I'm Back....

 Hi all -

Sorry for the long absence. It ended up being a long summer for me. My biggest concerns were my sister and Lance. 

My sister has had a lot of knee pain for several years and she finally started looking at knee replacement surgery. She is the one who lost her husband in January, so she is newly living alone. So I wanted to be there to help her out after the surgery. She was able to get the surgery scheduled for early August and I came out to help her for 5 weeks. Luckily she was able to schedule it so that her daughter, who is a traveling nurse, was able to be there, too, to help out. I mostly took care of the dogs and encouraging my sister to do her PT while her daughter mostly took care of the nursing. The first week after the surgery was a bit tough because the drugs, the pain and the worry made my sister a bit grumpy, and she can be pretty grumpy when she wants. I think one of the things that got to her was the in-home PT person used the worry about not breaking up the scar tissue in time as an "encouragement" for her to do her exercises. She would say that she had to work hard to break that up because otherwise it would be permanent and the replacement would be a waste of time. What she didn't say was the time period where you need to worry, which ended up being on the order of 6-8 weeks rather than 6-8 days. Once we realized this and once my sister started making progress, things got a lot better and it was a wonderful visit. My sister had been thinking about getting both knees done at once since she's a "get it over with" type of person, but she ended up being very glad that she decided on one at a time for this! She's doing incredible now and is working on scheduling her other knee. She's hoping to get it done in December so it counts towards this year's insurance to save money.

Lance is doing really well, but there are always more concerns and more work as he gets older. He's now 14.5 or 15 years old (he was a stray so we don't know exactly) and he has degenerative myelopathy, which is a spinal cord disease that makes his back legs weaker and weaker. So he has a difficult time walking and has trouble with incontinence. To add to the fun, he also had a liver biopsy earlier this summer. It's pretty major surgery for a dog his age, but the vet had found a possibly-cancerous liver nodule during an ultrasound and it was early enough that he could remove that nodule before it could spread so we did it. It turned out that it was benign. The first week after the surgery was tough because, although he ate at first when he got home, he stopped eating after a day or so and ended up losing 3 lbs in a couple of day. He also couldn't use his back legs at all for a couple of days and his incontinence was out of control. We ended up taking him off of the after-surgery meds and he got back to his usual self.

Because this just wasn't enough, my washing machine decided to break down and it took about a month for them to be able to deliver my new one. I live in the mountains so delivery trucks only come up here once a week so it can be hard to schedule. And my house was hit by lightning which knocked out everything that was connected to the outside world -- internet, land line and satellite TV. It took about a month to get everything replaced and set back up. But we're back to normal now!

On the plus side for Lance, I was talking to the lady at the Post Office one day and we talked about how expensive dogs are as they get older. I mentioned that Lance had DM and she told me that she had a doggy wheelchair that someone had given her for her dog, who passed away earlier this year, and she had been looking for someone to pass it on to. It turned out to be the perfect size for Lance so she gave it to us. We got it just before going to Kansas City, so I was able to teach Lance how to use it on flat land before coming back home to use it on rougher terrain. Here is a picture that my niece took when she passed us on a walk one day:

It's not a great picture, but you get the idea. The wheelchair is designed so that it supports his back end, but he can still use his back legs a bit so they get exercised. It's not something that he uses all the time because we want him to use has back legs as much as possible and it's not practical in the house or in my yard, but it does allow us to go for short walks again.

But that's enough personal stuff. Now I can share what little I've been working on. The biggest project I've been working on is my Open Minds MKAL shawl designed by Laura Nelkin. An MKAL is a "Mystery Knit-Along" which is a knitting project where you don't know what you're making but you get a little piece of the pattern periodically until you have the project finished and finally see what it looks like. Some people chose their own yarn based on Laura's guidelines, but Laura also offered some kits and I was able to snag one of those. I kept up fine at the beginning, but got behind when I visited my family for a week in the spring and haven't finished the project yet (story of my life....). This pattern consists of 6 "clues." Here is my shawl after the first clue:

Open Minds -- Clue 1

And here it is after the second clue:

Open Minds -- Clue 2

The third clue was the mirror image of the second:

Open Minds -- Clue 3

This is where I fell behind. So I started getting the clues and seeing how the shawl went together, without actually knitting it. Based on the construction, I decided to skip clues 4 and 5 and go on to clue 6, which fills in the back of the shawl:

Open Minds -- Clues 1, 2, 3 and 6

The reason I did this is because clue 6 uses a specific amount of yarn while clues 4 and 5 are written so that you can use up your yarn. You are told to reserve a specific weight of yarn for clue 6, but by doing clue 6 first I didn't have to fudge that measurement so should be able to use more of my yarn than I could have by following the clues in order. Now I just need to finish up.....

I also made some more progress on my Comfort Fade Cardi designed by Andrea Mowry. I've finished the body and still need to add the sleeves and the collar. Here is the front of the cardigan:

Comfort Fade Cardi -- front

And here is the back:

Comfort Fade Cardi -- back

I hope to make more progress on this soon because I'm really loving how it's turning out!

My final knitting project is the Rock & Roll Scarf designed by Amy Gunderson:

Rock & Roll Scarf

 I started working on this because I needed an easy project to work on while at my sister's house. This is a simple pattern, but each row takes a while because it's knit across the scarf rather than end-to-end so there are 500 stitches on the needles. I'm making this a little bit wider than specified in the pattern because I want to use up as much yarn as possible. I have about 6 more stripes and I'll be done.

I also did a little bit of sewing. A friend of mine is retiring after working 40 years at NCAR, where I worked for 23 years. As a retirement gift, I decided to make her a project bag. She loves chickens and used to raise them so I used some chicken fabric for the bag:

Chicken Bag -- outside

Chicken Bag -- lining

I think she's going to love this!

Well, that's all for now. I'll try to keep in touch better in the coming weeks.

Nancy