I have very sad news. Doug has osteosarcoma. It's a very aggressive form of bone cancer in dogs and literally has swollen his knee from nothing to huge in less than 2 weeks. He apparently has a fracture above the knee and is a ton of pain. To get rid of the pain, we're having his leg removed tomorrow. And then we'll be lucky if he lives another 4-6 months.
Ethan had a couple of huge cries today. I shed a few tears, which is extremely difficult for me, as I hardly ever cry. We gave Doug a bunch of roast chicken and skin tonight, which I think makes him feel pretty good. He has a fentanyl patch on his non-injured leg and has been given the NSAID Rimadyl. One can only hope these pain meds kick in tonight and keep on going through his surgery and recovery.
He had a series of x-rays today, including chest x-rays that did not yet show any metastasized tumors. This doesn't mean it hasn't metastasized; it just means they're not detectable yet (except through lots of bloodwork, which we're not going to do).
I just want Doug to have as little pain as possible for as long as he lives.
Our beloved dog Doug, who is now around 9 years old (we think), has a torn ACL in his right rear leg. It's awful. His confidence is shot, his morale is low, and he's in pain. We took him to the vet, who immediately referred him for surgery. I definitely don't think I know more than a vet does, but I'm all for other options than surgery for non-life-threatening injuries.
So, I did some research and found a Yahoo! group that discusses Conservative Management. I discovered a company (one of many) that makes prosthetics and orthoses for animals. So we've decided to have a stifle brace made for him from OrthoPets, in the hope that he can avoid surgery and start having the confidence to walk on his bad leg before he tears the ACL in the other leg.
Tonight we made a cast/mold of his leg and Brian will send it off to OrthoPets tomorrow. Hopefully, within a week we'll have his new brace. I was told that they usually start walking on it within 30 minutes of putting on the brace. I'm crossing my fingers.
There is an amazing episode of "Batman: The Brave and the Bold" coming out this week, of which I've seen a preview. Neil Patrick Harris as the villainous "Music Meister" is simply brilliant. I had no idea he has such a fantastic singing voice. I think it is premiering on Cartoon Network tomorrow (Friday, 10/23, 7:30 p.m.) night.
I've been watching this because Ethan is obsessed with CartoonNetwork.com, and turned me on to this preview, which I viewed a couple of days ago with him.
A while back M. and I did some experimentation with yarn dying with kool-aid. I tell you what, if you are wanting to kick a kool-aid habit, dying yarn with it should do it for you. It's kind of creepy how well it dyes the yarn. Kind of makes you wonder what it does to our insides. We started off with Knit Picks Bare Merino Wool Fingering weight yarn.
We did a couple of skeins of just solid. One with pink lemonade kool-aid for M. and one with black cherry kool-aid for me.
Then we branched out into multi-colored yarns. We tried two, three, and four colors:
I got the idea of hanging the yarn into the quart jars of kool-aid from a tutorial on the web. I thought the yarn above the jars would absorb the color, but it didn't, so I ended up with sections of undyed yarn in the multi-colored skeins. Here is the finished yarn from the first dying. It's hanging to dry outside on our patio.
I like the white sections in some of the color combos, but not all of them. Also, some of them turned out a little brighter/more pastel than I wanted, so I overdyed a few skeins a couple of weeks ago.
The skein on the left was originally dyed with orange and black cherry and then I overdyed it with a mixture of both orange and black cherry. The skein in the middle was originally dyed with tropical punch, grape, and lemonade and then overdyed with blue raspberry. The skein on the right was dyed with black cherry and then overdyed with grape. I'm pleased with how the over dyed skeins have come out. I have one more skein that I might overdye, but I haven't gotten it done yet.
I've started knitting with one of our dyed yarns. M. requested a pair of socks out of the pink lemonade dyed skein. This was specifically her skein.
