Woefully Behind

I am terribly terribly behind in my posts - I have been a virtual knitting MACHINE lately - - I'm on my third Shedir, and have started the Green Tea Raglan out of my plum-coloured bamboo (a yarn that is everything - and more! - that it was promised to be!!!!) Before I finished the 2nd Shedir I knocked out a knitted & lined purse for my mother-in-law and between finishing the 2nd Shedir and starting the third I also churned out a Shetland Triangle shawl for my grandmother in a mere two days.

I am on FIRE.

(whose knitting skills I am drawing on to do all this, I have no earthly c-l-u-e!)

Luckily, though, while I'm behind on posting I at least have pictures of everything and will try my absolute best to post as many descriptive and picture-laden posts as humanly possible this coming week. Happily enough I'm not planning on having a second bout of the stomach flu (what happened to me LAST Monday morning from 2-6:30 AM!!!) and so should not miss work and correspondingly be behind at work for an entire work as a consequence....and so should have loads of time to post & wrote & edit pictures.

But in the meantime I'll leave you all with a picture of the new yarn that lays immediately on my horizon - and the best part? I didn't even have to pay for it! (Of course, neither do I get to keep the finished product, but that's okay - I'm totally willing to sacrifice long-term gains for short-term greedy-animal gratification!)

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...................I can hardly wait to get my hands on it!!!!!!

Twisted Stitches and Peacocks

(Editorial Note: This is a Catch-Up Post that I had started but not posted from about, oh, 3 weeks ago!)

I tried to take some pretty pictures of my past Shedir-in-progress hat - - as after all one of my New Year's resolutions was to do a better job on the photo front in '07. Now granted, I'll never be as good as Mr. Brooklyntweed (nor will I ever be able to purchase a camera as expensive as the one he apparently owns and uses!) but still, I could most certainly improve from my more-typical "stuck wherever it happens to fall" type shot of the past. So I set up my 3/4 finished Shedir and started snapping away........and you know of course what immediately happened, don't you?

(You can see his little feet at the top of this particular pic. To say that he was a wee bit annoyed because I was taking pictures of something/someone other than HIM is a serious understatement! He kept putting his head in front of/behind my knitted object and saying !!!!CHEESE!!! while squinching his eyes completely shut and baring all of his teeth. His classic 'photogenic' smile of the moment............)

So anyway, this is the Shedir That Was. This particular hat is now long finished, washed, blocked, and gifted - and my friend said that her sister (34 years old, 3 weeks past brain surgery to remove a huge tumor plus one of her inner ears, currently residing in a nursing home where she will stay and recover for another 2-3 months) was thrilled with it. Didn't register what it was at first, but once S put it on her head for her and adjusted what little hair the surgeons left in a more normal style under/around the hat she said that she just BEAMED. And S, normally an extremely reticent sort of person, was actually so happy that she hugged me as thanks when she told me all of this. So most certainly worth ripping out several rows (several times, if truth be told!) to get the cables RIGHT.

I have moved on to my second Shedir - and am pleased to say that now that I totally 'get' the way that these cables work I no longer have to read the pattern - and as such the 5 main pattern repeats literally FLY by. I'm already to the decrease section after only 2-3 days of working on it.

Here is the one and only artsy shot of the second Shedir that came out barely decently enough to share - this one for a co-worker's mom who was diagnosed with liver cancer several months ago and is finishing up treatment and just now losing her hair...

I found out that 100% ktbl stitches is the only way to go on cables when it comes to my knitting - makes everything a zillion times more crisp & clean. Likewise I wish I had done the ktbl when I was doing the k1p1 ribbing - and I also wish (!) that I hadn't done the tubular cast on for it. While it looks LOVELY - and was a good thing to practice and learn how to do, it is a bit less stretchy than my normal Twisted German cast on and therefore isn't (I don't think) quite as good.

Happily enough my stepfather is going to benefit from all of these lessons - his hat is a Twisted German cast-on with 100% twisted stitches from the very get-go. Unhappily enough his first chemo treatment hasn't done what we had hoped & been told it would - and rather than significantly cutting the pain it has left him in even more pain with laryngitis and increased weight loss to boot - only 3 days after treatment. He goes in to see his doctors tomorrow and I'm hoping that they'll be able to admit him to the hospital to properly treat the pain - as the combined Vicodin and Morphene that he's currently on just isn't cutting it. Dark days indeed.

