The Full Story

I just sent an email to my peeps who aren't necessarily following this blog or my FB page, and I thought the big picture of my aunt's recent story would make sense here, too.

Last year, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma of the bone marrow (MMM). In February, she started chemotherapy treatments, and that had been going well. She was tolerating the meds and was pleased she hadn't lost her hair.

During testing for the MMM, however, doctors found a spot in her lung, about the size of a quarter. While they were making plans to biopsy it, they uncovered another one, very small. They decided to only biopsy the bigger of the two, and about 2 or 3 weeks ago they confirmed the bigger one was malignant. They were going on the assumption that the second one was also malignant, and scheduled surgery for last Thursday, 5/21.

However, the weekend of May 16, her back started hurting, and after many phone calls to doctors and many (many) pain pills, they finally decided she should be admitted to the hospital, where they discovered she had more compressed disks (she's had a bad back for years). Doctors said it could be from the MMM, from her osteoporosis, from previous falls, or just 'old.' There was some talk of doing a back surgery before the lung surgery, but cooler heads prevailed. She stayed in the hospital the rest of the week and they operated on 5/21.

The good news was that the cancer hadn't spread to her lymph nodes, and they believed they got all the bad tissue from both spots. She was slowly recuperating, when on Sunday, she was having trouble breathing, so they put her on a respirator.

This morning (Thursday), the doctors were concerned about her being on the respirator so long, so they are doing a bronchiotomy to make sure the passageway is clear. At this point I'm still waiting for my dad to call with an update.

Aunt Irene is my mom's sister, and even though at one point I had three other aunts (my dad's sisters), if anyone asked how many aunts I had, I'd likely only count Aunt Irene (sorry, Aunt Helen, Aunt Dot, and Aunt Sister). She is special, and after my mom died, she became my new emotional mom. She really needs to pull through, not just for me and Ray, but for everyone else who have come to love her through the years. Please hold her in your hearts.

More of the Same

No new news from Florida. Aunt still on the respirator. Despite early news that they only had the respirator on a little bit (I guess there's a range of how hard the machine has to work for you), the news now just seems like it's the same - on the respirator and will continue to be for a few more days.

Her friend Joan flew out yesterday, ostensibly to be there when she came home and help her through the first 2 or so weeks. DH and I are thinking that no matter where she is, I'll fly out in a week or two. Haven't spoken to my brother yet to see what he and SIL are thinking. We are both coincidentally leaving on vacation Monday, June 1. DH and I are coming back Wednesday, but bro due to return to NY 6/10-ish. We'll figure it out.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame...

A great SFGiants game - beautiful weather, a win for the Giants, and a shutout for Tim Lincecom. Niiice...

Setback

Aunt was having trouble breathing yesterday, so they've put her back on the respirator. Word from dad this morning was that they were able to turn it down (meaning her own breathing was getting stronger), so that's a little bit of good.

It's times like this that I wish we lived a 2-hour drive away instead of a 5-hour plane ride away.

Edited 5/25: Thanks to everyone for all the good thoughts being sent to me and my aunt.

Another Knitfest!

Lots of fun at today's semi-monthly knitfest gathering at the ranch! It was "Monkey day," the day when most of us cast on for a Monkey knitalong. We have 3 of us doing two-at-a-time toe-up on Magic Loop, 5 doing cuff-down on Magic Loop, and 1 doing cuff-down on 2 circs. There were monkey tablecloths, monkey sproingy-hangy things from the light fixture, monkey water bottles, and monkey lollipops... and lots of yummy food (as always - we're a talented bunch in the kitchen, too!).

I got all my toe increases done with the gang today, and am now about a half-inch into a one-inch buffer between toe and starting the pattern. I'm using Pagewood Farm Denali yarn in a gorgeous turqoise color. Mmmm... It's not only beautiful, it's a lovely yarn to knit with, very squooshy. I'm a wee bit afraid it's too squooshy to be sturdy on the sole, so I decided to make the instep on US#1.5 needles (2.5 mm) and the sole on US#1 needles (2.25 mm) - tighten the sole stitches up a little bit. If I really want to make it tough, I should use US#0 neeldes, but... ugh... I've done that with a couple of pair before and they're just toooo small for me. Seem to take forever to knit.