This was the first skein that we dyed and I sort of messed it up, but it ended up being a happy accident. I had the kool-aid too concentrated and not enough water in the bowl to fully emerse the yarn, which meant that the color wasn't evenly distributed and there were some paler and even white spots. I was really upset with myself for messing up M.'s yarn, but it actually turned out really neat.
Just based on the kool-aid experience, I don't think I'll ever become a serious yarn dyer. It was a fun experiment, but not anything that I would want to do too much of. Plus there are so many fabulous indy dyed yarns out there for sale, that I'm not lacking for yarn!
This has already been a crazy fall and it's going to get crazier as it goes on. On the school/career front, I have started collecting data for my dissertation. This has eaten up a huge chunk of my time and has created a constant stream of things that I need to do each day. I should be done by the end of this week and I'll be relieved when it's over. I will then move directly into doing job interviews. We do everything way in advance in the accounting field, so I'll be interviewing for faculty positions that will start next fall. I've done one already and have more over the coming weeks. These interviews are all day affairs with research and sometimes teaching presentations and two days of travel to get there and then home again, so they are both fun and exhausting. Plus sometime in there I have to analyze the dissertation data and get it written up.
On to a more fun topic... knitting! I have finished up a number of projects that I haven't had time to blog about, so I'll just give quick details and pictures on each. The first up is the Wisp.
Over the summer, just about everyone my LYS made this out of the pattern yarn (Rowan Kidsilk Haze) and I just didn't like it. I think I just don't like that yarn because at some point someone made one out of malabrigo lace and I just loved it. After several false starts on other patterns with my Azul Profundo Malabrigo lace weight, I decided to jump on the Wisp band wagon. I knitted this on size 8 needles. I used the square circular needles which were kind of neat to knit with. The malabrigo is smaller gauged than the kidsilk haze, so it ended up a lot narrower, which was ok with me since what I really wanted was a scarf. I did 24 pattern repeats to get enough length on it.
The second project that I finished up was a pair of crazy, striped socks:
I made these out of two colorways of Noro Silk Garden Sock. One colorway was #252 and I lost the yarn band on the other colorway, so I'm not sure what it was. I think it was the same colorway that I made my very first scarf and hat out of. I used a basic sock pattern with just 12 rows of ribbing at the top and then the rest stockinette stitch. I alternated the colorways every 4 rounds on leg and foot of the sock and every 2 rows on the heel. I did the entire heel turn and toe in the non-#252 colorway. These turned out great. They are extremely warm and dense though, so I haven't gotten to wear them yet. I look forward to wearing them on some dreary day this winter when my dissertation and job search has me stressed and depressed, because really how can one not be happy when wearing crazy striped socks.
The next project was a quick little hat. I joined a Halloween Vampire swap on Ravelry. It's been fun. It's kind of like secret santa except that it's for Halloween and it's supposed to have a vampire theme. My spoilee for the swap appears to be a big Twilight fan, so I knitted her on of the patterns that were designed to replicate the hat that Bella wore in the movie on the beach at La Push.
I actually didn't care for the hat in the movie, but I've decided it's just the way the actress is wearing it. I had M. model the hat it looks adorable on her. I think I'm going to knit her one now. The hat knits up fast, but it's a killer on the hands. It's moss stitch, knitted in bulky yarn on size 7 needles.
The final project that I've finished up is what I have dubbed my "Vampire Scarf":
This is actually the Montego Bay Scarf pattern. I love this pattern and tried to knit it out of a different yarn a while back, but that yarn just wasn't right for this pattern. This time, I've knitted it in the much coveted Wollmeise Sockenwolle 100% Superwash yarn in the Rosenrot colorway. I call this my vampire scarf because I started knitting it only while watching True Blood this summer and then finished up while watching the Twilight movie and The Vampire Diaries. I love the scarf. I think my favorite part is the fringe, which is the only modification I made. The fringe was supposed to be braided with five strands folded double and I didn't like how thick the braids were, so I made them with three strands folded over.
M. and I did some kool-aid dying of yarn a while back and I overdyed some of it just recently, but I'm going to put those pictures in another post.
