It has not been a good week.

 I wish that I had happy things to share and fun pictures for you. I don't. This week has sucked. First, there was the business of being on tenterhooks waiting for my father-in-law's condition to change. He had been in the hospital most of last week (which wasn't a good week either) due to complications from fatty liver disease and a fall the Friday before. Fortunately, the fall just left him with some good sized bruises but there was no concussion or broken bones. About the middle of last week, he decided that he was done taking medication for his fatty liver disease and dealing with the side effects. So began our death watch.

To some extent I was on the sidelines for this. But it was still stressful. The kids were prepared for the news that he was dying, but they still were upset with it. They had a close relationship with the man. A day or so after my father-in-law decided he was done with treatment, we got a phone call telling us that he had anything between a few days to a few weeks before he died. At which point, Beloved called out of work and we all trooped up to the hospital. Snuggle Bug wanted to see his grandfather and say something to him. Cuddle Bear preferred not to go into the ward where the man was. He waited with me and we all headed home when Snuggle Bug had his say. For my part, I had nothing to say.

I had to restrain myself from saying when Beloved asked me if I wanted to step back and say anything "Naw, I've seen corpses before." To put it very lightly, I despised my father-in-law based upon his past behavior, politics, and general attitude. And he never knew the depth of it. My father-in-law would tease my Beloved and insist that I actually liked him. The old goat mistook my politeness for actual pleasure in his company.

 I didn't disabuse him of the notion but as time passed on, he started to think that there was something a bit off there. Perhaps it was the fact that I had my hair chopped after he fawned over a haircut that I had gotten, I think it was two or three days after it that I got a super short pixie cut. He made me uncomfortable, angry, and I decided to do something about it. But between the mannish haircut and my changing my clothing style to black everything with occasional splashes of color, I got suspicious looks from him and he started queer baiting me. I made a point of not getting into an argument with him over it because I was observing frith and sticking to my own faith's rules of good behavior in another's home. There were several times he said things that made me want to loosen his teeth, but I replied with a dry 'that's your opinion.'

All of this exposition is to explain the background for why I am not mourning the man. I'm actually somewhat relieved and glad that he's dead. He can no longer hurt anyone now. He can no longer terrorize his wife. He can no longer spread his brand of hatred. And, he's made himself semi-useful in death by donating his body to science. I have but one childish regret, that I didn't punch him when I had the opportunity. I, however, recognize that I have anger issues and do my best to keep that in check. And I recognize that punching him would have been breaking frith, done nothing to resolve all of the agony he has caused in the course of his lifetime, and would probably have netted me an assault charge. I still feel like he deserved at least one punch for how he behaved in life, though.

All of that aside, the old goat dying has left something of a mess that Beloved and his siblings are sorting through with their mother. Changes got made to important legal things which didn't get down in writing before my father in law went into the hospital. Palsy made it impossible for him to feed himself, let alone write something down. And I presume that when he made these changes to his wishes for end of life stuff, he expected that he wasn't going to die essentially immediately after. The extended family are in the process of converging on the town. This is going to be complicated and messy because feelings and opinions on what should happen next. 

I'm not looking forward to the next few weeks. I expect that Beloved and the kids are going to have a rough time of it all. I expect that Beloved's mother and his siblings are going to have a rough time too. I'm going to do my best to support them and disregard what others have to say, even if it makes me angry. 

Fiber Fluff: Stalled on the Shawl

 Hi everybody!

I have two shawls that I currently have set up for working on. They're both stalled because life has gotten in the way of spending time on serious knitting. One is the Lady in the Woods pattern which I am making in magenta with a black border. One is the pattern that I've winged together as I was going along. Both are not complicated patterns. They're straight up stockinette stitch (well, technically the Lady in the Woods is garter stitch but that is boring).

