Category Archives: Diary

Reboot

Yesterday I got a surprise book in the mail with no clue as to the sender, and this morning I got some Peaches & Cream tea from DavidsTea! The book is from our friend Helen in Australia (actually, I have two friends named Helen in Australia, thanks to the magic of the Internet), and the tea may be as well. Random acts of kindness are so special, and it came at a good time and cheered me up.

In mostly unrelated news (because being happy is what being treated for depression is all about, right?) I met with my doctor this morning. He says the numb/tingling tongue issue is odd, because I’d been taking the medication for a while at a lower dose for fibro with no side effects, but to be sure he wants me to take it at the half dose again for a few days. If there’s no reaction, I’m to up it to the full dose again and watch for the same tongue thing. By that point we’ll be at our next appointment in a week’s time, and we’ll go from there. If it turns out I’ve developed a sensitivity to it, we can switch to the medication I was on twelve years ago, but he wants to make sure I have a sensitivity to this one first, to resolve the open issue, so to speak. He doesn’t want to leave a question mark in my file; if I have a reaction to it, he wants to be able to confirm it and enter it in my permanent file. I can understand that. And he doesn’t think it’s dangerous, or he wouldn’t ask me to do it. Although I did the right thing by coming in, he assured me.

So we’ll reboot the medication, and see where it goes. La.

Blurry

Owlet and I are both sick with colds. She seems to be chugging along with the usual bounces and energy regardless and is back at daycare today with just a bit of lingering chest congestion, but I feel like I have cement in my head. Beyond this, something odd and worrisome happened over the weekend. On Saturday, I finally got irritated with the odd tingling in my tongue. It had been happening for a few days, and I had ascribed it to spring finally deciding to drag itself out of bed. Sometimes the roof of my mouth tingles when I’m having trouble with my allergies, so it wasn’t that much of a leap to put the tongue tingling down to the same thing, especially when I noticed it more when I ate chocolate or peanut butter, two things that sometimes make my mouth feel a bit odd in the spring when my system is already handling allergy overload. Except it wasn’t going away, or getting any better when I took antihistamines. In fact, it was kind of getting worse. So maybe it was something else? What else could it be?

The only thing I could think of was the medication my new doctor put me on. But I’d been taking it in a lower dose already for fibro; surely the higher dose couldn’t be triggering it, could it? I looked up side effects to be sure, and, um, there it was, in big “seek emergency medical help if you feel any of these following symptoms” letters.

So I stopped taking it. I wasn’t going to go to the emergency room of the hospital saying that my tongue felt a bit odd, not when I’d been taking the higher dose for three weeks already. But it was worrisome enough that I wanted my doctor to know, and to discuss alternate medications with him. I left a message this morning and the receptionist got back to me at lunch (on her lunch hour, I think) and gave me an appointment tomorrow morning. (Bless her; it really does pay to always be super understanding about cancellations and rescheduling on their end.)

Stopping my medication isn’t a huge thing. I mean, it is, and it isn’t. I haven’t been taking it for long enough for a full stop to have significant negative effect. On the other hand, the blessed sleep it was ensuring has taken a hit, and that’s ungood for the physical rest I need for the fibro (proper muscle relaxation and all that) as well as the mental and emotional wellbeing (bad sleep makes me short-tempered and significantly reduces my available spoons with which to cope with basic day-to-day stuff). And I still can’t think of why I started having the reaction three weeks into the treatment. Did it hit a particular saturation in my body or something? Or were my allergies stacking, as they sometimes do, and I started having a reaction to it now because there are so many other things taxing my system? I have no idea. Perhaps the doctor will. But stopping it and the reaction vanishing within twenty-four hours was pretty significant, I think. Even if it’s a stacking issue, it needs to be dealt with.

In Which She Takes A Deep Breath

Yesterday morning my blog started displaying php errors at the top of the screen. The last time this happened was in 2008, when my host upgraded their end and my blog software didn’t play nicely with it. I tried to upgrade, we lost the RSS feeds for a while, and the blog was broken in a way I couldn’t fix. It mysteriously fixed itself a year or so later, but having been scarred by previous upgrade attempts (the great mySQL disaster to 2006, anyone?) I resisted upgrading until I absolutely had to. Which was yesterday.

So I did. I backed everything up a billion different ways, and I struggled with an anxiety attack all day. And then after the upgrade… the blog wouldn’t display. Nada. White page. This is so common, I later discovered, that it even has a colloquial term on the boards, “the White Screen of Death.”

