First week of 2016

So the first week out has not been as productive as I hoped.  But given what's happened I cannot complain.

Let's see:

This

plus this

plus this

equals this

In other words shark week plus going off the hormones in little brown bottles, which I have to do every three months, plus a cortisol shot to the knee equals a week where very little gets done.  I do not focus well when I'm on my period, I do not focus well when I'm off progesterone and I do not focus well when I'm anywhere near a steroid.  I spent much of this past week reading Reddit.

Thankfully that seems to be passing.

On the plus side I've decided I'm finally done with being fat.  I always said that when I was ready I would do this.  I'm finally ready, not just to start working out but to start dieting in earnest.  I cut down to 2000 calories this week, because if you're going to feel like shit you might as well get it all over with at the same time, and promptly lost 11 pounds.  I know, I know, a lot of that is water but my knees don't give a fuck.  That's 44 less pounds of pressure they have to deal with, which is what matters.

I guess having a needle pop off the back of your kneecap is kind of a wake-up call.

Speaking of the shot, it wasn't that bad.  Didn't really hurt except when he literally hit the back of my patella, that hurt like a bitch.  Threw my blood sugar off, which was expected, but only for about 12-14 hours and it only went up to 215, which is not horribly horrible.  Left me crazy thirsty for the week, but more water is just not a bad thing.  And my knee is about 90% better.  Not back to pan free perfect but quite tolerable.  I do have arthritis after all, they will never be perfect again, but I can live with this.  And my left knee is responding well to the Celebrex, it might not need a shot.

That said, I am avoiding leg day until I have my knees gone over by an orthopod.

Speaking of the gym I am taking one more week off, just to let everything heal, and then trying to go back.  Spinning, so as not to put pressure on said knees, and HIIT using upper body machines so as not to have to try to stand and balance weights and perhaps walking in the pool.  When I am cleared by said orthopod, perhaps with Sinvisc on board, and have braces for my knees I'll go back to serious riding and kettlebells.  One step at the time.  But I am looking forward to going back.

I did manage to finish a few things this week.

Sideways Bobble Hat done in Lion Brand Homespun in Blue Mist on size 10.5 needles.  Crochet cast on, three needle bind off and only five wedges because my gauge was ridiculous.  But I did it in five days, if I was more dedicated/focused it could be done in a day.  It's likely as close to an instant hat as it gets.

Also this

Kitty Cat Tea Cozy, which is based on the Wake Me Up Tea Cozy.  Done in Red Heart Classic in mulberry blend.  It was supposed to have that kind of gathered top but I didn't make it tall enough so I was just going to seam it across.  Then the husband saw it and said "It kind of looks like a cat" and I had to add the details.  It suits him, he is the fabulous purple Dungeon Kitty after all.

Yes, you pour tea out of the cat's nose.  Hush.

I also finished In The Heart Of The Sea this week.  It's quite good if you like stories of historical disasters.  I love me some disaster books, so this was right up my alley.  Now I want to go see the movie:

Next up is Dune by Frank Herbert/

I haven't written jack this week.  I have lots in my head but I haven't been able to focus.  I might just catch up today, or I might catch up with my sewing. 

Slowly but surely on that one.

Speaking of writing I've been nominated for the 2015 Profiler's Choice Awards, which means nothing unless you're really in to CM fan fiction.  But I was nominated in four different categories.  I'm honored.  And flattered.  It's kind of cool.

OK, musical inspiration for the week.

Yes, it's country.  It's not even "good" country, it's horribly poppy country.  But it's making me think of wearing snug jeans and boots and perhaps being able to show off a tight waist and go dancing.  Which is inspiring right now, so you can all just hush.

That's it for this week everyone.  Later.

Plans for the year

I try to do this every year, and every year I am stymied by the Winter Curse.  I even tried rebooting this in late 2015 and the curse promptly caught me.  This year I am making tentative plans, both what firm ones I can and some ideal ones which might not work for reasons beyond my control.  I will do my best but no promises.

