2 Finished projects!

Simply Stripes pattern knit with Brown Sheep Naturespun. Cranberry Fog and Dark Olive colorway. I started this sweater way back in Sept. 2007 and made real great headway until I got to the sleeves. Then, for some reason, I guess I got bored with it and set it aside for a while. The worst part of the whole sweater was weaving in all the ends! This will be a nice warm sweater for next winter.

Simple crew length socks knit from Urban GypZ yarn in the Olive colorway. Love this yarn! Socks are way more green than they appear in this photo.

I've got so many projects in my que that I'm not sure what I'll be working on next.

Momma's go a brand new bag!

Isn't it pretty! What doesn't show really well in the photo is the color along the top. It is a very deep auburgine purple. The whole bag is made of a chenile tapestry fabric. The front there as you see in is a magnetically snapped full pocket. The top has a hidden metal clasp type closer. Inside both the front pocket and the body of the bag are small side pockets for assorted knitting gadgets and accessories. I LURVE this bag. I have always loved tapestry fabric and this is sooooo soft and lush. It even has little metal feet on the bottem to protect it. Squeeeeee happy dance!!!!

My parents farm distroyed in last weeks tornados

As if losing my dad last October wasn't bad enough. Last Tuesday when several states in the Southeast were ravaged by tornados and many, many lives were lost and many millions, perhaps billions of dollars of property damage was done, my parents farm was also distroyed.

My mother was alone in the house with her two little dogs when the storm roared through Cleveland, Ark. She took shelter in her small wood frame home in a central hallway. Only God and his angels know why she wasn't hurt.

Both of the barns were totally blown away. All of the trees that were in the immediate surrounding area of the house and in the yard were either uprooted or broken off and striped of limbs. As far as we could see on the 48 acres all the way down to the wood line, there wasn't a tree left standing.

Thankfully, a neighbor who is an EMT, came up to the house and ran through the pasture and up to the house and got her out safely. The driveway up to the house, which was once tree lined was unpassable. They literally had to lift/carry/toss my mother over a fence row of broken brush to get her to a vehicle to take her to safety so that we could get to her to bring her to my house that night.

The next morning, when we saw what the storm left in the daylight, we were all just stunned. The thought that kept going through my mind is that I was SO glad that daddy wasn't alive to see all the distruction to his beloved farm because it would have just killed his soul. They lived and loved on that place for 25 years.

Tonight is actually the first night that I have had an opportunity to really sit down and write about all of this. Thankfully, my mother had already been planning on moving away from the farm into the town where I live because she knew that she couldn't live so far out from "civilization" by herself. So, because of this, she actually did have somewhere to go as she had already purchased a new mobile home. The problem was however, that it had just gotten delivered and was no where near finished being set up. Plus, she hadn't even begun to pack the first box! We worked like mad in the freezing cold, and mostly in the dark inside her tornado damaged house just to try to get her belongings out before another rain came. Luckily, I think as it stands right now, we have 90-95% of her stuff out. All of the major important stuff is out anyway. She still has pantry canned food items and some kitchen cabinet items, but those won't be damaged it they get wet.

We are all just so overwhelmed at the daunting task ahead of us as far as the clean up goes. She was going to eventually put the farm up for sale, but now with all the damage, I just don't know how that will effect the value of the property. It used to be so beautiful with huge oaks and cedar and pine trees. Now it's just a jumbled up mess.

Mom is very much in shock. She doesn't understand why God took her husband and then took her home like that. Me, I am just very, very sad. Sad for her and sad for the distruction of such a beautiful place that was so special.

The Good, The Sad, and The Ugly

It has obviously been a loooooong time since I have posted here on my blog. As you can tell from the title of this post, it has been anything but "normal" around here. It has run the gamut from very happy to incredibly, inconsolibly sad, and painfully ugly. Why you ask? Well.....



A very happy day was when the UPS man delivered 4 ginormous boxes of processed fiber for me from Stonehedge Fiber Mill! I tell you, Deb McDermott does a wonderful job! I sent her 6 fleeces in my first order. I was pretty much just sending my largest fleeces out at the time to be processed. I was also sending them out to "test run" the mill to see how I liked their work. I was completely and totally satisfied. And let me tell you one thing.......she packed the finished fleece so tightly into the boxes she sent back to me, that when I cut the tape to open them up, the fiber literally sprang up and exploded out of the boxes! It didn't take me long to decide to box up the rest of the fleece that I had and send it to her to process. SO much easier on my back and neck! And for the price, I don't think I can get it washed for what she charges. The worst part of the whole deal in my opinion is the shipping! THAT is highway robbery!!!!!

