Stay Hungry

Yeah, baby! That's what I'm talking about! Push it! PUSH IT!

Oh, hello, fellow knitters. You caught me mid-set there. Little Lefty Pinkerton has been working hard on the strength exercises in anticipation of our final visit to the hand surgeon on Monday. We're hoping to make him proud, show him the fruits of our perseverance. Might not get full function back? I know he said it in an attempt to set realistic expectations.

Of course, I took it as a challenge. When my official physical therapy course ended, I bought the equipment to continue it on my own. I looked up the normative data on grip strength for women my age, found that I'm average for my right hand, decided that I should be above average and started working on that hand, too, even though there's nothing physically wrong with it. I might not be in great shape otherwise, but I'm going to have freakishly strong hands. I wonder if it will help my knitting speed.

Speaking of knitting, I am happy to hear that I'm not the only one with sewing issues, or the only one still knitting. It's just that I spent September looking at the knottygnome and stitchywitch blogs, insides twisting with jealous admiration. Go check out their work. It's quite humbling. Actively squashing the desire to be a seamstress.

Finally, today, you might be wondering what's up with all of the blog posts. Four days in a row is a record for me. It's part of my new outlook on life, my new creed, if you will. There are several parts to this creed, which I shall explain at nauseating length in a later post. You will, beloved readers, probably want to be at least partially intoxicated for it. The tenets of my new creed include "I'm Done with All That", "I'm Forty Years Old, Dammit", "Embrace the Cliche", and "Because F$%k It, That's Why". Those sound pretty negative, I know, but believe me when I say that they're actually affirming. And there are more positive-sounding tenets, but they don't have catchy names yet. For now, just know that the relevant piece here is "Go Big or Go Home".

Reflections

This is a thing of beauty. The light, the reflections, the cool tones of the garnish tray juxtaposed with warm glow the golden lager, and the rakish angles all combine to form an image that pleases my discerning eye. This picture is completely unretouched. I took it at this angle intentionally, to add to the feeling of cheerful disorientation. I look at it often and try to figure out what exactly about it I love so much.

Yes, I took this with my phone. I then emailed it to Accountant Boy with the following message: "We want the funk! Gotta have that funk! At the bar. You should stop what you're doing and get here immediamente. Love, Doc, the Chemist, and me."

I had a whole piece here in which I reflected on the knit-blogging community's abandonment of knitting in favor of sewing. It was full of introspective musings and longing for days of yore, back when knitting was the hot ticket, before everyone moved on and left me in the dust, surrounded by thousands and thousands of yards of unknit wool. I felt so alone. I then went through my bookmarks to find support for my disheartening theory, and discovered that I was skipping about three-quarters of the bookmarks in my list. My phone rearranged them in an odd way, and I go to most of the blogs through my phone because it's the only way I can browse at work, so I got out of the habit of visiting most of the sites I used to frequent. Long story short, most of us are still knitting. I actually look like the LEAST productive blogger I know. Uh...HOORAY! Yay, knitting!

Carry on.

Living in the Fisheye Lens

(What's the Story) Morning Glory?

My backyard here at the new house, which will continue to be the new house for another five years, at which point it will have been our house longer than the old house and will lose the modifier, is a wild and unstructured place. Accountant Boy rebuilt one-fourth of the deck's total surface a couple of months ago, but the rest of it is still unstable, one heavy foot away from catastrophe. We haven't taken the time to figure out the irrigation back there, so some things are overwatered and some are dying from a lack of it. We bought some Japanese maples at Costco early last spring. They're still in nursery pots. We like to say that we're pacing ourselves.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I looked out there at the vine that I couldn't remember planting and saw that thing. I remember throwing some morning glory seeds in the ground, but it's been a while, at least a couple of years. When a leafy vine cropped up around a withering rudebeckia, I assumed it was a stowaway from the nursery. It didn't bloom for eighteen months, but it didn't die over the winter, even with the snow. Tough plant. And now it's blooming, which is amazing given that we don't water it and it's living in the notoriously crappy Pleasant Hill soil.


Everything in the ground went wild this summer. This is the cosmos that we grew from seed. See what looks like a sapling trunk in the picture, near the plastic Holstein's ass? It's actually a cosmos stem. Yes, these are the same cosmos that you buy in 6-packs at Home Depot. Mine grew six feet tall.

It may not be formal, or purposeful. It's not the garden I had at the old house, that's for sure. Back then, we designed everything, planted that yard from flat dirt, knew the botanical and common name of everything in the ground. I planned very little of what's growing in either the back or the front yards here. We simply threw stuff into the earth and hoped for the best. If it perseveres, we're happy. If it thrives, we're surprised. It has been a surprising few weeks. It's wild. I love it.


