully frilly dress and lace trimmed socks--the whole thing. Even a purse, although I seem to recall having nothing to put in it except a wad of Kleenex that my mother gave me, and which I could be relied up on not to use, preferring instead to sniff loudly in church until she gave me a look that said clearly "My daughter is so very cute and it will pain me to have to kill her when we get home". I usually wore two slips because the one that I deemed suitably "pretty" itched as if it were made of little wads of duct tape that plucked at my skin while I moved and the soft cotton one I wore under it was not, in my wordly 3-year-old view, quite grand enough for such an occasion as Easter. Sometimes I had panties with ruffles on them, which seemed odd to me even then, seeing as how my mother spent as much time admonishing me to "sit like a lady" and "keep your dress down!" as she did plotting ways to murder me for the sniffing thing. I am told that I referred to these panties as "classy assies", and that my mother never EVER said such a thing within my earshot so she can't imagine WHERE I picked it up. Perhaps I channeled it from herthoughts about what parts of me were going to have a sharp meeting with the hairbrush when we got home from church. It is possible that I tried my mother (particularly when I flushed the hairbrush down the toilet....but that's another story).

Then again, my mother also performed the unspeakable cruelty of placing in my Easter basket one year, on a nest of improbably pink, shiny grass, a chocolate egg so huge that it might have come from within a chocolate ostrich--a monster of an egg with flowers and my name on it in frosting. Why cruel, you say? Because when I took a bite I discovered that the treasured goodie was, in fact, about 7/8 of a millimeter of chocolate (not the good stuff, either--it was rather reminscent in flavor of a melted, dark brown crayon, and don't ask me how I know what that tastes like), scraped over a mound of maple-flavored fondant that suddenly seemed even larger and more imposing now that it was not a thing I wanted to eat. I seem to recall finding that bitten egg about a year later, not rotted at all but certainly hiding well among my rock collection, many of which were quite a bit softer than it was by then.

I seem to remember getting Peeps, too, which I loved but not because they tasted like anything other than slightly gritty styrofoam packing peanuts. Rather, I loved them because I could play with them as if they were festive play-doh, assuring more malevolent looks from my mother when she looked down at me in the pew and noted the grimy wad of marshmallow and chemicals in my hand, some of it inevitably stuck to my dress, the hymnal, my purse, or all three.

Fun as those times were (we'll use the term "fun" somewhat loosely here, given my tendency to inspire something close to infanticide), Mr. K and I opted for a different sort of Easter experience today--specifically, we worked on his resume together until he was about to swat me for the annoying, persistant little bee that I can be, and I was about to shove him from the chair for moving at the speed of a senescent snail with an old football injury. We have slightly different work styles. We did get quite a lot done, though. Once we were both adopting variations on my mother's "children would be best served hot over noodles" look, we decided to take a break and go for a walk on the same path I went on recently. We even took some new photos. This first one isn't sharp, but I love the silvery, liquid look of the leaves (which is Ms. Kspeak for "I screwed this up but maybe they'll think it's an artistic thing..."):


Something about these little purple flowers appealed to me, and not just because they weren't perched on top of a maple flavored, crayon-coated rock:

This is one of those idyllic pictures that we Seattlites use to taunt tourists who inevitably manage to show up in the pouring rain...as in "really, it was just LOVELY yesterday..."

We had these kind of woods at our house when I was a kid at Diamond Lake, and I played in them endlessly during the summer. My mother assures me that she wasn't REALLY hoping a forest troll would come take me off her hands.

We ran into one other couple on our walk, and they let me walk right up to them without turning a hair...er...feather.

May your Easter be a good one, may all your eggs be filled with chocolate truffle, and my all your chocolate bunnies be solid.

