Thank you so much to everyone who sent me well-wishes and speedy healing thoughts! I thought that I was superwoman and would be up and back at work on Thursday…Um, nope. I slept more than half that day away and was too sore to be up and moving for more than 30 mins at a time. Friday started much better and I was thinking that I could possibly get away from the couch or sitting down all the time and I did do a bit better. I was feeling “swimmy” (you know the way the movies portray a person on drugs? That wavy, watery, swimmy feeling that the person always experiances? Thats what I mean) And this was without the drugs. Just trying to be normal. Anyway, J made me lie down and while I was hoping to get thru the day without a nap, I ended up sleeping for 3 hours and waking up feeling so much better. Last night I took some more of the “good” drugs and they really space me out and make me want to veg, zone and sleep. I woke up today and was feeling a LOT better and dont feel like I did too many crunches…just like I did just enough to feel. And sometimes feel like something was ripped out thru my bellybutton…naturally Nothing tastes good to me and for the first time in my life, I just dont want to eat anything. Yesterday, J made halibut with Teriakki sauce and mashed potatos and it was the first thing that actually smelled good and I wanted. I had a few bites of both and was done. Today, I had some fruit and an iced coffee and a bit of bagel. I didnt and dont want anything else. Food just is not appealing in any way. Not the best way to lose weight and I will talk to my doctor on Monday.

I am painting a room in J’s dads house for the BRAND-NEW TWINS!!! J’s step-mom just gave birth to twin boys on Wednesday and my gift to them is a painted baby’s room in a beautiful creamy yellow, seafoam green and this really cool colour called “Inchworm” for the contrasting trim. The moving and stretching is JUST enough for me to feel good and the fact that I am here in the house makes it easy for me to sit down and relax when I get to feeling swimmy again. The family will be back from Anchorage/Palmer the Monday after Easter and the room should be done and fume free by then.

Why fume free? Because the weather has been so beautiful and sunny and warm and I have been able to leave the windows open all day long. Why is it like this? Not because of any weather pattern but because I have needed to be lying down all day! Thank goodness for the windows and wind-blocking houses.

My Lola socks have become my “Sheer Gall” socks. With that stripe of neon green, they just scream impudence to me I started them just as I was starting to have pains and finished them as I was recovering making the name just perfect. I will post pics tomorrow or Monday along with my pattern for them. This brings my “milage” (more like yardage) to 730+ yards down for the LnV marathon. Good thing they extended the date to July 15th…maybe I can establish a goal for myself by then too

For a few nights this past week I had been woken up in the middle of the night with this extreme pain in my lower chest/upper stomach. Nights one and two woke me up with these pains but werent so bad that I couldnt sleep. Night 3 nothing. No pain, no nothing. Night 4 woke me up and kept me up for quite a few hours and made me really sick. Night 5 held nothing pain wise but I was so scared that it would that it took me a long while to fall asleep. Day 6, J came into town (!) and we were talking about me calling in “sick” but about 2pm the pain came back just after I ate some lunch. This time, it was almost unbearable. I was sick quite a few times and really did go home sick because I hurt so bad. J and I talked about me going to the doctor but I was resistant because it would cost “alot”. J said that was dumb and I promised call the next day for an appointment. I really had never had pain that lasted long enough that I would even think of going to see the doctor but that pain from day 6 lasted until 5am on day 7. Day 7, I was pain free until 10 ish because that is when I finished a cup of cocoa and banana ginger bread from a local coffee shop. I could feel the pain coming on immediatly and that it was going to be really bad. P took one look at me and said “lets go”. I made my appointment for 1230 and by the time I was at the doctors office at 12 to fill in papers, I was in so much pain that I was crying and trying my best not to move.

I swear that I have never been in such pain in my entire life and Holy God, I wouldnt wish that on anyone. The best way that I can explain it is the feeling of being punched over and over again with an uppercut without any hope of stopping. The doctor came in talked to be about my history of this pain, got me up on the table and I couldnt even lay down. Stretching out HURT, him tapping lightly on my upper back made me wince and move away from him, when he touched my upper stomach, the tears flowed without stopping and he helped me sit up. Then he asked me if I would go to the hospital with this pain and for the first time in this whole episode, I realised that this was hospital worthy pain. I said yes and he pulled his car around and away we went across the street. Apparently, I really freaked him out because the nurse told me later on, he ran in wild-eyed calling for a wheelchair and looking and sounding scared. I had called J before I left the doctors office and I was really hoping that he wouldnt have gone out fishing already. Lucky for me, they hadnt and he showed up at the hospital just after I got there.

