Yarnivorous

G'day all1 Having a bit of a pity party today. DH had a go at me about not being proactive in doing stuff around the house. He isn't happy with me barely managing to keep up with cooking meals, doing the shopping, doing some house cleaning, dealing with most of the dishes and clothes washing, sitting looking at Ravelry too much , kntting, generally trying to hold things together, not making any money, not going out and getting a job, not taking pressure off him . I apparently need to plan things like our garden and our new kitchen (we'd have to take money out of the mortgage to pay for that), etc etc. Sorry, don't have that much brain power left. I can still think about stuff but it takes energy that I sometimes don't have. I certainly don't have much volition beyond knitting and spinning and managing to get food cooked. It is odd how when your nearest and dearest have a go at you, you feel abandoned and unloved. None of this cancer business was in my plan...

G'day all! Hooray for me, I've survived another PET scan, mammogram, ultrasound and two biopsies! And chemo today. Feeling pretty tired - one of the anti-nausea/anti-bloating drugs I am on seems to wake me up at 4am (didn't help that someone rang us at 3:30am!) and I can't go back to sleep until after 5am. But at least that meant I rescued the chicken stock that I meant to freeze on Tuesday after making it on Monday. 4:30am and I'm reboiling the stock. Has to be an upside for every early morning awakening. The infusion went in ok, no dramas with allergies or anything. Tomorrow Nathan has to stab me with a new drug to keep my neutrophil (a white blood cell/immune system support) count up. We'll see how I go! I never showed off my new little quilt. I finished it over a week ago! The olive colour is actually a bit brighter and happier in reality - it is called avocado and is quite like avocado skin in colour. The quilt measures 88cm X 110cm, so roughly 34...

G'day all! I am now involved in a wrangle with the mob we used to move money from the States to home. We've triggered some money laundering thing and now I have to provide evidence of our US income and address for the US government. Well we have no income in the States (or here for that matter). I've been moving money from the US account to here to help us survive. I haven't even paid the mortgage for the last two months (we are still ahead though due to shovelling money onto it in the past). We also do not have an address in the States so proving residence is going to be awful hard when we are not residents. Argh! Stupid regs. I know why they are there but I simply cannot provide the evidence they want of income and residence. We have none! Argh grumble mutter. All I need is a wrangle with the US govt thinking we deal in illegal stuff or some such rot. We are horribly law abiding. Heck I won't even speed or park illegally or run orange lights. It's a d...

G'day all! I am pretty sure I have not blogged this. I better not have! It didn't show up when I loaded my own blog.... (Talk about chemo brain - I just had to go investigate the funny hissing noise. Turns out it is the onions I put on to brown on the stove (obviously in a saucepan!). Oh. At least it wasn't a leaking hose, which is what I thought it was at first! Maybe I need my ears checked.) So this little shawl has been doing the rounds recently on Ravelry. I thought I would try my hand at it. Calais , by Judy Marples. I had some sock yarn sitting around (doesn't everyone???) that had been part knitted into a sock. The hand of the yarn as a sock just was not doing it for me. It felt rather cottony but wrong for cotton too. I dyed it up hmm, three years or so ago. It was a test skein that I never really like. Looks pretty good as this little shawl though! But it is a little shawl - 330m of fingering weight yarn, about 1.2m across and 60cm deep. I knitted ...

G'day all! On the weekend, I succumbed to temptation. I bought a ball of this yarn in pink, white and green (aka a colourway that is not in the online shop). It is a novelty yarn with puffy lumps of polyester that looks sorta like small marshmallows when knitted up. I admit to giggling like a maniac as the lumpy bits start lining up. I wish I had enough done to show you what it looks like but really, three rows is not enough! I am making myself a very basic hat out of it - one of the sorts of hats that is a rectangle seamed on both sides to make a rather square hat. Here's me, being a yarn snob, and the simple things are amusing me, like puffy marshmallow hats. Tee hee hee! And you should see the enormous fluffy dead muppet chemo cap I made - just finished it a little while ago (oops, no I haven't - I haven't woven, more like knotted, in one of the ends. Best fix that up). I made it for a true boofhead - it is a little large even on me, tough the large just means ...

