Fears, Frailty, Falls and Fractures

 

Mom Summer 2023
age 91

Dropping in for a quick note to explain why I disappeared for a week just as it began to seem I'd established a nice rhythm.  One that had held in spite of my falling on my tailbone on my birthday two weeks ago.  Even in spite of the fear that colored several days after the scare Mom gave the family complaining of chest pain the night before my birthday.

But then Mom ended up in ER last Monday having fallen because she'd fractured and dislocated her ankle.  And then fell.  But because of her grip on the bar her fall was in slow motion and no further harm was done--no bruises, breaks, scrapes or sprains.  But it was hours before we could be sure of that.  In fact I think it was nearly a full day before the tests and scans had reassured us and the doctors.

She spent four days in ER and I visited her there twice last week.  And a third time in the nursing home they moved her to for follow-up physical therapy and occupational therapy and monitoring of the (hopefully) healing bones in her left ankle. 

They opted to do no surgery as they believe her too frail.  It was her hip surgery after breaking her hip in 2008 that led to a clot induced stroke and the aphasia she's had ever since.  The known risks outweigh the possible benefits and since she has been bedridden since having COVID two years ago this month her muscles have atrophied. 

She hasn't walked since then but had still been able to stand briefly during the transfer from the bed to a chair and back again.  Now she will not be able to do even that much and the doctors have told us she needs to use a Hoyer lift.  And to accommodate the space that needs my brother and sister have been rearranging rooms at home.  They are moving her bed into the living room.

I visited her at the nursing home again yesterday.  I wasn't able to do so today as I had a preexisting appointment.  The same is true for tomorrow. But I mean to visit at least once more this week.  This event has forced me to see we're on borrowed time with Mom.  She will be 92 on January 3rd.  Suddenly all the difficulties with my energy, appointments, caregiver availability etc that have made getting over to see Mom even once a month for most of this year too challenging, seem frivolous.  I've had a priority reset.

Meanwhile I'm also scrambling to get my NaNoWriMo words...  But I won't say any more on that today.  Words on writing are for my Wednesday post.  And maybe the news will be better by then.

But I will say this much: due to the upheavals and associated anxieties I had to choose between posting and NaNo this past week.  Obviously I didn't choose posting.

Read more...

Rocking in the Hot Seat -- Sunday Serenity

 

Rocking Chair with Long Heating Pad

This is where I've spent most of my hours not in bed since last Tuesday afternoon when the fallout from my fall on my tailbone early Monday morning began to grip my back from tailbone to neck.  I read, wrote, watched videos, crocheted, ate, and occasionally slept sitting here with my back feeling as tho it was sunbathing.

Heat for me is soporific.  Which means sleepy as well as serene.  But also means lazy.  That list above may have sounded productive but in practice it was always snatches of activity soon filled with the static of crossing eyes then hypnogogic images then sleep but also in snatches.  Naps of twenty, thirty or ninety minutes.

This has untethered me from time so that I forgot to do my Friday Fiber post and did not remember until I was prepping the photo for this one.  I have the photo for the update on the Post Virus shawl so maybe I'll go ahead and put that post up retroactive as a record of my progress.  This new iteration of my blog is so far mostly a personal journal with an 'audience' in the single digits on most days and I'm not sure how many of those are just bots.  So I can't see why it matters.

I was already in bed for about three hours earlier and hoped it was for the night so I would have missed this post as well.  But I got woke up and then couldn't get back to sleep and thought that my best chance of doing so was to sit with the heating pad again and that's when I remembered my Sunday post so I got the pic before sitting down.

Well the heating pad is working it's magic.  

Read more...

Post Viral Shawl Update -- Fiber Friday

 

Second Post Section 4/6 Complete

Can't afford to spend much time on this.  Need sleep.  So just a few comments.

I'm pleased with the progress.  Most especially pleased that there has been much less frogging since the struggle with the first post section a week ago.  Some combo of sleep and upping the magnification of my reading glasses seems to have solved that.

But I laid it against the first shawl which it needs to match so that I can make a poncho out of the two of them and there is a hint of 'shrinkage' in this one.  I think if I had been using the wrong hook size from the beginning there would be more than a hint of shrinkage so I suspect it is the tension.  To rectify this tho I'm going to switch from the 3.5m to 4.0m hook for the duration of this post stitch section and possibly all further post stitch sections.  Unless I learn to loosen up on those sections as I gain confidence that I'm not having to frog so much of them.

Read more...

