roses

roses

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Ugh, stupid polar vortex go home.

It's been a long week. I've had several migraines and felt generally miserable since this polar vortex moved in. It has been exhausting. I'm running low on spoons because I am not sleeping that great. All of the stiffness and aches of my body because of the weather just makes it impossible for me to get comfortable. Add on top of that the fact that I am having night sweats and hot flashes during the day, I'm just not thrilled with this whole perimenopause business.

Despite the birth control medication that I am on, my periods are getting irregular again. This stuff is such that I generally shouldn't have one unless I go off of it. I started going off it once a month because I was experiencing break out menses about two years ago. I had a regular menstrual cycle for the first time in my life by the force of medication. It was a pleasant deviation from the norm. I knew exactly when I was going to have it and how long it was going to last.

I was lulled into a false sense of security. It's been almost a year now since I have been having perimenopausal symptoms and now my menses are getting unpredictable despite the medication. I feel like an idiot for daring to buy light colored underwear. I am going back to black all the time now. Along with the hot flashes and the night sweats, I get to feel paranoid that I have Covid-19 because my body temp is elevated and I'm having cold symptoms. I know that it's actually my hormones being stupid and the fact that there is a ton of pollen flying around in the air bothering me.

The cold weather has the animals confused. They're here but they're not doing their spring things. I'm hoping that it's decimated the stinkbug population because they're an invasive species and a problem. It's beating the tar out of my plants that are outside. I would be a bit more upset about this but the thing that I am truly bothered by is the fact that someone decided to pick my lone daffodil as soon as it bloomed and they did the same with my purple hyacinth. I don't have many flowers out there in that flower bed. It just is a bad spot to grow things. I have two tulips attempting to grow but I am concerned the cold is going to kill 'em off. I've pretty much given up on flowers right now.

I just want the weather to warm up so that I can plant the rosebush that Beloved got me for Mother's Day. As he handed it to me he said, "A knock out for my knock out." The rosebush variety is known as Knock Out and has a double blossom. It's quite fragrant and pleasant. I don't dare put it outside because I know that the cold will kill it off. And my greenhouse frame doesn't have a cover over it so I can't put anything in there that will have it protected from the frost/freeze that we've got going on in the evenings during this polar vortex.

Since I can't do my walking, I have been doing stuff in the apartment. I'm about half through this 1lb bag of semi-felted fiber. I've been spinning it on my Ashford student spindle. It's the heaviest spindle I own and I'm attempting to make yarn that's closer to the commercial medium weight acrylic that I use for a lot of my crafting. I'm making progress on that goal. I still have a small portion that I have aside that I am using with one of my drawer pull drop spindles to make thread. It's been slow going on that front but I am making progress. If I remember it rightly, they say that hand spinning is slower by the hour and faster by the mile.

I feel a touch annoyed with this fiber. I was going to use the drawer pull drop spindle for this stuff and make a mile of thread. I loaded my distaff and was ready to set to work on it when I discovered just how felted it was. So, I have been getting something of an upper arm work out ripping out the felted fiber into semi-fluffy strips and using it with my bigger spindle. I haven't touched the bunch upon the distaff. I'm going to have to get it all off and repeat the process of fluffing it all up. I would just abandon it but I'm halfway through it. I feel bad about the idea of abandoning a project in the middle of it all.

And then there is this shawl that I'm working on that is possibly going to turn into something huge. I have a crochet wingspan shawl pattern. It said work it with medium weight yarn and a 'H' hook. I figured I'd go up two sizes and use my 'J' sized hook. I thought I'd get the project done faster and have it a bit more open fabric. Well, that theory isn't matching up with the results I am getting. It is working up a LOT bigger than I anticipated. I have decided that this is my 'crazy' pandemic project. When it gets to the halfway point, I will post a picture of it. I'm still working on the first third. I have gone through approximately two pounds of medium weight acrylic yarn. This is still the beginning of it and I'm not finished with the third triangle. I may be half done with it, I'm not sure.

Once I get that third triangle done, I'm going to sit down and do some math to figure out how much yarn I am going to need to finish this thing off. I am working each triangle in a color of the spectrum. I started with red and used about 1/3rd of a pound. Then I did orange which was one pound. I'm now on yellow and I'm almost finished with the first pound ball and nowhere near finished with the triangle. I had Beloved pick up two more pounds of yellow. We'll see if it is enough to finish it. Once I get the yellow triangle finished, I can do some math based on the three triangles to calculate how much yarn I am going to need for the remaining colors. I have a feeling that this thing triples by size with each triangle because the base of the triangle is on the hypotenuse of the triangle before. But I still have to check.

We're joking that this thing will probably be an evening gown by the time I get done with it because it works up in a spiral. Other people are doing the pandemic hair thing and I'm doing pandemic crochet.

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