Work continues on Juliet. I'm finally down to the lace portion. What I neglected to mention last time was that I'm knitting it at the wrong gauge. Yes, I did do a gauge swatch, but I did it not long after I got the O.K. to lightly use my pinkie, and while my thumb was still in a brace for twenty-three hours a day. I thought that, as it was just knitting, no purling for the first third of the project, it wouldn't be a problem. My tension couldn't be that much more loose, right? Heh. I like it at this gauge, but I'm knitting it as a large so that I can get a small/medium, so it's taking a little while. The Theraputty is in the picture for color adjustment. My phone camera couldn't get the color right without it.

Why the phone camera? Wasn't I just whining about how I don't take out my "real" cameras anymore? For some reason, the lighting in my office and the processor in my Sony don't get along. None of the white balance settings work, even with helpful color contrast object thrown into the mix. My phone, on the other hand, takes wonderful pictures at my desk, with clean, accurate white balance and brightness. My phone won out in the morning glory pictures as well. I took shots with both, but the one above was the most true to life. The big Nikon would more than likely best both of them, but that defeats the purpose of the kind of spur-of-the-moment photography I like to do. For now, the phone wins.

Tenacity

"At this point, we probably should...but, you know, let's try one more time." He bent my finger farther, beyond the point where we'd been able to move in in therapy, well beyond the point of excruciating pain, and tried for another grab. "Shoot," he said under his breath. "They never do this. We ought to schedule a time in the O.R. to...maybe one more shot at it?"

I admired his tenacity. As a tenacious sort myself, I willingly went along with his attempts. Well, you can see how well that worked out.


Anyway, all of the pins in my finger have been out for a couple of months now, and it's starting to move a little more freely. I can bend it in so that it doesn't stick out when I make a fist, and I can stretch it almost all the way straight. If I keep it warmed up and limber, it almost feels like a normal finger. I've put a lot of time, attention and effort into it these last few months.


All of that work has taken its toll, and has made me think of things that haven't been getting my time, attention and effort.

The pictures in this post were taken with my phone, not a proper camera. I haven't been making the time to get out the good camera and get the right lighting and composition in my shots. It hasn't mattered much, as I've only been looking at them on my phone, not posting them or sharing them. I've also been relying on my phone too much for email, which means I'm not keeping up there, either. I haven't been writing.

For the first couple of months, my finger was so swollen and sensitive to any kind of jostling that I couldn't do much exercising. While the pin was sticking out of it, I couldn't get it wet. It goes without saying that I couldn't hold a leash and walk Molly and Winston. It's been better than that for a few weeks now, but I haven't gotten back into exercising.

I also haven't been knitting, lately because of my hand, but it's been longer than that since I've made anything that I really loved. I started Pas de Valse back in December, and all that's left are the arms. Just pick up the stitches and knit them down to the wrist, but it's been untouched in my knitting box for at least four months.


It's funny. When I could have been doing all of those things but wasn't, I kept coming up with reasons why they weren't possible. Not enough time, have to clean house, have to keep an eye on the dogs, have to sort through the mail, too tired, too hungry, too much to do to get anything done.

Once I really COULDN'T do all of those things, I found that I really missed them. I thought about why I wasn't doing them back before the accident, and realized that it was just laziness. Oh, I have a lot of handy excuses, like "I don't like where my computer sits", and "I'm too out of shape for anything I knit to look good anyway", but they all come down to that. It's frustrated me all summer, realizing that I'd let so many things slide.

Now that my hand's almost better, I'm trying to refocus on creative things. I've countered "my computer's in a bad position, and the chi's all wrong" by getting a newer, smaller, much more portable laptop. I can sit with it on my lap and type for hours instead of fifteen minutes. I don't believe in poison darts and bad chi, but I know I haven't been good at writing at home since we moved, and I think it has to do with every spot where I can put that big, old laptop. Now I don't have that excuse.

I joined my old gym again and started back with The Amazon last week. My physical therapy sessions have become less about my finger and more about my upper body anyway, so it's like working out three or four times a week again. It feels good.

I still haven't picked the grey sweater out of the box and finished it, but I plan to do so within a few weeks. In an attempt to get back into the swing of knitting, I picked what should have been a quick, gratifying project. That's it up in the first picture, Juliet in Jo Sharp Desert Garden. Of course, I would pick a project and a yarn that would tire out my already compromised hand after one or two rows. I wanted to be it done with it in a week, but it's been more than a month to get that far. Seven more rows until I can bind off the sleeves, but they're taking forever. I keep thinking I should start something else, or just finish the grey sweater, but then I think, "...maybe one more shot at it?"

Damned tenacity.