Where did my life go?

I feel like I'm floating in someone else's life lately.  Is there crafting being done?  not really.  Knitting?  a bit  DIY? not really.  Where did my life go?

I'm still not well and have been spending much of my days resting which totally sucks since that's not what I want to be doing.  I went from being the Energizer Bunny to being a Couch Potato.  It has been good for having time to spend at online gaming though, but how does that make my house look beautiful?  It doesn't and my hips are starting to show the effects too. 

You know how when you're sick and lose your appetite and you lose all that awesome weight?  (I'm talking the 5 - 10 lb kind of weight, not serious unhealthy weight)  Well, my appetite showed back up and I gained it all back and that's just depressing.  During the holidays, that weight loss was my only rainbow coming out of the black cloud following me.  Oh well.  I'm doing really well at gaming though.  :)

So if things have been sparse and sporadic with the blog, please bear with me.  I'm trying to get the docs to work with me and listen to what is actually going on and it's not happening so far and that's totally taking up all of my time that's not being spent on my family.  I keep thinking up all these neat projects that I want to do and share and just don't have the time and energy to spare for them yet. 

They'll be coming soon though.  There's a Batman/Joker party in the works and Mama's got to come up with some good stuff for it pronto!

Who's Coming to Town?

You know Christmas still has a pull on a kid when you hear from another room:

"You watch out; You better not cry
 Better not pout; I'm telling you why

Spiderman is coming to town..."

First Piece of Mystere

Mystere is now 40% complete.  That's fancy talk for the front (or the back since they're both the same) is done.

It's also been blocked within an inch of it's life.  I don't know if it was the yarn or what, but my confidence in this piece was less than great.  So, I decided to get out the schematics of the pattern and block this to make sure everything was like it should be.   I should have trusted myself more I guess.  The piece was dead on with the schematics.  Yay! 

This has been fairly fun to knit.  I love how subtle the cable is in the front and the texture that surrounds it.  There's garter stitch at the bottom edge, reverse stockinette at the sides and the cable panel in the middle.  I also like the waist shaping that is happening in the piece as well.  This has been great for moving watching due to it's simplicity.

The one thing that I'm not liking is the yarn.  The yarn (Nashua Hand Knits Creative Focus Worsted) is a lofty, single ply mix of alpaca and wool. The ball band says it's a 10 ply, but if that's a 10 ply yarn, then I'm a jack rabbit.  It's looks like it is softer than it really is and it's very fuzzy.  I don't mind that part, but what I do mind is the splittiness of the yarn.

It's very easy to only grab part of the loop your working with and not notice until the next row.  When this happens it's very noticeable.  I've just been grabbing the stray loops and pulling them up onto the needle with the loop above it and working them together and that seems to be doing fine, but it's still a bit messy looking.  However, I'm not ripping back every time I find one.  I'd never get this sweater finished if I did that!  It happens pretty much every two rows.  Yuck.  I won't be purchasing this yarn again.

Everything's Coming Up Roses!

I was flipping through the Grandin Road Catalog the other day and came across this:

 

This is a snapshot of some really pretty pillows and area rugs (link to the catalog page) that I fell in love with.  It caused all sorts of WANT in me and I'm determined to make something similar.  More for the "I can make that!" side of me that rears it's ugly head every now and then than for any other logical reason.

So I did a little research in how to make Crocheted Roses and found a Leisure Arts free project  (the link is to the pdf) that was written by Terry Kimbrough who is a crochet genious.   These roses are so lovely and easy to make.  Just two rows of crochet will make one rose.  If you combine some Noro silk garden yarn and this pattern you get some jaw dropping gorgeousness:

Just look a little closer at one of the roses:

I'm planning on making some solid color roses to go along with these for the pillows that I will make.  I'm going to have to come up with another skein or two of Noro silk garden before the project is done if I want two pillows worth though. 

Aren't they pretty?

The Novelty Is Over

The Novelty of the snow is over and the pain of the ice has set in.  The kids and I are working through some severe cabin fever.

So in order to alleviate it just a bit, the Youngest and I decided to make some aliens.  Here's our first batch:

Cute aren't they?  Super easy to make too. 