Truth: I was stunned to hear that President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize this year. I mean, has he actually done anything worthy of the Peace Prize yet? I think not. Which makes one wonder why he was awarded this most prestigious prize. I've heard pundits say it's because of the promise that he shows. Okay. I kinda get that, although I don't agree with it.
What I think is that we of the isolated United States of America have seriously underestimated how much the rest of the world absolutely despised President George W. Bush and his policies. And they are so ecstatically happy that his administration is no longer in power that it's possible the Nobel Peace Prize would have been awarded to any U.S. President who followed GW Bush. Yes, I believe the sentiments were that strong around the world.
[overhead shot of a table in an expensive modern-european restaurant. It's not a capital, but it's one of those cities on the thinktank/summit-circuit that treaties get named after. Two people are talking. A man in his fifties and a woman in her mid thirties. Both are understated in appearance, but obviously expensively dressed. Both of their smartphones are turned screen-down on the table. It's unclear to us who is the most important. And it's unclear which one is saying the following]
Governments and corporates know me as 'Switchboard', which is how I like to keep it.
I have an aptitude.
Well, a few aptitudes.
But, mainly - I'm very good at people.
Especially those who can't really be described as people anymore. I know what they're good for, what they want and - how to get hold of them.
I've never saved the world, but I've probably had lunch with someone who has.
I'm who you call if you have, y'know - a *really* big problem.
[ringtone]
Women have sexual power. Men do, too, but for some reason, women's sexual power is threatening to men. I'm speaking in generalizations, of course.
I've read hundreds of historical romances over the past 9 months, mostly taking place in England or Scotland. They usually play out thusly: Girl and boy meet, sparks fly, passion ensues, boy can't live without girl because of her newly discovered wanton ways (she was a virgin, of course, or a previously unfulfilled widow), boy desperately desires to possess girl, girl succumbs and marries boy, now she's his property and gestating his babies, the end.
What's up with that?
I totally understand that in the period settings of these books, when a woman married a man English law decreed that the woman and all of her worldly goods became the property of her husband. And I think this possession primarily had to do with the sexual power that men felt that women held over them. So men, who always held the political power, used whatever means necessary to make sure that women never held any real power. The society matrons in these books always have the power to decide who's allowed to enter the hallowed upper echelons, but this kind of power seems petty and meaningless to me. In some of these books, there are wives of political men who delicately and cleverly manipulate situations to benefit their spouse or political party, but they usually have to resort to flirting, sexual innuendo and outright affairs in order to get what they want.
And this pisses me off. I've heard a statistic that the romance genre is 40% of the consumer book market in the U.S. Here's one that seems more reasonable to me -- "Romance fiction was the largest share of the consumer market in 2008 at 13.5 percent", according to the Romance Writers of America. And something like 78% of the readers of romances are women.
Historically, men can't stand women having any kind of power. Women are physically weaker than men. Before the 20th century, women weren't permitted to become educated; if they pursued knowledge through books and formal education, they were derided and often outcast from society. Nevermind that there have been female British monarchs who often turned out to be far stronger than the male monarchs.
So a woman's power often is reduced to the only thing she does have control over, and that's her sexuality. And sexuality is definitely a powerful weapon, when wielded or used as a deterrent. I think most women still feel as if their primary power is their sexuality, which is why romance books appeal to women. They're looking for strong female characters, which abound in romance books; it's unfortunate that many of these female characters primarily use their sexuality to achieve their ends.
Which makes me think about what exactly is sexual power. I'm starting to believe that sexuality may be the greatest power of all. Men have created and used an abundance of killing machines, they've wielded intellectual and political power to make others bend to their will, but it's sexual power -- whether used by men or women -- that dominates all other powers. Maybe it's the drive to procreate, the perpetuation of the species, that propels us to brandish our individual sexual powers.
