kmkat and her kneedles

42. It's another name for random.

Look at this message I found in my Ravelry inbox yesterday morning:

Is that awesome or is that awesome! I immediately sent her a reply that blathered on about how much I like that book.

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Took the Jeopardy qualifying online test last night. 42 was not the answer.

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I just looked out the window and DA YEEP IS WORKING! Smokey is currently plowing the driveway, which had not been plowed* since before Thanksgiving. Every time he went out to attempt to plow there was something else wrong with Da Yeep. (This is what happens when a 20-yo vehicle sits for six months. He was never able to get it really ready for winter because of his back surgery/recovery and all the other tasks that got postponed because of it.) But now the battery and the electrical cables and the accelerator cable and who remembers what else are apparently all functional.

As much as I love where I live, I (and we) curse certain parts of it every winter, mainly the hill that is the driveway.

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Hip surgery has officially been postponed and is tentatively scheduled for Monday, April 22. Thanks for all your good wishes and kind thoughts and thoughtful opinions. The majority seemed to favor waiting until all the snow and ice are gone, which will make recovery and the required rehab exercise easier. (A good friend likened the surgery to having a baby. She said, "I had one baby in January and one in May, and the May one was waaayyy easier because we could get outside." Having had a December and a May baby myself, I found that thought to be absolutely true.) Those who are even slightly familiar with taxes also thought that skipping a tax season was not the best option.

If I could do whatever I wanted with no thought to consequences, I'd have the surgery ASAP. But I am being an adult about this. 

In the meantime, my PA put in an order for two cortisone injections to keep me relatively pain-free and mobile for the next three months. First one is next Tuesday.

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Have I bored you yet? I am always a little surprised when bloggers talk about the details of their life being boring. I find such minutiae of others to be a way of connecting with their lives. We all experience some of the same things, but some stuff is unique to each of us. 

But if minutiae bores you, you probably stopped reading this blog a long time ago.

 

* The ever-helpful folks at Typepad suggest other Typepad blog posts that may be related to what one types in their post. Apparently my reference to plowing caught their attention. This is what they thought you might find interesting:

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The Art of Plowing

Spring, part the third.

For all the glory that is spring in the north woods, there are some less than delightful bits.

I think this guy must have spent his winter burrowed deep into the duff on the floor of the woods. Now he is on our deck railing getting a tan. I let him be; no critter, no matter how capable of giving me a nasty ouch, deserves to be swatted after surviving the winter. Unless it is a mosquito; then all bets are off.

Other less than savory aspects of spring are the wood and deer ticks.

Lower left, something called a star tick, which we do not have here. Middle, an adult female deer tick -- those are the ones that transmit Lyme disease. Upper right, adult wood tick, aka dog tick. I found this photo online and stole it because I couldn't find the ones I took last spring of the eight wood ticks I pulled off Hannibal The Fearless Who Fancies Himself To Be An Outdoor Cat.

Like many things in nature, the tick population varies from year to year. Last year we were inundated with ticks. Boo! Hiss! This year, they are almost non-existent. Yay! I think I have found fewer than half a dozen so far this year, which is, I think, a record low for this date.

Despite that, for the past couple days I have felt them crawling on me everywhere. I have not found a single one for over a week, however, so I attribute this annoyance to an over-active tactile sense.

There are the ubiquitous mosquitoes, vector of the West Nile virus:

Don't worry, we shooed that one away before it bit my boy.

There are other less-than-wonderful aspects of warmer weather. Follow the link if you want to see an over-40 woman wearing a too-young-for-her, way-too-short garment while doing her exercise walk. She was doing laps around the block Saturday while we were stuck for a couple hours with what turned out to be a broken timing belt on the Aveo. I probably shouldn't be snarky; she was, after all, very trim and was doing a good thing. She had just made an unfortunate wardrobe choice.

To remove that last image from your eyeballs, here is a sign on the wall of the diner where we had a very tasty brunch that day, right before we discovered that the car wouldn't start.

I had to pay for my coffee, darn. No gossip to trade.

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Thanks to everyone who chimed in with advice on yesterday's post about the Summer Chevron sweater. There is a l-o-n-g thread over in Ravelry (special thanks to those of you who told me to check there) that details all the trials and tribulations of that pattern. Apparently it has a wacky row gauge that no one can achieve, and the deep V neck tends to become a wide V when worn. I am still undecided about whether to attempt it with my bamboo yarn, but now I know where to go for more help. Thanks, guys! You are the best!

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As much as I love having #1 son home for a couple months, it has been driving me absolutely NUTS that his computer seems to hog our DSL connection. I have forbade him from using BitTorrent -- or downloading anything -- between the hours of 8 am and 1 pm, which is my preferred internet time. But even though he has been completely cooperative about our agreement, sometimes my connection gets so slow it is impossible to do anything. Every single page gets the "Cannot find www.xyz.com. Please check your spelling..." message.

Today I got so frustrated that while he was out for his daily run and clearly not using his computer, I went downstairs to his bedroom to see what was open on his Mac Pro. I discovered that the problem seems to be that Skype, even when just sitting there with a chat window open but not being used, continues to hog our internet connection. I closed Skype, came back upstairs, and walla! my internet connection was fine. Hurrah! Too bad we didn't figure this out a month ago; he leaves to go back to NY a week from Sunday, and I had been counting the days.

Colors.

Took a little break from photographing stash for Ravelry. I was having such a good time. C'mon over and say hi. I'm kmkat, same as here.