In Aunt I status, she's still in recovery/ICU, but dad and Joan got to see her today. She's still being somewhat sedated, and will probably hurt a lot more before she starts to hurt a lot less. Her back problem won't help matters, either. She told dad that she thought she had pneumonia. Let's see - they cracked her ribs and took out two chunks of her lungs, and she's self-diagnosing pneumonia. Um, as dad told her, let's see what the doctor says. They're waiting for the final pathology, but the surgeon was fairly sure they got all the bad bits, and the oncologist doesn't think she'll need chemo or radiation after all. Hooray for little victories. If that's the case, she'll want to get better quickly so she can start her MMM chemo again (it was on hold while she did the surgery thang).

Finally, Sock Summit registration opens at 10:00 on Tuesday, 5/26. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!

Another Bit of Good Newts

The company DH is contracting with as their CIO just gave him a raise. In effect, they doubled his contract time for each month. A little financial breathing room... Nice...

Aunt out of surgery. 2nd spot malignant too; she came through surgery fine. She'll be under sedation all day. Talk to you soon, Auntie I. We love you.

Enumeration

- The IRS audited our 2006 tax return. They want $2600 more.
- We were going to try to refinance the house next month. Rates are great. A house 2 blocks over (same floorplan as ours) recently sold at the toilet-bottom price of $300,000 less than what we paid for our house (admittedly at the peak). Thanks to this sale, our house won't appraise high enough to get us an acceptable LTV given our current mortgage and HELOC. In order to get below the acceptable percentages, we will have to buy down the mortgage by about $12,000, plus pay around $6,000 in closing costs. Sure. We have lots of extra money laying around. See item 1.
- My ear infection is apparently gone, but my hearing still hasn't returned. Ear doc says it could take as long as 3 or 4 weeks. Or longer.
- DH has part-time CIO gig (thank god) but we still need more income. There are 4 or 5 pending contracts, but none signed yet.
- I actually got bored today and decided to pull some weeds. I know. I tried to sit down until the feeling went away, but there were too many weeds that were higher than the bushes we like. Next place - condo.

Normally, these would send me over the edge. I hate the uncertainty of consultant life, hate that we pay DH's ex a stupid amount of money for her to sit on her fat ass, hate that this house has lost almost a third of its value, and really really hate gardening.

None of this matters a whit. I'm spending all my emotional energy on worrying about my aunt in Florida. She got diagnosed with multiple myeloma of the bone marrow last year, and during tests for that, they found spots on her lungs. She's having surgery tomorrow to remove them. One big one that's known to be malignant in one lobe and one small one that's still a mystery in the other lobe.

Nothing else matters. Heal well, Auntie I.

Fetching!

Here they are, from Ashlee, as promised!

In Which I Confront the Errant Waitress

Ashlee was her name. I knew this from the restaurant receipt. 

On one of our last drives down to visit the in-laws, I knit a pair of Fetchings - fingerless gloves - from some Drops Silke-Alpaca that I got on our honeymoon cruise in the Baltic. The yarn was luscious, one skein was cream, one was cranberry, and they were actually cheaper than what I would have paid for them in the States - even given the exchange rate and Visa's FX charge. (Never mind that there was the $3,000 price of the cruise; that doesn't count.)

I finished the Fetchings Sunday afternoon, and wore them that night to dinner at Outback. Ashlee, our waitress, gushed over them. She was a local college student, she loved gloves and fingerless gloves, her gramma knit, she recently moved to the area because things went bad somewhere else... we had a lovely chat. At the end of our dinner, I gave her the Fetchings. She was happy, she was surprised, she was tickled pink. I told her there was one huge caveat - she had to send me a picture of them so I could post the picture on my Ravelry projects page. I gave her my business card with my email on it, and she promised she would take the picture and send it.

Next day, we got home. No email. Tuesday, no email. Wednesday, no email. Thursday, Friday, Saturday... nothing. My knitting posse was even getting on my case. Weeks... months... nothing.

So, here we are again. Dinner at Outback. Ashlee is still waitressing there. We ask for a table in her section. She comes over to ask our drink order, and does what looks like a short double-take. I asked, "Do we look familiar to you?" She opens her mouth wide and points at me. "YES! Thank god you came back! I lost your business card! I've been driving my boyfriend and friends crazy because I felt so bad that I couldn't send you the picture!"

