I planned to just do a little bit more of the chair yoga positions when I got settled in the kitchen this morning but the poses flow together so seamlessly and it was easy to adjust to favor my left ankle that I just kept going. You see the lady on the left in the frame? That's Edna and she's the person to follow if you can't do the full pose as demonstrated. I'm Edna. Not standing up to do any poses, not pressing my foot to the floor, I've got it propped on a pillow while I do the other things. It felt good to move all my parts, especially my shoulders. That was $15 well spent.
I cast on Sudoku Snow #8 and knitted a few rows. Didn't get far because what I really wanted to knit on was this month's version of the Seamen's Cowl. See? I think there's bound to be a mariner who'll be tickled to get a bright warm cowl to keep the cold lake wind off his neck next winter, don't you?
Yesterday my brother, TW and his wife ARA, stopped by on their way home from church and stayed for a nice visit. They brought a salted caramel kringle from Uncle Mike's bakery. See the little triangle of rich yumminess on the corner of my lunch tray? I was smart. I cut the whole thing into serving sizes, put them on a tray in the freezer, and when I'm done here I'll wrap them in plastic wrap, bag them, and freeze them so we can pick out one each and not gobble the whole thing up in a couple days, thereby making ourselves good and sick. OMG, that's so good.
Today is the last day I'll follow the "4 hour/ 3 hour" pill schedule. Tomorrow they'll all be 4 hours apart. The doc told me last week to slowly cut down on painkillers so, of course, I forged ahead going way overboard stretching out the time and making myself miserable. I learned my lesson--slow and steady.
I told you I'd be keeping up my Bullet Journal and I am. See? Putting down everything, what I want to knit on that day, to blog, leg lifts before lights out, all the stuff I do so that I don't feel like I'm lying here wasting or just marking time. And I'm getting brave enough to put in a terrible drawing now and again--only for the most important events, like last Friday's shower. That totally deserved a drawing.
April 18--DGR Studio, Inc., DGR9524.
Above the reef that
teems with graceful, colorful life
a phalanx of pale, flabby snorkelers
churns the surface
like a centipede
on steroids.
They send out pulses
like dying carp,
everything hides.
Masks on foreheads in the shallows,
the tourists grumble,
"nothing to see down there,"
go to swill pre-made margaritas
from a Slurpee machine.
~~~~~
In case you're wondering, here's how the nightly prompt writing looks before it gets put on here. Every night a new picture, every night a new poem.
Today is my brother-in-law RJ's birthday. I'm not sure what number it is but I know for a fact that it's over 70. One of these days he might even start acting his age. Nah, probably not. Enjoy your Monday. I get to go get my blood drawn to check for... blood thinner levels. Whoop. Hasta la vista, babies.
--Barbara
I am not accustomed to the sedentary life, to having to entertain myself with whatever I can reach from a seated position but I'm managing. It helps to have willing emissaries I can send to the library or the store so that my supply of audiobooks, yarn, etc., and food doesn't dwindle. Yesterday MW picked up my reserved book on CD at the Southwest Library, Durwood went to Festival for yummy grub, and friend JM called for a nice long chat. But what am I doing you might ask yourself. Well, I'll show you.
First I finished the Chinchilla Barley hat to remove any impediments to Hamish making an on time or even early appearance (although his due date's really too close for an early arrival). This completes the ensemble of Hello, Hamish cardi with owl buttons, the Yoda Hamish hat, and the Chinchilla Barley hat for dressier occasions. I like 'em. Hope he does too--and hurries up about it. Anytime, Hamish. I'm sure the doc has his catcher's mitt ready.