First and Foremost, You Guys Rock

As usual. After my tirade of yesterday, I logged on today with the assumption that you'd all think I'd lost my marbles and, while I'm not going to surmise about the possible locations of said marbles OR your personal opinions about those marbles, I was delighted to find such warm, funny, loving support. Monica, I would have loved you forever anyway, but that phrase "not competent to serve as the Batshit village idiot" would have done the trick if that were not the case. I laughed until I rolled. Marianne, I would happily take you up on your offer of folks with pointy sticks to accompany to the village idiot's office, and I think Charity has a point. Between us all, I bet we can make a wonderful Batshit Village Yarn Shop! Dana, you raging alcoholic you--this is why you take knitting to doctor's offices. You might find those pointy sticks useful! I had a urologist once (irritated bladder--nothing whatever to do with my kidneys) who insisted on dialating my urethra once a week while patronizingly uttering the phrase "Yes, I know it's a bit uncomfortable." Uncomfortable? I think I can be forgiven for my fevent wish, then and now, to have been able to grab him by the soft dangly bits and squeeze firmly while assuring him that the searing pain he thinks he's feeling is just his imagination, and it's just "uncomfortable".

ANYWAY, the update is that the Dr. Batshit has still not called me (she was supposed to do it yesterday) and I think we're done here. I'm going to hightail it back to the doc I used to have (switched because it was closer to home, and because I've always wanted a chauffered drive to Batshit) and show her the results. If that doesn't work, perhaps we can all take Dana on booze-up and then drive to Batshit for a yarn crawl.

I spotted this cartoon today, and thought that it was a good thing the subjects didn't go to my soon-to-be-former doctor, or they'd probably still be having biopsies and MRI's and some bloodwork just in case:

I do knit somewhat faster when pissed off, so I have this to show you:

The back of the alpaca cardi. Thankfully, it's on large needles, or it would probably be the size of a postage stamp, due to the fact that pissed-offedness also impairs my gauge, just a tad. You'll note that Gracie approves of the cardi thus far...but wonders if I wouldn't just leave those ends hanging (the better to eat them and barf on the rug--every day is improved so much by the addition of wooly barf, isn't it?).

Being that it has been wet and nasty here for so long that I have had to begun bathing in Rustoleum, I was unreasonably delighted by the sudden gift of an 83 DEGREE DAY!! Check it out:

Green Stuff! And sunlight!

And even cherry blossoms! (Sorry...we Northwesterners get quite excited by the arrival in town of the big yellow ball of fire. It's a fickle beast, so we try to get down on our knees and praise it when it shows up, in the hopes of flattering it into staying. It never works. We keep trying.)

I think I mentioned that I've been trying to eat better recently, so I shouldn't have been surprised to find this note, scrawled desperately in the handwriting of my inner child:

April 6, 2007

It has been three days since my outer adult began a cruel experiment involving fresh vegetables, fruits, and low fat proteins. I have tried to find out what information I might offer her that would lead to the release of the chocolate eggs; to no avail. I think it unlikely that I will come out of this alive. I'm deeply concerned about her sudden obsession today with all the green in the back yard, as I fear I will be required to eat it.

p.s. Have been offered yogurt or applesauce as supposed substitute for chocolate. Am beginning to fear for both her sanity, and my own.

I Am Not in a Happy Mood This Day

There are bad combinations in the world. Tuna fish and banana sandwiches, for instance. Or chicken casserole with chocolate bunnies on top. Or even pancakes with motor oil. And then there's this: it's the first week of the Spring quarter. I am taking microbiology which promises to provide assloads of work (big assloads--no Paris Hilton ass here, but real, meaty asses), I do not know if I will make it into the nursing program and no one knows when they will decide, my hair looks as if I was dragged through a hedge backwards, I am embarking on a plan to eat better and, as such, have removed all chocolate from my home, as well as everything more than 30% fat, and my doctor's office is trying--with moderate success--to drive me batshit. (Yes, they probably had a headstart, given that it's me. Still.)

It's all very involved and confusing and annoying, but I'll see if I can shorten it. I go in for physical (which is yet another part of the bad combo), they call to tell me that doctor wants more tests. I ask why; I'm told that my kidney function is abnormal. Based on what, I ask? The genius on the phone doesn't know (although she has the chart right in front of her) and, after several frustrating exchanges and a decision on my part to stop frequenting clinics that hire from the nearest dork factory, I finally asked her to just send me the damned results.