We chatted, she took the picture 'way back when, still has it, still loves her gloves, and promised that she would send the photo this week... because we told her that 10 knitters would descend on her the next time if she didn't!

I hope she does; she seems really sweet and sounded very sincere and contrite. Or, I'm just a sucker for a pretty face...

Another anniversary today (we have lots of them): today is 3rd anniversary of our engagement. We are celebrating by going to Costco... How romantic!

Bargain of the Century (so far)

... where a store pays me to order over $400 worth of clothes...

DH is the love of my life, but he can be SUCH a pack-rat. Most of the time it's useless papers - a receipt from lunch at Hobee's from 2006, or a memo about a fire drill that was held in 2003, for example. Sometimes, though, it's a little nugget, like last week's find.

So he's cleaning out a pile or two in the Batcave (his office) and I see a pretty green display envelope. Being nosy (natch), I open it up to find a gift certificate to Tuttle. A gift certificate from his ex-wife. A gift certificate from his ex-wife from sometime before 2004. Yep; 5 years ago. And not just a gift certificate, though - a $250 gift certificate. "Sweet!" I say to him. "Hm? What? Oh, yeah," he says to me. After I roll my eyes for dramatic effect, I ask him if I could shop for him. "Sure; have a blast."

Oh boy oh boy oh boy! $250! We bought him a new suit last year to go with his new (unintentional) consultant status, but haven't done much other clothes shopping, so I was looking forward to getting him some new jeans, pants, shirts. I logged in to their website...

...and damn near cr@pped in my pants. $198 for a pair of jeans?? $245 for a cotton sweater??? Are you sh!tt!ng me? I went to the women's department, thinking that the women's clothes would be a little cheaper.  HA! So I found their 'sale' section... and I do use 'sale' in quotes, because things there were still more expensive than we would pay at other stores, even Nordstrom.

I eventually found 2 pair of socks, 2 pair of pants, and a polo shirt where the total after shipping came to $249.95. Gift certificate was for $250 - cool! We'd get a nickel back! But when I tried to check out online, there was no place to enter a gift certificate number. Getting any further in the ordering process required a credit card number, so I left the order page, and instead sent an email to their customer service department, asking (1) how to use the gift card, and (2) if they could confirm that the gift certificate was still valid. (I know they're not supposed to expire, but at these prices, I wasn't going to risk it!) 

I got an email back confirming that I had a valid gift certificate, and to just put the certificate number in the comments box on the ordering page. 'Okay, I'll do that tomorrow,' I thought. When I opened my next email, though, it was also from Tuttle... saying they had noticed that I put stuff in my shopping cart but left without placing the order. Perhaps a 25% off offer would make me go back and order? Perhaps... perhaps... Hell, yeah! So I went back and found one or two more things that figured in nicely with that discount and went to check out again.

It wouldn't take my 'special customer' code. So I called. The very nice lady took my order, and at the end, she read me the total I owed after applying the certificate. It was something like $175. No no no no no... When we went over each item one at a time, it turns out she was looking at paper catalog prices and I was looking at online catalog prices. When we finally reconciled everything, here's what we got:

3 pair cotton lisle socks

2 pair cotton slacks

1 genuine, authentic Lacoste polo shirt

1 silk/cotton crew sweater

Full retail price for these 7 items = $438.50 (the socks alone were $19.50 EACH!)

Total of the order at the online sale prices = $302.00

Total with the 25% discount = $226.50

Shipping = $17.95

Grand total came to $244.45. Apply the gift certificate and they'll be sending us a check for $5.55!

The clothes arrived today and they do seem to be well-made. But know this, Tuttle... For things made in China and Vietnam, your clothes are outrageously and ridiculously expensive and I will never order from you again. Ever. (Unless, of course, DH finds another gift certificate among his papers and piles....)

And now, some knitting news: I finished the back of Picchu-Picchu and cast on for the two fronts! The neat thing about this pattern is that it's a little like a bat-wing sleeve (without the '80s overtones) so you knit it at the same time you're knitting the back and fronts. That means once I'm done with the fronts, there are just 2 underarm seams and 2 three-needle bind-offs. (And picking up around the collar, but I like picking up stitches definitely more than setting in sleeves, so I'm not really counting the collar.)