Anywhats. I let it go, knowing that the upgrade had worked (mostly) since my dashboard and back end were all functional. I left a note on the support boards asking for help, and Meallanmouse sent me a message with a link to more common fixes and saying she’d try to help if I needed it, which was terribly nice of her. I couldn’t do anything overnight, so I let it go.

That’s huge for me, you know, not obsessing over something I can’t fix right away. I’ve been having a lot of trouble with anxiety lately, which was one of the reasons I’m back on medication. (Which, conveniently enough, addresses my fibro issues, too, so more bang for my buck. Yay for doctors who actually trust that I know what I’m talking about, and yay for being able to admit I need help!)

Anywhats, I delivered children and ran errands this morning (I am now well stocked with tea again, yay), and when I got home, I checked my messages. Someone had answered my board post with specific suggestions, so I ran a couple of those checks and found the error in a misbehaving theme. So voila, now the blog is upgraded, behaving, and displaying, in tidy new clothes. I’m leaving well enough alone for the moment; I’ll play dress-up with it sometime later. (I miss having a photo banner across the top, for example; I’ve missed it for years and years.)

So that’s where the wee blog owlies are at. If you couldn’t see them yesterday, that’s why. But now they’re back in line and hooting softly to themselves about their new digs. We’ll spruce the place up once we’re comfortable painting the walls.

In Which She Tries Not To Laugh

Owlet is sick. She’d been moody and prone to bursting into tears over tiny things in the latter half of last week, but Friday she manifested a full-blown, terrible cold. Friday bedtime and Saturday nap were awful experiences for everyone. She was so sick she just moaned and screamed for ages, stuck in that cycle that toddlers can’t break sometimes, and once she was asleep Friday night she woke up pretty much every hour moaning, “Noses running, noses running.” Poor bunny.

Then, of course, the clocks went back on Saturday night. She’s old enough now that we don’t have to spend the week leading up to a time change shifting the schedule by ten minutes every day to be in line with the new settings. Still, the first nap of Daylight Savings Time is always tricky. We put Owlet to bed, and she kept getting up. (I would like to blame the time shift for this, but she does it often.) I’d put her back to bed four times, and told Sparky to be quiet half a dozen times. I heard a bang from her room, then silence. Maybe she just whacked her hand into the wall while turning over, I thought. It was quiet for a little while longer, and then bang again; it sounded like she was hitting a drawer or something. I opened her door with a little more power than I should have, because I was getting cross with both kids… and there she was, sitting on her little potty, falling asleep with her head nodding to the side, where it was hitting the side of her dresser.

I picked her up, pulled up her leggings, and tucked her into bed. I don’t think she even woke up. It was all I could do not to laugh; she was so determined not to sleep, and she looked so funny.

It was adorable. I still feel bad for her, though; she’s just knackered by this horrible cold, coughing so hard that she sounds like her lungs are being ripped out by the roots, and while she’s getting a bit better, I suspect she’ll be home on Monday, too.

March Break Date

I’ve been struggling with a really bad bout of depression this past week, so I’ve been pretty quiet. Most of the time I’m fighting bursting into tears for no apparent reason, and just feeling really, deeply sad.

I handed in a project yesterday, and today Sparky and I went out on a date day, as it’s his March break week. We dropped off a bag of cloth diapers I sold, I deposited my paycheque (yet again, gone as soon as it hit my account — someday I will be able to enjoy it being there for more than a minute or two), and then I took him to our bookstore, ostensibly to pick up the next book in a series we’re reading together, but my ulterior motive was the 20% off Lego sale they were running. I thought his eyes were going to fall out of his head when he read the poster. So since I’d encouraged him to bring the twenty dollars he’d saved up, he had a $25 gift card, and he had a $10 reward for one hundred practice sessions of cello (we keep track!), he walked out with two books, one each from a series he’s reading, and two Lego kits.

Then we went into the adjacent Starbucks and I bought him a hot chocolate and a Rice Krispie square, and he read one of his new books while having his treat. Seeing him so happy was really nice.

I had a wonderful moment while we were in the bookstore. We’d gone through the Lego and the younger chapter book section, and had ended up in the 9-12 area. We were both sitting on the floor, our coats open, and he was reading aloud to me from one of the books he had chosen. I sat there, smiling at him, not really hearing what he was reading — he was reading way too quickly, so I couldn’t understand the individual words. He does that when he’s super excited and eager to share something, and usually I rein him in, but this time I didn’t worry about it. I just listened to his voice, and watched him bend over the hardcover book, holding it open with one hand and gesturing with the other as he read aloud to me. I didn’t have to worry about rushing him anywhere since we had the whole day together, and I didn’t feel like nagging him about his reading. I just enjoyed sitting there with my son, listening to him read a book aloud to me, both of us being happy about being there together. It was a very special moment, and I have no idea how long we sat there, to be honest. I only suggested we move on when another mum and her daughter came along and I felt like we were in their way. I wish we had more time for things like this together.