I get the results, and find that all the labs are completely normal. The only issue is a calculation that is an estimate, drawn from other figures, and one that isn't supposed to be used on people with more than average muscle mass (like those of us who exercise for an hour a day maybe, hmm?) because it gives a false positive. I do some research and discover that the accuracy of the calculation swings wildly for everyone and that an actual number of 60 can show up as an estimated number of anything from 35 (dialysis territory) to 140 (perfectly healthy). This seems like a good reason to me to perhaps do the test required to get the ACTUAL number instead of the bloodwork, ultrasound, and referral to two specialists that the doctor is insisting on. Call me crazy. I call the doctor's office, and I wait.

The second person to call me doesn't know much about my situation, but she is at least somewhat removed from the aforementioned dork factory, so I feel confident that she will help. I ask her my questions and she agrees to give them to the doctor, and to have her call me if there's any difficulty. I begin to calm down. Surely, this will all turn out well. I've done my research, and I'm being utterly reasonable.

But no, not so much well, and I'm to stop calling ANYONE shirley. Because dork factory reject number two calls today to announce cheerily that "doctor says (I love when they use "doctor" like it's the person's proper name) that we don't do that test first and to just have you come in for the stuff she already ordered." The end. And why don't we do that test first? Brain trust doesn't know. And, while it may sound as if I'm being nasty to the poor thing, I have to say that I've done her job. I've never EVER called a patient without anticipating their questions and making sure I knew the answers before I dialed. It would definitely occur to me that "we don't do it that way" might generate more questions than it did answers.

It gets better, though. I told today's genius that I needed--NEEDED--to talk directly to the doctor to resolve this. Which is when I found that the doc had been in the office all morning, doing paperwork and not seeing patients--and STILL didn't bother to call and explain it to me. And now she went home, which is probably miles and miles from the town of Batshit, unlike my current place of residence.

To recap: My doctor's office is using an unreliable test to attempt to convince me that I might be in Stage 3 kidney disease with absolutely no symptoms and is unwilling to do the one test that would confirm or disprove the number. And no one wants to discuss it with me. Oh yes. I'm cranky.

I'm reminded of the movie "Naked Gun", where one of the cops starts off saying that he "picked a bad day to give up smoking", then later "a bad day to give up drinking", and so on until eventually he's referring to giving up glue sniffing, cocaine, heroin, etc. Apparently, I picked a bad week to limit my chocolate intake. I wonder if it's safe to sniff it......

I figure I have a few options:
a) accept that I will forever be known as the clinic bitch and keep insisting on proper communication, in spite of my absolute certainty that I would have more luck convincing Ed to start doing the ironing while I sleep.
b)allow the assorted tests and referrals, knowing full well that none of these things will conclusively prove the presence or absence of a problem and will take up huge amounts of my time and cost a ton of money (yes, I have insurance...but this kind of thing is what drives up medical costs and it also hastens that trip to Batshit...a short drive for me at the moment. I don't even need to take a snack) while the one test I want them to perform will show conclusively whether or not my kidneys are functioning properly, thus obviating the need for any further studies or referrals. (The downside of this option, naturally, is that I may well bite right through my tongue while attempting to avoid helpful comments like "Do you people actually have a full brain lobe between you?" and "How do you SLEEP at night after ignoring your patients and contributing enthusiastically to the rising costs of healthcare, you complete and utter weasel?"
c) drive to Safeway for a bag of chocolate eggs and eat them in the yard as both a soporific and a tasty alternative to worms.

I know one thing: I hope the town of Batshit has a yarn store. It looks like I might be spending some significant time there.

Today's Quote (besides "our medical system sucks ass"): "I can handle anything that life throws at me. I may not be able to handle it well, or correctly, or gracefully, or with finesse, or expediency--but I WILL handle it." I'm not sure who said it...but it fits.