These socks were finished & gifted weeks ago - and the recipient (another Susan!) told me just last week that she is absolutely in love with them. Soft as soft can be (Emily's gift of Shaffer Anne didn't go to waste!) and warm warm warm - and with last week's temps of 8 and 10 degrees she needed warm feet! The pattern is one I made up myself - but please, I followed a basic sock pattern (64 sts) - did a feather & fan pattern down until they were anklet length - then did a basic eye of partridge heel flap, turned the heel, then picked up & decreased until I was back to 64 stitches. Then I did a.....oh, what is that called...............a toe where it decreases in a large spiral. I used the description from Nancy Bush's Knitting Vintage Socks and followed it to the letter and just adored the way that it turned out.

A work in progress shot still on the needles...................

And a Finished Object! I adored the way that the decreases went when I decreased down from picking up stitches along the heel flap. Such a crisp clean diagonal edge!

Of caps & rotoviruses

The Munchkin is finally better. After looking at his symptoms we finally realized that he had come down with the rotovirus - which can be potentially quite nasty and hospital-stay requiring - - so on the grand scheme of things we actually got through with very little damage done. Things started to significantly clear up last Friday, and by Sunday he was back to his old self, and Monday happily saw him running into his daycare provider's house screeching out the names of his buddies at the top of his little thrilled lungs. Being at home with Mommy & Grandma for a full week is BORING compared to hanging and playing with like-aged friends all day, let me tell you!

I, on the other hand, simply sagged with relief at the QUIET once the door closed behindThe Munch and Peggers Monday morning - so much so that I ended up simply sitting with my borrowed laptop at the dining room table drinking coffee and catching up on library e-mail and work until roughly 2 PM, at which point I realized that no - I was not actually going in to work that day! I did get in some knitting while I caught up on e-mail and work (of course!) and was happy to report that Tuesday morning around 11 AM I slipped the very last stitch of my first Shedir off the needle. It is a beautiful beautiful pattern - and the end result is quite lovely, even if the colour wasn't necessarily one I would have chosen for myself. In my delight I - of course - cast on the second hat that same evening - but this time I took a nod from Brooklyntweed's post about starting his second Shedir and tried a tubular cast on for it. And while I love the tubular cast on's smoothness and...........unique tube-y look, I'm a bit worried that I'm not going to have enough yarn to finish (it was very very close last time around!) and that the tubular isn't a stretchy enough cast-on for a hat. However as I ripped out a good half of the first Shedir (not all at once - I'd knit about 15 rounds, rip back 3, knit 8 rounds, rip back 4, etc. ) before I really got the hang of it, I know that this particular type of Rowan is some Very Tough Yarn, and can take being cast-on, knitted, and ripped without any harm.

So while things were still a bit on edge (unhappily enough Peggers had picked up the Munch's viral unhappiness, so not everyone here at Chez Pointy Sticks is feeling well at the moment) things were at least peaceful.

Then the news came that a PET scan had just been ordered by the doctors, as they now suspect that the lymphoma is actually originating from an organ or bone - which would mean an automatic diagnosis at Stage IV and I was reeling again. So I went out and paced the streets around campus for an hour to get my brain to shut up, and then went back and was able to get some work done..........and came home hoping for a nice quiet night and a fire in the fireplace (as the forecast was for night-time temperatures of 18 degrees!) to calm me down and keep me just enough on the sane side of things to function........only to find a frigid domicile and a broken furnace.

These Are (Bad) Days. (To quote Natalie Murchant & her horde of Maniacs. )

I had chocolate and red wine for dinner after the Munch went to sleep.

So the emergency technician came after a frosty two hours of waiting (thank GOD for wood stoves!) and fixed it........and we woke up this morning to a thermostat registering 61 degrees but that was set to maintain a temperature of 67. So another call went in to the heating people & I ran to work, loaded up the laptop again with some new necessary software, grabbed my thrilling book on Copyright Law, and came back home to haul a ton of wood into the house to keep the stove stoked up on high all night if need be, cleaned out an entire half of the garage, moved an eighth of a cord of wood from outside storage to in-the-garage storage (despite being off the ground & covered by a tarp, our outside-stored wood was growing MUSHROOMS.............anyone want to guess why the wood was mostly smoking instead of burning? Hmmmmm???????????), emptied all the garbage cans in the house (7!) and did two loads of laundry. Then sat down at the dining room table again with my trusty laptop and created fairly boring web pages about Copyright Law and what that means for faculty and their classroom activities.