And now back to men wanting to control women's sexual powers. They feel threatened by this weapon of mass destruction and will do anything to tame those holding the power. The irony is that it's only a threatening weapon if one treats it that way. Take the Taliban. They will do anything to subjugate women, take away their sexual power. They (and other religious zealots of all persuasions) are terrified of women's sexual power. So they resort to desperate and, frankly, immoral measures to keep women down. But they're validating women's sexual power by their actions.
Hmmmm.
OK. I'm definitely going to see "Bright Star", a film by Jane Campion about John Keats. Can you believe that he died at age 25? I have read bits and pieces of his poetry, but am now committed to reading "Endymion".
Behold, my "Blanket of Insanity", a work in progress. When I was looking at quilt patterns and quilting material for the quilt that my grandmother made me, I fell in love with scrap quilts. I have tried three different times to learn to sew, once as a child, once a teenager, and once as an adult, and it has never stuck, so there is no way I will ever become a quilter or make myself a scrap quilt. Then I heard about sock yarn blankets, which seem to be the knitters equivalent to scrap quilts. These are blankets knit out of leftover sock yarn. I favorited a bunch of these on Ravelry, but never found a pattern that I just fell for. They all seemed so complicated that I felt like I would need to knit it all at once or else forget how to do it. Then I found the Zig Zag Pram Blanket pattern. I love zig zagged stripes as evidenced by the quilt I did have my grandmother make me and it's a simple enough pattern that I don't think I'll forget what I'm doing if I don't knit on it for a while. The pattern was for a small baby blanket, but I wanted a larger blanket, so I cast on 361 stitches instead of the stitch count called for by the pattern. I was hoping this would give me 5' wide blanket. I measured today and it's 56" wide, so not quite 5', but close. I also decided that it would drive me nuts to try to put a solid border around it as I go, so I decided to just skip the border.
I bought a set of size 7 circular needles with something like a six foot cable on them that I could just dedicate to this project. The plan was to knit up all of the sock yarn scraps that I currently have and then just put the blanket aside and knit in the leftovers each time I finish a pair of socks or any other project that uses sock weight yarn. I now have all of my scraps on hand knit in and the blanket is about 19" long. The yarns included so far are (from bottom of blanket up to the needles):
· Knit Picks Essential Sock Yarn Navy – used for garter stitch bottom border, never knit with before.
· Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock Medium weight Lemongrass – leftover from chevron scarf.
· Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock Medium weight Rolling Stone – left over from chevron scarf.
· Colinette Jitterbug Toscana – left over from first pair of simple socks.
· Brown Sheep Wildfoote Luxury Socks Brown Sugar – left over from second pair of simple socks (Wasn’t knitting up well with the size 7 needles, only knit a partial row with it and then switched to a different yarn).
· Claudia Handpaints Yarn Fingering Dessert Dusk – left over from the Dickerson Park Monkey socks.
· Claudia Handpaints Yarn Fingering Hokies – left over from the Hokie walker socks. This is the yarn that I traded S. for that turned our fingers orange.
· Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock Medium weight Farmhouse – leftover from second chevron scarf.
· Collinete Jitterbug Velvet Leaf – left over from second chevron scarf.
· Shubui Knits Socks 5001 – left over from nutkins socks.
· Claudia Handpaints Yarn Fingering Hokies – left over from Hokie socks for M.
· Misty Mountain Farms Jubilee Evergreen – left over from Broadripple socks.
· Pagewood Farms Alyeska Fabulous Fall – left over from Fawkes Sawkes.
My initial estimate was that this blanket might take me 20 years to finish, but I'm saved by the fact that I knit short socks and thus generally have a lot of yarn left over. Now I'm thinking that it might only take me 5 years to finish. I've also been weaving the ends in as I go so that I don't have hours worth of ends to weave in once I'm done.
I'll keep you updated on this one as I go. The only bad thing about these blanket is that now that I have all of my scraps knit in, I almost hate to finish the socks that I currently have on the needles, because that means more scraps!