Help Wanted

Wanted: Personal assistant for reasonably harmless madwoman with severe yarn obsession and an alarming tendency to anthropomorphize her cats. Applicants should be bright, friendly, well-groomed, and not easily frightened. Duties are to include the completion of household tasks such as vacuuming, dusting, etc, so that the madwoman may soothe herself with her knitting. It will be in your best interest, I assure you. Other tasks include (but are not limited to):

Locate lost knitting needles
Hide chocolate most of the time
Murmur soothing words on days leading up to tests
Protect madwoman's husband from relentless angsting on part of madwoman regarding nursing school application process (it may be necessary to throw your body in front of her or, alternatively, to reveal location of small amounts of chocolate)
Examine all knitted projects dozens or hundreds of times (quite possibly after every two rows) and assure the madwoman that yes, it looks right, yes, it looks like it will fit, no, the colors are not pooling, etc. Important that you appear as enthusiastic with the 700th request as you do with the 1st.
Keep constantly appraised of all yarn sales and fiber events in a 30 mile radius and informing madwoman before it is too late for her to go.
Attend these sales and events...but know when to encourage wanton abandon and when to firmly lead her from the store. This can be tricky.
Quiz madwoman on anatomy, microbiology, or whatever is most pressing at the time, thus leaving her hands free to knit.
Notice when madwoman is developing jailhouse pallor from too much time indoors knitting and studying; move her with books, yarn, needles, and water bottle out to back deck if it is sunny.
Remember contents of yarn stash, to help avoid duplicating purchases
Forget contents of yarn stash, to help madwoman avoid full awareness of obsession.
Discourage unrealistic belief that madwoman could quit school, forget competition required to enter nursing school, and knit or buy yarn for a living.
Encourage color diversity when stash begins to look like a big, teal furball.
Try on partially completed socks whenever asked.
Remind madwoman (gently) that dinner should not include any food with the the word "gummi" in the title, or pictures of cartoon characters anywhere on the package.
Write down everything madwoman says she needs to remember to do. She will not remember.
Remove sticks from her hands when she falls asleep on the couch.
Translate charts
Be convincing when saying repeatedly "Don't worry. You'll figure that pattern out. I promise."

The successful candidate will possess:

Patience
Mind reading ability
Yarn resistance
Chocolate resistance
Ability to appear calm.
Disorganization skills (too much organization makes her nervous)
More patience

Compensation package to include:

Knitting lessons
Free cat cuddles, at all hours
Trips to wool shops all over the Pacific Northwest
Opportunity to learn about all kinds of medical stuff
All the cookies and boozy ho you can eat.

It would be good if you could keep her from doing this....:


...but reasonable expectations are encouraged. The yarn store was closing and no one should be required to overcome the pull of THAT.

Please send resume to Ms. Knitingale. If you are a male willing to perform assistant duties wearing no shirt, please send photo.

I Got the Cat to Behave....

...now for the husband. It's no secret that I completely and utterly adore Mr. K because he is thoroughly loveable and wonderful. That said, I managed to convince the Thumbless one to leave me alone in the wee hours this morning, only to be thwarted by

snorting.

No, not snoring. Snorting. As in, he sleeps completely quietly until I believe that all is well and actually dare to drift off; then, once my REM cycle is firmly established, he rolls towards me, takes the covers, and snorts in my ear so loudly that I am halfway from the bed with my feet tangled in the sheets and slipping on the stack of knitting magazines on the floor next to my side before I realize what's happened. And, given that my heart is now threatening to pound out of my chest due to the fear--however brief and sleep-deprived-irrational--that the house has somehow been invaded by giant carnivorous pigs, it becomes somewhat less than likely that I will return to anything resembling slumber. Not that he won't snort again many more times if I do. Mr. K is a multi-pig talent.

Monica, to answer your question about my cat rump, I definitely didn't push it away with my face but rather had it placed rather rudely IN my face and had to bring a hand up to shove it away. But your mental picture was funnier.