G'day all! I have been terribly ungracious. (Actually it was someone known as me forgot to take pics of a couple of items received and then got all hung up on not being able to blog the gifties without all parts being acknowledged.) I received some parcels a month ago and haven't blogged them. (And I need to find the pics of another giftie that will be coming in handy very shortly given we are moving well into autumn and soon winter here.) So my good buddy Dreamcatcher sent me a lovely mauve chemo chap in Calmer: and a silk scarf: (with me trying for some Hollywood in a convertible with the top down glamour but failing. alas dismally - I just look like a nong instead. LOL) Both of these gifts are finding plenty of use :-) And if you are in the market for a bit of hand-dyed yarn, hop along to Dreamcatcher's new shop, Flamboyance Yarns , particularly if you are in the UK. And my good pal Sknitty sent me a whole passel of bits and bobs, like a badge: some stitchmarkers:...

G'day all! Anzac Day has rolled around again. I swear it is happening more often these days. Anzac Day is now used rather like Remembrance Day, to remember all the wars that Australians have been involved in. It seems some people are worried that the resurgence of Anzac Day from being a half forgotten anniversary of the storming of a little cove in Turkey to a national day of remembrance means that we will glorify war. For me at least, that fear is rubbish. Ridiculous. My Pop fought at Gallipoli and then backed up for more at the Somme. Like many veterans, he didn't like talking about his time at the war. He talked a bit about the "good" bits - the gattling guns, the women - he very much liked the French women! - but you didn't get to hear about the horrors. A generation of men came back from the war struggling to cope with what they had seen and what they had done. How can you glorify that? How can you glorify trench foot , living for months in freezin...

G'day all! I'm keeping busy at the moment. Yesterday I had to get my PICC line dressed, which means going to the hospital. I have *never* been to a hospital so often before. I have to go every week! Next week I need to go on Tuesday (clinic), Wednesday (PET scan), Thursday (mammogram/ultrasound/biopsy) and then Friday for chemo! I'll be really busy but that is ok cos I reckon I am up to it and it also gives me four more chances to forget to go and buy some more peppermint tea (loose leaf, hard to come by cos we don't have a local Wholefoods any more). I forgot yesterday and boy was I peeved with myself cos I bought a heap of other stuff but forgot the very thing I went to that shop for! So much for old chemo brain not affecting me...though I am prone to forgetting stuff anyway and I have not missed an appointment yet. Except the one where they sent the notification to a completely wrong address - I think I can say that was not my fault! On and off I've been w...

G'day all! I have more FOs to show you. Plural? Yes. But do I have edited pics? *blush* My bad! Things are interesting at the Modest Manor. I am happily engaged in making stuff. DH is unhappily engaged in being unemployed. He really needs a job but there are not that many jobs out there for a chap with his qualifications - companies here are only willing to pay for graduates, as in someone with a degree. Of course if you pay peanuts, you will get quite a number of monkeys... Anyway, I brought home a fair amount of undyed sock yarn. I even paid duty on it. My plan was to set up yet another little dyeing business whilst I looked for work. Well plans change as things change and whilst I won't be looking for a Real Job (though I do have a rather short haircut!) for the nonce, I've decided maybe I'll do a bit of yarn dyeing to help pass the time. (Cos I don't have anything else to do, ha! You would not believe how much time I spend in the kitchen these days - ...

G'day all! Today I visited the familial cancer clinic at Monash Medical Centre, Clayton. It is only 15 minutes drive away, less really, but of course I caught every major set of lights on the way. Then I drove around and around and around and around and AROUND the carpark, a paying carpark , looking for a carpark! (It would've taken less time if I could take the train but I am supposed to avoid crowded places and the train is often busy and usually has people with colds on board. Blighters!) Eventually I grumped at the car park attendant and he let me out. Then I drove into the familial cancer clinic car park, double parked the car and told them I'd be even later cos I had just spent 15 minutes looking for a carpark and now had to go park out on the streets somewhere. I found a carpark on the street very easily. I know where to look. But I was 20 minutes late and rather crabby. So I met with one of the doctors and an intern. Some people are very "private" ...