I haven't done any spinning in a while. I'm going to try to get to it again today. I'm half way through a ball of grey alpaca pencil roving. The cop on my drop spindle is half full. I think if I focus, I can finish it off over the next two weeks. The hard part is going to be spinning the third ply for this yarn. It is 2/3 alpaca and 1/3 acrylic. I have no idea what the staple length on the acrylic is. The ball of chunky yarn (which I'm going to unspin and have roving out of) claims it to be almost 300 feet long. If the staple length is 300 feet, I'm going to have to cut it up to make it easier to spin. According to my research, spinning acrylic is a lot like spinning silk. We'll see if I need one of my light weight spindles for this or not. I'd like to use the same spindle for all the plies and then spinning them together to make the final yarn. Everything is in the same colorway, so I don't need to chain ply to keep colors organized.

The crochet preemie hats project is on pause right now. I have about 80 preemie hats done. I just need to get myself organized to figure out how to get them to the rural hospital in my area. When the big project was done through the spinning guild I used to be a part of, the hats all went to the big city hospitals. I didn't think that was fair once I realized that. So, I have to do a little planning to get these hats to local rural hospitals so that they have something warm and comforting for the little ones there.

Book sales have slowed down, but my yarn stock pile is still pretty hefty. I am still drawing from the yarn that was donated by kind souls. Some of these hats look pretty funky but they work up super quick. I am branching out from hats for micropreemies into hats for babies a bit bigger to use up the yarn faster. I keep telling myself it's slower by the hour but faster by the week. I am debating if I should make thumbless mittens for the babies to match their hats. The last time I did that, it went over really well. 

No Monday Menu this week.

 It has been one heck of a weekend. Friday, Beloved was sick with the flu. The rest of us fell like dominos over the course of Saturday. Today, the neighbor's kid who came to visit Thursday has come down with it. I feel bad that he's caught it but there isn't much I can do about it. I may offer them what's left of the ginger ale to help settle his stomach. But if it goes like it did over here, they're all going to have it in short order.

Thinking about food is making my stomach roil still. I'm no longer getting sick to my stomach, thankfully. The kids have started keeping solid food down. It makes things easier. Beloved is just about fully recovered with the exception of some stomach misery and a lot of gas. We're all hoping that nothing was caught by his parents with respect to this.

As logically as I can figure it out, we picked it up when we visited the hospital for the kids to see their grandfather. Because all week last week during the kids' winter break, that was the only place we had gone. At first, we thought that Beloved had food poisoning from a bottle of flavored milk that had gone off. Then the rest of us got sick. It's made things exasperating. I have two sinkfuls of dishes to wash, food to prep for Beloved's lunches this week (one of his favorite things is tuna salad to have for lunch), and another pile of dishes to take care of on the stove.

I also have to still clean out the fish tank and get rid of the fish's corpse. I was waiting until the garbage went out this way the kids didn't get upset seeing Snap laying in the garbage. But it's going to be a challenge to catch up on this stuff. A part of me says that making two pans of brownies last week was a poor executive decision. But there was no way I could have known that we were all going to get sick. I'm trying to give myself a bit of grace and just be reasonable about it all.

Dinners this week are going to be tailored to what people can keep down and what will keep the blood sugar stable for us diabetics in the household Beyond that, who knows the things I'll be putting together. If any of it comes out particularly good, I'll make a post here.

Since the cat is out of the bag ...

 My husband's parents are not doing well. We've been doing our best to offer support and help out. But there are something that you can not avoid, help, or otherwise make go away. My father in law is actively dying of liver failure due to fatty liver disease. Now that I am aware that this runs in Beloved's side of the family, I can educate the kids about it. I'm probably going to wait until everything finishes unfolding for my father in law, to be honest.

So far, Beloved is doing ok handling complicated feelings about his father. I am doing my best to hold space for him and support him in whatever way that I can. I understand the complicated feelings that he's going through, having gone through them myself when my own father got a cancer diagnosis. (Dad's in remission thanks to an experimental treatment and will be declared cured if he doesn't have it come back by August.) It is rough to hurry up and wait for someone to die.