In Which She Shares Her Excitement Regarding Processing Fleece For The First Time

I’m going through a rough fibro patch. Everything is achy, my hands can’t grab things correctly and I have reduced sensitivity in my fingertips, and my energy levels are about equal to sitting in a chair and not doing much else. There are other crappy things going on, and I’ve had to drop cello lessons and stop going to orchestra for a while as well, so I don’t get my one evening away from the house. I’ve just handed in another work project that was fun but draining, since it was a book of home DIY renovation projects and all the measurements needed checking and formatting, and I have been handling a yucky sinus cold through it, too.

So I thought I’d share some of what’s been interesting me lately.

Last fall my friend Stephanie bought a couple of fleeces at a fibre festival, and asked if I wanted to share some. I bought a pound of brown Corriedale fleece and some white Lincoln locks as well, and she shipped them up to me in November. They sat in their ziplock bags till this month, when the Ravellenic Games launched in concert with the Winter Olympics.

As you know, Bob, The Ravellenic Games are a fun event where you challenge yourself to do something fibre arts-related between the opening and closing ceremonies of whatever Olympics are being held. There are fun categories for knitting, crocheting, spinning, and weaving, and permutations thereof, and the point is to really challenge yourself somehow: do colourwork for the first time, teach yourself a new skill, or plan to do a huge project in only two weeks. My online knitting group of mums decided to call ourselves Team Coconut Two-Sters this year (long story, but the name partially came about because one of our awesome mums is a graphic artist, was bored at work one day, and started doing deliberately bad Photoshopped images of our two-year-old kids in coconuts), and this is my team avatar!

One of the events is the Fleece to FO (finished object) Long-Track, where you spin your yarn and then knit it into something. Stephanie and I decided this was a great occasion to each process some of our fleece and do something with it. Since the timeframe was limited, I decided to spin a bulky yarn and knit a pair of mittens. (Since I’m knitting mittens, they also qualify for the Mitten Moguls event, hurrah!)

Processing fleece means washing and prepping it for spinning. The fleece I started with was exactly the fleece that had been shorn from the sheep, greasy and dirty. I started with a cold water soak to dissolve most of the basic dirt, which sank to the bottom of the dishtub I was using. Check out that dirty water. And this is just a water soak, no soap! The silt at the bottom of the dishtub was icky.

Then I did a hot water wash, with original Dawn dish soap. (It’s a classic for washing fleece, because it really goes to town on the lanolin and grime.)

I did two washes, and I think I either washed too much at once or didn’t let it soak long enough, because after the fleece dried it was still somewhat sticky. I wasn’t sure this was wrong, though, since this was my first go, and I carded up a bit and tried spinning it longdraw from a wee rolag. It didn’t draft well, and I didn’t know if this had to do with the stickyness of the fleece or my carding technique. Figuring a second wash couldn’t hurt, I gave it another soapy bath, and when it dried it was much softer and fluffier.

Here’s what it looked like as I began to separate out the locks from the dried fleece.

I carded about two-thirds of the clean fleece in the week leading up to the Olympics. Since I don’t have hand carders or a drum carder (someday, someday) I used a pair of dog slicker brushes. I left a lot of the nepps and second cuts in, because I wanted a tweedy, rustic yarn. (Also, I didn’t want to lose any more weight/fibre.) I picked out a lot of the vegetable matter as I carded, but I’m only human and some got left in, to be picked out as I spun.

I had a pile of rolags, ready to go on the day of the opening ceremonies!

I spun two bobbins’ worth of singles, and plied them that first day. It turns out spinning bulky yarn goes really quickly! I’d done some sampling before I began and I’d originally wanted a bulky single, but that wasn’t working well for me, so I spun slightly lighter singles and did a two-ply yarn instead. When I measured my yarn I discovered I only had about 60 yards instead of the 100 I needed, so I spun up the rest of the rolags over the next day, realized I’d need even more fibre, and spun the rest of my clean fleece. I didn’t want to waste time carding them, so I just teased the fleece with my fingers till it was loose and even more fluffy, and spun right from handfuls of that.

It worked just as well, and I got the added bonus of the yarn having tiny little bits of curly crimp popping out here and there. I was done spinning by the second evening, and cast on my mittens the next day.

