I finished it!  And I can’t really show it off yet, which runs totally counter to the instincts of a blogger, but never mind.  Don’t miss the caption–it’s true!

Continuing the food theme, I saw these and had to try them once. The idea of green beans being potato-chipified was well into the nonpsychodegradeable category.  Um.  Hubby, day one: “Gaack!”  Hubby, day two: “There’s some left?  Sure, I’ll have some more.”

Make sure there’s plenty of water nearby to help you swallow–trust me.

Meantime.  I told this story last month on my blog, but a lot of people at Purlescence’s knit night on Thursday didn’t know anything about it.  Mary was there for the first time in awhile, so I decided to tell on her generosity a bit and say what she’d done.  And I did want to know if her shawl fit okay.  I told her, if she wanted more length, she had the rest of the dye lot: after the shop had gotten their shipment in from Handmaiden, she had shown up that Monday morning to buy a new skein to replace the one she’d given me. I, not knowing that, had shown up an hour or two after her to buy two skeins to knit her a bigger shawl to replace, you got it, the skein she’d given me.  They’d sold out of the periwinkle fast.  Heh.

She loved it, told me it had been a complete surprise, and that it did fit.  Good! That helps confirm my idea that for a larger size, starting at a wider neckline (row 2 in most of my patterns) and adding length works best.

But the group laughed when I admitted I had two more skeins of Casbah somewhere and I couldn’t find them for the life of me. I knew I had them. I knew where I would have put them.

“You’ll just have to buy more!”

“Twist my arm!”

Next shipment… Maybe I should knit a shawl in the Blackberry colorway, long as we’re talking food here.

(Edited Friday to add this picture of an Ostrich Plumes shawl I did in gray laceweight a year or two after theirs.  It too will fit through a wedding ring, hence the name.)

Today I got to see a doctor I seldom see and told him that there were only two people mentioned in my book whom I hadn’t given a copy to yet.  And that I needed to fix that.  I hadn’t referred to him and his wife by name in there, I said; last page, second paragraph.  I was a brand new laceknitter way back when and I’d made them a wedding ring shawl on size 3 needles in white laceweight Ostrich Plumes.

Dr. M was the ENT who, eighteen years ago when my lupus was diagnosed, finally put together what had eluded everybody else for all those years: that my progressive hearing loss was due to an allergy to aspirin.  I’d apparently triggered it with an overdose when I’d climbed into the medicine cabinet as a toddler and had eaten not quite enough baby aspirins to have to get my stomach pumped.  It was a new bottle and Mom counted pills and fed me baking soda instead on doctor’s orders to neutralize the acid.

With the lupus, I had a new diagnosis and meds to have to take, but I went completely deaf on the prescription-strength Aleve.  I have to tell you–you can close your eyes and try to see what it’s like to be blind, but you cannot close your ears.  It was like nothing I could have expected: when someone talked to me, I felt waves of pain in my ears.  But no sound.  Nada.  Except for the roaring white noise in my ears that didn’t respond to anything but itself.

Apparently Aleve (called Naprosyn then) was different enough from aspirin that I lucked out, but whatever, my hearing came back to what it had been when the dose wore off, and under Dr. M’s directions, I never took NSAIDs again.

And what he told me meant my kids wouldn’t go deaf in their teens too.  And they did not.

And what he told me meant I didn’t have to go any more deaf.  And I did not.

The man was right.

There is more to the story, related to when my Crohn’s was diagnosed ten years later, but this will do for here.  Suffice it to say, I owed him, bigtime; that wedding ring shawl felt absolutely imperative to do.  And it became one of those projects that I will forever rejoice that I knitted it: both for my own sake, and for the great joy of their reaction to it.

I signed and gave him a book today. And he signed my copy for me.

Came across this and found it important enough to pass along to those who want to know how to help when someone has a very ill family member.

If there’s anyone who hasn’t discovered Sandra Boynton yet of “Hippo Birdies Two Ewes” fame, let me help you find her site.  Including here, for a little music with your knitting. (That’s not the only song, just my favorite.  Not to diss Davy Jones from the Monkeys singing “I Want To Be Your Personal Penguin.”) Boynton’s “Dogtrain” album is where I first heard Alison Krauss.