We use stiff felt for the feet and cut it into a fat V shape.  Added a dab of glue and placed a pom pom on it and then attached two googly eyes to it.  Easy Peasy. 

So easy in fact, we may be up to our ears in little aliens soon...

Snow!

We got hit with another snow storm last night and got between 5" and 6" of snow.  Way more than we are used to here in these parts.  The kids are loving it!

This was the first thing they did this morning:

 

Just look at the expression on this kids' face:

You don't get much happier than that!

Much Happier Yarn

Before I get into all things yarny today, I just wanted to say thank you.  Thank you for the support and encouragement that you've given me over the last two horrible months.  I can't tell you how much all your comments have meant to me.  Even though I responded to very few, please know that they were a very welcome part of my days.

Okay, on to all things yarny.  Remember the snobby yarn from yesterday?  It's gotten over it's hoity-toity ways and has now settled into a much happier lifestyle.

 

I chose to make Mystere by Cecily Glowik Macdonald.   There are still cables in this pattern, but they are incredibly subtle ones.  You can just see one in the center of the project above.  These aren't the tight kind of cables, but loose and flowing.  The little you see above is the beginning of the back of the sweater that I did this morning while re-watching the movie Twilight.  Doesn't look like much yet, does it?

There is also lots and lots of reverse stockinette, but instead of making this a dreary pattern, it's keeping it fairly lively.  It's very simple (which this yarn was craving) and full of lots of texture.  I'm pretty stoked about it and I think it's just what the doctor ordered this time around.  Something simple, quick and still has cables.  Yes! 

Loose Yarn

I started a new project the other night.  One that I really like, but I'm afraid that the yarn that I chose has decided that it's just too good for the project.  Snobby yarn.  It's too loose and fancy free for a multi-cabled project I'm afraid.  The stitch definition just isn't there.  I also got gauge, but it feels way too loose and limber.

This is what it looks like currently:

.
The cables just aren't defined enough and the fabric feels loosey-goosey (that's a technical term.)  I got through 32 rows of the front right side and decided that it just wasn't doing it for me.  I adore the pattern (Ravelry link), but not with this yarn.

Not wanting to give up on the snobby yarn, I went looking through the Ravelry database in search of just the right pattern for it.  Ya know what?   I didn't find one single thing that thrilled me.  So many bloomin' patterns there and not one raised it's hand and spoke up for the yarn.  So sad.

As soon as I hit the publish post button here, I'm heading back to Ravelry to go through the patterns some more.  Maybe I wasn't in just the right mood last night or was looking at overly complicated projects.  This yarn wants simplicity I'm thinking.  We'll see.

Two others in the house weren't bothered a bit by my frustration last night (the traitors):

5th Birthday!

Five years ago today I was a happy camper.  Finally no longer carrying around an alien in your stomach leads to a very happy mama for sure!

Today is The Youngest's Fifth Birthday and it's been a fun one.  We are not having the official party until either the end of January or February.  It's just too close to the holidays.  But he's had a ball today anyway.

In October I put in a shopping moratorium for the boys.   No spending on themselves whatsoever until after Christmas.  The purpose was twofold:  A)  So they wouldn't buy what was already bought for them as presents and B) So that they would save up their allowances and supplement what they did get for Christmas.  So today, the moratorium went away and they knew down to the penny what they had in their wallets.

The Youngest bought himself a Spiderman/Green Goblin/Venom action figure set with his $20 that he had saved and he's thrilled with it.  He got this after he had already opened his gifts from us.  To him, it's like a second Christmas already and his Aunt will be bringing another set of gifts over this evening.  His brother managed to buy five different Wii games for the new Wii they got this Christmas (which I got for free from Swagbucks by the way - Still happy about that one!)

Oh, and the Youngest got to eat Coconut Cake for breakfast too.  He's thinking that he's had a Pretty Alright Birthday!   Cake, presents, shopping...  I think I might have to agree.  Sounds fun to me too.