Now......much to my dismay, onto the sad. Unfortunately there is a couple of things that fall into this catagory. One is a sort of sad, but in the big scheme of things -- not so much. The other -- LIFE ALTERING.
1. my German Shepherd female, Jade has been sick. For the past 4 weeks she has been having 1 grand mal seizure in the middle of the night one week apart. Since she finally had 4, she established a pattern and the vet said to bring her in for a full work up. Well he ran every single solitary test on her from stem to stern and everything came back negative except for one. Rocky Mountain Spotted Tick Fever. We have no idea when she got a tick bite since we never SAW a tick on her (she probably bit it off before we saw it), and we have no idea how long she has been sick with it. But, with the diagnosis in hand finally, now we can treat her. She'll be on antibiotics for 6 weeks. Since she is young, we'll just have to watch her in the future and hope that her brain can repair itself where it's got the lesion or "short" in it that is causing the seizure. FYI - you can't immunize against Rocky Mountain Tick Fever, you can only treat it. Both in humans and in animals.
2. My dad had an accident on his farm involving a tractor and a bush hog (a big mower) and died on Oct.31st. Needless to say, this has ripped the guts right out of the whole family. A neighbor called and notified me, but he was using my dad's cell phone and for a few moments I couldn't figure out WHY the neighbor was calling me on dad's phone. After the news sunk in, I literally lost my mind for a few minutes. I am still in somewhat of a "shock" state. I'm supposed to be able to pick up my phone and be able to call my daddy. My mom is beyond lost, but I really think that in time she'll do ok. She's alot stronger than she gives herself credit for. It's just that she's depended upon dad for sooooo very long for nearly everything.



That, my friends, is the UGLY!! What you are looking at there is a photo of what was hanging out of the middle of my back between my shoulder blades last week for 5 days. I underwent a "trial" for a Spinal Cord Stimulator. What a Spinal Cord Stimulator is, is basically a pain pacemaker. Since I suffer from chronic pain ever since I wrecked my spine back in '03, and have just about exhausted every other medical avenue avaliable for the relief of pain, this is now the second to the last stop on the road. Why would a person want a "pain pacemaker"? Well, for me it's because I hope to not get as much "break through" pain even though I take pain medication. I also hope that I can keep the amount and the dosage of pain pills that I have to take a day down to a minimum.

But, too.......I am kinda scared. The surgery to put the thing in is rather strange because they put the electrodes in at the back of my neck. Then, they have to take and run the connecting wire that hooks to the battery pack down inside under the skin of the back all the way down to my lower back. At that juncture, they make an incision and insert the "pacemaker" looking part of the aperatus and hook everything all up together. Since I'm right handed, the pacemaker part will go into my body below the skin on the right side of my hip. Apparently, you can adjust it from a controller that you simply touch to the inside thing from the outside of your body once the incision has healed to either increase or decrease the level of pain control. Then somehow to recharge the thing, you plug into a wall outlet and just sit there and touch some kind of charger thing to the pacemaker inside. It's some sort of high tech weirdness that's for sure. After that, I hope above ALL hopes that I am DONE with people cutting on me for a good loooooong time. Personally, I am sick to death of it.

Next up in the batter's box will be Tony. He survived his mylograms and his diskectomy but whoooo boy was it ever painful. He is still sore! He couldn't get home from St. Louis fast enough. We aren't sure just yet when his surgery will be.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving! It will be a quiet affair for us. I don't think the holidays will be quite right this year without dad. It's just too soon.

Essential Stripe Sweater

Here is one of the lastest projects that I'll be working on while I'm just sitting and healing. I started it while I was out in Calif. The pattern is the Essential Stripe Sweater by Wendy Bernard. Unfortunately, the colors didn't show really true in this shot. The actual colors are more olive green and more of a true cranberry grape color. The yarn is Nature Spun by Brown Sheep and the actual colorways are Green Olive and Cranberry Fog. The original pattern showed to be multi-colored stripes, but for the first run at it, I thought that I would just do it in two. So far I'm liking this pattern just fine. It's one of those patterns with options for different sleeve lengths etc.

I'm also working on a Chevron Scarf. Oh boy is that ever a tedious little dude! I *might* be done by Christmas.