But the part that intrigues me is where she says she wrote “Chocolate: The Consuming Passion,” which my husband and I laughed over till we cried, solely because that way she could write all her chocolate off her taxes for a year.  The book recently went out of print after 20 years, I’m hoping simply so she can update it.  You know, it might need more research.  Yeah, I can see why she let it go out of print, just, you know, while she stocks up.  I can’t wait to buy the new version.

Do you suppose…I wonder what types of chocolate would best match my favorite cinnamon-brown baby alpaca…  Nah…

The 20″ long tie-in-front blue shawl is one skein of Lisa Souza’s Sock!Merino in Siobhan; the white is one strand Misti Baby Alpaca laceweight doubled with one strand of Claudia’s laceweight silk, 1100 yards/100g, a half skein left over from an earlier project.

I’m playing with my yarns.  I’m reversing the placements of the ssk’s and the k2tog’s.  Except, doing one project right after the other, my fingers keep stuttering: wwwwait, which, oh, that’s right, got it.  I feel a little like a teen in driver’s ed trying not to hit the gas when I’m going for the brakes as my movements re-orient to the new reality.

Beautiful pictures of a beautiful soul here.  I waited for permission to link.

A few minutes ago, my daughter, rushing to get ready, asked me to find and print out directions to the wedding she’s going to of a college friend of hers; it was being held 60 miles away through the worst of Bay Area traffic.  I glanced at the wedding invitation, and…

…”MICHELLE!!!!”

It said the parents of the groom were holding a second reception later at their home in Indiana.

The father of the groom was our Mormon bishop when we lived in West Lafayette 25+ years ago while my husband was in a PhD program at Purdue.  I taught a Sunday School class of ten-year-olds and they adored me and I them enough that one even sent me a wedding announcement a few years ago, but I’d gradually lost touch with them all.

And now I have the address of the parents of one of them to go and say hi, both to their daughter and to them.

Very, very cool.

I’ll have to drive an old clunker awhile longer.   The papers are signed: solar wins.  And… (pardon the cellphone photos)…

I asked John Miles, my longtime audiologist, if Sonic Innovations had ever yet come out with a more powerful hearing aid.  (Okay, yes, I know, if you click on SI’s link it looks like the guy is gargling his, but never mind.)  I had had a pair of theirs for awhile that were musically by far the most perfect hearing aids I have ever tried–but they just weren’t loud enough for someone at my level of deafness, they fed back too often, and eventually I had to replace them.  But the best of the rest of what was out there was just plain not pitch-perfect.  They drove me nuts.  You can’t tell me Alison Krauss is singing those top notes flat in real life, you know and I know it’s lazy software.  Grrr.

So.  I was in to John’s recently getting some work done, and happened to ask him if SI had ever yet come up with the hearing aids of my dreams.  Louder?  Got feedback suppression now?  He went and checked.  Yes!

There was some twiddle-your-fingers time in his office this morning with my ears hitched up to his computer as he was programming the new aids and walking through the new SI system, and out came the knitting.

And I bet I’m the first patient of his to snarl my silk in his telephone-cord-type testing setup.

I went home and, first thing I did was to listen to a favorite song on a musician friend’s CD.  And then: Alison Krauss, “Now That I’ve Found You.”  The way she really sounds.  Heavenly.

At last.  Oh, at last!

I didn’t join up with Ravelympics in part because–well, we don’t even own a TV.

But last night we were visiting friends, and the friends’ kids wanted to watch Michael Phelps win his eighth gold: the TV got turned on.  NBC was of course not saying when the swim meet was going to be shown–they weren’t about to let people TIVO it.  We saw the Romanian woman break from the pack and get far, far ahead of the crowd of marathoners, and I was glad to see in the paper this morning that she did indeed win.

