Mittnz & Socks

Using Youngest Daughter's phone, I got these two pics. (My phone camera is d-e-a-d just like the camera is. :::sigh:::) Anyway, Mittnz pair 46 is finished. Pair 47 is half done.

Here are the Bones Socks. All finished, blocked and ready to send on to David Boreanaz. It will be so much fun if he wears them and shows them off during taping of an episode of Bones! Of course there will be several pair all made by different people heading to his agent, but we live in hope!
Youngest Daughter went back to work today. She did much better yesterday, even managing to sit through Indiana Jones. It, BTW, was fantastic! It was as much fun as watching the first one the first time! Don't wait till it comes out on DVD, go see it now!

Karen Allen returns in this episode. BTW, did you know she has her own fiber business?

I'm hoping the day will be nice and easy going. I really need a break from my "nursing" career!

No Camera...

I bought more batteries for the camera and the same thing happened. One or two pics and the batteries were dead. Don't think it's the batteries....

And my camera phone is dead, too. That, I might be able to get fixed. It's only a couple months old and should be replaced for free.

So, I'm "stealing" pics from blogs I read. This is a stitch detail from Jill's Chickadee Cowl. Naturally, it's a discontinued yarn, but I adore the quick color changes. One does get tired of long color changes that pool or just don't look good. Notice her nice even stitches, too.


I finished up my Bones socks. They are gorgeous and soon will be ready to mail to the coordinator. The bad thing about making socks for an unknown foot is the anxiety of knowing whether or not it will fit. Oh well...

Didn't make any progress on Mittnz knitting yesterday. I spent most of my day in the car driving EGD to school, YD to acupuncturist, and then the return trips spaced an hour apart.

Last night was Author's Night at Eldest Granddaughter's school. Everyone in her class wrote a book (one to ten sentences long) and illustrated it as well. Each one of them made a hat from a paper grocery bag to wear during their recitation. Quite the fashion show! It was nice to see all the family members there to encourage the reading and writing. The books are all laminated and were very professional looking.

Today we are taking Eldest Son to see the new Indiana Jones movie as his birthday present. I don't know if YD is going to join Youngest Son and I in seeing it with ES or not. She just came downstairs and is walking pretty good, but the hour in the chair at Author's Night last night just about killed her.

Google & It's Products

Google must be having some serious server issues. It took for ever for my gmail to load, had to go in through a back door to get my Reader to load, and Blogger is sure takin' it's sweet ol' time to get anything done.



My latest progress shot on the 2nd Bones sock. Just starting the gusset decreases, so if I work on it I'll get most of it done today.

But I'm getting the guilties for not making Mittnz. Some of the members have finished 32 pairs, and I feel like an underachiever for my 17 pair!

I watched a really good movieyesterday morning, Snow Cake, that had been recommended by Debbie. Sigourney Weaver plays a high functioning adult autistic.

Then Youngest Daughter picked me up so I could go see Prince Caspian with Eldest and Youngest Sons. Really good movie. I thoroughly enjoyed it as I didn't remember the story at all.
I had the rest of the day to myself and just knitting, dozed and caught up on my TV shows. It was a nice day.

Socks and Narnia

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Abby's comment on yesterday's Asperger's post reminded me of Jenny Joseph's poem, Warning.

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Perhaps around 50 we do finally start, at least, to give ourselves permission to quit following the rules everyone around us thinks we should follow.

I finished up Bones sock #1! It's just a little big for Youngest Son so I think once washed and blocked it'll be just perfect. I really am happy with the way the color pattern picked up again in the foot but find it so interesting it's got narrower bands of red and white stripes than the top! How weird is that. But it's find, it didn't pool and that's really what I was afraid of.

Second sock has been CO and about five of the seven leg inches finished. The patterning is similar which is very surprising since this skein has four breaks in the yarn. It's the damaged skein of Hill Country Yarns I bought from Discountyarnsale.com. I e-mailed both companies and Hill Country never responded and Discountyarnsale said they'd credit my account but never followed up to say they had. I emailed them with new pictures twice yesterday and got their canned response, but no human has contacted me yet.

