I can't think of a good title for this post.

I'm usually dynamite at thinking of "sexy" titles for our workshops, programs and institutional blog postings, but today folks, I got nothin'.

Marcella's passing knocked the stuffing out of us. We simply lost the ability to focus. Both of us. Her son, which was to be expected, but me too, which was a surprise - to me at least. My sister, who spent 30 years as a nurse, and who is also a pragmatist by training, doesn't get it. "She was 93. She lived a great life. She didn't suffer", she told me these things over and over, to no avail. But I figured out. It doesn't matter. When someone you cared about deeply for over 30 years is gone, it leaves a hole in your life. Double that for my husband and siblings and I cannot imagine. So we've just been getting by. Our 25th anniversary came and went, and though we recognized it, we still haven't exchanged the very special gifts we have for each other. Partially it was emergency dental work, then the flu, at precisely the wrong time, but I also don't think we had the heart for it.

Then there was the very disappointing election. I'm still stunned by a country who can elect someone who made every facet of this country worse. It isn't simply that he accomplished nothing. He made it worse, with the most deceitful administration I've ever heard of or studied (and I lived through Nixon). We, personally, are on the precipice (I'm not using the word cliff deliberately) of massive health care issues (e.g., won't be able to afford our co-pays), in 2013. I'm still wondering who actually can afford the "Affordable Health Care". But don't worry, I can get free birth control pills. (I hear the hormones make good plant food. The only purpose they would serve for me.)  I feel a rant coming on so I'll stop now.

We are just catching up. Seriously. We just figured out where we will be spending Christmas. One of our families isn't happy. (Sorry Mom.) I spent the last week fussing about what to send our teenage nephews for gifts. Husband finally settled it, with one word "check".

Last year it was a town in turmoil. This year, it is all personal turmoil.

Nonetheless here are some scenes that deserve to be preserved:

An office Christmas tree (that we were discouraged from erecting last year) that each day had homemade "treats" appear on it and in it - including loaves of sweet bread. (I was beginning to be afraid of that tree.)

A Christmas party for the knitting teachers from the LYS where the owners gave everyone Nameste Better Buddies (mine is eggplant).

An SUV driving down Beaver Avenue with a red nose on the front and reindeer horns attached to the windows. 

The barista at my local coffee shop tickled to death that her finals are over.

A concert of Duke Ellington's Nutcracker arrangements.

So all is not bleak. At the grocery store, the checkout person was chatting with the customer in front of me waxing poetic about how it will be nice "to get the town back" for a little while. I agree.

We just need to remember the meaning of the holiday, and get our feet under us again in 2013. 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everyone. We start again in 2013.

Bad Blogger.......

.... I started this yesterday, but real life, uh, I mean my job, interrupted.

When I wrote the title I was thinking about that commercial where the woman admonishes her credit score as if it were a puppy ("Bad, bad 509."). Yeah, my brain is still coasting.

• But we finally got our taxes done and mailed (hubby is a Luddite). Besides the Post Office really needs our help.

• My personnel review, as expected, came back like a boomerang for [minor] revision. [deleted text to protect my long term employment] If you're really interested, email me for the rant. I long for the days, when I sat down with my supervisor, and she and I had a casual chat about what was good, what needed work, and where the unit was headed in the near term. Along with that there were always griping about our own supreme poo bah. Often I was given a new and usually challenging assignment. Fun times....

• I have one more med test lined up, to complete my winter of getting hit with the illness stick. This hopefully will wrap up my odyssey [fingers crossed]. I did however emerge with one overarching issue, and there is a not so simple solution...lose about 25 lbs.....There I've said it. It's not so simple because even though I'm a pretty good eater....little fast food, no soft drinks, not big on sweets (outside of sugar in my tea, and dark, fine chocolate), I am weight loss resistant. I have a bit of insulin resistance going on...yes, it is documented. I am also exercise averse....meaning outside of yoga, I hate exercise. A deep abiding hate. I find it wasted time, unless I'm going somewhere....like hiking. Oh yeah...and I'm over 50, you can figure out the rest.
  
  The bright side is I could knit smaller sizes! I don't know how I'm going to do this, but it must be done. My doctor, who is really a nice honest gentleman, simply said, yes, the weight mattered. And I'm smart enough to know this.
  
  
• But for following along this far you get a bonus.
  

