It LIIIIIIIIIIIIIVES!!!

Hello, blog. Hello, world.

The long silence has been purely a function of nothing much to write about. Have been back in Seattle for (…some quick finger counting…) three months, contract position has been extended to the end of June, health is still a little funky but I'm in physical therapy for it, and on we go.

The good news? Given that the new bridge toll combined with parking in a fancy-schmancy building adds up to a cool 600 smackeroonies a month, I've been busing it to and from work. And, as all commuting knitters know, bus time = knitting time. Even more importantly, bus time = limited knitting time so I don’t aggravate easily aggravated wrists. Funny thing: string enough half-hour bus trips together and projects get completed. This week I finished a sock, the first in, like, ferever. Would love to show you it but I’ll be damned if I know where the thingy is for charging my very dead camera battery. Fortunately, in the digital world of blogging, you can scavenge from old photos, so here we go. Look at this…

…and imagine it in the shape of a sock. That worked, right?

P.S. It's Dream in Color Starry. I also have it in brown. Be prepared to use your imaginations again very soon.

Huh.

Funny thing.

I’m back in Seattle.

Remember the boss who got fired with the result that I was booted out the door an hour later? He landed safely elsewhere, tracked me down in San Diego, and offered me a three-month contract position at the new company. As the saying goes, “In this economy….” Plus he’s a nice boss. And he had lured away other people from my last job so I knew there'd be friendly and familiar faces around from the get-go. So here I be for the nonce.

Thanks to the passage of time and support from friends and family, health is better than when I did a face-plant on the driveway upon first arriving in SD so I figured I’d take a gamble on coming back, after much discussion with:

Self, which went something like, “Yes. No. Yes. No. Maybe. Yes. No. Oh, look, a bird!”

Sister, which went something like, “No.”

Financial advisor, which went something like, “Yes.”

Therapist, which went something like, “Yes.”

So, I crammed my belongings back into Crazy Ivan and threaded my way back up the coast. But (and please forgive me this one, Ken) this time I did it the sane way: in five days, three to six hours of driving a day with stays at slightly-dumpy-but-they-take-cats-at-no-extra-charge hotels along the way.

The cats were in no particular hurry to leave since they had grown accustomed to the California lifestyle…

…but they were troupers, as evidenced by this, taken the night of Day 4, after their usual sleuthing-about in the new room. (There is also a slight possibility that the tranquilizers hadn’t completely worn off yet.)

Not a lot of photos from the trip because I was determinedly focused on getting from Point A to Point B each day but there was this…

…Mount Shasta, taken after Crazy Ivan and I had ground our way up one side of the pass and down the other. Fortunately the weather was with us the entire way, thank you, Mother Nature.

And I arrived home to this, which put a huge grin on my face:

In other news, I’m knitting. Sort of. It’s knitting. It’s legit. It’s just that…it’s dishcloths. To go from this…

…to this…

...is a bit of a comedown but I’ll take what I can get, and whatever my wrists are willing to do, so I’ve been churning these things out like a madwoman. Two stayed in California, and these two are promised to a co-worker. Anyone want a dishcloth?

Oh, and one other small thing. Went to California looking like this…

And came home looking like this…

Two Months In...

Last we heard from our intrepid adventurer, thanks to a series of bizarre-o blackouts, she had decided to wend her way down to Sister and San Diego for some R & R & R & S (Rest, Relaxation, Re-evaluation and Sun).

BFF Ken, bless his ever-lovin’ heart, chauffeured me, Crazy Ivan and the cats the 1,264 miles, and I think even he, with his devil-may-care plan to “point the car south and see what happens,” would agree that the drive was a little more than we bargained for: 26 hours of driving in two days; a mix-up with the hotel rooms; lost directions; a zig when we should’ve taken a zag, which almost landed us in Meh-hee-ko; my not being able to remember the address of the house (only to discover we were parked in front of it); and my not making it up the driveway before collapsing and having to be hauled into the house like a sack of potatoes. (Pretty look, that.) All that being said, we had a wonderful time—talked and laughed and played Yellow Car (using his family's highly suspect modified rules) all the way.

As for what the cats thought of the trip, this photo speaks for itself. There are actually two cats in the cage.

Sister has an old, slow, wonky-in-the-hips dog but, for all that, still a cat-eater so Benny, Joon and I are tucked safely away behind the door of the beautiful, cavernous master bedroom with bathroom en suite (as the realtors say) which Sister has kindly given over to me as our little “apartment” for our stay. Er, to be clear, I do have full range of the rest of the house; the cats, not so much—although this doesn't seem to stop them from pushing the boundaries:

(The cavernous bedroom also has an equally cavernous California king bed. I've discovered the naughty little secret to California kings. When the sheets get dirty, you can just move to the other side. Saves water and electricity. It's "eco." That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

Health-wise, things have improved greatly although I don’t trust the "I'm fine" vibe my body’s giving me because it felt fine-ish before the blackouts. However, I’ve gone from not being able to walk at all (see "sack of potatoes" above), to being able to stumble drunkenly for a block, to being able to walk a good mile with no drunken stumbling, to getting lost and having to/being able to walk three miles round-trip to get back to Point A. Muscle mass is coming back; I can see better; I’m perkier; and I’m eating again.

All told, by the time I head back to Seattle, I will have seen three neurologists, three psychiatrists, three GPs and attended a variety of quirky self-help groups. And yet—surprise, surprise!—nobody knows what’s going on. The neurologists say it’s psychological, the psychologists say it’s neurological, and none of them are being evasive or condescending (except the neurologist who apparently took his medical training in the 1500s and hinted I was being an hysterical female. No lie. He actually managed to insert both the words “hysterical” and “female” close together into his diagnosis. Very smooth how he did it, too.). Sigh. How can a girl make important life decisions with this kind of iffy information?