The breaks in the yarn all occurred in the first inch and a half of the sock, before the pattern had really established itself, and they are all in the white yarn.

Youngest Daughter and granddaughters spent the night at a friend's house last night which gave me a nice quiet evening and morning. Eldest Son and I are going to the movies to see The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian today. I always enjoy going to the movies and I'm expecting this one will be as good as the first one.

Youngest Granddaughter's first speech therapy session will be this Wednesday morning. When the evaluator was here, she questioned whether we really wanted the "autistic label" on her. I've thought about it a lot since last June when my sister said the same thing. It really isn't a label to those on the spectrum, it's part of our identity. So we don't shy away from it anymore than we might shy away from using "Native American" or "Irish". I guess we still aren't past the day that these kinds of words are derogatory nouns rather than the adjectives they really should be.

Cars, Socks and Asperger's Syndrome

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Here is our new car. 2004 Kia Rio. And it's really a manual. Hand crank windows, no electric locks and manual transmission. I'm not complaining about the lack of electronic gadgets. Manual are much easier to fix if they go out. It's got good AC, lights that work, a place to store my driving glasses... It's a good car for us.
And here is the progress I made on my Bones sock yesterday. I had Big Foot aka Youngest Son try it on and it's not snug at all, so I'm sure it'll fit Seeley aka David Boreanaz.


Not much else happened yesterday. Little grocery shopping, a trip to the library, and that's about it...

From a discussion on one of Ravelry's forums concerning Autistic Spectrum Issues:

Poster: I’m just hoping that one day my daughter will have the skills and the courage to go out into the world, and to make a life of her own as you have.

I hope that she figures out coping strategies to help her deal with sensory overload and unpredictability. I can really do little more than just love her, when she is overwhelmed.

My response: I don’t feel I have a life. I spend most of my time figuring out how not to have to interact with people and the rest of the time terrified I will have to. I don’t think any amount of skills would have changed that. I really thought about it this morning, and it’s about a 50-50 chance no matter what I do, it’ll piss someone off. So now I try to do what doesn’t upset me.

Of course it’s taken 50+ years of trying to be normal for me to get this jaded. My kids and grandkids still try to do it “right” but they have more reserves of energy to do it. I hope it’ll be different for them, but I don’t think it will.

And something to remember. Doing the things you “make” your daughter do gets her to do them. It doesn’t change the anxiety they produce inside her. So each time she “has” to perform according to the standards set by someone other than herself, it produces anxiety within her. The anxiety may or may not create physical symptoms (such as stomach issues, etc.) but for sure it will create psychological issues of tension, fear, or a mental scraping of fingernails on the chalk board. It doesn’t change with time, either. I can make eye contact. But it always, always, always creates a gut wrenching anxiety within me.

I guess giving her the tools to “pass for normal” is an okay thing, but I just don’t know how good it is to insist she use them. I worry about this all the time with my kids and grands on the spectrum. It took me years and years to understand that everyone didn’t go through this agonizing anxiety every time they walked into the store, answered the phone, went to school. I thought everyone had a garbage disposal grinding inside when they had to interact. So I pushed the feelings down and down and down until I almost had a breakdown. Well, I suppose that some would say I did, because I walked out on my family and tried to start all over.

I’m not criticizing your beliefs. You, like every other parent, has to do what you think is best. And I don’t know that what you are doing isn’t the best. But I still come back to my original question for these kinds of forums:

Why do I have to change my behavior to make NTs comfortable? If your answer is, “Then less NTs would single you out to pick on you,” that is an untruth. It’s always a crap shoot whenever someone on the spectrum interacts with an NT. They still know we are “faking it”. Some are still nice, most aren’t. They can single someone that is different out of a huge crowd. I’ve had someone I’ve never seen before walk into a room full of people, make a bee line to me and start being abusive. I’ve seen kids on the playground single out my aspie kids or grands and start pushing them around.

Although it may make you more comfortable your child can “act normal” I can assure you it’s not making your child comfortable.