It doesn't matter how much you're angry with them, how much you hate them, or how you feel on any front. It's still unpleasant and difficult. You see the suffering of the people who love them and it gets to you. Or at least it gets to me. Grief isn't easy. Grieving someone as they're still technically alive is a paradoxical experience and painful.

Right now, my father in law is spending a lot of time sleeping and getting pain medicine. He fell last week and was in the hospital with respect to that when it was discovered that his liver enzymes were high. The old goat refused treatment after a few days because he was just sick of the side effects. Not long after that, he started spending a lot of time sleeping. The doctors think he has anything from a few days to a few weeks to go. 

It's odd. The idea that it can be that uncertain is just strange to me. Then I think about acute liver failure and how it kills you in 24 to 48 hours. It's been a surreal week. I feel like I should have more empathy for the grieving that my sister in law is going through because she is close to her father. I don't, however. I kinda feel like a bad person for that.

I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about death and coming up with no good ideas on how to talk about it. The fish died on Tuesday. I haven't been able to clean out the tank yet because of all the stuff stacked around it right now. As the fish had been acting strangely for about two weeks and he was old, the kids were prepared for it to happen. There wasn't really any wailing and gnashing of teeth like the last time we had a fish die. The kids were disappointed and sad, but they accepted it as a natural part of life. They've agreed that death is not cool and that it's a sad thing. By letting them come to their own conclusions about the matter, I have done my best to keep my opinions out of it.

Looking back on the last week, I think that the death of the fish prepared the kids for the coming death of their grandfather. My only concerns about all of this is how to help my immediate family navigate this process. Beloved, as I said, has conflicting feelings about it all. He has a bad relationship with his father for much of the same reasons why I have a bad relationship with my parents. But we're standing behind the kids and doing our best to guide and support them through this, because they have a relatively good relationship with the man.

My mother in law is obviously distraught. It has driven her blood pressure up and she's had medication changes which have impacted her in various ways due to it. I suspect her doctor didn't fully consider her situation when he made the change and put her on a high dose rather than titrate her up to it. Hopefully as the medication is adjusted, she'll be doing better. But her cognition isn't the best right now for a number of reasons. This has kickstarted my anxiety again about myself developing dementia, because that's in my side of the family.

I try really hard not to think about it but watching my great grandmother H. lose her mental faculties scared the hell out of me. It was somewhat traumatic to watch from the side lines as a kid and it instilled in me a deep fear of losing my memories. Hence why I started journaling to begin with. My thinking was if I wrote everything down, I'd have reminders about the important things as my mind started to go.

Then bipolar happened to me. After living with the facts of how bipolar effects my cognition, I have come to recognize that my frantic urge to save as many memories as possible is futile. I still journal. It helps me to get a handle on my brain and sort through my feelings. But the anxiety about preserving everything just kinda got pushed aside in the light of how this last depressive episode really messed with my memory and stuff. And realizing that the next depressive episode will likely do the same.

Fiber Fluff: New Shawl Pattern

 Hi everybody.

I have been stalled on the spinning front because I haven't been able to walk and spin as I like to. It is my goal to get back to the half ball of grey Alpaca pencil roving and finish spinning it over the next few weeks. This way I can free up the spindle to start spinning the third ply of the yarn I plan on making. That is going to be from grey Acrylic pencil roving. Which I was shocked to discover it was silky in texture compared to most Acrylic yarns. Technically, this roving that I'm using is a 'chunky yarn' but I'm spinning it. I have no idea how long the staple length of the fiber is. It could be the approximate 200 yards or it could be less. It's going to be an adventure.

I have been working on a knitted shawl in a pattern that I brained up last year. I am a slow knitter which is why I haven't finished it but it's a really simple pattern. It is knit in stockinette stitch with a garter stitch stripe every 4 inches. I casted on 4 stitches at the beginning. The right side rows are knit with a make-one increase after the first stitch and before the last stitch in a row. This gives it the classic triangle shape. The wrong side rows are all purl stitches. After 4 inches of work, you knit two rows to make the garter stitch ridge and then go back to stockinette. You start your garter stitch on the right side of the shawl, making those increases as you do in the stockinette section.

