Erstwhile child speaks up

The Erstwhile Child called me for a natter last night.  I told him about my furious rate of sock production.
"Wow" he said, "you are really stressed."
Busted.  He was right, and I am.

Frabjuous Day

Yesterday was a good day.  All the minor lost things (one of the sock needle cases, two pairs of keys, the second pair of pants I was retrofitting, and two orphan socks) All showed up the same day.  I was able to pick up and refill the Footless Man's prescriptions before I head out, get the registration renewed on Edith, and..........
 The Footless man presented me with my birthday present.

Remember the cabinet? the one that has been making my living room unusable for 5 months? That cabinet?
Yesterday The Footless man and a good buddy (Who looks like Mr Clean on steroids) got it upright and over on the east wall where it belongs.  I am about to embark on a cleanup and furniture rearranging binge.
Do you want to know the best part?
I wasn't there.  It happened while I was at work.  I didn't witness it at all.   I only heard about it later.
Awesome.  My kind of birthday present.

Sock of the week contest

Next week is counting down and I am looking forward to  a trip to a training.  In Cal.  Just north of San Fransisco.
I will be going to a workshop conducted by this woman.  Among the multiple sets of directions for getting to where I am going plus the lists of hotels that I might stay at was a set of directions to bring something that has significance in my personal and professional life.  something that symbolizes something about how I do what I do.  Ok.  Got that.
I am now finishing up a set of socks for one of my mentors and teachers.

Wendy Palmer has had a great deal of influence in my life and my work.  I will be meeting her for lunch the first day of the workshop.   They are filled with the knitters prayer (Oh God I hope She likes them.)
I must admit that knitting a set of tabi from the toe up was a pretty interesting mental challenge.  They look vaguely obscene and distinctly alien until you get the heel finished.
As many of you know, I have been ripping through a  pair of socks per week   since March. This is while doing the rest of what I do.
I am going to have a day of travel plus three days of  workshop time.  I intend to hit the LYS in Sausolito on Sunday.  I have a limited amount of room in my carry on.  How much yarn ( how many sock sets) should I pack?

Presenting: summer knitting pants

Most of my creative work comes out in the form of either knitting or my tiny canvas cards.  Over the last several weeks something has been simmering.  It began to surface when a new fabric store opened up  in old town.  They have really neat and unusual fabric, with a different feel to it.
Add to this, summer is coming, and I am not entirely happy with my summer pants.  Add to that a pair of cargo pockets in a pair of the Footless Man's pants that I appropriated during the worst of the cold last January.  I fell in love with the pockets.   I fell in love with being able to stuff my present sock in progress in a pocket and knit on it so very easily.  I miss the pockets when I wear other pants.
What all these things added up to was a major pant revision to my old baggy summer capri length jeans (Made by whacking off the legs of pants bought at goodwill and the like.) Subtracting baggyness  from the leg, adding fabric lining to the hem edge and making them cuffable.

Then comes the genius stroke.  Lined cargo pockets, placed so that the contents don't spill out when you sit, and so that you don't have stuff digging into your leg.
The pockets have gussets of the lining material so that stuffing things in lets the hidden material peek out.

(click on the pictures to embiggen them)

I was test driving them yesterday and took them apart for further revision.

I have been test driving the revisions today.  Alas, alackaday! I have to take the right pocket off once more.  It is close to perfect in every way.... except that it is two inches lower than the left one.

 Photo's were taken by the Footless Man.
He has not been feeling well for the last three days.  This morning I saw a huge bruise on his chest.  I pestered him until he told me how he got it.  This is one of those pieces of information that you would think would be obvious, and apparently it isn't.
Public service announcement: 
If you don't have feet, don't stand up without your prosthetic legs.
That will be all.

Wake up!

This morning was fairly normal for a Sunday.  The Footless Man did all the usual things early..... and fell asleep before he ate.  So about 10, I brought him his usual cup of juice breakfast and yelled at him until he began drinking it.  Whereupon he fell back to sleep and got an ice cold grapefruit juice bath.  Sometimes consequences are the best teacher.  One sheet change, mattress turn clothes change shower later I am still laughing.  surprise!

Kitchen cabinet Tetras

It has been a day of kitchen cabinet tetras.
the Footless man and I have been having another bash at getting the last cabinet process going to my satisfaction and unfortunately, to the Footless man's deep distress.
This process involves tape measures and hand waving, and wanting to shake the other person involved because they can't see the picture inside your head.
In the end I resorted to the computer.

As a starting point, we will revisit the cabinet that occupies my kitchen's west wall.  This honking big  kitchen island that the Footless man would dearly love to keep with all its attendant hardware.