The lovely nurse got me into a room immediatly, drew blood and gave me a shot of morphine 2, all while sitting in the wheelchair. Thank god for morphine. For the first time in a 24 hours I was almost pain free. I was still tender to the touch and before I could get settled into the bed I was on my way to get an ultrasound. Before we left the office, my doctor had told me that the problem was either my pancreas, ulcers or gall bladder. This is where the ultrasound tech focused and after about half a hour of prodding me in still rather tender places, I got to wipe off the ultrasound goo and get dressed again. Back in my chair, I was told that I had gall stones and quite a lot of them. One was HUGE at 8mm. Back in my room, J sat with me as I got another shot of morphine and drifted in a mild haze of painless goodness. Finally, I was back to being completely pain free (how I normally live my life) and despite the fact that this painfree exsistance was thru the help of drugs, I was OK with that. As she was giving me the morphine, the nurse mentioned that this Scottish doctor would be in to talk to me and that he is a great surgon and I would be in good hands with him. The fact that he was mentioned to me as a surgon was the part that threw me off. Surgon…what the heck were they going to do to me?

Apparently, they were going to have to take out my gall bladder. At 8am on what would be day 8, I was scheduled to be one organ short. Here I am, 11 am on day 9 and I have 4 holes in me and have ruined my chances and dreams of ever becoming an international swimsuit model because of my scarring issues. Oh well. J was there thru the whole thing and has been taking great care of me ever since. I dozed all day yesterday and I feel like I have done WAY too many crunches and am sore that way. I have eaten a little bit but really, I am not hungry at all. I know that I have to eat and that is why I have eaten at all but I have stuck with chicken soup mainly and some salad. J is so sweet an has taken off of work for the next few days until I can move easily enough to take care of things around the house and the dog by myself. I dont remember anything about the surgury itself and I am so happy to be pain free. There was no other choice to become and stay painfree without removing my gall bladder and I am glad that I didnt really hesitate to have it done. Thank goodness for a great surgon.

BTW…I had great comments on my Lola socks from all the nurses who were amazed to see a “young person” knitting! And my socks now smell of hospital:(

Sometimes ‘ole MN is quite psycotic…and I mean this in the nicest way. Friday and Saturday were lovely and warm, cloudy but warm. Today it is snaining (snow + rain = snain). Slippery, slushy and nasty. It was lovely out earlier and smelled of spring.

Herring season is almost upon us and it is a beautiful thing. There are Seiner all in the harbor and Packers, erm, packed in too I love this time of year if only because of the bald eagles that abound. I counted 50 on Thursday and that was just coming over the bridge to the school. Granted, the seagulls are flocking like crazy too but that just makes me smile. J always smiles when I oohh and aahh over the eagles and make a fuss about seeing so many around. I point them out when we travel and have to force myself to focus on the road when I see them driving. I hope that I can live here for years and years to come and still feel wonder over these beautiful things and times of the year.

Lola Saga: Ok, so I thought that I would have them done and I would have…if I didnt have to stop and frog them both. I didnt have to frog them because they would have fit OK but I didnt want OK, I wanted perfect. I did my first short row heel and I cant wait to see how they fit. (Hopefully they do!!) I have never made or worn SRH yet. Not too bad There is just one thing that makes me groan when I look at the socks and really, it leaves me in a bit of awe. They are knit exactly the same way. On the same size needles. With the same number of stitches. I just have to smile and shake my head when I look at them. Part of me wants to rip the “slow striped” one out and the other part loves them both. How simple am I that *that* is what makes me happy. I dont think that I am going to get far up the leg with this skein of Lola and am taking care to knit only a few rows before switching socks and knitting the other about .5″ beyond the 1sts point. I am liking this pair of socks and am having fun messing about with the ribbing. Its kinda my own pattern of ribbing and is modeled after my fave pair of commercial woollen socks. Its meant to hug my feet and hopefully it does just that.

