Derailed a Bit

This has been a rough week. Kids in physical and emotional pain. Dog difficulties. Oh, yeah...and then there's work. So this blog entry will not be about my knitting, which I have done nothing on this week, but instead about the rest of my life at the moment.

Oldest stepdaughter has been in and out of the hospital three times in the last week+ for stomach problems. Once for testing and twice because she was in too much pain. She's having trouble keeping anything solid down. The doctors have ruled out gall stones as the cause, but beyond that, we're waiting on test results.

Youngest stepson has been diagnosed with non-verbal learning disorder. This means that his verbal skills are off the charts, but his non-verbal skills are wimpy. Think Hulk and Bruce Banner. He has trouble processing chaotic situations, organizing any aspect of his life, and reading social cues, including facial expressions. I always knew the boy loved words; I just didn't know that everything else was so overwhelming for him. He's handling it as well as I think he can, but he's skipped classes, and on Thursday he failed to go to the office when sent and failed to come home or tell us where he was. Add to this that he has a fascination with violence lately. We're trying to ratchet things down here until he sees his doctors on Tuesday.

Youngest stepdaughter told us this morning that she just found out a friend from high school died of cancer recently. I'm feeling for her as she's grieving and facing mortality. I think she needs lots of someones to hug her, and I hope she gathers her friends around her instead of trying to do this pain solo.

And Jack. Jack is a (roughly)12-13-year-old German Shepard mix we got from a shelter about 10 years ago. He's getting old, and for months now, he has had a tumor on his chest--almost certainly a fat tumor, which the vet said was likely, even without testing. It hasn't seemed to cause Jack any discomfort, but it would cost about $1500 to remove, which is more than we're going to be able to spend, particularly with six kids in need of various kinds of support. Besides, he can't stand the vet and is seriously depressed several days after just a bath. I'm not sure he'd survive surgery. This week, probably because he scratched it, the tumor started bleeding. It's also hot to the touch. So we're worrying. We know what the vet will tell us, but we're not going to have the tumor removed. And he's too active still to think about letting him go. So we'll deal.

Oh, yeah. And I'm up to a full page, two-columns and notes in the margins, of a to-do list for work.

So knitting and learning pattern design hasn't been on my mind this week. Here's hoping the coming week is better.

A Sense of Direction

Last year, I got a windfall. My mother had given me some birthday money, and I also received a $100 Amazon credit for some survey work I had done. I decided to use this money to flesh out my knitting library. I followed my usual process: reading reviews, checking candidates out of the library, reviewing them, and then purchasing the ones I thought had staying power.

The design book I chose was Knitwear Design Workshop: A Comprehensive Guide to Handknits by Shirley Paden. So far so good. It's a workbook, so it's not something I'm reading cover-to-cover. Instead, I'm figuring out how to use the book--a tool like my needles and stitch holders.

The first four chapters are the basics, and that's where I'm living now. In these chapters are dozens of charts and tables, as well as a set of silhouettes for making sketches and design notes. I'm not a paper-and-pen notebook kind of person, so I'm trying to figure out how to convert all this to the computer. The tables and text-based notes are easy; word processing and spreadsheets will do the trick, and I might try keeping all of this in OneNote, a program in my MS Office package that I'm liking more and more (I can't believe I'm writing that...).

I'm not as sure about the sketches. I have the ability to scan them in after I've done them, but unlike my daughter, I don't think I'm much of an artist (though maybe I'll add that to my things-I-want-to-learn list!). So I'm not sure what's going to be helpful here. I need the silhouettes for making notes on, but I'd love to find a way to put my notes on the silhouettes in electronic form. Maybe Publisher is my answer. I'll be playing with that next week, I expect.

So tonight, I am creating spreadsheets for measurements and notes. My first project is going to be a sweater for Carl. We've been married for more than five years, so the boyfriend rule no longer applies. (For those who don't know, the rule is that you cannot knit a sweater for a boyfriend; if you do, by the time you're done, he won't be your boyfriend any more, and he'll probably keep the sweater anyway!) I'll write more about the actual sweater in the next post.