MORE French Press Slippers!! Yea!! I know what you're thinking--that the flu back in January, or bad daytime TV, or both, killed brain cells. Actually, these are a Christmas gift 2010 for my Mom. So there's a method to the madness.




Details:

French Press Felted Slippers
Less than 2 skeins Lambs Pride Worsted (85 wool/15 mohair) my felting favorite. And I got them for half price at our LYS Superbowl sale.
The delightful Pistachio colorway







More details:


The button.....precious no? Bought it at JoAnn fabrics.












The soles with puffy paint hearts, which really do make them less slippery. (I know this because I jammed my too big flipper into them to check.) Yeah, not nicely drawn, but it was a bitch because the tip of the paint bottle kept catching in the wool. My mom's house has mainly hard wood floors, and if she fell and broke something because of slippers, MY slippers, my sister would murder me in my sleep.






I will soon be starting yet another pair in a wonderful goldish color. But because I don't know who they're for yet....I have several options, I'll forgo the puffy paint until I decide. Stay tuned.

I also have another finished piece that I've been wearing a lot this spring, but I'll save that for next week. Knitting has been verra slow lately. Work has been so busy, by the time I get home, grab something simple for dinner, I'm falling asleep and knitting isn't even an option.

Sometimes it's good, sometimes not so much.

Thanksgiving is usually a pretty low key holiday around these here parts. It was this year too...for the most part.

We visited my in-laws. Including my 90 year old, 8 weeks post hip-replacement MIL. How's she doing? Well, if dragging her quad cane behind her, like a bad puppy is any indication, pretty damn well. Around the house, other than getting out of bed in the morning, she really doesn't need it at all. She will use convenient furniture to support her if necessary, but she cruises around pretty effortlessly, albeit slowly. She carries the cane out with her, but it almost seems like a security blanket. I, personally, wouldn't care if she carried Gandolf's staff, if it helped.

If any of you watched Extreme Makeover Home Edition on November 29th, you saw my sister-in-law's employer in action. They were the contractor that built the home. She did all the behind the scenes stuff with the producers. I don't know much about it because we were watching the Steelers lose yet again.

The holiday downside was the unwelcome news that a relative, to which my DH was particularly close - a year younger no less, has apparently (I say apparently because we don't have all the details yet) been diagnosed with a vicious cancer. If it is what we've been told, the outlook is grim. It is particularly heartbreaking.

It's me...I'm back.

Last week I was in Denver, CO for a conference - a BIG conference. Truthfully, I wasn't delighted to go. I had issues at home that needed to be resolved and managed, and the timing sucked. Well, I'm now glad I went.

The home "issues" while they didn't sort themselves out, at least remained manageable, and I got some "away" time I didn't realize I needed so badly.

The week prior to my trip Denver got FEET of snow. The week I was there the temps were in the high 60s and low 70s without a flake in sight. To say it was bizarre, doesn't quite describe it.

The conference was in the Colorado Conference Center. The upper level is an enormous atrium with stunning views of the Rockies--when they were not fog shrouded.



Outside the Convention Center the designers added a bit of whimsey. See the big BLUE bear peering in the windows?



Seems perfect for Denver. The Denverites I met were all very nice, and friendly! Even, are you sitting down?, the bus drivers. (I'm from Pittsburgh, and the natives are wonderful friendly there, UNLESS they are bus drivers. At least that's my experience....Maybe it has to do with passengers like me who leave their clog in the middle of the street while boarding a bus.....Hummmmm.)

On Wednesday night, I took a bus to The Lamb Shoppe. See this is how I know about bus drivers. I got some info from the hotel concierge about where to actually get a bus. Not only did this gentleman give me information, he walked outside the hotel with me to point me in the correct direction! When I got on the bus, it was dark (Standard Time), and I had no idea where I needed to get off, other than between Madison and Maple. I told the bus driver that I needed to get off at that stop (I knew the bus stop was near the shop because I called them), and would he alert me? He said "Sure!". Well, after about 15 minutes I got antsy, and we were in a VERY residential neighborhood, so I stood up to get a better look. He saw me and said, don't worry, it's another two stops away. He then told me where and when to get the bus back to downtown. When I told him I was going to a yarn store he said, "that's a first"..."it's usually BEAD stores!"