MN has gotten more crazy as I typed this…about 15 mins from start to finish and is all out snowing. Big fat flakes and quickly falling but not yet sticking.

*ETA: Pictures of a Seiner and 3 packers! Sorry about the snow…MN at large!*

Just when you think that you have everything under control in your knitting, sometimes a really dumb mistake comes up and bites you in the a**. I was so proud of myself for knitting along so well on my Mariah sleeve. I had finished the C:A pattern and 2 repeats of the C:B and was well into the 3rd repeat when I looked ahead to the C:C and saw that there would be a funny stitch issue (cableing stitches that werent “that way”) so I looked back at the instructions and realised something.

I forgot to increase.

Not a single increase.

18″ of beautiful cable and even knitted goodness and I was supposed to increase at the 6″ mark and every 7th row after that. Um, yeah. Can you hear the amphibious reptiles calling? With a sigh and a resigned feeling, my 18″ of sleeve became 5.5″

The odd part of this is that I dont really feel all that horrid. I know how fast it went up and I know how fast I can do it again. I had made a misscrossed cable at just about that point so I guess it was just fate that I would have to rip this back I fixed the cable, started the increases and all will be right in the world.

My Lola socks have become the socks that I work on in my down time at work. I swear, the next job I want will keep me so busy that I will want to knit because I am tired and need to relax, not because I have to have something to keep my hands busy. The good thing is that I can knit and watch a computer lab without care. I have gotten to the heel on one sock and will get the other to that point and then make my foray into the strange new world of short-row heels. I’m just a bit scared so please think happy thoughts my way Friday night and Saturday!

Ok, not really. I ordered from Sheri not more than 5 days ago and its here today! I was kinda crushed at first when I checked the mail today because there was no box. I looked in the mail room and there was no box there either. I really wanted to show P the yarn because I know that he wants to make an order of Cider Moon for himself. No so much because he is a knitter but because he wants me to make him something! We agreed that my “payment” for knitting him something would be him buying his skein and then buying me one of my choice for myself. OK by me!!! Anyway, he went home from work early and didnt get to see the BOX that was waiting for me in my ROOM!!! Not only did I get this beautiful Glacier in Juneau : I highly suggest that everyone takes a look at this picture. This IS the colour of this yarn (of course, YMMV if you dont have the same Mac monitor ) I really like it. Those greens and purples really get me, especially when mated with blues.

But I became a member of Loopies Groupies!!! Yes, I realise that this means that I have a problem. You only can join this elite group if you have placed 6 or more orders with the Loopy Ewe and as this order of Glacier took me to 6, I got in! We wont talk about how I was going to buy another few skeins today…especially after I saw that she has Cookie A’s patterns. I really want to make Rhiannon. Really really really. But there is no way I am buying 8 skeins of Louet Gems in FINGERING weight. Thats $62 just for the yarn. $68.50 with the pattern. Um…I dont think so. Beautiful and such an amazing piece of work but I would be so scared to wear them and I actually think that I would get tired of knitting them. I think that I will get the pattern and try to make it my own by doing it in sportweight. ANYWAY…Sheri gifted me with an awesome bag, skein of Opal 6 in blues, greys, a bit of teal and black and Dove chocolate. This bag couldnt have come at a better time because I was thinking of needing to buy a new plastic box to contain all my sock yarn. I LOVE IT! Thank You Sheri!

I have decided to chronicle the Lola Autumn of the Sea saga with an update every few days. It might go even faster than a few days because this is knitting up pretty fast. I am creating my own pattern and trying a new style of knitting by knitting from both ends of the ball of yarn AND doing it toe up AND AND I’m gonna give short-row heels a try. I’m not quite to that point but I plan on using SKS to do it. I might get through the cuff and switch to a different yarn because I KNOW this single skein wont be enough for a pair of socks tall enough for J. SO…if anyone out there bought this Lola from The Loopy Ewe and has access to a good LYS or know of a match for ANY of the colours in it, I would LOVE to hear from you. Here is a picture of where I stand thus far: This doesnt give the colour justice and it really is a bright, bright, almost neon of everything. I love how fast this is knitting up and I really think that I might have a full pair of socks by next Sunday. Granted, that is only if I dont touch the Mariah or the PNW shawl and I dont think I can do that.