What I want is different.  I want one of the end cabinets with the lovely roll out shelves to sit near my stove  so that I can reach in to them and grab my pots.  What I want is to reduce the big thing into units and build a wall.

I want it to look mostly like this.

Trying to convey this to the Footless Man is like explaining to my youngest grandchild that mom is talking on the phone and She ( grandchild) is not getting the use of it any time soon.

I finally resorted to using the computer paint program with a grid made by the excel program like it was a CAD program.

This is what I want.

This is what I have

Now that I have managed to get this mostly across,  I hope that I can repeat myself enough times to get it.

All better now

The last month has been a downhill slide with an increasingly nonfunctional computer.  I eventually had to push the destructo button and reformat the damn thing. 
While it did work, it also deep sixed  a whole lot of useful things like my firewall, my word processing program, and the media player.
Yesterday the Erstwhile Child plus his dear one came up bearing education and gifts of software.  Thanks guys,  I love you both.
Today my reformatted, improved, stripped out, safely protected, fire walled and infinitely faster computer and I are getting re acquainted. 
I am going to have  to relearn a whole bunch of stuff. 
I hear that word 2007 is really different and I am just about to find out just what that means.
Mean while, this is mother's day and I feel that it is another commercial holiday over hyped for the benefit of the flower companies and the restaurant trade.

All the same,  this is my mom in her new socks.  She is a fine and intelligent upstanding woman who has had the courage to grab the opportunity to grow when it is presented.
I love her very much. And Mom? yes I will be making more socks for you.  Get in line.  There are a few people ahead.  Your turn is coming, don't fret I won't forget you.
Love, Your daughter.

So that's what it was

The past most of a year has been both a learning and a profound healing process for a lot of people.  I count myself one of them.
Anyone who is around me for more than five minutes knows that I don't think in conventional patterns.  Over the years I have struggled with the disconnect between the demands of the world around me, and a mind directed into channels that were distinctly non linear.
Non linear brains are highly creative, but with no resources they tend not to do well financially.  This becomes difficult when the non linear brain has to earn a living and support children.
Lack of formal education means low paying jobs with no upward mobility.  Poverty is a bitch.  
I have been able to find explanations for some of the ways I did not function over the years.  I knew for a long time that I could read very well and could not hand write.  It was one of the reasons that getting an education was frustrating.  Giving a name ( graphic Dyslexia) to the problem made it easier to explain.    Over the years I largely self taught me.  While I was raising children, I was buying college texts at garage sales and reading them, to learn as best I could. ( I wasn't stupid, just limited.)
The first real breakthrough  for me, was sitting at a computer keyboard and being able to write a paragraph and then a page with no brain lock.   I won't describe brain lock, I can't.  the closest I can get is  having your computer shut down in the middle of what you are doing, and  not re start for three hours, or maybe three minutes.  (you never know how long)  It also physically hurts.  Technology in the form of a computer gave me the hope that I might someday be able to get some higher education.
The next clue to my problems was a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder (ADD).  Aha. Other people have this too, I am not alone.
 Now I had both technology and some educational assistance  on my side.  I eventually found that with nutritional supplements, knitting, and a computer I had more than half a chance to go to college and do reasonably well.
Go I did.  I graduated and went ahead with my non linear career.  In the last year I found the last puzzle piece.
Traumatic Brain injury.
Without going into the history, I had several incidents where my brain was bashed. Some of them were accidental, some not.  My entire family has ADD to some extent or other.  The reason that I had an extraordinarily hard time was that extra piece.
I am still learning about this. 
Over the last months I have been learning about brain integration, finding pieces of myself in the strangest places, and coping with past history in the light of new information.  It hasn't been pretty, and there have been parts that involved my entire family.
Now I am learning to use the brain integration processes in my own work.
Present focus is on the Amegedela, the lizard brain, and the center of fear and safety.
Here Is what I have found out about making changes.
You may want, need and be ready  to make the change, and if the lizard brain  thinks that  the change is not safe, you will find it very very hard to make that change.
 In working with my wonderful group of willing guinea pigs, here are some of the things I learned that  the lizard brain has believed:

• I am safe when people are mad at me, 
• when I am fat, 
• when I am dead, 
• when I am in charge,
• when others are in charge, 
• when I am pretty,
• when I am ugly,
• when I am responsible for others happiness..... 

 some of these are held as opposite beliefs at the same time in the same brain(!)Amazing.
I still have places that are unhealed, and ways that I will have to cope with a brain that does not cooperate.  I have great hope that what I am learning will help others because I am sure that  I am not alone.  I know that there are others around that have had to cope with the same kind of  wayward brain.
I wonder what this means. 
I wonder how it will work.