Catching up after another trip (yes, another) to the ER

For the past two weeks or more I had been having these pains and the only thing that helped was laying down.  On Christmas night I was having severe chest pains and thought I was having a heart attack.  So there was yet another trip to the ER for me during Christmas, but this time it was a good thing. 

I had my parents (while it was snowing profusely) drive me to the ER in their Podunk little town.  I'm not exaggerating the podunkness here of the town even a little bit.  There's not one red light, just one tiny four way stop.  If you blink, you've missed the town completely.  The teensy tiny hospital has traveling doctors that visit it and I got lucky this night by getting someone who knew what he was talking about.

Over the past month I've had two EKG's done, one Echo Cardiogram done and seen lots of docs who were hesitant about doing anything.  It turns out that the traveling doc knew what he was talking about and wasn't afraid to say it.

The chest pains were from an inflammation in the chest wall surrounding the ribs.  Every time that I would cough, breath or have an irregular heart beat (more about that in a minute), it would hit that inflammation and be excrutiatingly painful.  The cause?  Remember the virus that turned into a sinus infection at Thanksgiving?  That was the culprit.  He put me on a methylprednisolone pak and some ibuprofen it's helping already. 

Now, for the irregular heartbeat, he suspects mitral valve prolapse (which I evidently inherited from my Dad.)  So that will be the next thing that I have looked at by my fancy docs. 

Long story short, I'm feeling better (YEA!) and I am finally able to get up and move around somewhat.  A good thing, cause the three males in the household have let things pile up into an ungodly mess.   I've started chipping away at the Christmas toy mountain, Laundry mountain and the rest of the stuff that's been piling up on every flat surface.  I'm afraid it's going to take a while to catch back up.  :)

Merry Christmas Eve!

Merry Christmas Eve everyone!

I managed to finish my project, get it blocked and photographed!  Yippee!  I'm pretty sure it's safe to share it with you.  The recipient is off from work and that's where she usually checks the blog.  Plus, she'll have it in two hours anyway, so I'm going to show you how it turned out.

From the front:

 

From the back:

 

And hey look!   It's the Millennium Falcon!

This is the Kathy Kelly Cabled Capelet by Renate Haeckler and it can be found for free here.  (Ravelry Link)


Mods:

Instead of doing the 3 in 1K (I didn’t like the way mine was turning out), I changed it to M1, K, M1. I like the division between the panels much better this way and it adds the feel of lace in between the pretty cables.


So, the big project is done and now I can enjoy my Christmas.  Hope you have a wonderful one! 

Merry Christmas Everyone!

This Close

I am THIS close to being finished with my big Christmas knitting project.   Unfortunately, this is one of those projects that starts out with just a few stitches on the needle and grows exponentially until there's billions on the needles.  Okay, maybe that's a small exaggeration, but it feels like billions. 

I've only been able to work on it in small fits and starts.  I spent the majority of the day today laying down because I still feel awful.  The doctors still have no idea what's wrong with me and that totally sucks.  I just want to feel well again.  I have an echo cardiogram scheduled tomorrow and we'll see what that shows us.

But, I have about two and a half rows to go of the big project and then I can block it.  It has to be ready and wrapped by Christmas Eve.  Hopefully it will get done by then.  I hate that I haven't been able to share it with you, but the recipient reads this blog and I don't want to ruin the surprise.  This is the only the second project that I've been able to complete for Christmas this year.  Not the best record for Christmas knitting that I've ever had. 

How about you guys?  Did you knit a lot of your Christmas gifts for your friends and family?

Baking Christmas Cookies with the Kids - Don't Do It!

Every Christmas holiday, you hear how wonderful it is to be baking cookies with your children.  Well, I've got news for you:  It's not all it's cracked up to be.  I would only advise doing this if you have the patience of Job and only as an exercise in futility.  Really.

Why the bitterness you ask?  Just let me vent a moment, will you?

My ever so cute little chef, seen above, begged to help me make cookies.  "Sure, why not?   It'll be fun!"  I said.   Uh-huh.

 First, he needed a chef's hat to match the elf's (which the elf made from a coffee filter at 11:45 pm last night.)  Since his head is a wee bit too big for a coffee filter to work, we had to come up with another solution.

