Planning for Non-Movement

I tore my ACL in my right knee on our trip to Whistler last March.  I have since worked on rehabbing it for most of the last year and have a very good amount of strength and stability.  However, it still causes me problems occasionally.  It gets a real punishment on the bus and subway.  I often seem to catch it below the knee against a solid object, like the seat, at the moment that the transit vehicle of the moment jerks to a start, wrenching it badly.  I have fallen three times in the last month, each time when weight bearing on my right leg.  I went over on my left ankle last week, but unlike when I did it on my right, I did not hit the ground.  I have to be careful when dancing to not apply too much lateral force or the knee goes out.  Regular mopping is a problem due to the side to side force involved.  Gardening can also cause problems in trying to cope with uneven ground.  All of this has made me decide to go ahead with the ACL reconstruction.  I know it's going to be hard, but I don't always want to be thinking about where my leg is, or having to wait for the next bus so that I can sit, or trying to convince someone else to do the mopping. Someday, other than my husband, there won't be anyone else to do the mopping.  Skiing is an optional activity,  unfortunately, house cleaning is not.

So that having been said, my surgery is now a little over two weeks away.  Just enough time to finish the term and go to a few appointments and then boom, I will be immobile for a few weeks.  Well, my knee will be immobile, but my hands will have plenty of time to do whatever.  Here are my plans.

1.  Put up a how-to for the horse pop-up card.  It seems to get a lot of traffic, so that would be a nice complement.

2.  I am getting a Kromski rigid heddle loom and will be playing with that.  If it is not beyond frightening, I will share.

3.  Scrapbooking!!!  It has been forever since I have done much of this.

4.  More Zombie stuff.

5.  Read, non-class books.  Fiction and non-fiction.  Maybe start on some research about stuff I want to know about.

6.  Start helping my oldest work on cosplay outfits.  She wants to do three and one is extremely challenging, requiring a corset component and perhaps work with plastic, but if we can pull it off, it will blow people away.

I will share as much as I am able, as physiotherapy will also take up a lot of my time.  So stay tuned.

Yikes, spring is coming and What pray tell have I done?

School, gym, and life seem to have taken up way too much of my time.  My page count for scrapping is just abysmal.  I have to confess that it's two.  That's right two.

I have two classes on my plate this term and they both take more  time than I had hoped they would.  On the plus side, my Medieval Latin class is a blast.  My prof has a seriously good sense of humour and when you're translating the Vulgate Bible and contemporary commentaries on it, it helps immensely.  Translating this kind of writing is terribly interesting but at the same time difficult. Lots of new vocabulary and lots of terms with a totally different meaning than they had in Classical Latin.

All the learning aside, I have however, had time to finish up a major knitting project.  Unfortunately, I can't say that I am entirely happy with it.  At this time I have to admit that I came to the whole Ravelry thing a bit late in my knitting career and had I arrived sooner, this disappointment might have been avoided.  First off, the pattern is gorgeous being from Norah Gaughan and Vogue Knitting, and secondly I did a gauge swatch so the size should have been fine, thirdly I purposely picked a size, small, that I thought was smaller than I actually needed as in my experience knitting patterns tend to run a bit big.  I thought I had gotten off to a right proper start.  Too bad the finish did not go as well.  The sweater is still at least a size or two too big.  Why?  And if I had spent time at Ravelry I would have known this as almost no one has made this pattern work as written.  There are several modifications available and all are major deviations from the instructions given.  I have no idea how one messes up that badly on sizing up a pattern that on the model on the cover looks fantastic.  I too made a couple of modifications, but they were planned from the start.  I made my sleeves long and I added a rib section to the bottom at the back of the sweater.  As a last resort, I may try shrinking it a bit.  We'll see.  It is nice and warm though, and since that's why I made it, not a total loss.