I'm not going to show you playing an audiobook on the Kindle or iPod, or listening to a podcast either. Those things are way too cerebral to be photographed, but I can show you that I did about half of the chair yoga practice this morning, enough to learn that I can't really do it on the couch. So tomorrow morning a pillow (for my cast), my Kindle, and I will be setting up shop in the dinette so I can sit on a kitchen chair and have room to swing my arms and stretch my leg muscles. (Don't worry, I'll be careful)
Yesterday afternoon, while transferring a book from CDs to the laptop so I could fong it onto the iPod, I was bored. I'd finished a book, didn't want to knit, didn't turn on the TV (I rarely do), hadn't downloaded any podcasts lately that I wanted to listen to, so I worked the first puzzle in the crosspuzzle book that DD & Co. sent and the Friday daily puzzle. (crosspuzzle is what DD called them when she was little and I think it's apt because many times a tricky part makes a person cross--who me?) While the CDs were uploading into iTunes, I knit on Sudoku Violet #8. Didn't finish but I'm on the downhill side so that'll get done today and Sukoku Snow #8 will be cast on. And I think I'll cast on a Seamen's Cowl too. I need to make one for April, especially since I won't be sewing 3 ditty bags in April like I hoped to.
After a yummy supper of BBQ-ed pork chop (I ate half, it was enormous--leftovers, yay!), some boiled baby reds, and a moderate serving of asparagus, I dragged out my colored pens and dipped into a Zentangle how-to book. I think they're meant to be mostly black but the colors appealed to me more. I've got a hardcover underwater coloring book too. Gotta color the other half of the octopus--later today, I promise.
Hey, I have a complaint. I'm taking a blood-thinner to prevent blood clots after ankle surgery and they gave me a list of no-no vegetables and every single one that we eat most of the time are high in Vitamin K which is the vitamin that diminishes the effectiveness of the medicine. Gah! I've decided that I'm going to keep eating my broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and asparagus (even green onions are on that list! what veggies are we supposed to eat? Cheetos? nothing green, that's for sure. Tsk.) since I have to go for a blood test every week. Last week I was at the low end of "acceptable" so he upped my dosage by half a pill. We'll see what tomorrow's blood draw says. I can take more pills; they say I'll only need them for 60 days and I'm already 15 days in, so a quarter of the way through. I can do this.
April 17--DGR Studio, Inc., DGR9523.
At the edge of the reef
the bottom drops
into the navy water
down to white sand
a hundred feet below
where the light is dim,
the corals are drab and wiry,
fish are plain, grumpy-looking creatures
that crouch on their bellies
waiting for an incautious meal
to swim by.
~~~~~
And that's my day. I won't deny that I take my walker to the potty every so often and maybe to the kitchen to help Durwood get something that needs bending over to fetch but it still feels a lot better to have my foot up on a pillow with an ice pack or two on it so that's what I'm doing. Look how mature and responsible I'm being. You thought I'd ignore the doctor's orders, didn't you? Well, I want to heal as well and as quickly as I can so I'm planted here on the couch finding amusements to keep me here as long as necessary. So there.
--Barbara
I am not loving being stuck here on the couch while the whole world wakes up outside my window, as you can probably tell by now. (whine, whine, whine) I took a super-zoomed picture of green grass across the street. Look, chlorophyll. No leaves on anything woody yet but the tips of the twigs are getting plump. Go, Spring!
We opened a couple windows yesterday to let real air infiltrate the Winter-stale corners of the place. All I can say about that is, ahhhhh.
I got to go to Friday Night Knitting last night. Hooray! Durwood drove me over and LB met us at the door, wrestled the wheelchair out of the back of the van, and pushed me back to the community room where we meet. It was easy to shift to one of their comfy chairs and find one with no arms to prop my cast up on. I had a banner 2 hours talking and laughing with friends. Made me feel like a real person again for a bit. Then Durwood came back, LB delivered me back to the van, and she and MW put the chair back into the van and we drove off home.