I also ripped out my Diagonal Lace socks because they were 'waaaay too big around my foot. They would have given Harlot's cross-dressing Sasquatch socks a run for her money. I whacked off about 18 extra stitches (what the hell was I thinking?? On size 1 needles, I do NOT need 74 [or even 66] stitches around!). I decided to cut back to my known number - 56 - and make the instep plain, then get to the right number for the pattern up the leg. These are in the lovely and luscious Malabrigo sock yarn (thanks, KB!) in pur-pur-purple ("Violeta Africana"), and now that I have the right number of stitches on the needles, they're going faster. Another 1/2 inch or so and I'm ready to do my Bordhi increases.

I'm itching to cast on for my Cosima, but have so far resisted, knowing that I'm SOOO close on Picchu-Picchu, and am almost done with Hibito, too. This concept of finishing things... After my success with Hey Teach!, I'm really starting to groove on it...

Hey, Teach!

I'm teaching Beginning Cables tomorrow (5/9) at Bobbin's Nest Studio. Why, I think I'll wear my newly FO'd Hey Teach! sweater. How appropriate!

I don't get to teach it that often, but cables are my favorite class to teach. When I was learning how to knit, I thought cabled things were just the most complicated things I had ever seen. (That was before I realized what a pain intarsia was.) And for the first hour-and-a-half of the class where I learned cables, every time the teacher tried to make us understand what was happening, it just seemed more and more confusing. By the time we were about 15 minutes away from the end of the class, I was ready to conclude cables really were incredibly complicated and I would just have to learn at a later time... when I was a *real* Knitter-with-a-capital-K.

Finally, after trying to show us with drawings on a whiteboard and by moving us - human bodies - around like stitches), she showed us what to do with needles and yarn, and it clicked. OH! You just hold these stitches here while you knit those stitches here, then knit the first ones! That's not so hard!

Even now, knowing how easy cables are, I just love 'em. They spiff up plain stockinette even if you're just doing a C6F, and really pop your eyes when making a complicated Aran design. Learning how to un-knit made me feel invincible because I didn't have to start my work from scratch when I made a mistake; conquering cables made me feel like I could do anything in knitting. I hope I can impart some of my wonder of cables in my students tomorrow.

Bring on the weekend!

E/N/T doc agrees w/GP - fungal infection + a crapton of greenish-brown crud. Yuck. Cleaned it out, shot in some Lotromin, & sent me on my way. Hope that's it!

A Good Time Had by All

Love taking trips to the wine country. Thanks, KB, for chosing to live up there so we could go visit once in a while! 

On the way north, stopped in at one of the cutest LYS, Cast Away, in Santa Rosa. Justine (owner) is the sweetest thing, and she has a nice selection, beautifully displayed. She happens to carry my (so far) second favoritist sock yarn, Knitcol from Adriafil. I found 2 balls of it at the-store-that-shall-not-be-named (the LYS local to me here in South County), but haven't seen it anywhere else. It's yummy, and  you can knit it on #2 needles = fast socks!

Then on Saturday, KB and I went to Village Knitters, also in Santa Rosa, and I got 5 skeins of Brown Sheep's Cotton Fleece in a lovely Robin Egg Blue. A nice summery color for another Lacey Vee Tee.

Sunday was the Healdsburg historic home tour, where we got to peek inside 6 downtown homes that have some historic significance (although sometimes the 'historic significance' was that the house was more than 50 years old). No matter, they were all beautiful, especially the one that looked very nondescript on the outside, and very very very modern (and gorgeous) on the inside. In that house, the kitchen/living area had an all-glass wall that opened onto the backyard swimming pool. The master bedroom opened onto the pool as well, and the master bath opened onto another open garden area, making it seem like a spa. Absolutely gorgeous. It's the house that's been in my head as the perfect design for a house.

Late home today, just 'puting to relax from the long drive, but now I think I'll knit for a bit. Let's see... Picchu-Picchu? Market bag? Or turn the heel of the other sock?? Decisions, decisions! 

Testing updates to Blogger via mobile phone. Whoopie! if it works; bummer if it doesn't.