To make the chef's hat:

1.  Take a sheet of paper and cut it in two pieces, lengthwise.  Tape those two pieces end to end, make sure it will fit the kid's head and then tape it closed in a full circle.
2.  I took three pieces of tissue paper (left together, not separated) and cut the squares into a giant circle.
3.  Taking the edges of the giant circle, carefully tape them to the inside of the hat, all the way around.
4.  Poof the center up slightly and you're done!

Moving on.

Incident #1:  This one was more annoying than critical, for that you'll have to wait til Incident #2.  I removed the bowl from my big Kitchen Aid Mixer and walked away to another counter.  While my back was turned, he poured about 4 tablespoons of flour into the little lipped part where the bowl sits.  Boy was it a pain to get all that flour from under that lip.   The child was banished for about 10 minutes before I took pity on him.

Incident #2:  The recipe called for separating the egg whites from the yolk.  I did this and had the yolk still in one of the egg shell halves, ready to be poured in the bowl.  The mixer was running full tilt at this time because I was creaming butter and sugar, the color of which was very, very pale yellow.  I told the little chef,  pour the yellow stuff into the bowl.  So what did he do?  Threw the whole thing, egg shell and all into the mixer that was running ninety to nothing.  I heard and awful crunching and raced to turn off the mixer, but the damage was done. 

Eggshell + creamed butter/sugar = an awful mess.  As I didn't have more ingredients with which to start over, I spent the next half hour picking tiny bits of shell out of the mixture while he spent the rest of his time in another room keeping out of my sight and hearing.   I've decided I'm going to add sprinkles on top of the cookies to disguise any mysterious crunching that these cookies may make once they enter one's mouth.  :)

All of this came though, after our Elf decided to make a huge mess in our kitchen last night.  Obviously, he was not happy that there has been no Christmas baking going on.  Just look what we woke up too:

 

My advice?  Don't stress yourself out this Christmas by baking cookies with the kids!  Of course, I'll probably forget this sage advice by the time next Christmas comes around.  

After all the miserable stuff that's happened over the past two weeks, I decided that our family needed some fun anticipation to replace the stress.  The kids big gift this year is a wii and I decided not to wrap it and put it under the tree.  What I did decide was to torture them.  That's why you have children, isn't it?  :)


 So I got out an old wardrobe box.  The bigger the better for this project.  In the very bottom I placed Clue #1 and then filled the box to the top with newspaper.   Trying to wrap a  box this large was an adventure, let me tell you.  A big bow was placed on top and the whole thing was maneuvered into the space between the tree and the fireplace.

The clues will lead them all over the house on Christmas morning.  I'm using nursery rhymes and doctor suess rhymes to lead them back and forth.  It's going to be great fun.

The knowledge that there is a huge, huge present with their names on it is killing them.  The guesses of what's in the box have been pretty fun to hear as well.  One of them actually thought there was a puppy all wrapped up in it!

Ah yes, this kind of stress is much better than the stress of multiple family visits to the ER!
 

Little Black Rain Cloud

Do you ever feel like you've got Charlie Brown's Black Rain Cloud following you?  That's exactly how I feel right about now. 

 

First there was my trip to the ER on the 3rd, then my son's trip to the ER on the 9th.  My parents both got sick and then my father went to the ER last week too for a stricture in his throat.  

THEN,  I got a call today from my Mom.  Dad drove himself to the ER again for chest pains.  This is not the first time that he's had heart problems, so he knows the warning signs.  They've admitted him and given him a room for monitoring.  It's two hours away and I have no one who can watch the kids so I can't just take off and go sit with or spell Mom at the hospital.  

Oh, and also, my husband has a nasty cold / flu bug right now too.

Is it just me, or is there a little black rain cloud following my family around?  Aaaaagh!

Yet Another Trip To The ER

So there we were last night, looking forward to a quiet night with nothing going on.  I've still been really sick and under the weather and just generally trying to take it easy until someone on the good green earth can figure out what's been wrong with me.  I haven't been crafting, knitting, blogging, or singing, nothing.  Basically avoiding anything that I enjoy doing along with avoiding driving and household chores, the latter of which I haven't minding ignoring one little teensy bit.