NaNoWriMo Workstation -- Wednesday Writing

The Full 8ft Long L

A couple weeks ago I traded my wheeled office chair for a rocking chair.  I thought I would be able to manage without the wheels but after one weekend of trying to manage with a stationary chair I realized it wasn't going to work with my work style.  It worked fine for those times when I was focused on one task at one desk station.  Especially for long sessions on one of the laptops either writing, online research or exploring and reading my story files.  But when I needed to spread out physical papers for editing or sorting I needed the wheels zip between the couch and the larger desktops at the far end.

The solution was the little wheeled stool like you see in doctor offices.  I had a very productive weekend after it arrived.  If I hadn't fallen off it at 6am Sunday morning as I was wrapping up my all night session I'd still be ecstatic about it.  I'm not about to give it up but I will have to be more mindful while using it.

What happened was that one of the times I approached the couch by walking it forward I didn't get quite close enough to reach the item I want to move to the far end so I stood up but that motion caused the stool to scoot back an inch or so and so when I sat back down I sat on the edge and tilted it onto one wheel and it shot backwards five or six feet across the room as I landed hard on my tailbone.

The Serious Writing Section

That was not a wonderful start to my 66th birthday.  

The fallout has been moderate tensing of the muscles at several locations along my spine.  The two worst at the rib cage and neck and right shoulder.  I've been spending a lot of time in the rocker with a heating pad.  But so far this is minor compared to three or four previous impacts on my tailbone going back to age 11 when I fell off a horse; age 16 when I fell from the top of a doorway after walking up one doorpost with my back pressed against the other; and at age 30 something while playing with children on a slide.  Those were the three times that gave me severe whiplash as well as bruised tailbone.  The worst one was the slide.  I'm pretty sure based on the extreme headache and vomiting I developed hours later that there was a concussion as well.  I did not know before that that you can get a concussion by falling on your butt.

The Research, Paper Sorting & Hardcopy Editing Section

 
Well I need to wrap this up so I can get back to work on my NaNo.

The big thing I accomplished last weekend was organizing the manuscript pages in my new Go Bag aka Trapper Keeper zippered 3 ring binder.  I now have all the stories in an order that makes sense to me with tabbed dividers between them that have pockets for the loose papers of all sizes that I'm finding tucked away in notebooks and folders.

I still don't have a wordcount registered at NaNo as I've been doing most of writing by hand and some of it scattered among the already existing application files.  For the latter I'm keeping the new words tagged.  For the paper pages I'm keeping them in the binder.  This weekend's big (non-writing) project will be to add up my word count and report it on my NaNo profile.

I know I'm way behind but somehow I'm feeling serene about it.  I'm really enjoying the return to the root story of the FOS storyworld and also a return to the process that I had before my first encounter with a computer in my early thirties.  I'm enjoying that and I think I'm going to be OK if I don't 'win' NaNo this year.  But I also believe that this year for the first time since 2004 I won't abandon my NaNo words after November 31.

Read more...

The Peace of Progress -- Sunday Serenity

A Piece in Resistance

This is an update on Friday's fiber art post about the frustration of a day of putting in and taking out four short rows so many times I lost count.  Well the next time I picked it up after the photo above, I discovered I needed to take out that row 4 of the post stitches yet again.  I'd started front posting on the row I was meant to back post on.  Sigh.  So demoralizing. 

I put it away and went to bed and the next time I picked it up on Saturday evening I frogged that row and put it back in without incident and then added the last two rows of post stitch with no frogging.  And then started the second virus stitch repeats and so far have gotten two full iterations of the virus stitch with zero frogging.

I wonder if it was sleep deprivation playing a roll in the mistakes.  Or was it because I switched my magnifying glasses from 1.75 to 2.50 on Saturday..
 

A Piece in Progress

Whatever it was, I'm grateful and was feeling peaceful as I set it aside to prepare for this post.

Now, tho, I mustn't sit here and revel in it as it is time to return to my story weaving project.  Can you believe we are almost at the halfway point for NaNo?  I'm way behind in word count and yet I'm peaceful about it.  What matters more is that I'm swimming in the story and loving it.  But more on that Wednesday.

Read more...

Frolicking in the Frog Pond -- Friday Fiber Art

 

Post Virus Poncho 50.55% Finished

I finished the first Post Virus Shawl last spring and instead of wearing it, I set it aside because I decided I'd rather have a poncho.  So I started a second one with the same yarn and colorway.  But I barely got started before I set it aside to work on a time-sensitive project and never picked it up again until this past Monday.  Monday-Friday should have been time enough time for me to get at least a third of the way--even through the pink section and into the pale blue maybe.  But instead I've goofed so many times, I've had to put just about every stitch in more than once, many more than twice and some more than thrice.

It's been a veritable frog frolic.