G'day all! Knitting has taken a back seat these last few days. The weather has been lovely and I've been outside sewing up a storm. (OK, no storms yet.) A little while ago I managed to put a quilt sandwich together for a little pinwheel quilt. Yesterday I started quilting it. Along the way, the machine started playing up a LOT. Stupid machine! It started off so nicely and I was telling it how it was nicer than the Singer for quilting on - my Oz Janome was stippling away happily and the only major problem was the nut behind the wheel, so to speak (ie me). Then I started getting odd tension problems. Suddenly, after my third or fourth outburst of cussing at the machine and yet another round of unpicking, it makes a rather weird and scary noise and voila! It spits out the needle. Yikes! After I examined the needle carefully and declared it good, once tightened back in its holder, I had no further problems with tension until the top thread ran out. DOH! And Scroatfight ha...

G'day all! Oh the glories of peppermint tea! Oh blessed tea! Y'see the indigestion's got me bad, even with the new medication. (I am contemplating going off this med when things settle and trying the other one again cos I had EXACTLY THE SAME issues with this one as I did with the first and it is generally less effective as an anti-indigestion thing than the first one I tried.) If I drink peppermint tea, things settle to some degree. Maybe even enough that I can sleep! After all, it is only quarter to one in the morning as I write this and I really really really want to go to sleep. So hopefully the peppermint tea will keep setting me right enough to get some sleep. Oh blessed sleep! And next time stomach says it wants munchies at 10pm, I shall bravely ignore it and sally forth to bed instead. I never did show off Travelled Woman, did I? She wraps around my neck quite well, mostly because the tips are bent like (folded) bat wings. But she is not for me, no no. I am...

G'day all! Tis the season for me to hibernate! It has been rather cold here these last couple of days. A strong cold front came through and brrr! (OK, this is to say that it is getting down to about 10C/40-something F overnight and only reaching 17C/60?F during the day, with a rather strong cold SW wind. Yesterday was the first day since December last year when the temperature did not reach 20C.) So here I am, sitting at the computer (as I have been for a greater part of the day) whining about being cold. I've found I can keep my hands warm if I put them on the laptop cos it is warmer than some things around the place. I have a silk/bamboo cap on, a lovely little shawlette knitted out of handspun boucle silk given to me last year, handknitted handwarmers, luscious handknitted socks, four layers on my top (and I've got the hood up on the fleecy top over my cap), the ORBQ quilt on my lap and I am still barely managing to keep warm. And apart from the things in pairs, no...

G'day all! A quick one before tomorrow's chemo, the last FEC, hooray! I'm sitting on the bed, with a cat beside me. I'm reading a Ravelry post when I feel something on the back of my neck. ACK! It is HARD and has more legs than I'd like it to . I shriek and pull it off me. It's a weevil, a sort of beetle. In this case it is about 8mm/third of an inch long. "Oooh, what is that?," says Nutmeg, as I try to flick it off the bed. "Oooh!" I flick it (accidentally) right at her. "Oooh! YUM!" Nom nom nom. But the weevil is stuck firmly to the bed. They have claws you know. Nom nom nom. Nom nom nom! Eventually she detaches the weevil and drops it on the floor and eats it there. (One can only eat off the floor, preferably without any sort of bowl in the way.) Now she is looking at me and waiting for me to find her another little snack.... Nutmeg, scourge of small creatures everywhere. (Note, DH stayed asleep for the whole perfor...

G'day all! Today I saw the oncologist leading the study I am participating in. When I think about it, it is pretty impressive that he sees the women in the study cos he must be pretty busy. He seems to be my oncologist cos I've seen him every time for my chemo follow ups. We discussed my progress, any problems I am having - a new one! Snotty nose and runny eyes. Controlled by antihistamines. He said some people develop this runny nose and eyes syndrome whilst on chemo and most find antihistamines control it. So there I go. I've already found the answer. I've got something not quite as common as indigestion and hair loss and a minor amount of fatigue and oh the phlebitis in my right arm and the PICC line in the left that means I can't pick up more than 2kg with that arm (yeah, right! I try to avoid it but some times I must pick something heavy up - I just try not to carry much stuff on that arm. But then Mr Phlebitis gets annoyed in my right arm. Never sat...