I let our lovely friendly technician in when he showed up, happily heard the heat kick on (by then I was FREEZING - for despite the wood stove's best efforts it was a chilly 57 degrees in the house!!!!) and somewhat-less happily heard him tell me that it was a stuck pressure valve...which they didn't have in stock, and would have to order, and which wouldn't be in until tomorrow. But 'sokay, as he showed me how to whack the faulty valve with the handle of a screwdriver if it decides to get shirty with me between now & then.

My kind of technician!!!!!

So now Peggers is home early and I have a whole 20 minutes to do another few rounds on my second Shedir before he and I toddle off together to get the Munchkin - and as it's his night to cook that means that I get to play play play with my little one while he figures out dinner (or takes us out on his dime - either one is fair play!) and then after dinner it'll be time for bath and then after bath it'll be time for bed and then after bed it'll be time for me to watch a movie (I checked out both Hedwig and the Angry Inch plus All About My Mother from work) while doing some more knitting.

So today is turning into a Much Better Day and much less of a Very Bad Day than it could have seemed this morning around 8 AM. For which I am very very grateful.

But I still have no pictures to show you - as I had my act together enough to load all of the software on the laptop, but not any knitted cap (or sock or vest) pictures!

Soon - I promise!

Some Time Out & Off

Much going on at the house these days, sadly not much of it good. A medical diagnosis of diffuse b-cell lymphoma has absolutely shaken my extended household to the core, and we're currently scrambling to find out as much as we can in as short a time as possible. On the more immediate homefront, Peggers put in his 3-weeks notice on Monday - as he is switching to a new job across the hall from his old one. We shall see how it goes - except for a select few Extra-Special people I have yet to meet a lawyer that deserves to have my husband as an employee. The Munchkin has been ill since Saturday, when he (the poor wee one!) got a nasty case of Sick Hiney (to keep things delicate, in case any of you are eating lunch while blog-surfing!) and it still is holding fast to him even today. Sick Hiney children are most certainly not allowed in daycare for general hygene / communicability issues which means that I stay home with him.........and sweat not being at work as my online teaching duties begun this past Wednesday ("only" 86 students this term!) and my physical teaching duties begin on Monday. Thank goodness my mother-in-law heeded our pleas for help and swooped in like a rescuing angel - not only did she hang with the Munch for two full days (cheerfully changing NASTY diapers!) but she also did laundry & dishes. I told her that at this rate she could easily be begged to stay until he hit 18, but alas her husband wants her back tomorrow morning.

And me? I have a kidney infection.

Add to that 2-year molar teething issues that result in nonstop PM nursing screaming fits from the little guy (either that or 2-4 hour periods of absolute wakefulness where he wants to go downstairs and "play car carriers, Mommy!") and you've got a very tired, stunned, mentally fatigued house.

Luckily I have a minor remedy for such a thing - when told of the lymphoma diagnosis I was just so upset that I can't help in the immediate span of things - so I did what any good knitter would do - I got out my needles and found a patter that worked & I plunked down my credit card to buy the Good Stuff. My four balls of Rowan Calmer arrived in the mail on Monday thanks to Elizabeth's speedy operations at the Knitting Garden and I am already onto the second pattern repeat of Knitty's/Jenna Wilson's Shedir hat. I am making one for my family member, for my friend's mother who is currently battling liver cancer, and for my co-worker's sister who just underwent brain surgery to have one of her inner ears and a huge twisted tumor removed from the very core of her noggin. Needless to say all three of these people need hats ASAP. I'm knitting just the one now, but after that one is finished I'm going to challenge my brains by casting on to do 2 hats on 2 circulars - much faster that way, I'm thinking!

The astute amongst yourselves will have done the math & realize that I said I ordered 4 balls of Calmer & have only listed 3 people that I'm knitting them for - happily enough the 4th hat (and because of this, last on my priority list) is for the brain-surgery woman's niece. Who is just fine - she just loved the hat pattern & the actual Calmer yarn-Calmer colour. *Yes, Rowan's yarn which is called Calmer also has a colour called Calmer - isn't that confusing? The other two Calmer yarn colours that I ordered were Slosh & Coffee Bean.

Pretty things - and this stuff knits up like a dream.

And thanks to Grumperina's brilliance (and her incredible generosity in sharing it!) the whole cabling thing is going like a breeze due to her cabling w/out a cable needle instructions.........

So anyway, I'm going to be off & away for a bit - until the little guy is better enough to go back to daycare - I'll have a wireless DSL connection, so I might pop in and out for a bit - expect pictures of knitted hats soon, that's for sure!