---

---

Books to read

I'd like to say I'll read 52 books in 52 weeks, but I have tried that and I tend to get distracted by writing and so stop reading anything too serious.  I also like to say I'll read all the classics but in truth my ability to focus has been hampered by too much internet time over the years and many of the classics are not difficult to plow through.  But I can make these commitments:

Read 60 minutes a day

Read these books:

• In The Heart Of The Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• The Mitford Series by Jan Karon (13 books)
• The All Creatures series by James Herriot (5 books)
• The Anne of Green Gables series by LM Montgomery (original 6 books)
• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
• Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle
• Emma by Jane Austen
• Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• The Awakening by Kate Chopin
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
• Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence
• Les Liasons Dangereux by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
• Lake Woebegon Boy by Garrison Keilor
• Liberty by Garrison Keilor
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• Odd Thomans series by Dean Koonts (7 books)

Total - 45 books

On the one hand some of these are kind of cheating because I've already read them,  But I do enjoy re-reading them and gain some new insight every time.  On the other hand I only have to buy 16 of them, all the rest are either open source or already in my library.  My hope is that I can get around the Winter Curse that way.  Hopefully.

---

Projects

Embroidery:

Finish my stocking, of course.  Then make up two darling little cat pictures I've carried around for decades.  After that make up my wedding sampler.  Honestly that should take most of the year but if I end up with time left over and money I'll start in on my holiday gingerbread village.  If not I'll start in on the hens to hang in the dining room.  I have nearly all of it except fabric for the wedding sampler and the hens, which is quite reasonably priced.

Sewing/quilting:

Finish the Geeks Tea Quilt, which might be broken down into easier to hang chunks.  After that it's the charm quilt for our bed.  The Fucking Quilt needs mending, but it's also falling apart and it is a family heirloom at this point so I'd like to be able to put another one on the bed after this year.  Granted it seems silly to keep the Fucking Quilt and the Flag Quilt when we're not using them but I have hopes of a house where the Flag Quilt can go in a guest room and perhaps the Fucking Quilt can be displayed in our bedroom somewhere.

Knitting:

Stashbusting continues.  I currently have a hat on the needles, which should work up quickly, and a scarf to match a set of mitts. After that I'm making a buff for winter riding, which I will do one way or the other.  Then my mittens finally.  I have the stuff for three lace scarves to work on over the summer.  And I want to finish my Pride Afghan.  I have the yarn for everything but the Pride Afghan and the patters for most of it all but patters and acrylic yarn are all fairly cheap, so I can acquire those as I go.

---

Health:

Like it or not, to save my knees the weight has to come off.  I'm going to go whole hog in a week or so and get myself down to 2100 kcal/day.  Given that, according to the all hallowed Fitbit I burn 3100 a day that ought to give me a 7000 a week deficit, or two pounds without even going to the gym.  If I can get to the gym all the better, That should, at a minimum, get 100 lbs off my knees by the end of the year, which would be awesome.  At this point everything else is secondary to that.

---

Politics, religion and blogging

This will be the year I blog my way through the bible.  My goal is one political or religious post a week, and one update post a week.

---

Writing:

I intend to finish all my outstanding stories this year, hopefully by publishing one chapter a week on them.  The First Run and Percival's Dominatrix are all long form, I hereby commit to only one other story open at a time other than those two.

---

---

 So those are my goals for the year.  I'm not adding anything about education at this time because I've come to realize that there are only so many hours in a day and what is on this list is taking priority.  If I can get this to work I might add more later, we will see.

Right now I have a parade to watch and knitting to do.  Peace out.

...and there went December

The Winter Curse is well and truly upon us.  As happens every December/January we've had payroll interruptions, sickness and now injury.  My tests came back as severe osteoarthritis with an out of alignment patella and multiple large bone spurs.  I want to believe that poor medical care back when I was a child/young adult caused this, which is entirely possible, but my size has certainly not helped at all.  The single best treatment is weight loss, which I am now seriously working on.  The holidays are over.  But in the short-term I get to start cortisol shots come Tuesday, of which I will only have one in each knee, ever.  Apparently the potential for the horrific side effects older people whisper about go up with each round you have.  In the past it has not been unusual to have them monthly, but now there are other options.  It also helps if you get off your ass, work out and really lose the weight once you get the first one.  So I plan to have one in each knee, or at least my right which is horrible right now, and then a round of Synvisc, artificial synovial fluid, which will help protect them for up to two years, and then a brace for my left knee at least, which is the one out of alignment, and then back to the gym.  All of which, save the cortisol, will happen as soon as we get paid.  I have high hopes.

