Sprains, Spinning and Suze Susses Me Out

(So I'm a sucker for a little sweet alliteration. Sue me.)

(This post is the first of a series of "retrospective" entries intended to bring y'all up to speed as to what I've been doing with my time the past month or two - which mostly can be summed up thusly: Knitting, not blogging. I'm going to continue to try to catch up here, so expect a few more posts that may be a little more retrospective than usual.)

Sprains

So, about a three weeks ago now, I was trying to bust the kids getting into some kind of mischief, which had included them knocking over the baby gate in the hallway. I didn't want to take the time to pick it up, so I decided to just step over it so I could get to the kid-bustin'.

Well, that turned out to be a bad idea.

I slipped, slid, and tried to catch myself on a handy door frame, only to fall anyway, wrenching my shoulder in the process. I took a little bit to regain my composure (i.e. remember that I know some words which are not, in fact, banned by the FCC), and tried to get up. Ouch. I'd also apparently pulled a muscle in my chest, a seriously undignified muscle to pull.

I spent a couple days feeling ouchy, especially my chest, but figured it was just a pulled muscle and tension and if I could just get it to relax, I'd feel better.

Well, by the time the weekend arrived, I wasn't really any better. In fact, the day Caz decided to reverse the ceiling fan direction and spray dust all over the place, I discovered that sneezing made me want to pass out, it hurt so bad. So when Monday arrived, I called the doctor's office and made an appt. to go to Urgent Care. Went in, saw a doctor, and was pronounced with what I think is the absolute silliest injury I have ever incurred, and I've incurred some pretty ridiculous injuries over the years.

According to the doc, I sprained my sternum.

Yeah, you heard me. I never knew that was possible either. In fact, a friend of mine who is a nurse said, upon hearing that, "Wow. That's one I've never heard of before!"

But apparently that's what I did. So they gave me lovely Vicodin to help me sleep, and advised plenty of ibuprofen for during the day, and at last this point now I seem to be almost back to 100% recovered. Which is good, because keeping up with rampaging twin toddlers when it hurts to take a deep breath is not my idea of a good time. Just in case anyone was wondering.

Spinning
Also about three weeks ago, perhaps even the same day I sprained my stupid sternum, I was suddenly possessed of an urge to dig the spindle I'd bought at Rhinebeck out of hibernation. It turned out I did have some vague recollection of how to spin, so I finished spinning the "practice fiber" I'd picked up at Rhinebeck and wound it off into a ball. (I need to find a good book or tutorial or something on plying, because it needs plying but I have no idea what I'm doing there, so it's set aside for now.) Then I dug through my wee little fiber stash to see what I wanted to play with next.

I chose this lovely blue roving,


which was part of the wonderful array of fiber Jonathan had given to me from his stash after Rhinebeck. I'm not sure what it is, but it's got a much longer staple length than the first batch of fiber I'd been playing with (which I think was Corriedale or Romney, I can't recall now), and I'm loving it to bits. Just... love love loving it.


See how pretty?

I've just about spun up all of it I have, and now I'm wondering what on earth to do with it. I've put enough twist in there that it'll need plying, but... will there be enough yardage then to actually knit anything up out of it? I have no clue how to gauge how much is on there as yet, so I guess we'll see. But I do know I'm way too eager to try knitting it up to consider hanging onto it for any length of time.

I also decided that, as I was plotting a drive down to Chicagoland to see The Yarn Harlot, I would include a stop by The Fold to finally buy myself some Socks That Rock and look into a new spindle. This one has been nice, but it doesn't maintain its spin for very long, which is making it hard to figure out how to actually spin beyond using the park-and-draft method.

And when I'm not spinning, I just want to look at pictures of handspun yarns - most recently I've been working my way through the Twisted Knitters group blog, to see what kinds of cool things people have been doing. Some seriously gorgeous stuff there.

Suze Susses Me Out

So thinking that I had nothing to blog about (yes, I'm a dope, leave me be), when I saw Suze doing up a nifty interview meme on her blog, I decided to throw my hat in and ask to be interviewed. And here are her questions:

1. What aspect of your personality surprises people the most?
It's either the sudden, massive bouts of shyness that afflict me more often than I'd like, or it's the bizarro mix of precision and slobbery which is me. My house is a pit, but I know where absolutely everything is. I'm a total nitpicker about grammar, spelling, usage, but my bookcase is a jumbled mess. I cannot sleep if my bed covers are not carefully aligned, but I never make my bed in the morning, and I can never seem to keep up with my laundry, no matter what I do (and the dirty clothes constantly escape the hamper). I think it confuses a lot of people, but mostly it comes down to this - I am not a half-assed kind of person. I do things either whole-assed, or not at all.

2. Do you play any musical instruments? If so, what? If not, what would you like to learn?
I don't, though I did play clarinet and saxophone in junior high. I liked saxophone a lot, but had been discouraged from playing it because I was told my hands were too small, so I'd taken on clarinet as a compromise, except I hated it. I never practiced, spent most of my time in the school band in the last chair (or, for a while, in the second-to-last chair, because there was actually someone in band who was even more unwilling to practice than I was), and never even managed to memorize how to play the school song. My parents let me start taking lessons on the sax a year or two later, but I really didn't like my teacher, and again took to never practicing, and so eventually gave up on both. I did get really good at playing the theme from M*A*S*H on the sax, though.

I've thought, over the years, if I'd ever like to learn a musical instrument again, but so far nothing has really caught my fancy. If I ever get back into music as more than just singing along with the radio, I'll probably stick with voice - I was in choir for years and loved every minute of it, and would love to see if I can walk the first-soprano talk. Or some other mangled metaphor. grin.

3. What's the worst hairstyle you've ever had?
Easy - the Annie-ish perm my mom convinced me to get in 6th grade. Simply dreadful. I've got a really round face, and the perm made me look like Annie getting the Violet Beauregard treatment. (Well, except for the blue, which probably would have made it a little more palatable, really.)

4. What's the most annoying piece of parenting advice you've ever been given?
Any variation on, "You know, they're going to have to learn _______ eventually." It's become less in the past year or so, but for a while there, I felt like I was hearing it all the time, and usually about things that were, at best, only slightly age-appropriate. Most of the time it was stuff that was well advanced of where my kids were, and so all I wanted to do was reply, "Yes, and they're going to have to learn how to drive eventually too. I'd best get moving on that as well, I suppose?" It wasn't so much the people who maybe didn't know that much about what's appropriate for what age of baby that bugged me, but more the people who used that phrasing as code for, "You know, you're going to have to stop coddling them eventually." They really got my dander up, I tell you whut.

5. Name 3 things that make you smile.
I could cheat and name each of my menfolk, but I will combine them into one thing - my family, and say that bodies of water for watching, swimming in or boating upon are always wonderful, and of course fibery goodness makes me happy.

Thanks for the questions, Suze!