It's super frustrating when the piece is still so small.  When I can put a whole row back in in under 20 minutes.  But eventually I'll get to the rows where it takes me an hour just to get from the top edge to the peak of the triangle.  Long before then taking out a whole row will be well beyond frustrating.  I know because that happened a bunch while making the first one.

And yet I started the second.  What was I thinking?

I wasn't thinking.  I was drooling over the image of myself wearing the finished poncho.

But this pattern, tho gorgeous, is very unforgiving.  As unforgiving as math on which it is based.  If only I could reliably catch my mistakes before I am on top of them about to put a stitch into a stitch that isn't there!

A year ago this week the first cake of that yarn arrived on my birthday and I promised myself that I would be wearing whatever I made from it in time for my next birthday.  That's a promise I will have broken as there is no way I can finish it in two days.  Not even if I made zero mistakes from this moment on.



Well, my eyes are rebelling so I'm going to leave you with the video tutorial which taught me how to make the Post Viral shawl.  It is the creation of Bag-O-Day Crochet and draws it's name from both the fact that it alternates sections of the virus stitch pattern with sections of post stitches and also because she created it in the months after the pandemic's grip had loosened.

Read more...

From Where You Dream -- Wednesday Writing

 

From Where You Dream
The Process of Writing Fiction
by Robert Olen Butler
Edited and with and Introduction
by Janet Burroway

This is one of the writing craft books most influential on my craft.  In fact it was Butler who explained the story dreaming concept to me.  I can't claim he taught it to be since I'd been doing a version of it from the beginning which was before my double digit birthdays.  What he taught me was to respect it as the root source of the stories and the power source for their relevance.

He also taught me that for a story teller, daydreaming was the life blood of your work not evidence of laziness.  After I internalized this concept, I never had any further belief in writer's block as anything other than having gotten trapped in my left brain where the editor, critic and task master reside.  Perfectionists all and all full of disdain for daydreaming.  And yet no story and no idea is born in left brain machinations.  All things new and meaningful must incubate in dreamtime.

I have had this book checked out dozens of times from nearly a dozen different libraries over decades.  Now I finally have my own Kindle copy as I just stumbled on a sale while looking for the latest edition of Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction because I found it's Kindle edition on sale last August and bought it and was thinking of writing about it for this post.  So I grabbed this book and both images thinking I would write about both of them since Burroway's contribution to Butler's book is why I picked it up the first time as I'd been borrowing her book from my library for nearly a decade by then.  That was the 2nd edition.

Butler himself refuses to write non-fiction so without Burroway's help this book could never have been.  She recorded a series of his lectures made extemporaneously from a stack of index card cues then transcribed them (or possibly had students transcribe them) and then edited to smooth out the rhetoric, remove repetition and the grammatical glitches of conversational delivery.

It has been several years since I last read this so it is past time for a re-read.

I think I'll save Burroway's book for next Wednesday.  Unless I'm ready to talk about my NaNo project by then.  Right now that's still incubating.  I'm swimming in dreamtime and in spite of little wordcount, feeling as productive as a mother-to-be.

Storytellers must believe that day dreaming is not slacking but the ultimate making of meaning out of chaos.

Read more...

Meet Mr. Merryweather Giggles -- Sunday Serenity

 

Mr Merryweather Giggles
and My New Glider Rocker

My caregiver, Laura, took me to the Habitat for Humanity thrift store last Thursday.  I was looking for a deep glass baking dish for casseroles, hopefully blue.  I left with so much more than I knew I wanted before walking in those doors.  The two things I've gotten the most joy out of in the last several days is the glider rocker and the blue rooster.

I dreamed of having my own glider rocker since the first time I sat in one back before I married while on a babysitting job.  But it was never to be.  Until now.  As soon as I saw it, I had to sit down in it and instantly all the hullabaloo of sensory overload such a place as a thrift store imparts was dampened by the gentle glide.  I was instantly serene.

Before I could quite assimilate to this sensation tho, Laura exclaimed saying "You have to see this."  and disappeared because one step takes her out of my limited visual field.  But she was back in seconds and setting something into my arms that nearly filed them and I thought it must be a doll because the first thing I got focused on was the real toddler shoes.  Tracking up from the shoes towards the expected baby doll face I found instead the rooster and started giggling.

Laura knew I'd get a kick out of it as it was a form of fiber art and it was my colors which is any shade of blue.  I marveled at the handiwork.  Someone had put a lot of loving care into the project.  Eventually tho I had to hand it back to her to put back on the shelf and found myself saddened by it.  But we had to get with it as in about 90 minutes Laura had to clock out with me safely back at home.