Kitty Mommy mentioned her cat and his loving determination to share his "little orange rear end" (I don't know why that made me giggle until I snorted, but there you are), and this reminded me of a co-worker I once had. No...she didn't have a little orange rear end....at least, I don't think so. But she did have a cat with a similar determination to offer close-up and personal views of his nether regions, preferably when she was attempting to watch television. Now, my co-worker (with or without orange rear end) was not much of a fan of our president (yet another reason I liked her) and one day she got to thinking about those campaign buttons you used to see--you know, the ones with a photograph of the candidate's smiling face and their name under it and the word Vote! above it that you pinned to your lapel? Yeah, those. And so it was that, after an evening in which her cat was especially determined to share of his tushie, she suddenly came out with one of my favorite sayings ever as she pushed the cat away and told it to "Stop showing me your Bush button! I don't CARE who you voted for!"

Armed with this new insight, I've been forced to the conclusion that my house contains a number of hairy little Bush supporters, none of them the slightest bit interested in keeping their politics to themselves. Kitty Mommy, it's possible that your cat is, in fact, a Republican.

I finally figured out the problem with my sock mojo just recently. Specifically:

this yarn. Or rather, the yearning voice of this yarn, begging from the depths of my stash to be made into something lovely. It's Atacama Alpaca and it is so soft that I knitted up an entire skein of it last night and it was like a sort of handgasm. The pattern is the Lake Tahoe cardi from Knitty, but I'll be modifying it a bit. For one thing, I think it's quite busy enough with this yarn and so won't be adding a border in Koigu (I fear it would keep the rest of my sweaters up at night if I did). For another, although I wear cardigans frequently, I never EVER button them and so am hard-pressed to find a reason to subject myself and my loved ones to the swearing and hair pulling necessary to make a a button band and buttonhole band which I can tell you right now will not line up the first or possibly even second time I make them. And which would require picking up eleventy hundred stitches cleverly along the edge, an activity I believe to be somehow evil. However, the cardi is stockinette and so something must be done to keep the edges from rolling inward until I have a wooly back with shoulder straps and no front. I think I'm going to do a border of some sort of wonderful cabling on each front and then make a tie or frog to close it just at the point of the V. I am much pleased by this.

Meanwhile, the Adirondack silk blend sock is waiting patiently for me to stop slutting around with the alpaca:

While having a bit of a diagonal, it is significantly less so than the mermaid sock and is, in fact, a sock pattern of my own devising...sure proof, if ever any were needed, that my senses and I have taken some time off from one another. I think it's vacationing in Albequerque or something. Hey, maybe it's gone off to England for more butt wideners? Ang or Jo--if you see it, will you send it my way? Awesome.

In truth, the pattern is made up of a number of slipped stitches and psso's in an attempt to break up the colors and it's working pretty well. It's just...well..it's not the alpaca. What can I do--I'm a fickle fiber lover.

Miss either wants to remind me to vote or is starving to death. Since it's not an election day, I think I'll try the food. Love and good yarn to all of you.

Totally spaced off my "quotes of the day", didn't I? I thought I might...but "quotes when my aging and totally inelastic brain actually gets it together" just didn't sound as snappy. Heres a quote for today, in any case, source unknown: "The flower doesn't dream of the bee. It blossoms, and the bee comes."

It's Over Between Us

Really. We've both tried...no one can say we haven't tried. We've both tried to make changes for one another but sometimes, well, it just isn't enough. Sometimes you have to simply admit that, no matter how much love is there, you are incompatible.

So it is with the Lorna's Laces turquoise and purple. I love her, and I believe she has some degree of affection for me...but, sadly, everything we make together ends up frogged and alone. I surrender. I think it's gone beyond even professional yarn counseling. If anyone is interested in trading any other sock yarn for two skeins of Lorna's Laces (see my last blog entry for how it looks knitted up), let me know what you have. I'd be delighted to send her to a better home. I've knitted with one skein of it several times, but it's clean and undamaged and I'll reskein it for you. Whatever you have to trade cannot be any worse of a fit for me than this stuff. As lovely as she is, I'm starting to fear that my knitting mojo is being drained by her mere presence in my sock yarn drawer.

