Showing posts with label new beginning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new beginning. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

They say bad luck comes in 3s...

Oh dear. Where to start? As someone (Lewis Carroll?) once wrote, start and at the beginning and when you come to the end, stop. So here goes.

The 12th of January saw melting in the morning on my way to work. By lunchtime it was freezing rain and light snow was falling by the time I got off at 2. My first mistake was thinking it was fine to walk home. The second was taking the little cut through by the Bare Mountain trail. I fell. And once again landed on my left hand. Only this time I felt a pop. I took off my mitten to reveal the already bruising and swelling hand. Uh oh. I picked myself off, texted Roomie I was on my way back up the hill to go to the Emergency and slowly made my way back up passed work. Long story short, I cracked a bone in my hand and spent 11days in a splint/half cast and a further 4 weeks in a full cast. There was also soft tissue damage, again. Have to wear a tensor bandage around it if I'm at work still. Cast has been off 12 days today.

As if January wasn't sucking enough, there was heavy rains on the 25th. And with the ground frozen guess where the water decided to go? The joys of a basement apartment :( We got about 2" of water, which wasn't as bad as some but still bad enough. And I was at work when it happened. With a two-day-old full cast on my dominant hand. Oy. Long story short on this: we wound up moving to a lovely semi detached in a much more central location (15-20mins to work instead of an hour- hour+10).

As you can maybe guess, January was *not* my favorite month.  And enter February. Not too bad until the cast came off. Because of soft tissue damage taking longer to heal, I have a tensor wrapped around that hand/wrist at work. And two days after the cast came off I was hurrying to fill an order for several hot chocolates (mini rant: why do people come through drive thru and order huge orders?? Seriously, up to 4 drinks, fine. But 12? 15? And then complain that service is slow? You try doing your order, buddy. Let's see if you can fill it in under 2mins. Bet it would take you 10! Sorry, readers. end rant). Here's an interesting thing about hot chocolate: it's hot. And when it splashes back on a bandaged hand, it burns. And continues burning until the bandage can be pulled off and hand plunged under cold water. And an ice bath *will* prevent further damage but nasty blisters do form. Guess who gets hot chocolate burn scars down her thumb? Oy very.

2015 hasn't been too kind so far, but we're settling in and making the new place a home. The cats love the big windows and running up and down stairs (it's two stories plus full basement). I decided yesterday I was going to use the wool wash on two projects that got soaked in the flood and maybe work on one. I had tried to dry them in the damp apartment but not much luck so had put them back in their respective project bags (also soaked) and put both into a plastic bag *with* my bottle of Eucalan. And yesterday I made a discovery: that plastic bag never made it here :( It must've gotten shifted in all the confusion and wound up on the garbage pile :( So my lovely Carson shawl is no more :(


Even worse, the bag I was using for it was the bag I knit in 1999 to carry my softshoes, notebook and pen when I first started taking Irish dance. My lovely pale blue cabled bag that Ita (my first dance teacher, who passed from cancer in 2004) thought was such a clever thing and never failed to show people.

Ok, 2015, enough bad things. Can we now get on with the good stuff? Maybe a lottery win? Hint hint lol

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

New Year and new things happening!!

Happy 2015, everyone :) Hope the new year is treating everyone well.

So today's my first day off of the new year and I figured it's high time I got my patterns more exposure. I've been thinking on this for quite a while to be honest. And in December I started having some major doubts, thanks in no small part to the VATMOSS deal happening in the EU. It's not a great time to be thinking about jumping into designing patterns for sale, especially since the... he individuals who put this mess in place didn't have the foggiest clue they were potentially harming microbusinesses around the globe. I digress. We'll leave it at: the whole confused and quite frankly scares me a bit.

But I have 3 lovely patterns available already. All of them free, so not in any danger from VATMOSS or Darth Vader or whatever other baddie might be lurking. And they're on the blog here, linked to pattern pages on Ravelry and that's all good. But, and isn't that a word of great meaning for only being 3 letters long?, what of the wonderful piece I came up with this past summer that has yet to see the light of day? And the other little nuggets in my head?

I put a simple query out to the twitterverse this morning: what app(s) do you recommend for turning patterns into PDFs? I was answered fairly quickly but the lovely @plutoniummuffin :) And after a bit of fiddling and tweaking, I had Anchors and Ropes into a PDF and into my "store" on Ravelry. Both MVP and Pyewacket followed suit. My whole collection is available to the Ravelry masses.

I admit, I used a copy, cut and paste method with these three. The text is a bit wonky from page to page, I admit. But everything is there that should be and I included pictures.

Today I launched Knit-Dance-Repeat designs :) And I hope once things have become clearer with regards to VATMESS, I'll be adding to the collection!

2015 is going to be a year of changes. They're already starting :)

TTFN
Síle