I found my blue casserole dish and several other glass baking dishes, some of which would work in the toaster and/or microwave as well.  I found several DVD, a hand painted snowman ornament and a decorative wooden treasure chest.  I'd laid claim to the rocker as soon as I stood up from it and someone whisked it out back for us to pick it up after we checked out.

It wasn't until we were checking out that I decided I couldn't leave without the rooster as well.  I was still grinning and giggling in my heart every time it crossed my mind that whole hour.  So I told Laura and she went back to fetch it.

By bringing home the rocker though I had to give up my rolling office chair.  As soon as Laura brought the rocker inside she rolled the office chair out and packed it in her van so she could run it over to Habitat for Humanity the following day.  I miss being able to wheel up and down my 8ft piecemeal desk and swiveling side to side but it's worth it.  So far. 

I've got a small rug upside down under it so that it slides on the floor. Just not while I'm sitting in it. This allows me to position it in front of the section of desk I want to use or to position it facing either the TV or the front window and then roll or slide the section of desk I need in front of it.  It takes a little extra work to set up for a project but it is functioning and so much more comfortable for extended sessions.

Read more...

Picasso Ice Yarn Hat & Scarf Set -- Friday Fiber Art

Hat & Scarf Set 2/3 Done

I started with 3 of these small balls or skeins.  Not sure what they are called.  I hoped there would be enough for the hat and scarf set.  Now I'm sure.  But it was a squeaker.  One ball barely finished the hat and one ball barely got me half the length in the scarf I wanted.  But it will do.

Since I worked the hat between last Friday evening and Sunday evening and worked the half scarf between Monday and this evening, I'm determined to finish the scarf by Sunday evening.  I broke my own rule by starting something new before finishing a WIP but I needed something quick and easy to break the ice of the two month hiatus and the WIP I had been focusing on last July were very complex and big so I cut myself some slack.  But I'm itching to get back to them now.

The stitches used in this project are the simplest.  The single crochet into the top of the 3 chain loop.  Except for the band around the forehead in the hat which needed to be tightened up so I used the 2 chain loop.  In order to get the billowy shape on top I expanded the flat circle faster and for longer and then abruptly decreased half the loops in one round at the top of the forehead before switching to the 2 chain loops.  I was making it up as I go.  I call it sculpting.  I rarely have patience for patterns.

The Picasso Ice yarn has a lovely sheen and drape.  I love the feel of it in my hands as I work.  But there are issues one should know about.  It does not lend well to frogging.  It snags against itself and knots and snarls easily.  Working straight off the ball it comes in is easy for two thirds of the way and then at some random moment the end tail introduces itself to the working strand and curls up it and starts unwinding from the inside of the ball.  If not caught soon there will be a massive snarl.  The friction caused by the strands rubbing fuzzes up the strands.  Frogging also creates the friction fuzz.  And I imagine normal wear and tear of any item made from it will create this same frizz.

One might think winding the strand into a ball first would be a solution but there are foreseeable drawbacks to that idea.  Winding fast risks the friction fuzz.  Also if you hold the strand with too much tension as you wind you will stretch it and spoil the drape and the silky feel.  My solution was to keep a close eye on the ball and as soon as the empty center was big enough to fit over my left hand, I settled it on my left wrist and tucked the loose end strand up my sleeve.

It will make a visually stunning item that is pleasant to touch but know that it will require hand washing and drip drying and still will not fare well with frequent use.  Not recommended for an item meant to be an heirloom piece.

 

Read more...

Two Kickoffs in One -- NaNo and the Storyworld Go Bag

 

Storyworld Go Bag Filling Up

My new storyworld go bag for my Fruits of the Spirit storyworld was ready for NaNo on Monday night.  I got the printed manuscripts of several WIP installed along with a stack of tabbed dividers with pockets for loose papers.  I don't have the dividers placed at the head of each separate story yet as I need to reorganize the pages.  They are all in protector sheets--two per with often the first page of one story on the back side of the previous one.  You can see how that doesn't suit the concept of a divider sheet placed between stories.

They've been in a vinyl 3 ring binder like that for years and I was always thumbing through looking for the start of this or that story.  I kept putting off tabbing the protector sheets themselves because I'd had the concept of the tabbed dividers with pockets for sometime but I would have had to split the stories between two one inch binders as the first one was already stuffed.  I would have also had to expand into separate binders the next time I printed off new scenes or chapters.

I was hoping there would be more room to grow in the new 3 inch ring binder but after adding the divider tabs it is already over half full.  And with the stuff I put in the expanding file on the left it is already a challenge to zip it shut.  Sigh.