Talking and laughing are good fertilizer for mindless knitting and I got up to the decreases on the Chinchilla Barley hat to go with the Hello Hamish cardi. It's looking a little big to me but babies in our family are traditionally big-headed creatures (gotta have a big cranium for all the smarts we stuff into the little critters) so this might be just the ticket. I'll work to finish it today just in case Hamish is waiting until his knitted things from his Meemaw are ready for him to wear. Removing impediments, real or imagined, that's my goal today. Come on, Hamish, we can't wait to meet you, especially your mama who is ready for a more comfortable night's sleep.
Speaking of the Hello, Hamish cardi, I got the buttons sewed on yesterday. Lordy, they're cute and just right for the sweater. Love it.
The mailman brought my Chair Yoga for Seniors DVD yesterday. (I'm not too proud to put on that label; my Medicare card came in the mail the other day, it becomes effective August 1, plus whatever gets me moving a bit more, especially in my shoulders which are sore from all the walker-ing, I'm all for.) I immediately slotted it into the laptop to try it out. Even doing just 5 minutes, stretching my arms and shoulders, made a world of difference. Right now I'm uploading it into a program on here so that I can load it onto my Kindle, which will be an easier vehicle to play it on since carrying things is a tad problematic these days what with needing both hands on the walker.
I spent a lot of yesterday redoing the Bay Lakes Knitting Guild (BLKG) Ravelry Projects page. Instead of making catch-all categories like Charity Knitting or Show & Share, I sorted through my digital pix and entered each month's output as separate projects. That way we can see what we've made to balance our good karma over the years. Might as well make good use of my time on the couch, right?
April 16--Philip H. Coblentz, Enjo National Park, CA.
Aspen leaves litter the trail,
a scatter of doubloons
pays for this fine Autumn day.
Hawk circles the far peak
poised to cash in
on any chipmunk gathering
food for Winter.
The path plunges into
cool, coniferous dark
like a portal to
the underworld.
My feet follow.
~~~~~
I think I'll call Amazon Customer Support for help getting my yoga video onto the Kindle and save myself an hour's frustration trying to remember how to do it myself. Later, dudes & dudettes.
--Barbara
Yesterday wasn't a great day here in couch-land. I tried stretching the pain pills to every 4 hours but by 10:30 PM it was evident that had been a bad idea so I downed 2 pills, went to bed, and lay still until I fell asleep. Today the schedule alternates 3 hrs./4 hrs. That should be better.
I did notice when I opened the shade that the neighbor's maple tree is budding out with those burgundy, flower-ish things that come before leaves. Once again we have a representative photo from 2014 but, trust me, it looks the same (except today's sky is blue) and makes me feel hopeful that we won't have too much more snow to deal with.
Knitters are still stepping up to fill the chores and errands gaps. MW did an Aldi run, bringing back a bag of oranges, a tiny box of blackberries that I stirred into the bowl of sliced strawberries, and four 8-ounce boxes of Baby Bella mushrooms (only 89 cents each!) that Durwood cleaned, sliced, sauteed in a little butter, and froze for putting in all kinds of goodies for suppers. Durwood himself went to Copps for wild caught salmon and ocean perch some of which we ended up not having for supper because he kind of overdid it in the exertion area. (He went out for KFC, but tonight we'll have something healthy. Promise.) HH came over in the afternoon to carry up clean laundry, dig around and find the best color thread for me to sew buttons on the Hamish cardi, and water the plants. I am so grateful for their cheerful and selfless help.
I called Joe, the guy we buy our cars from and where we have them serviced, yesterday to ask if he knew of a place we could store my car until I can get back behind the wheel. I wasn't thrilled with it being in the lot behind our house because the fence is too high for us to see over and I felt like parking there too long would not only attract vandals and car thieves but it was an imposition on the owner's generosity and potential liability. Joe said he has a building where he stores vehicles and he'd be happy to stash my car there until we need it again. His wife brought him over, he picked up the keys, and refused my offer of paying rent for the space. Guess I'll have to bake some bread and cook up a cauldron of soup once I'm vertical to thank him. People sure are nice. I'm blown away.