In the meantime something resembling the holidays happened.  Once again it was not what we hoped for thanks to the Winter Curse and my family.  But this year Himself got fed up with it all.  He's taken on a second job just to save up for the 2016 holidays.  Next year we will sign up for all the card exchanges and we will exchange gifts and we will have a merry feast and we will go to the nearby tourist towns to see the decorations, even if I need a wheelchair to walk that far.  We will even embrace the Icelandic tradition of books on Christmas Eve, because we need more tradition in this family and it sounds wonderful.  He is entirely determined.  I think this is the first year he really realized how miserable our holidays are because for the past ten he's worked on the holiday.  Or perhaps he just realized that our last decent holiday was ten years ago.  Either way, I am utterly tickled.  In the meantime I am leaving the tree up for another two weeks just in case we can finish our holiday season.  Also because his back is out and my knees are out and neither of us can get the boxes down to put the tree away.  If it goes past the 15th I will put out the kink signal and see if we can get help in exchange for pizza.

Insert picture of tree here when he emails it to me.

In the meantime gifts happened.  Himself received a pair of socks for the dungeon, in purple of course.

I use Wendy's generic toe-up pattern, more or less, with a short-row heel.

He received a brace of doo-rags to wear to the gym.

Commercially they're geared toward bikers, with the sort of graphics you would expect, lots of Harley Davidson and camouflage and enemy flags and such.  He likes bright colors and cat prints and is a Brony more or less, so he picked most of these colors.  I picked the purple chevrons and red and black print for him and used Tommy's pattern

And the beasties got new beds.  Here are two sisters cuddled into one.

They were on sale for $5 each so we picked up a few,  One for each office, one for the living room and two for our bedroom,  We had an ulterior motive, they no longer sleep in our bed.  No more heavy rocks to try to sleep around at night.

My gifts are waiting for payday, 

 We watched holiday specials to celebrate as we could.  There's a lot more to appreciate about the Grinch when you're older, and you really listen to it.  But Charlie Brown left us both cold.  He is miserable at Christmas not because of commercialism but because he's bullied horribly by all his "friends".  We were both horrified when we realized what they were really saying to him.  And really, reciting the Gospel doesn't help at all.  Here's to hoping Charlie grew up, moved away, went NC with his entire home town, and ended up with a wonderful group of new friends who never called him a blockhead.  We also tried John Devner and the Muppets but Miss Piggy is the spitting image of my Nanny.  She always said Miss Piggy was her favorite muppet and she wanted to be just like her and she made it.  So now I can say that I grew up just like Charlie Brown, called a loser and a blockhead by everyone I knew, and I lived with Miss Piggy.  Think on that a bit.  But I did move away and I do have wonderful friends now.  We had a holiday party at the Dungeon and then New Years Eve at the home of friends where we ate too much and played Cards Against Humanity until midnight and had a wonderful time.

And that was December.

Now on to the new year.

There went that week

Also

In the same dammed week.

I went from mild fever to mild head cold to now this is a chest cold and I hate those.  I hate coughs with a passion.  They make my throat hurt and my head hurt and I can't take a cough suppressant because I have asthma and it could set that off and the next stop for that is the ER.  So I just get to cough and cough all day, especially when I want to laugh.  We laugh a lot around here.

Also, shark week.  Which is all I normally say about that, but this time I will add that coughing + that = really messy, really fast.

The sad part is that Himself sick + me sick + shark week = not going to the dungeon party this week-end, which was when we were debuting the holiday tree we put up at the littles & pets party, which sucks.  Hopefully we'll be better by tomorrow night but I am not holding my breath.

I did get some writing done.  Some sewing done.  Some knitting done.  I am, in the main, on track with crafts.  I hope I can get Himselfs holiday gift done.  If I really push it I can get it done in two days and it's due the 21st so I still have a bit of leeway there.  Housekeeping has kind of fallen apart, if I get the bathroom done today I'll be happy.  Reading is going nowhere, I've started a fascinating new book which I will be talking about once I can focus again.  My lecture series has been replaced with lists of creepy things on YouTube and the bible is waiting for the new year.

Isn't the holiday season fun.

And then it all went to hell

So instead of having my stocking for Christmas I'm going to finish it by the end of January and then hang it in my office to enjoy all year.  Because it's a lot of work and I should enjoy it for more than a few days.  Next year I'll put it on the door with the other stockings and then put it away.

This has nothing to do with the nasty head cold that has settled in to the house making it impossible to focus on little stitches.  Nothing at all.

Anyway, new priorities.  Finishing a few gifts by the 24th.  Assuming my head doesn't explode, it's so hard to wash brains out of wool.

He found it!

My wonderful good kitty of a husband found my missing box of ornaments.  I have no clue what it was doing on the linen shelf in the closet and I don't care, all of my missing minis are back and on the wreath.  Yay!  Thank you Kitty!

...and around...and around...and around....

Somewhere out there is a gif of a stick figure running around a square and never getting anywhere.  I was going to use that one here but I couldn't find it.