Anyway, another blogger/knitter once described the indecision of a knitter as "monkey mind". Well, I'm the original monkey. It used to happen in bead stores, I'd have a "plan" of sorts....("I'm going to buy Delicas.") Then as soon as I'm surrounded by gorgeous beads, well, forget it. I can't even remember I had a plan to begin with. That's exactly what happened in the Lamb Shoppe. The walls were just loaded with gorgeous yarns....seriously! Yarns that I've only read about. And here I was....with no room in my carry-on. In addition, there was a delightfully rowdy stitch and bitch group meeting up front. A table learning how to crochet, and another table of beginning knitters designing their own mittens...... Action packed doesn't quite describe it. For someone who, for the most part, is a solitary knitter, this was like an oasis.

So I wandered around for about 30 minutes, I bought some cotton sock yarn for my cotton loving mother, some Malabrigo, and a Skacel Zauerbal sock yarn, and herein lies a story.

A colleague of mine, who will soon be retiring (snif), recently took an extended vacation. She had seen a moebius shawl at one of our local arts festivals and was immediately charmed by the concept. In my "go big, or go home" approach to most things I said. I can show you how to knit a moebius. She is barely a beginning knitter by the way..... She bought needles, lovely Lamb's Pride Lanaloft, and I helped her cast on.... At her vacation destination, her knitting attracted the attention of other knitters one of whom introduced her to a skein of Zauerbal. Yet again, she was charmed and tried to describe it to me when she got back. I had never seen the yarn. However, lo and behold, there was Zauerbal, right on the Lamb Shoppe shelf! So I bought one for her as a souvenir from Denver.

Anyway, here is a [bad] photo, of the Malabrigo worsted (Ginger Carrot--has it dawned on anyone yet that I buy yarns because I like the color names?), and the Zauerbal.



I am using the Malabrigo to knit another pair of Fetching mitts. This time for me. They will "match" nothing...but I don't care. Nyah, nyah. I knit an entire pair of mitts while I was in Denver. They were that fast...and travel makes for lots of knitting time. (Not necessarily in the air, however.)

These are for my sister this is a new type of Araucania yarn. Loved it!!



I will definitely make the palms deeper (longer?) for me though.

There's more, but it's late here, and I do want to go home eventually.........

When I began this post it was Veterans Day, and I was going to tell everyone to kiss an available service person to thank them. Even though it isn't Veterans Day, I'm thinking this might be a good idea anyway.

Quickie update ....

MIL update: Though surgery was successful, rehab has been slower than we had hoped. Mostly that it took a long time for the anesthesia to clear and my poor MIL kept falling asleep during her sessions. Time is a great healer though, and she is now feeling well enough to want to "get up and move" on her own. She'll be hobbling around, but hobbling independently. Needs to get her tiny appetite back though. As baffled Daughter #1 told me, "I can't understand it. I've never been not hungry in my life". My father-in-law, at home, is being nurtured by my delightful sisters-in-law with ongoing deliveries of delicious dainties and uninterrupted TV watching. However, we all suspect that he is reveling in his preferred diet of Raman noodles and frozen burritos. Daughter #1 says she sees the light at the end of the tunnel....she's also hoping it isn't a train.

News from Kitty Camp: Dementia and Velcro (aliases that only I call them, but are much more descriptive of their personalities), are "surviving", and the kitty counselor (read: sitter) has even had a few Dementia sightings. Dementia barely tolerates most people, and LOVES my sister, so spends most of her time hiding when my sister is at work. The fact that she has appeared to a perfect stranger (albeit one bearing food and treats) is a good sign. It's kind of like a visitation from the Virgin. (Step back, because I'm probably going to be a black mark when the lightning hits!)

Here they are ready to "help" with the remodel:





Dementia is on the top...














Meanwhile I have a riddle:

What do you do, when you think you may be running out of yarn ..... (this applies to any project, but this is the Girasole...I'm not pulling it out! NOT!)

Answer Monday...maybe with photos.




P.S. Thanks for the offer of the adult beverage....I'm liking nice cabs at the moment.

P.P.S. A "just shut up" (for Just Shut Up Thursday) to Barak. Buddy, 45 interviews in 9 months? (To compare: Bush (6) Clinton (7), or the reverse, in the same time frame) 1000+ "I" references in 41 speeches? You are so played out.....