In the meantime, the cats are doing well—although this week Benny almost ripped out a claw when he got his head and one front leg stuck in the handle of a crackly plastic bag and broke land speed records trying in vain to get away from the bag—and I am being spoiled.

Wait. Didn't this use to be a knitting blog?

One Can But Shrug One's Shoulders

So, life…

It seems to be getting more sci-fi by the minute.

First, after eight months of gainful employment, I rejoined the world of the unemployed for the second time, thanks to a spectacular up-the-line bust-up at my job which had a trickle-down effect to, well…me. Out in about an hour, in a manner akin to “don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.”

Then, I woke up about a month ago, got out of bed, stood up, and immediately did a face-plant on the floor.

Hmmmmm, I sez to myself, I sez, that’s not normal. Let’s just get up, dust ourselves off and get on with things as they should be.

Face-plant #2.

Hmmmmm, I sez to myself, I sez, this continues to not be normal. Never mind with the standing up, then. Let’s sit up, just prop ourselves up against the side of the bed, wait until things right themselves, dust ourselves off and get on with things as they should be.

Face-plant #3. I just didn’t have as far to fall this time.

Hmmmmmmm, I sez to myself, I sez, there seems to be no standing up today. In fact, there seems to be no sitting up. In further fact, there seems to be no up at all. What a veritable pickle. My only option, from this point forward in life, seems to be lying on my back on the floor. (Bet you’re already thinking, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” Shame on you. Okay, yeah, I thought it, too.)

This was followed by about an hour of scooting myself across the floor on my back, trying to get to the phone and, when my t-shirt rucked itself up, discovering just how cold tile can be on warm flesh. In truth, because I knew I was safe on my back, the hour also included wiggling my way to the closet, opening it with my toes and spilling a pile of food on the floor for the cats (because I didn’t know how things were going to play out or indeed how long the cats would need to fend for themselves); wiggling my way to the front door to make sure it was unlocked for the EMTs (again, toes); and wiggling my way to the phone and calling my sister in San Diego first (so she could contact the cat sitter, which was important, and cancel a lunch I had with BFF Ken, which, in retrospect, may not have been as important but, hey, I had her on the phone) before I called 911. (It was a good thing I called Big Sister first because, once I called 911, the EMTs were there in a minute. Literally. I hung up, relaxed on the floor…and heard the sirens.)

(Incidentally, throughout all of this, I really, really, really had to pee. That was the true torture.)

Five more blackouts and six days later, I was released from the hospital with a diagnosis of cataplexy, suspected conversion disorder. Which, in layman’s terms, means the best the docs could figure out was that my subconscious had decided it had had enough of this life (regardless of how I felt), was determined to give up, and was going to make me lie down and stay down fer, like, ferever. (By the way, hospital? I coulda done without the 12 or so heparin shots in the stomach, thanks all the same.)

(For those interested in the gory details, the attacks were like being a marionette whose strings were all cut at the same time. Eyes slammed shut, head dropped, knees buckled, and, hello, floor. But I could hear and feel (do you know how many painful things EMTs do to you to try to wake you up? Holy Toledo!)—and, to a minimal extent, gurgle responses to questions but I had no control over my body and couldn't open my eyes. This seems to be the nature of cataplexy.)

So, I’m home. I’ve been home for a while but I'm still weak, dizzy, loopy in the head, sometimes I have trouble walking, and my eyes feel achy the way they do when they've been dilated, which all adds up to my not being well enough to look for work but not being sick enough to go on disability. And the diagnosis? Well, I just don’t know. I’m not entirely convinced it’s psychological (there were other physical symptoms that were just weird like how much my muscle tone withered in 24 hours) but the hospital docs did an intense work up—I was shoved into and onto and over every machine imaginable, and anything left over was attached to my body in some fashion or another, saw a GP, a psychiatrist and physical therapists—and, since leaving the hospital, I’ve seen a therapist multiple times, another psychiatrist, another GP, and am seeing a neurologist next week since the epilepsy which I’ve had for years does muddy the diagnosis waters a bit. True, there is some shrugging of the shoulders going on on the part of the professionals, but they don’t know what else to do—except tinker with my medications, which has been more of a nightmare than the cataplexy. Have not been enjoying that. I have made them untinker most everything they did.

In the meantime, the one unavoidable fact is that I cannot live alone—this go-round, I was lucky that the only thing I hurt was a toenail (which has turned a lovely shade of puce)—and there's no way to know if the attacks are under control, so I’m most likely shutting up the little cottage, packing up the cats and heading down to San Diego for a few months. The consensus, professional, amateur and otherwise, seems to be that a little sunshine and a lot of family certainly can’t hurt.

While I’m still here in Seattle, however, my coterie of Guardian Angels—friends and family in-state and out—have been peforming their ever-selfless magic and keeping me safe, sane-ish and fed. You know who you are, Guardian Angels, and I won’t even try to say thank you because it just doesn’t even come close.

The biggest change? Guess who has a cell phone.

How Could I Not?

I'm posting this for two reasons, the primary one being to force the round photo of the salad off my screen. The image of the salad itself is fine but the excruciatingly simplistic, anally clenched, uber-exact roundness of the photo makes my teeth hurt. I'm more an artsy-fartsy, blur-the-edges, toss-some-sepia-at-it kind of gal. So, in my world, where lazy is all relative and posting something new is easier than editing and reposting an existing photo, you get my second entry in two days.

The second reason speaks for itself: