Erica’s Blog

So.  It’s 9:06 p.m.  In less than 12 hours, I’ll be on the operating table, having my hysterectomy.  My bag is as packed as it can get before tomorrow.  I’ve taken my bottle of magnesium citrate and am waiting for it to act some more.  The Things are in bed.  Nana is settled in and ready to take the Things to school tomorrow (they’ve both shed tears over it, so I have a feeling it’s going to be a rough morning; Nana may need to hit the drive-through donut shop after she drops them off). 

No idea how up to visitors I’ll be.  I’ve been told that it’s like a c-section, but with more pain.  If you’re a local friend and you know where I’m staying, you can give a call and see if I’m up to seeing people (MEY, feel free to come on your lunch break).  My room is like a small hotel suite, so you can relax on the couch and watch TV or sit at the table and knit.  They don’t have set visiting hours, so you can come see me whenever I feel like it. 

I’m bringing some dishcloth cotton and some needles in case I feel up to some mindless knitting.  (If I feel up to more, I’ll have hubby bring me some stuff from home, but I doubt the narcotics will allow for that.)  I’ve got a book or two, and I plan to sleep a lot.

A number of you will get calls/emails from Hubby letting you know that I’m OK afterwards.  Until this weekend, ciao!

So, what do you do when you have a really small budget for a wedding shower gift?  Well, you gather up a couple of items you’ve aready purchased, knit up “a week of dishcloths” with cotton from your existing stash, buy a nice bowl and a pair of lacy underwear at Marshalls, and you put together a Sex Begins in the Kitchen gift like so:

Dishcloth patterns:

• Basic dishcloth.  (I didn’t use a pattern, but this one of Bev’s is essentially the same.)
• Mason-Dixon wash cloth.
• Pinwheel adapted from center of Mason-Dixon pinwheel rug.
• Garterlac dishcloth.
• Round dishcloth.
• Mitered dishcloth.
• No-pattern parallelogram cloth.

Oh, and that body oil is Neutrogena Body Oil, “light sesame formula”.  Fabulous stuff, known around our house as “liquid gold” (mille grazie Terry for giving me some at my lingerie shower eleven years ago).

Click on “Read More” to see the individual dish cloths….

EDITED TO ADD:  She liked it!  SO glad I asked Adri about Tina’s favorite colors b/c the bowl is the same color green Tina has in her kitchen, and the two other colors are yellow and turquoise.  The shower was great — 18 tons of food (highlights for moi = Velia’s ceviche/shrimp cocktail, Tammy’s chocolate-dipped strawberries, and the Mexican wedding cookies).  She had a “support the honeymoon” raffle with cool prizes (I won some Mary Kay eye stuff; I’m terrified of the eyelash curler).  The games were a lot of fun, too (and YES, I would say that even if I hadn’t won one of them!).  She didn’t get any sheets or towels, but she got lots of beautiful, sexy lingerie, so Frankie won’t mind not having the other stuff. 

Oh, yeah.  THIS is the other reason Wednesday was stressful.

This picture was actually taken AFTER the worst of it, when the plumber had already been here a while.  Earlier, there was, well, really disgusting brown water in the tub.  See the line?  That’s how deep it was.  VERY gross.  After the guy left (took him nearly FOUR HOURS to fix it all, but the work is guaranteed for two years), I had to clean, then disinfect the bathroom with a 10% bleach solution.  What fun!  The bathmat and scrubby got thrown out.

Wednesday was the first day of school.  Much excitement.  Much busyness, what with getting both Things ready & out the door, setting up the kindergarten parents’ reception and the teachers’ lunch, and my pre-op appointment at the hospital.  B/c of all this, I actually missed seeing and videotaping Thing Two walk into her classroom (she was the first one in!), get her nametag, find her cubbyhole, etc.  The second kid always gets the short end of the deal, hunh?  Oh, well.

Here’s a highlight.  The rest of the pictures (what few there are) are here.

P is for PERFECTLY PINK ‘PLACEMENT PART….

