Yarnivorous

G'day all! So we've made it to the end of May. May is not my favourite month of the year. Too many deaths of people that matter to me have occurred in May. My father at the start of May, my mother near the end of May, others that have passed on too. I wonder what Mum would've thought of the shawl I knitted this month. I spun the yarn. I chose the Echo Flower pattern . I started knitting. And I kept knitting and knitting and knitting row after row, repeat after repeat of the flower pattern Until I thought I should swap to the border pattern. (I am glad I did swap over then - I don't think I had enough yarn for another repeat of the flower pattern.) I nupp ed until I was done. Then I soaked and blocked the shawl. I think Mum would be surprised that I can knit lace. She told me not to knit it when I was younger. Much younger. She didn't think I had the patience or the counting ability/concentration. I knitted intarsia then, or picture knitting as we called it. I...

G'day all! I will be good. I will present FOs in order of finishing. Plus it lets me string out posts :-) In October, I had the mad idea that I could knit a shawlette in a week from a skein of luscious 4ply/fingering weight yarn. Ahem. May I present to you, in MAY, seven months later .... My Ruffles of Doom shawlette Ta-da! This was a silly knit. I first thought it was a spring bloom faroese shawl but suddenly the yarn ran out before I was ready for it to - it had gone on and on and on.... So I had to find some (not quite matching) pink recycled cashmere to make a ruffle with, only I didn't ruffle it enough so I had to go find some green recycled cashmere and make a more ruffly ruffle. Then the pink ruffle decided it was a flap that would sit up at about 45 degrees to the shawl itself, making a V at the bottom so I grabbed a crochet hook, added some stitches to it, hooked it to the green ruffle and generally made it more ruffle-icious. It had to have ruffles you see. And ...

G'day all! Oh what a day it has been. I ate something I shouldn't have. I think. Or maybe it is the chemo. Let's just say it is gross but I am still showing a family trait of not throwing up. Plus the last couple of nights it seems that I won't sleep for more than two hours at a time and have to get up to pee a lot, and by 3:30am I may as well get up for an hour or two to deal with the spinning monkey brain and legs that want to wriggle. Now we have an extra complication. And DH is down. He has a couple of little jobs at the moment but they are not Real Jobs. I didn't realise his identity is so tightly tied to his job. Is that a boy thing? I am actually pretty good apart from the little purging issue and the lack of sleep. I went for a little bike ride to some local shops and the library yesterday, today I walked most of a kilometre. Days 6-7 of the last cycle I could hardly walk before I saw my chiro - lots of spasms and knee pain and back pain etc etc. ...

Really go some nice gluten free, dairy free "ice cream" right now. Mmmmmm.... Whilst we do great GF/DF bread in Oz, unlike te US which has dreadful muck, we do not do good ice creams for those of us deprived of the usual sort. So currently I'm missing this (I must've eaten at least a hundred tubs of that whilst we were in the States) and this (mint choc chip! What more could I want in a flavour!) and even this (verra nice if it hadn't been allowed to defrost - the ribbon through it would go icy). Heck some cookie dough would be great right now - weird texture, sorta crunchy. The GF/DF icecreams here tend to be quite expensive (I thought $5 for a quart was expensive but most of the Oz ones are $7-8 and pretty darned hard to come by). Now I could haul out our icecream maker and muck about with some coconut milk and stuff but I just want to eat icecream right now. Mmm, icecream. (Maybe I want to eat it cos my gullet is sore again, not as badly as sometime...

G'day all! I might be laying low for the next few days. Don't get too worried if I don't blog, though I may well cos I'll be bored and brainless. New chemo and/or the bone marrow stimulant does interesting things to my body. Whatever muscles I use hurt - I've been knitting a bit so my forearms are sore, I've been leaning on the desk so my back/shoulder muscles are sore, I walked a whole 500m if that so my knees and thighs are sore, things just ache. Time for some paracetamol, see if that knocks it down some. Smoke me a kipper, etc etc.... anon!

G'day all! Today I went to see the medical oncologist, the radiation oncologist and the breast surgeon. We have a plan. Assuming the chemo goes as expected (ie my immune system keeps rebounding and I don't get any infections), I'll be having a lumpectomy and axial dissection (with sentinel node injection) sometime late July or early August. That is a three day hospital stay. Then I do set up for radiotherapy 4 weeks later and start radiotherapy 5 or 6 weeks after the surgery. Radiotherapy goes for six weeks, 5 days a week at the same hospital that I'm getting chemo at. That's a good hour round trip five days a week - just like work! Except I'm not working and I need to have 2 minutes of treatment not 7.5 hours of work a day. They will be targetting the areas of surgery and the lymph nodes at the base of my neck, just to be sure. The sixth week of radiotherapy is a "booster" on the surgical site itself. I should be done like a dinner by my birthda...

G'day all! Isn't this a sad thing the poor cat, waiting to come in - she's found the (let me) In Tray! I've still been busy recently, buzzing around, not really getting that much done quite frankly! I'm making good progress on my Echo Flower shawl - only got 1.5 repeats to go before I start the edging charts I think. HOORAY! There's over 300 stitches per row now and it takes a while to get each row done (20 minutes or so). Given how much time I can spend knitting, it seems surprising that it isn't yet finished. Pics today are of Nutmeg, in various moods. I've joined two quilting swaps, one just a little charm swap. Egads, cutting charms (5" squares) is hard work, especially when you have to iron twenty-five different lots fabric first. Also I don't have a cutting table, I have a cutting mat on the floor. That adds to the difficulty somewhat. The second swap needs me to get a couple of metres of material, one white, one "fresh moder...