The color yarn I am using is garnet. It is a 50/50 wool and acrylic yarn. It has a nice feel in the hand and is working up fairly warm. Like all of the triangle shawl patterns I make, I knit until either I run out of yarn or until it is wide enough to fit the person I am going to gift it to.

Monday Menu

 Since life has been a pain in the neck, I had to go completely decaf with my coffee and tea choices. Yay to no splitting headaches, boo-hiss to giving up the caffeine buzz. It was annoying, but I managed to kick my long standing caffeine addiction. Now, the challenge is improving my diet. I eat fairly healthy but I see there is room for improvement. As a result, I am getting back into weekly menu planning. I hope to get back to prep cooking, but I suspect that life isn't going to give me time for that on the weekends. Grocery shopping happens Saturday evening. It used to be a thing Saturday afternoon, but since Beloved has taken that task over it happens in the evening. 

I have been using the internet more for looking up recipes than anything else right now. I am getting better at tweaking portion sizes and such to make recipes that I find more diabetic friendly. The biggest challenge I am facing on that front is how to make homemade pizza more diabetic friendly and that's a tough one. We all love pizza over here. But with how prices keep going up, I suspect that our weekly pizza night is going to get complicated. The local pizza place that we love is no longer offering delivery because of how many people have been ordering through places like Doordash. Yes, we live around the corner but we have our days that are lazy. And ordering through the pizza place's website is complicated and adds the Doordash fee to the pizza. So, homemade pizza is going to become more frequent. I  may try the Bisquick pizza crust recipe and see if it goes over well, we'll see.

Enough jabbering, here's the menu. 

Day	Breakfast	Lunch	Dinner
Sun	yogurt with granola coffee	pb&j tea	breakfast for dinner coffee
Mon	yogurt coffee granola	quesadillas flavored water	hamburgers quick salad water
Tues	yogurt coffee granola	leftovers flavored water	tacos water
Wed	yogurt coffee granola	taco salad tea	meatloaf cheesy potatoes tea
Thurs	yogurt granola coffee	leftovers water	chicken patties water
Fri	yogurt coffee granola	pb&j tea	spaghetti & meatballs water
Sat	yogurt granola coffee	roast beef sand. tea	take out water

Ugh, politics.

 I must confess, I am horrified by everything going down on the political stage over the last year. At the same time, I am exhausted with it. I am sure everyone feels that way. I don't think people have realized that with an act of Congress, a stroke of a pen, and support of the Supreme Court, we are no longer a democracy. The changes that were made to the Executive branch of the government's powers (via the act of Congress) fundamentally changed the government of the United States from a democracy to a totalitarian state. These waters are unknown to us but we have to forge forward. I have hope that the Republic will be restored, but it is rather slim.

I feel betrayed by Joe Biden. Now one may ask why that is, after all I vote Democrat. He was the bulwark against which the act of Congress that changed the Executive branch's powers should have crashed. And he caved in like paper. A part of me wonders if it was spite that moved him not to veto that act. Here he was, facing the fact that Donald Trump was breathing down his neck and his own political party had jumped ship based on the smear campaign that Donald Trump was running. His vice president took up the mantle of candidate with out much apparent protest shortly before this mad bill was pushed through Congress at lightning speed by the Republicans that were swayed by the cult of personality which surrounds Donald Trump. I still think that law should never have been signed to expand the Executive branch's powers. It's all rather logical but disgusting at the same time.

Let me explain. There's been a push in the United States towards a totalitarian state since at least the Regan era. There's this book that details it (The Cult of the Presidency by Healy) but I'll try to summarize it. The educational system of the U.S. hasn't done a very good job of teaching civics and the fundamental under pinnings of the government we had before this Executive powers nonsense took hold. (I think it is only going to get worse moving forward.) As a result, people took to this idea that the PotUS was like a monarch or a dictator. This was something that has been fermenting on the Conservative front since at least the Civil War. (Yes, that long.) Language surrounding the PotUS changed and voting habits changed over the years.