As I said, there we were, enjoying the peace and quiet when I heard screaming.  Uh huh, the cat finally taught the little booger a lesson.  I knew what had happened as soon as I heard the crying, I just wasn't ready for what she had done to The Youngest.   He's forever picking at the animals (out of love, not meanness) and was all in her face and she scratched him.  On the eye.

Was there blood?  Oh there was blood all right, gushing and squirting from the eye in massive amounts.  You couldn't even see his eye.  Oh My God!  was all I could think, he's lost his eye! The Eldest was running around screaming for me (even though his Dad was sitting right there) and screaming "She got his eye, His eye is bleeding!"  His Dad was screaming and then I started crying while running for a towel to try and staunch the bleeding.  Total pandemonium and freak out.

Now I'm normally the very calm one in situations like this.  When the Eldest went to the ER for a broken elbow and then again for 10 stitches for a cut over his eye, I was the picture of calm.  I couldn't be shaken.  My usual philosophy of life when major crap hits the fan is, Okay, it's happened, now let's just fix it.  But that is not how I reacted last night.  I don't know if it was from all the health issues and problems that I've been having lately or the fact that my baby was all covered in godawful amounts of blood, but I lost it.  I was crying as I called 911.    By the time we got the paramedics and fire department there, the bleeding had slowed down drastically and we could see the actual eyeball.  Thank God, he still had one was all I could think.


We've had a lot of excitement on our street this week.  First, there was one firetruck and one ambulance to help me.  Then on Tuesday night, our neighbors one the big prize.  There were fifteen firetrucks on our street called to help put out a chimney fire.  Then, last night, Thursday night, we again had one firetruck and one ambulance.  Our house has become quite the talk of the neighborhood.  There's no telling what rumors are being passed around.

As a matter of fact, I became quite embarrassed when one of the firemen said, "Weren't we called here last week?"  Um, yeah. 

The EMTs checked the Youngest out and put on a great big eye-patch and determined that his eye looked okay, but we needed to get him to an ER to make sure.  At this point the little guy had gone into shock and was shivering uncontrollably in the living room chair.  He was a bit ticked off that we didn't let him ride in the ambulance to the ER and instead chose to drive him ourselves.

This is what he looked like at the ER a few hours later:

So then before we could leave to go to the hospital, one more straw was added to the camel's back.  Do you smell something burning?  We smelled something burning, something that smelled like burning plastic.   The Elf was burning!  He had appeared that morning in a very little used chandelier, the one that had been turned on in all the excitement and had been leaning up against a bulb.

I asked the paramedics if they dealt with Elf injuries, but they politely said no.  Poor Elfie.  We need an Elf burn center STAT.


Meanwhile, back at the ranch ER, they squirted a dye into the Youngest's eye and put it under a black light to determine that the cornea had not been scratched.  Nope.  Boy was this kid lucky.  But I guarantee you that his stubborn little self still hasn't learned his lesson and will be messing with the cat again asap. 

 

Hope you guys have a great weekend and I hope that we have a calm quiet one!

Multi Tasking in The Ambulance

Having a cold is no fun, but getting really sick is even less so.   If you've been wondering why I fell off the face of the planet, there's your answer.

I got to take a lovely little ambulance ride to the ER last week.  Oxygen count in the blood = very low, Blood pressure = high.  Not a fun combo to be dealing with.  Turns out, they couldn't tell me what was wrong or how to prevent it in the future and were basically clueless.  Scary.  I go in two weeks to talk to the lung doctor and we'll see if we can't narrow down the cause a bit.

Have you ever noticed that your brain works funny?  That it multitasks even when you are unable to?  I find this is more common with Moms in general due to the training that they get with the onslaught of daily chaos that children bring into their lives.