So I’m sure you all know all this already, and that you saw it while I only got to read about it: but.  Phelps won his eighth, and when the reporter asked him how he felt about it, he answered, “I just want to see my mom.” And then he threw his arms around his cheering mom and sisters.

And in the interviews, he praised and thanked his teammates, saying he didn’t know them before they all arrived but they were a part of him forever now.  He spoke like Randy Pausch, saying you could dream your dreams and make them happen, encouraging everybody else with his words in whatever dreams they might have. From everything I have read, he was gracious.  He was grateful.

And he honored his mother first, in front of billions of people. He reached for his family’s loving arms for and in affirmation before the camera’s.

(And he’s from my home state of Maryland.)

The man is a bona fide hero.

I would not have joked about PCC lines yesterday had I known what was going to happen last night. An intense thank you to everybody who signed up or tried to sign up for the bone marrow donor registry.

I went to go blog this morning, but the words I’d been going to say just kind of trailed away from my fingers and left me; at the time, I didn’t know why. I thought, okay; it can wait till the right time.  Many a knitting project has shown me that.

But, though I know we will all see each other again in a place where there are no more tears, mine are flowing freely right now.

(Edited to add: http://www.bobgreenberger.com/ for those so inclined.  Thanks.)

I came back here and Michelle had already made that comment–and I laughed out loud. Surgeon’s hands!  While I was coming here to write that I had the central line installed, two more IV’s to go.  Too funny.  Now, to connect those two on the white needle to the lines above them.  This may take awhile.

Channon wanted a lace repair book.  Here you go.

It’s splayed out like a seventh-grade frog dissection in science class.  Here’s what I’ve done so far:  I undid the cast-off to the point above where I needed to work and opened up the work space by holding the stitches on separate needles there.  Every time I unpicked a double decrease, I ran a length of laceweight between the two side stitches to hold them together (tying it in a knot so it doesn’t pull out) so that when I come back up, it’s clear they’re a pair straight across, with the one between to be added back in.

I then thought to add a length of yarn through the stitches being dropped as I laddered them down to get to the offending part.  Ahoy!  Here be drag-ins!

It does help that I’m doing this after a rinsing-and-drying so that the stitches want to hold their shape.  I got a few rows worked back together.  But it gets squirrelly where I knitted past the drops, and I have now spent an hour doing everything but going back and working on it some more.  I keep thinking things like, you know, I really need to get that carpet cleaned.  Maybe today’s a good day to go do that instead.

You know those cartoons with a tiny devil dressed in red and a pitchfork leaning into one side of a person’s head, and the angel waving frantically on the other?  “Just frog it!” “No, no, it can be rescued and you know it!”

What is ironic is if I end up trying both, but I don’t think so.  Yet.

The first picture is the update on yesterday’s problem. Today’s the day for making progress on it.

Yesterday, feeling crummy, I needed something more positive to work with.  If I didn’t have any energy, I could borrow some from my wool.

I had some of Lisa Souza‘s Sock!Merino yarn in Siobhan that had been sitting in my stash since the last Stitches, and for days it had been begging to come out of the bag.  I was finishing (I thought) Ocean; I ignored the Siobhan, and besides, I had definite plans for what would come next.  But never mind what I wanted to do: that Lisa yarn leaped into my hands the first chance it got yesterday and stomped its soft little merino feet at me and how could I resist?

I was of two minds about what I would do with it.  Make a short, narrow, tie-in-front type wrap?  Or a long, full shawl, the kind that would prompt a small child to twirl around and around to see it swoosh out around her?  The stitches were coming out flowing and soft.  Hmm.  With two skeins, I had enough Siobhan for one or the other but not both.  I spent a long time hashing out pattern details for knitting it either way: one yoke, a different increase row, two outcomes.  I changed my mind a few times.  I started.  And then, being foggy-brained, I stitched a boneheaded error.

There is a cliche in knitting about mistakes: if you wouldn’t be able to see it from the back of a galloping horse, nobody else will ever notice it either, so just forget it.  Except that idea doesn’t work for me anymore–what I have to go by, I realized, looking at the two missing yarnovers around the central stitch three rows earlier and how tight it would all draw up into the later rows if I tried to breeze by, was the thought that, if, say, a non-knitter photographer enlarged that section and put it on the cover of a book or magazine, would a knitter notice?