I have a son in a wheel chair and no matter how many tools we give him to walk, he’ll never be able to do. His disability is obvious and no one tries to make him pass for “normal.” My spectrum kids and grands and I have invisible disabilities and people are always trying to make us pass for normal. I don’t get it…..

I’m sure this post offended someone. I apologize in advance, but I know no other way to speak for the spectrum people that can’t speak for themselves. You have no idea how debilitating being forced to act “normal” is.

Heel Flap

I've got maybe one or two more rows on the heel flap. I tried a different, but not too different, stitch pattern for this one. The slip sts are slipped as if to knit instead of purl and they alternate each row in their placement. It adds a bit of texture to the heel, the ribbiness of the standard Eye of Partridge heel is flattened out thus it doesn't feel as thick, but it's still got the extra thickness for wear and tear. It also breaks up the color repeats a bit more than the EoP.

The assessment from the Speech Therapist for Youngest Granddaughter went well, I think. I hope that she will be YGD's therapist as YGD took to her like white on rice! It's so rare that she immediately interacts with someone she's never met before. But she did and it was delightful to see.

I didn't get any work done on the last Charity Log Cabin I have presently, but will do that today before playing with my sock!

Goin' Green

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So, we went to CarMax yesterday to try and buy a car. They have a calculator on line that you can see if you can afford one of their cars. We could. At least we thought we could. Once they started putting numbers in the computer, they said we'd have to double our down payment. Okay, we could do that. Oh, and add $6o do the monthly payment. Okay..... Then they said, "No." The bank offered us a list of cars they would finance at at that same rate. Okay. We looked at one, fell in love and went back in to proceed. Bank said, "No." No to the cars they suggested and were willing to finance. Now they want us to quadruple our original figure for the down payment and we're at $100 more than the original monthly payment. Sounds quick and dirty, right? No, this whole humiliating and mean trick took two hours. I think we were victims of a "Bait and Switch." I mean really, the bank gave us a list of vehicles they would finance and the backed out.


The good news is I got the leg completely finished on the Bones socks, and the stitches all lined up to do the heel flap. I'm really pleased with how the yarn is striping on this. Hope it picks up as nicely on the foot.

Back to the car thing. We came home and spent several hours discussing it and decided, for the time being, to use the bus. With the price of gas rising daily it'd pretty hard for us to afford the paid off car we had, let alone adding a car payment and much higher insurance to our lives.

Although it's not the most ideal situation, it'll work for us. For the nights Youngest Daughter has to be at work at 11:00 pm, she can take the bus to a well light convenience store and then a cab the rest of the way. It's less than a mile, so the cost is minimal and will keep her from walking in the dark. (It's a well lit, busy street, but that doesn't mean anything anymore.) And likewise she can call a cab to avoid the steep hills from the bus stop to her dad's house to take care of Eldest Son.

Eldest Granddaughter has three weeks of school left, so after that the only bus riding we will do is for pleasure. Our bus stops are less than a block away, one bus to get where we are going for all of us.

And it'll cut down on the impulsive trips to the store, push us to organizing our outings and use of groceries cuz we won't be as inclined to run to the store to get ___________________. With the money saved we'll be able to pay back our savings account and then feed it.

And none of it is written in stone. If it doesn't work for Youngest Daughter, we can start shopping for a vehicle again. It's just removed us from the Panic Mode. I could see YD getting to the point of agreeing to anything just to get a car. "Anything" would have financially crippled/killed us. This gives us time to sit back, weigh options and wait for something we can work with.

Tomorrow we clean out our dead cars and then get rid of them ASAP.

We had to cancel Youngest Granddaughter's initial appointment with the Speech Therapist yesterday due to the above mentioned car experience. So she's coming today instead. I was surprised she'd volunteered to do a Saturday appointment, but I guess if she has school kids as clients, Saturdays would be one of the days she'd have to work. I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of help she can give us expanding YGD's very limited vocabulary.



Star Wars fans have some fun!

And it's still snowing in some places!