All of which is the end of the story. The beginning was the rude and amusing sock you saw the other day; the middle was when I realized I had made the heel incorrectly and had to do it yet again....and, while I was at it, it really didn't have as much ease as I might want and so should probably be started completely over with more stitches. See, no actual mushroom clouds yesterday (although I did go over to Knotty Kitty's house, just to be sure the universe couldn't immediately locate me...a ploy which it apparently saw right through) but definitely an irreconcilable rift between yarn and knitter.

In its place, I tried a few things before finally acknowledging the truth (which all of you have kindly avoided pointing out to me) that I am a terribly picky pain in the rumpus when it comes to matching yarn to pattern and so I gave up and am starting one in my own design. At least if it sucks, I can't curse some other poor, innocent designer (I question the innocence of the sadist who invented the Pomotamus sock...but that's a different matter). The yarn is Adirondack silk blend and the colorway--well, it would be great if I could recall it.....but here's the best picture I could get (because I still can't operate a camera any better than Ed can operate the can opener):

Miss was quite willing to examine it for you, to let you know her opinion....

...and she says it's fine but for tuna's sake get the sticks out of her face and let her return to her nap. High praise, I think. I realize you can't tell a thing about it from either picture, but it's a colorway with yellow, emerald, royal purple, and royal blue (because I'm so shy and restrained in my use of color) and the stitch pattern involves one row of knit followed by a row with repeats of yarn over, slip one, knit two, pass the slipped stitch over the two. It breaks up the colors nicely which is good...because this stuff was bound and determined it was going to pool or spiral. See what I mean about the mojo? I suspect it will knit up beautifully once that purple and turquoise is out of the house.

Other happenings at the House of the Madwoman include the discovery of this letter on my pillow this morning:

"Dear Thumbed One (you screwed that up in your blog yesterday by the way--YOU have thumbs, WE don't...sheesh)--

It has come to our attention that you feel some strange need to sleep all night long, in spite of the superior cat companionship offered to you. We've made a log of your dreadful behavior, the better to demonstrate the grievious nature in which we've been wounded:

0300 hours: subject lying on side, blatantly ignoring purring cat

0305 hours: subject flails recklessly in response to friendly, snotty nose smear across face; does not attempt to pet loving cat

0315 hours: subject actually pushes on backside of cat, after it has lovingly been placed in her face, forcing cat to dig in nails. Unbelievably, subject seems to blame cat for this, as evidenced by the dreadful, murmured comment about cat stir fry with snow peas.

0330 hours: subject get up, lurches into small room. Accidentally kicks cat on the way without apologizing--actually mutters something it "serving the hairy little buggers right for being underfoot".

0345 hours: notice second cat on subject. Smack other cat in clear demonstration of love for and ownership of subject. Find self shoved unceremoniously to floor.

0350 hours: push head under hand of subject, hoping to remind it how petting is to commence. Hear startling comment about "little tabby rugs". Consider questionable state of subject's sanity.

0400 hours: bite soft flesh of subjects inner arm affectionately. Duck flying pillow and consider whether subject fully understands concept of affection.

0410 hours: curl up against subject. Subject strokes head gently. Begin to purr. Subject continues to stroke head. Meow happily several times. Subject places pillow over face and says something about "why didn't I get an easier pet?? A howler monkey, for instance??"

0415 hours: Second cat returns to lie on subject; smack interloper soundly on head and meow in a high pitched fashion, indicative of highly protective nature. Run from flailing subject as subject loudly contemplates practicality of slippers made of cat.

As you can see, we have been sorely maligned and mistreated by you, the subject. It is clear to us that the small payment of canned cow lips in snot and the occasional scratch behind the ears is truly a miniscule one to pay for the protection and adoration we obviously show to you and yet, it is clearly too much for you. We are disappointed.

It is also clear that you perceive us to be small and without power. To that we can only say this: did you think the fact that the black and white thumbless one vomited her body weight on the white carpet this morning was coincidence? Think about it.

The Thumbless Ones

p.s. We didn't appreciate that crack above about the can opener.

I love my cats. I do. But if something happens to me...well, you know where to look.