And so we had Siobhan, take two, and the photo above.  Early on in the process. No biggy.

And then we got an email last night that totally energized me and made it suddenly clear exactly why I needed to be working on a practical, machine-washable beautiful and soft wool for a new mom.   The short tie-in-front model wins.  Congratulations and welcome to the world, little one!

Yeah, I was tired when all that happened. No, the Russian splice idea won’t work–the yarn’s too slippery. What it did do was give me a thought that allowed me some calming down so I could start to think it through better. Richard this morning looked at it and went, “Even *I* can see that one!”

But I knew in the instant I woke up that of course I could fix that.  Just an extra necklace hanging around the neck of one stitch by the time I get done. Yes it’ll take awhile. Yes it’ll mean dropping down many rows at the point of a double decrease each time, and it will be a major pain.  And yes I can do it. And no it won’t show.

And no I don’t have to and actually can’t right now because it’s still damp–but just wait till I get my mitts on it.  I’ll show it.

Company about to show–later!

Did you?  My stars. I NEVER do that, and now I’ve done it two shawls in a row.  Although the last shawl, at least it was in the very last row or so, quickly fixed.

You see this nice, innocent picture?  With the shawl kind of doubled over on itself so it doesn’t look so big, but, it is.  The color of the yarn is pretty true on my screen.  A bit slippery with silk, a bit dark to work with in a room that could stand to have a little more light in the evenings, which is my prime knitting time.  We even went out shopping for a new lamp while I was working on it, but didn’t find one we liked yet.  Not to mention, I can’t go near fluorescent ones–please, nobody recommend the Otts here.  Thanks.

I snapped this photo and then went to block it. Which, as I started to stretch it out on the guest bed, is when the dropped stitch started to run.  And it was a double decrease, meaning one dropped stitch instantly turned into three lines of yarn droppings.  (Yes, Mom, I said that. )

Right dead center of the whole thing.  I’d gone merrily right past it, closing the gap after it.  Totally unsalvageable–there’s no way to recover that and make it look right.  All I can do is wait for it to dry and then buy me half an Ocean’s worth of frogs to get back to that point.  Dang.

(Edited to add: hmm. I could perhaps weave one small length through, working things back together and fastening the stitches in place and Russian-splicing that into the ongoing yarn.  I’ll have to experiment and see if I can get it to look good enough and be safe enough from running again to satisfy me.  But I’m picky, and rightfully so.)

I got an email from a friend that left me thinking about the on-the-spot wisdom I aspire to having myself, like she has, come my eventual day of grandmotherhood.

My cousin Doug, a Baby Boomer a bit older than me, told this tale at our 95-year-old grandfather’s funeral fourteen years ago: back in the day, he grew his hair wayyy down to here, as so many were doing during the Vietnam era.

His dad had a lot of his Army days still in him and couldn’t stand his son’s hippy-freak look.  They fought over it.  Constantly.  Neither would budge.  Our grandfather being in the US Senate, my uncle finally shipped his kid off to DC to be a page for Grandpa for the summer to get him out of his hair: let Dad handle the kid.

Doug loved it.  It was clear, as he spoke to the gathered family all those years later, that the experience had left him with a lifelong closeness to our grandfather, whom he revered.  But that summer, he kept waiting for the explosion that he so much expected–after all, that’s what his dad would do, and Grandpa was a conservative from a conservative State and here Doug was, visibly flouting that image while working in his Senate office and, in a sense, representing him every time he walked down any of the halls of Congress.  Finally, near the end of his stint, he couldn’t stand it anymore and asked nervously, “Uh, Grandpa–what do you think of my hair?”

And our bald grandfather smiled sweetly and answered him, “I think you should enjoy it while you’ve got it!”

Doug, telling the tale in the eulogy, ran a hand over his now-shiny top and laughed, “As always, he was right!”