I'm happy to be single-handedly keeping the US Postal Service afloat sending out thank you cards to all of the generous people in our lives. Three more go out today and, no, I'm not sending one every time someone does us a favor but I am making sure that people get one every few times so they know how much we appreciate them. I am very grateful that DIL1's mom got me back into the habit of writing thank you notes. (Yes, I wrote her a note to thank her too.) Maybe I can single-handedly bring manners back into daily life... yeah, probably not, but I can spread it around my little corner of the world.
Like I said, yesterday wasn't a great day so I spent most of it listening to an audiobook and knitting on Sudoku Violet #8. Despite how it looks in this picture it's just slightly less purple than Welch's Grape Juice. Can someone tell me why purple turns blue in digital pix? Speaking of digital pix, I want to spend part of today redoing the Projects page on the Bay Lakes Knitting Guild's Ravelry account so that we can revel in our charity knitting and Design-a-Thon entries.
April 15--Chris A. Crumley, #920205-18-18.
Not
king of the world
but
servant of the moment
charged
with witnessing
sunset
death of the day
mourning
loss of light
craving
star diamonds in blue-black
sky
~~~~~
Well, Poetry Month is half over and I'm having fun with it. It's the perfect word challenge for a month when I'm confined to the couch and my world has shrunk to the nest I've made and the path to the bathroom. Hey, at least I can get up and go. Not being able to would suck, wouldn't it, cda? Go run around in the sunshine for me today, will you?
--Barbara
Every other day, just like I said. Sunny, gray, sunny, although it's supposed to clear out and warm up big-time this weekend. And me stuck on the couch unable to get out and bask. Drat.
I glanced at the bulbs when I opened the drapes this morning and saw that the little squills are blooming. There is no earthly way I can get out to take their picture so I'm going to resurrect one from last year as a representative of this year's bloomage.
I finished the Yoda Hamish hat yesterday and can't wait to have a baby to put it on.
KW came over with Kwik Trip bananas after work and dug out the owl buttons I knew I had downstairs so I can put them on the Hello, Hamish! cardi. Now I just need some thread and a needle that fits through those holes and I'll sew them on--and another knitter is stopping by later to carry up some clean laundry Durwood did and she can find me some thread downstairs.
In the evening I cast on the Barley Hat as a dressy hat to wear with the sweater when he doesn't feel like being Yoda, like to church, although I've been to their church and I think a little Yoda baby would be more than welcome there. I'm especially pleased that I dredged up a sparkly seahorse stitch marker to cheer me up as I go round and round the hat. (trapped on the couch as I am, I'll take all the cheering up I can muster)
(BTW, these are all free patterns. I'll link them for you. You're welcome.)
April 14--Chris A. Crumley, #940907-56-20.
White geometry
backed by a blue firmament.
Arches, columns,
pediment
softened by decades
of paint
rounding architectural
forms.
A wedding cake
of town hall
against a sky of tropical
blue.
~~~~~
Durwood's off to Copps because they have wild-caught salmon and ocean perch on sale which means we're having salmon for supper. Yahoo! He's subscribed to Cooking Light magazine for a couple years but I'd never looked at it until last week. It's a good thing I have a block of post-its in my knitting basket because I'm cutting each sheet into 4 tabs and marking what I want him/us to cook. That magazine is a gold mine. DS said they get it too and make things out of it all the time. Such interesting recipes and most with things we already stock. How have I not looked at this before? Tsk.