Here’s what the yarn looks like! I love how the paler tips of the locks contrast with the darker fleece from closer to the body of the sheep, and when spun it creates a beautiful variegation. That’s a bulky yarn at 4 WPI (wraps per inch, as marked on my handy little WPI tool, there).

I’d decided to knit mittens because I’d never tried before, though I’ve knit socks and so I figured the sock-knitting basics would carry me through the cuff and hand of the mitten, and only the thumb gusset would be new. (For those of you keeping score at home, that’s processing fleece for the first time, carding it for the first time, and knitting an item I’d never knitted before in a limited timeframe. Optimistic!) I found a pattern and began, frogged it and tried again, then found a different pattern because it still wasn’t working for me. The second pattern was wonderful, and I knit the first mitten in two evenings, and the second in another two evenings. And I used just over half the yarn I’d spun; I’d panicked for no reason after all.

So then there I was, halfway through the Olympics with my goals reached, and this extra yarn. I should use that up, I thought, and looked for a hat pattern on Ravelry that used less than 100 yards of bulky yarn. I found one and cast on. The brim is knit separately on straight needles, then seamed together to make a tube, stitches picked up along one side, and the crown is knitted in the round from there. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Part of that big brim gets flipped up and pinned in place with a brooch or a button.I have the perfect button for it, I think. If I finish in time, this will qualify for the Hat Halfpipe event.

Knitting bulky things goes quickly, so this should be done by the closing ceremonies, no problem. Mittens are easy, I have discovered, and I will knit more. (Not right now, of course, but in the future, certainly.)

So that’s my adventure with processing my own fleece and working with quickie handspun. I can’t get any closer to doing it all myself unless I actually shear the sheep.

Trudging Through January

I need to be honest with myself about something. It’s okay to not enjoy what you’re doing. It’s a valid way to feel, especially in January when sunlight is at a premium and the cold snaps suck the life out of your bones and soul.

The project I’m handling for work right now started out as okay. It was given to me in a rough state, and I had plenty of warning regarding its requirements and inflexible deadline. The editor asked specifically for me to handle it, which was flattering and confidence-boosting, and my copy chief gave me a general raise for the consistently excellent quality of my work (woo!) plus an extra project-specific raise because it was heavy and on a tight deadline. I went in very positively. And as the pages dragged on, I got more and more bogged down. I began to feel irritated with the author for not doing her work properly. And then as I hit the halfway point, that irritation bloomed into fully formed anger, and I started dragging my figurative heels. Working on it made me feel so negative that I found all sorts of ways to not work on it, which is unlike me. (Having to go the grocery store every day this week was not a way to avoid work; it was necessity because things weren’t being written on the list as they were needed, and while it gave me a bit of the break in the morning between dropping the kids off and coming home to work, it was still frustrating on another level.) I was having so much trouble that I couldn’t choose music to work to, which is a sign that something has gone very, very wrong indeed. Nothing worked.

I have to struggle with some inner tension about this. I don’t like not enjoying what I do. I take pride in my work, and I get seriously upset when others don’t. When sitting down to work became an instant trigger for anger, I needed to step back and think about what I was doing and how I was handling it. It’s my job to fix other people’s writing. If they did it right the first time, I would be out of that job. I was requested for this project because I am sensitive to an author’s reception of an edited manuscript. (Been there, done that, and apparently I am also naturally gentle and civil in my communication.) Part of my frustration is also stemming from how slow my pages-per-hour rate has been, because the manuscript needs so much work. I’m working hard and feeling like I’m getting nowhere, which is always guaranteed to tax my patience.

I know part of my tension is also coming from the weather. We’re suffering an incredibly bitter cold snap right now. The kids haven’t been able to play outside for a week, which means that the daily high temperature has been below -25 C for over a week now. Owlet is going through some kind of developmental phase where her own patience is being tested, and she’s flipping into tantrum mode so easily that we’re kind of taken aback, because it’s very unlike her to do that. Sparky is working on taking responsibility for bringing home the correct books and papers necessary to do his homework, and you can read between the lines there and extrapolate the frustration both of us are feeling about that.

So I have had to step back and disengage from my personal frustration about this project. I am here to help this person. Being angry about the uneven research and the vague, circuitous writing and incomplete sentences doesn’t help. It’s my job to turn lazy, vague writing into succinct, active prose that conveys information clearly to the reader. This is a non-fiction project (as my last three have been — hmm, that’s interesting; I edit fiction more quickly, I must remember that) so I’m doing a lot of fact-checking. That slows my pages-per-hour rate a lot.

I will put on yet another pot of tea, and get back to it, now that I feel a bit more grounded and on an even keel again. Sometimes I just need to write it out.