More Pages for the Go Bag

Pictured above is a folder containing the rewrite project for my story Blow Me a Candy Kiss.  The rewrite is still unfinished.  That all needs to go into the big binder but not just willy nilly.  I need to look closely at everything in situ or risk missing all sorts of clues or memories of what I was up to triggered by seeing each item exactly as I left it.  But I don't think I'm going to take the time to do that during NaNo as my focus is on a different story.

I declared myself a Rebel Wrimo a few weeks ago by deciding that I was going to devote this NaNo to the story that started the storyworld even tho nearly 30K words already exist.  But it has become clear to me for some time that all of the stories I start for NaNo that grow out of it all stall out for the same reason: The root story isn't finished. 

Faye's story in The Substance of Things Hoped For impacts every other story either directly or tangentially.  Most of the other POV characters encounter her at least once on their own story arc.  But with Faye's timeline still not gelled I can't gel the other timelines.

So on Tuesday evening I started setting up my new Dell laptop for NaNo.  Once again a prep step that should have been done days if not weeks ago.  But I kept shying away because it involves so much tech stuff I don't feel confident doing without a techie in the house.  One of the things I needed was to install the Whiz Folder ap that I'd done NaNo on and most of my research and journaling and note taking and book reviews and..... ad infinitum since the early 2000s. 

I think it was after 2013 when I started using Scrivener for NaNo but continued using WhizFolders for everything else and thus always needed to have both open so I could keep referencing or adding to my notes in Whiz because I'd not got the material transferred over to Scrivener before NaNo Kickoff. 

And here we are again.

This is what was meant by the ROW80 Goal referencing working with my storyworld files both pixel and paper.  I set myself the goal in April and one thing after another kept taking priority. Whether properly or by simple procrastination.  Until here I am on NaNo Kickoff with a new computer that contains none of my files and only one of the aps I need to open those files. 

The files are all on an external drive that needed to be ejected from the HP laptop and plugged into the Dell. I've kept it hooked up to the HP because once I'd copied the files last spring I did not want to save anything new to the old files as I feared loosing track of what changes I made to which drive.  I know there is supposed to be a way to sync so that any change you make to one will automatically be made to the other but I don't know how to set it up.  There is also the fact that the HP hard drive is stuffed to the gills and had been giving me warnings for some time. Especially around update times.

So Tuesday evening I ran into a snag when I discovered that the company that created WhizFolders had stopped supporting it.  I'd missed the warning emails in 2018 along with my last chance to get the latest updates.  The downloads for the version I owned was also no longer available.  Luckily I remembered that I'd saved a copy of the setup file from the Pro version I bought in 2008.  I'd been using the Delux since at least 2013.  But the Pro would still allow me to read and write to my files.  After some frantic sifting through my email I found the one with the code I needed to input to validate and lo it still worked.

So I spent NaNo Kickoff swimming in my story files instead of generating new words.  And yet if felt like the most productive kickoff ever.  I discovered a Scrivener file in which I'd set up a title page and at least one scene page as its child for every story belonging to the storyworld that I've ever worked on.  Each POV character's story was kept separate as if a separate novel even tho it is probable several of them need to be smashed into single novels with 2 or more POV characters. Nearly each story contained at least one scene I deemed written well enough I was willing to expend ink and paper on them.  I need to cross check these with the ones in the binder now because I can't be sure I've got hardcopy of everything I found in this file.

The Substance of Things Hoped For contains two complete stories aka chapters 1 and 3.  I am still trying to decide whether to do the NaNo words right there or create it's own file.  But I think my concept for creating this file was about keeping it clean as a showcase for scenes that were print ready.

One interesting note: when I click on the top of the file hierarchy the ap treats it as all one file and gives me the total wordcount.  It is closing in on 90K.  If only there was a complete novel in that mix.  Well maybe by the end of this NaNo I'll be closer than ever before to that goal.

I am unsure whether the stories in this file that have a title page followed by a blank scene page are missing words because I felt there was nothing good enough to move there or because I didn't finish combing through them.  Each one of those several blank stories have they're own Whiz and/or Scrivener file.  Some of those Whiz files are named only NaNo plus the year instead of the story title so I have to open them to identify them.

I explored these files all night quitting just after 7am.  I tried to get a nap before time for a zoom appointment at 11 but I felt like I was plugged into an electric socket.  All I could do was rest in the dark with my eyes closed and swim in the storydreaming.  So I was 34 hours awake by the time my caregiver left that afternoon which is why I'm writing my Wednesday post on Thursday evening tho I'm going to predate it.

I better wrap this up if I want to have any hope of getting NaNo novel words for day 2....

Find me on NaNoWriMo

Read more...