--Barbara
Like a popular nightclub act, I've been held over for two more weeks on the couch. I don't think the couch is too thrilled because it made a groaning sound when I sat down on it this morning, but I did sit in a different position yesterday evening (in the center with my leg-propping pillows on the coffee table) that felt like a while new thing. I also realized that what was most irritating about my leg yesterday was my skin. It felt like I had a rug burn on the outside of my calf, the side that's down when I relax my leg, the side I've been sleeping on, so I hopped into the bathroom, grabbed a jug of lotion and set about figuring out how to cram my fingers between the cast and my skin to lube it up a bit. What I managed really made a difference. Then I figured out how to sleep comfortably on my other side after I got up to whiz in the middle of the night (but only once, yippee). Today I'll ask Durwood to bring me the lotion and a narrow spatula so I can use gravity and something skinnier than my fingers to spread the glorious moisturizer down there. (no, you potty brain, not that downthere)
I walkered over to open the curtains this morning and took my camera so I could lean out to snap this picture of my daffodils just beginning to open. Even though it's been cold and snowy the bulbs are still inching their way toward blooming. Thank. God. Or I think we'd all line up and slit our wrists. Time for a little warm and sunny, don't you think?
I took my Purple Sparkle cast sock along to my appointment and finished it before suppertime. I like it. It sparkles. It looks a little odd but that pointy part's where my big toe fits just right. I didn't work on the Hello, Hamish! Cardi after supper because I got tired and just kind of vegged. Today I'll dredge up a YouTube video to remind me how to attach an I-cord and get that done.
Earlier this year I came across the Bullet Journal and decided to jump on the bandwagon. I jumped on and off, on and off, and when I broke my ankle I thought, "well, that takes care of that, I won't be journaling day after day on the couch," and I was wrong. I have lots of things to accomplish while I'm on the couch and I even tried my hand at a little sketch of my view in the afternoon. This couch sentence might turn out to be just the thing I needed to get into the Bullet Journaling swing of things. It's turning into a mix of to-do list and journal, and I like it a lot. And I'm using a real, honest to God, Waterman fountain pen to write in it, with cartridges and everything. Did you know that you can't buy cartridges outright in chain office stores anymore? Pitiful. Makes me want to buy fountain pens for everyone on my Christmas list this year just to stir up the silt in the marketplace.
April 12--Philip H. Coblentz, Santorini, Greece.
Looking like a portal
into the sky,
set into an archway
made of sunset,
the blue door promises
tranquility and rest.
Leave your cares
on the weathered chair
beside the doorway.
Enter through the orange
end of the day
into the perfume
of baking bread,
roasting meat,
and the sea.
~~~~~
Naturally my next doc's appointment is scheduled on the same day and at the same time as the heating & air conditioner tech was coming to make sure the A/Cs are ready for summer (if it ever comes) and filtering the air for Durwood so I rescheduled the tech (put the thought in my Bullet Journal yesterday and did it today--one job marked off), and I've got a friend on the way to run to Aldi for fruit and veggies that are on special that ends today. I never realized how much fruit I eat until I had to ask for it and how bereft I feel without a bowl of it cut up in the fridge. Time to read the paper, then knit.
--Barbara
I cast on Sudoku Snow #8 and knitted a few rows. Didn't get far because what I really wanted to knit on was this month's version of the Seamen's Cowl. See? I think there's bound to be a mariner who'll be tickled to get a bright warm cowl to keep the cold lake wind off his neck next winter, don't you?
Yesterday my brother, TW and his wife ARA, stopped by on their way home from church and stayed for a nice visit. They brought a salted caramel kringle from Uncle Mike's bakery. See the little triangle of rich yumminess on the corner of my lunch tray? I was smart. I cut the whole thing into serving sizes, put them on a tray in the freezer, and when I'm done here I'll wrap them in plastic wrap, bag them, and freeze them so we can pick out one each and not gobble the whole thing up in a couple days, thereby making ourselves good and sick. OMG, that's so good.
I told you I'd be keeping up my Bullet Journal and I am. See? Putting down everything, what I want to knit on that day, to blog, leg lifts before lights out, all the stuff I do so that I don't feel like I'm lying here wasting or just marking time. And I'm getting brave enough to put in a terrible drawing now and again--only for the most important events, like last Friday's shower. That totally deserved a drawing.
In case you're wondering, here's how the nightly prompt writing looks before it gets put on here. Every night a new picture, every night a new poem.
