Step Into My Thimble

It’s been a weird few days…a weekend in Chicagoland, Rodney’s 33rd birthday, some very troubling family secrets revealed, two ear infections recovered from, a trip to the big Mitsuwa where a kids’ book about animal butts (title sadly not noted) was enjoyed, a fall off a dining room chair that resulted in blood everywhere, and the discovery that for the last month I have had a broken index finger. All that in just a few days!

I got that finger X-rayed a week or so ago, and while I was waiting for results I wondered if I would get to claim one of these. Maybe this one:

I still can’t figure out how it happened, though. One day I just woke up with a stiff, sore finger, and I had pretty much concluded that it was the harbinger for arthritis. After all, with my mouthful of crowns and all these other aging things going on, it would only be natural. In true knitter spirit, I never stopped working on my current project, which is way too lumpy and weird to show in progress. Give me another month.

Here is Maeve in the maze at the fairly new Kohl Children’s Museum in Glenview, Illinois. It was a great place for her at this age, maybe a tad crowded, but almost all of the exhibit material was perfectly age appropriate and lots of fun, especially the paint-your-own-face station.

Maeve’s godfather gets a big break.

It’s that time of year when people in Michigan start complaining about how they want winter to be over. The cities are running out of money to plow the roads, under the snow horrible blowout-inducing potholes are lurking, the heat bills are unbearable, all our shoes are trashed from the sidewalk salt, and everybody’s hands are dry and cracking. And, we complain!!

I never said I love winter. I only like it when the snow is white and pretty, and it’s 30 degrees or more outside. After a week or two of that, I’m ready for tulips and baby bunnies.

Today I went back to my dentist for more crown work, on teeth #31 and #32, which are the back two bottom right ones in a mouth without wisdom teeth. This dentist is one Rodney selected for us when we moved back here, I think primarily due to the fancy market-saturating campaign in the community (I know, dental marketing, whatever). You can have locally roasted coffee while you wait, a warmed flax-seed pillow for under your neck, a blanket for your feet, lip balm in your choice of scents, and even a DVD to soothe and distract you. And, the bill to match.

The DVD choices include Spongebob Squarepants, plus nine live concerts by various music acts, the dentist’s personal favorite being Michael Buble. Today the tech who assisted him asked me if I wanted to watch one, and I said sure. She said she really loves the Celine Dion one, it’s very relaxing for her. That only made me gag a little bit, and so I went back to my old stand-by, Phil Collins “Seriously Live in Berlin.” Based on the backup singers’ clothing, I am guessing it was filmed sometime in the late 1980s. All the hits are there, and it’s a crowd of billions. Phil even busts out a bit of basic German on the crowd, often shouting “wunderbar!”

Although it took more than 15 injections to get my mouth numb enough to withstand the agony (apparently the lower jaw requires the most medication), after a while the dentist and the tech got going with the horrible drilling-out of those two teeth, and I tried to enjoy Phil.

A mind gets to wandering after hearing the chorus of “One More Night” a few too many times, and soon I found myself thinking about the gigantic crowd that was in attendance. It was a sea of people. I’ve been to a very few concerts like that, the first Lollapalooza, three nights of Grateful Dead (hey I was 17, and they had Bruce Hornsby on keyboards!)… so I guess I never really thought much about how it must feel to be THE PERSON all those fans are there screaming and writhing over.

Then I started thinking about how some of the boys I dated in high school and college had dreams of becoming rock stars. The indie rock kind of rock stars, but rock stars just the same. I doubt many of them would have said that the reason for it was a desire for a sea of people traveling miles, wearing their face on shirts, buying their stuff as soon as it hit the store, screaming, and writhing…never quite getting enough. Now, as a grown up far removed from the angsty indie rock boys of 15-odd years ago, I think that was it, the big true reason for wanting to be a rock star.

Watching Phil up there through my tinted protective glasses as the drill buzzed away, I guess I tidied up another little corner of my formative years. I accepted the fact that those boys wanted all the glory even though they couldn’t admit it at the time. What else could it be? The music certainly wasn’t that awesome.

A F. O. to share today.

This is a pattern I made up myself a while ago, and finally got around to figuring out math for two larger sizes. However, it is still completely wrong. This size (the medium, 2-3Tish) was supposed to have a chest measurement of 24″ but it ended up more like 29″. I’m sure when Maeve is ready for a size that big the sleeves will be way too short. Oh well, it’s top down, and I have a lot of yarn left, so I can always make the sleeves longer. I am not planning to frog it and do it over.

I let her pick out the buttons from my stash herself. All it took was one glance, and she yelled “corn!” so that made it easy.

The yarn is Araucania Nature Wool in the best deep orange/red colorway. I bought it in Indianapolis when I was like 100 months pregnant. After Maeve was born, I started using it for an elaborately cabled sweater in a 6-month size. I had the whole front done, and it was really beautiful, but then it got shelved. Lately I couldn’t even find the pattern I was using, and anyway it would have ended up too small, so we have this new purpose for it. I would recommend this kind of yarn for cables though–it looked great on that front piece.

Next up, and actually almost done due to an in-law visit that left me free to sit and knit and chat for a large part of the weekend, is a bottom-up vest sort of thing that I am just making up. It is made out of a Lorna’s Laces superwash in seriously hot pinks, orange and yellow that someone gave me. It is going to have a very 1970s look, I think, with the full-on “shazam” color pooling and a boring square neckline with crocheted edges. Fun.