People shifted to looking at the parties nominally running the government as teams in sportsball (hat tip to the Oatmeal for coming up with that expression). They rallied around their 'team' and didn't think about the long term consequences. The old tribal habits that lurk within social structures of humanity roared to the front and created a schism. The government was run by ...

No, I'm not going to detail it all out. I'm just tired and as much as I want to be an educator, I'm too busy with my cold and trying to take care of my family. If you understand what deep shit we're in here, you understand. This isn't another day at the office in the USA. We've collapsed, betrayed into the state we're in now by people who should have known better. I accept that everyone involved was fallible and probably were more focused on the moment. After all, it's only human to worry about the immediate consequences and not consider the long term effects. (And it is effect not affect, effect is a result and affect is an air you put on. Goddamnit!) It doesn't change the fact that our government is destroyed and fundamentally transformed into something repugnant.

There's a reason that George Washington refused a crown when it was offered to him. Those people who wanted him to be king linger on in their many descendants apparently. Washington believed that the government that he put together with his associates was fundamentally better than a monarchy. Now, people who are eager to bask in the light of the PotUS because they assume that it's the same thing out of ignorance and being caught in a cult of personality ... ugh. 

Maybe there's no hope right now. I don't know. I just know that life has become fundamentally more risky for my family. No one has moved yet but it's only a matter of time. So many people have told me that I was paranoid for worrying about such a thing happening in my lifetime since childhood. The same people assumed that they weren't changing the fundamental structure of the government in voting for these assholes who are in power now. They were too worried about what was in somebody's pants to stop and think long term for the generations that come after them.

Huzzah! They found nothing!

 I had that colonoscopy and I was told it looked text book perfect. It was a surreal experience to be laying on my side, watching on a screen what the camera was showing them and knowing that it was in my guts. One of my hands was laying against my stomach and I felt the camera moving under my hand in ways that reminded me of carrying babies in my belly. I am relieved and amused with the fact that even my hemmroids looked text book perfect. I was so afraid that they were going to find something pre-cancerous that I just was too busy watching the screen to ask my usual battery of questions of the doctor and the tech doing the procedure.

Since then, I have had so much gas that the kids (specifically my youngest) refuse to sit by me. It's kinda funny. My sinus infection cleared up just in time for the weather to get stupid and give me a migraine. The week has been one long headache of varying strength. As of right now, I feel off and somewhat floaty. I know that some of the side effects of the migraine medicine includes that, but it's been a day so I think that it should have stopped by now. Checking my temperature shows that I have a low grade fever but I still have a cold. Because nothing this time of year is complete with out a cold to go with it. The coughing has cleared up. Now, I am waiting for my nose to stop running. 

One may ask how I know the sinus infection is gone. The effluence of my sinuses is no longer tainted with blood or given to odd colors. More detail than you wanted, I'm sure, but it was more than a crushing headache that lead me to seek out the doctor. Who I offended by telling him that my normal temperature was 96.8 deg F. He insisted that my thermometer was not calibrated properly and that everyone's normal temperature was 98.6 deg F. Every thermometer I have used in my life, and I have checked my temperature so many times it's beyond my ability to count, has read that when I was healthy or at least devoid of a fever. So, when the thermometer reads 98.4, I feel like most people do when their fever is reaching towards 100 deg F. I am tempted to go in there when I am healthy and the weather is not stupid, just to prove the point. I kinda feel like I'd be wasting everyone's time, however, so I probably won't.

Now, if I could just not feel loopy that'd be great. I do recall that the side effects of the Imitrex that I take for my migraines can make me feel this way. It's probably what's driving this because my temperature is not high enough to make me feel this way. I am in no way fit to drive. It's a good thing that Beloved usually drives and I ride shotgun. Today, we're going to visit his parents. I don't know what to expect. I am hoping for no discussion of politics. I have, however, a bad feeling that's going to happen. But, if distasteful topics of conversation are the worst that happen, I still win.