So Thanksgiving is more or less over.  Tomorrow I plan to make up our last pie to give us dessert to last until Saturday, which is the last day of Hell Week around here.  I have nearly finished all of the naughty ornaments for the party, only one left to go, which I am tempted to just do and get done today.  But at the same time I am several days behind on my stocking, which I am also tempted to work on, and I am well and truly behind on my current published stories, which is also vexing me.  I might just churn out a few chapters of story and then finish the last ornament so I can work on my stocking in peace for a few days.

Of course this is all compounded by my knees, which are not doing well.  I've been taking the advice of my doctor and trainer and husband and staying off them, only stretching the muscles around them a few times a day.  Stretching feels wonderful, of course, but otherwise they are getting worse.  Six months ago I was able to ride 5 miles at a stretch and was considering training up for a quarter-century (25 miles) next summer.  Yesterday I was in so much pain I was having trouble hobbling around my apartment.  I would go in and get this fixed but long story short money is an issue.  All I will say is that if you are behind in your bills calling others out publicly for fiscal issues is more than a little hypocritical.  That said this should be fixed in he near future and then I'm going in to get this checked out.  As it is I'm afraid to hang my acid rain* snowflakes in my window for fear of irritating my knees and I need to make a stop at JoAnn's tonight.

Another irritation over the last few days involves missing Christmas items.  I've always collected Hallmark miniature ornaments, ever since high school when I was stuck in the dorms much of the time and my nanny's** 2nd husband insisted on a "designer" tree every year.  You know the kind, one color of glass balls, one color of garland, one color of bows scattered about and a large one for a topper, all color coordinated.  Red and gold, silver and pink, purple and blue, make your house look like an office building.  I started a mini-tree for myself, and adored it for years.  These days I display my mini collection on a wreath in my kitchen/dining area.

Apologies for the truly crapalicious picture there.  I store the mini ornaments in their original packaging and boxes in 3x5 card boxes, so they stay together and as added protection.

I pack them in a big red and green storage box along with both the display wreath and the display tree and all the bits that go with it.  So it's all neatly organized and safe.

And somehow I managed to misplace a box of ornaments.  Seven of them from the late 80's and early 90's, just gone.  I also lost a stocking, a very lovely one, given to us by one of our groomsmen, which is usually the stocking I hang for absent friends every year.  I have no idea how these two items escaped from the holiday boxes, except that they have and I have no idea where they've gone.  The stocking has somehow migrated out from time to time, let out when it came time to put away, so it might turn up, but I don't know about that box of ornaments.  And the loss of one of them vexes me greatly.

It doesn't seem like much but in 1989 laser cut ornaments were the latest thing.  One year right around then an amusement park near us named Great America opened for Christmas.  I don't know if they didn't advertise well or if it was because it was pouring rain but on the day my nanny and I went we were practically the only ones there.  Can you imagine having an amusement park all to yourself and having it all decorated for the holidays?  I love holiday decorations, they give me the literal shivers, and everyone was so nice to the only customers so I ended up having the most amazing time.  Nanny bought two of those laser cut ornaments as souvenirs from the park, which I never saw again after that season, so this little one reminds me of that wonderful trip.  I will be replacing it soon because I really don't mind having two of them at all.  Thankfully the secondary market for those little ornaments is robust, so they're around to buy.  And eventually I will collect all the ones I missed, some will go in shadow boxes for year-round display, and some will go on the wreath and perhaps even the little tree, if I can find a cat-safe way of doing it. Husband will just have to live with that.

---

*  Acid rain snowflakes are what you get when you crochet cobweb snowflakes, block them in thinned out white glue, and pin them out with pins that are supposed to be rust-proof, but aren't.  You end up with rust-spots which do not wash out.  So you can either crochet more, which I might someday, or live with acid rain snowflakes/

** Most people would call Nanny my mother.  However over the past few years I have come to realize that if 1) you didn't want to be pregnant, 2) someone pays you to carry the pregnancy instead of having the abortion you were planning, 3) someone pays you to stick around to raise the child and care for the house and 4) you were never emotionally invested in any of it, you were just in it for the money, you're not really a mother.  You're a surrogate/nanny/housekeeper.  But if you never actually clean house you're not really a Housekeeper. and if you stuck around after giving birth you are more than a surrogate, so Nanny will have to do.  My "mother;", the woman who loved me and wanted me and would have raised me on her own and who paid for me, died when I was eight after a long battle with cancer.  Nanny received her final pay-out in 2013 and has not been seen or heard from since.