Seeing as how I’m having a hysterectomy next Tuesday, Matthew from our knitting group, made me a womb and presented it to me last night.  As you can see, it’s complete with two ova and three smiling “swimmers”.  (For size reference, that’s a “venti” cup of herb tea supporting it.)  I joked that I ought to embroider on my c-section scars and fibroids and “tie” the tubes. 

I think Matthew should enter it (or another one; he’s got a few in progress)  into the Knitty calendar contest.  What do you think?  You’re allowed to alter the pattern as long as it’s still recognizable as that pattern.  I think it would end up in the calendar for sure.  Hmmmm.  I’m tempted just to enter it for him, but that wouldn’t be right.

The Tooth Fairy made another visit last week….

Look at how crooked the new ones are.  I fear this kid is going to need braces in the future.  Her top right (your right) middle tooth is loose, too, so now she’s focused on “working” that one.  I tell ya, at a dollar a tooth, this kid’s going to be rich!

So, a bunch of us in our Tuesday night knitting gang entered knit items into the San Mateo County Fair.  ‘Nette’s lavender hooded baby sweater won second place in its category!  The rest of us didn’t win anything, but we got free entrance tickets and a free parking pass, so it works out.

Yesterday was our day to go to the fair, but we almost didn’t make it b/c I had a rotten headache and didn’t crawl out of bed till about three o’clock.  Finally made it, though.  I wasn’t good for much, but we saw our stuff, the Things rode rides, we spent a long time at the cool hands-on exhibits, I had a latte, Hubby had a Cinnabon, and we got to hear a little bit of Tower of Power’s show.  All in all, a good day.  Rest of the pictures are here, but these are the two of us with 1) my bowl and 2) ‘Nette’s bag, my green & pink bag, and my red bag.

(Matthew’s doily is directly behind my head.)

You can just barely see the bottom of “Lucy’s” bag above ‘Nette’s.  If it had registered in my little pea brain that it was her bag, I would have made sure to include it in the picture.  BTW, I take no responsibility for Thing One’s outfit; she chose it herself (and she even had a pink/blue/white striped Lizzie McGuire shirt underneath!).

So, are you going to finish that today?

Maybe. Why?

I’m just tired of looking at it.  How long have you been working on it, a month?

Not really.  When we were on vacation, I only worked on it on the plane and that one little bit at your mom’s house.

Well, maybe it just seems like a long time because you had to frog it so much.

Mmmmm…[thinks about it]…only once.  I think.   But yeah, I should have it done today.

Yeah.  Uh, huh.  Famous last words…. 

‘member how I said I thought the neck on the blue & white sweater for Jubal’s baby was too small?  Well, that’s the least of my worries.  For a while, I was worried about the armholes because the dimensions in the pattern seemed too small.  I ended up making them an inch or so bigger than the pattern said to.  Well, I got 3/4 of the way through knitting the sleeves today [relaxing on Jim & Toots' patio in Terra Linda, watching/listening to the Things and J&T's grandkids run around and play, chatting with whoever was hanging out on the patio at the moment], and I realized that the armholes are JUST.  TOO.  SMALL.  The main problem with this, of course, is that I’ve already joined the shoulders together (three-needle bind-off; I avoid seaming as much as possible, remember?). 

Any suggestions?  (Other than just deciding it’s a cleaning rag or weirdly-shaped dish cloth?)

Meanwhile, I try to figure out what sort of baby item I can get out of approximately 300 yards of DK-weight AllHemp6 + oh, 100 or so yards of a thinner hemp yarn.  Nana thinks all could I get is a hat or so.  Hubby took a piece of the AllHemp6 and had fun taking it apart, examining the fibers. 

This is really interesting.  The individual strands a thin, but I can - what’s the word?

Draft?

Yeah, draft.  I can draft it even thinner.  This is cool.

[Wifey thinks that it's probably not called drafting when the fiber has already been spun, but that's OK.  She's just glad that he finds the fiber interesting.]