Why am I mentioning this?  Because there I was riding in the ambulance, oxygen mask on my face and barely aware of what's going on around me and I hear what one of the EMT's is saying to the hospital:  "I have a white female, approximately 45 years of age..."  That's when my brain went funny.  I wanted to sit right up and say "Oh no you dit'nt!  You did not go there.  I know you didn't just say that I look 45!"  Then I started thinking, OMG!  I'm going to have to go out and get a face lift!  I can't believe he thinks I look four years older than I am!  I mean, who did that whippersnapper think he was anyway?

All these thoughts were going on in the background as they were checking vitals,  training a fellow EMT and treating me for a heart attack "just in case" which it wasn't, thank goodness.    The front of my brain was complaining about tingling in the hands and feet and my teeth going numb.  Meanwhile that back of my brain was going all "Aunt Esther from Sanford & Son" and I wanted to pound him with my purse. 



The brain's a strange thing, isn't it?   

ThanksGiving Week

Our Thanksgiving was truly the week for us to give thanks this year.

First, we had almost 60 people show up for Thanksgiving.  My Mom ran herself ragged and loved every second of it.  I wasn't a whole lot of help since The Youngest infected me with a nasty little virus.  But fun was had by all despite the sickness and the food that I did eat was delicious.


Second, I finished my stairs finally!

For the observant, no the rail is not yet finished, but the stairs finally are and we are no longer having to skip every other step to go up or down.  Yay!

Third and definitely the most important reason for our family to give thanks: 

We received a call on Friday morning that my cousin Caleb (age 20), after leaving the family gathering, had fallen out of a barn loft on Thursday evening and had broken his back.  He was rushed to UAB (University of Alabama-Birmingham) hospital and he underwent about five hours of surgery.  They ended up fusing 5 vertebra together.   The surgeons said that he is incredibly lucky to not be paralyzed.  They said that they had seen less traumatic injuries that had left the victims paralyzed for life. 

Would you believe He was up and walking around the hospital just a day after surgery?!  He's leaving the hospital to head home tomorrow.

Our family will be giving Thanks for quite a while for this miracle!

Stripes of All Kinds

The first set of stripes involves stairs!  The first two coats of espresso bean brown have been applied and I'm waiting for it to dry before applying paint to the other steps.  That won't happen until Monday probably.  I'll be very busy next week.  The kids will be at the grandparents for a few days and I'll be diy-ing as much as I can while they're away.  Call me crazy, but I kind of like the steps like this from this view:

You should see us doing the "every other step thing" around here.  Up is no problem, but down?  Not quite as easy!  I just about killed myself trying to take a basket of laundry downstairs this morning. 


The second set of stripes are the Noro kind.  I started on a set of Elizabeth Zimmerman Mitered Mittens for the BFF and have been working on it during car pool rides and other places where mindless knitting is called for.

Don't you just love the colors?

Have a great weekend!

Ewwwww!

So there I was freaking out about the stain on the steps when I heard "Mom, there's blood!"  followed by a sneeze.  I rushed to the living room and there on the floor was a huge amount of blood, but the victim wasn't one of the kids, it was our geriatric dog (she's around 18 years old or so.)  When I got there, she had moved about six feet away, to the nice new living room rug.  Yeah, can you see where this is going?

I grabbed some paper towels and was cleaning up the first mess when I hear another sneeze, followed promptly by two more sneezes.  This dog had the Mother of All nosebleeds.  Before we could corral her, she had left two more sneezy, bloody messes in two more rooms (including on the dining room carpet.)  Yuck.

We (the kids and I) hit the mass panic button and finally got her hemmed up in the kitchen where at least the floor would be easy to clean.  While this was going on, I rushed to call my Sis-In-Law who worked at a vet's office for years and is our repository for all animal knowledge in the family.   Then we got to work cleaning up all the mess. 

The poor dog's nose was gushing blood and was really gross, poor thing.  We laid down moving blankets, made her comfortable and made sure she wasn't going to die on us over night and went to bed.  First the steps disaster and now the dog one.  I was completely stressed out by this point. 

The good news is, she's fine.  The vet kept her all day under observation, gave her antibiotics and there's been no more nosebleeds.  The bad news is that not one person knows what caused it and it could happen again at anytime. Yep, two hundred odd dollars later and the vet is clueless.  

Being a pet owner is so much fun.