Things

The white sweater has been on the needles since late 2012. It was meant to be something else, probably all in linen stitch, or with linen stitch details... or something. After five centimetres of linen stitch, I caved and switched to stockinette - unless it was planned and only then I discovered that linen stitch doesn't work as a decent hem. I possibly thought it all white. Or not.
At some point, I grabbed a book on folk costumes which has an extensive documentation of embroideries, grabbed a few motifs and made them mine. The local stuff is hardly ever red on white, it's usually white, yellow or sometimes black embroidery, placed differently on garments etc. But I needed a starting point so I used the general daisy shape. Foliage is mine. It all goes slowly and I lost the chart again. The current state is not really promising.

The basket was meant for yarns I intend to use very soon. Currently, it's a depository of yarns that were somehow around. It's getting fuller and fuller.

In all the Flash Your Stash debates, I would love to add a picture of my stash. It's dispersed in several rooms and stacked in various boxes so it wouldn't look pretty. However, due to memory impairment, I need to do an inventory (and chase the spiders away) so it may go as far as to have most of my stash spread out in one spot. I've taken up weaving and that eats up yarn rather fast. Or makes the stash grows fast, sources vary.

And then there's gift knitting. I would love to say that I have a bag, box or other receptacle with yarns carefully chosen for hats and scarves that will be given away but the lie may change the basics of relativity. It's the random yarn pile, a mixture of yarns I don't like but found its way to my stash (most often there was a batch of yarn on fleabay or somewhere that contained stuff I wanted and the rest was... stuff I wouldn't touch with a six foot pole under normal condition.), or leftovers, or yarn I liked but couldn't find a way how to use it for myself. Well, gift knitting. Makes people happy since who knows when.

Diagnosis of the day.

Ma'am magistra artium, your reflux is big as a swine. Your gastric juices spill like the contents of a kicked bucket and where there should be a hole tightly shut, your cardia is open wider than a barn door. Your oesophagus has better self-cleaning properties than an average cat because to my great surprise, there's no acid damage.

Excuse the bits of literal translation including the local abusive use of academic degrees of no major significance but I couldn't deprive you of the Monty Pythonesque sense of humour of my gastroenterologist. On paper, it said boring things like Massive GERD, no hernia. I got a script for A LOT of meds which they didn't have in my pharmacy because apparently, people are not supposed to use them by handfuls, a flyer that listed things to be avoided so I should deprive myself of the basic survival needs like coffee and the things that make life worth it at least for the time of consumation, such as wine, poppy seeds or chocolate. And I should prop the head side of my bed on a 4 x 4 so that the bucket contents stay where they should, which is not going to work because the headboard just reaches the lowered ceiling in one corner.
Tomorrow, I'm not seeing any doc so I should be just fine, I hope.

Advantages of bed rest

I finished a sweater.


The pic shows construction, starting from the hems and upper edge of the sleeves, decreasing and then... forget it, making it somehow. The sleeves got crocheted up and I'm finished now

My back keeps hurting, thanks for asking, and I'm slightly bored by all the bedrest. I went to pick a skirt from my dressmaker friend who lives two hundred metres away because I had an itch. It took me twenty minutes to walk there (well, the outing took an hour but we spent some time chatting at the fence) and while I got some fresh air, I admit that it wasn't the most brilliant idea. On the other hand, I apparently can run the hotel and do stuff over the phone, from my bed. Not bad.

Sciatica

So that you know what's up. Not that the depression et al. would be anything like solved but sometimes, an urgent trouble sheds a new light on life.

Yesterday, I got up, brushed my teeth, got halfway dressed, looked into the new sunny day, thought to myself Today will be a good day for cleaning, picked a piece of paper from my table, something in my lower back cracked and it hurt like a damn hell. I was standing by a bookshelf so I held onto it, my bag was at my feet and I guessed I could have some painkillers in it but I wasn't able to bend. My faulty memory however conjured an image of metamizole on my nightstand so I was all like Oh, great, I don't need to bend. Then, I realized that I can barely stand on my right leg. I shuffled and stumbled to the other side of the room, leaned against the wall and pondered what next. Meantime, mom came back from the grocery and for the first time in many years, I caled Mommy for help. Mom helped me to splat me on the bed two steps away and I was so happy about my lousy habit of basically living in bed because I had a laptop, books and some noms at hand. Prescription painkillers didn't help so I asked mom whether she still has her secret stash of tramadol - that's an opioid analgesic painkiller for those who are not pharma geeks - because IT HURT.
Opioids being what they are, I felt slightly better. We have my cousin and her son and her dogs over, aunt is staying at grandma's and coming to annoy on regular basis so I put on a skirt and brushed my hair because of personal dignity, grabbed my knitting and crawled downstairs. Mom got annoyed because I was wearing my only short skirt at hand, and one wears sweatpants when sick, not a woolen office skirt. I uttered a few expletives hinting that struggling with hose when one can't stand without holding onto a building with both hands, or when one can't bend or turn, is one of the more idiotic ideas, and spent the day splatted on the sofa. What offended mom even more was my tramadol high, it was unbecoming to giggle stupidly when I was in pain. Well, fuck pain and fuck such ideas.
The internetz differential diagnosis was either herniated disc or sciatica so I called my friend Doc, who is an ENT but still a M. D., he said that sciatica sounds more likely, that if it's sciatica, it will improve on its own, if it's slipped disc, it will worsen, that I can go to ER but if I wait until Monday to see my orthopod, er, orthopedist, it's just fine. (I will. I need more painkillers, mom refused me more tramadol.)

I'm utterly pissed. I organized a photoshoot plus makeup gal plus a hairdresser, cousin would drive me to Prague with a suitcase of clothes and 20 kilos of cat kibble that belonged to the late Hotel Kitty that got run over, I yet need to cancel my shrink appointment and I need meds and serious shit to talk about, I was to pick a kitten at a shelter. Dressmaker and her business can wait, work can always wait, I'll read my policy because I have some sort of accident/illness/loss of income insurance. But I need to find someone to refer me to a neurologist for my memory issues and I need to get my psych meds because while back pain and hip pain are metaphorical and partly literal pain in the arse, depression is the ultimate pain in the arse, metaphorical or not.
Today, pain metamorphed and I can't sit or bend and I'm afraid that in these two days, I've used up a whole yearly supply of curses.

Next time: more depression.