View From The Chair

You walk by me
As if I am not there.
My legs may not be strong
But my mind is.

These wheels do not shield
Me from the world.
They do not make me blind.
I see you as you pass me by.

My body reminds you
Of your own mortality.
Yours reminds me
Of my own.

You find temporary escape from truth
As you pretend I don’t exist.
Yet when you close your eyes
Mine are open wide.

We stayed plenty busy despite our allotment plans being foiled.  Maybe even because the plans were foiled. Somewhere along the line I decided that I am going to make this kirtle for my youngest to wear at a dance performance next weekend. They need to dress up in the period of the dance, Tudor, for the villager fun day the first weekend in June. Last year they wore shorts and t-shirts but this year, with the retiring of the old teacher that organized the performance, they have apparently brought on a more ambitious organizer.  Which somehow translates into Katie needs to make a fancy dress costume.  I am sure that other parents are no where near as insane as me, but a switch gets flipped in my brain that compells me to make instead of buy.  No rational thought employed, just irrepressible urge to do it myself.

The sun is back out and we need to get outside and finish up the allotment planting. The rains will have made the soil, which is a very clay soil, much softer and easier to work. Heavier, but softer nonetheless. It will be June next week and things should be well planted by then.  Onward ho!

When I cam back from France I was riding a wave of high energy.  The weather was so much better - so much dryer. Even though it rained part of the time, the atmosphere was less damp.  What an incredible difference it makes to how I feel.  I even took a few short walks!  Walks people!  I don’t take walks except a stumble from room to room in my house these days.  But in France I walked - for more than a few feet at at time!  That alone had me feeling like I could take on the world.  So when I came back I knew that it would be hard, I knew that I would have a post-holiday come down.  But I felt so good that I made a point to keep riding the wave of optimism and energy that I caught down there.  And for the first week or so I was able to keep it up.  I worked in the back garden, I worked in our allotment doing things I wouldn’t have believed I did if I didn’t know I did.  We had a party at our house over the May Bank Holiday weekend and I trotted around the place with only my walking stick and the occasional wobble.  Everyone said how good I looked, how great it was to see me up and about.  I agreed - I felt great! I celebrated what felt like a new beginning to something fantastic and exciting.

And then I crashed.  Hard.

In the weeks since I crashed it has been a struggle once more between my will and my body.  My will is intense and strong, and it is not at all pleased that my body is once again calling the shots, and the directive is: stay put and do nothing.  Not pleased at all.  So I pushed with all my might and in my best little engine voice cheered myself on as I struggled to get out of bed and do something - anything- to prove that I was not losing this battle.  I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.  I got back out to the allotment and dug in the dirt.  I sowed seeds and planted starts in their new beds.  Inspiration and visions came to me while I worked.  It was incredible and I felt that finally I knew how to live with this illness, that I had found that something I was looking for that would push me —-through—- the pain and into life.

But then I crashed. Even harder.

I didn’t get up this time.  I tried.  I got as far as the kitchen where I realized that making my breakfast -at 11:30 - was all that I could handle.  Even that was overwhelming. I ate and needed to go back to bed for a rest. By 1:00 I was flat out fast asleep.  Woke up at 5:00 (yes, that is a 4 hour nap) only to eat and crawl back in bed where I fooled myself into feeling like I did something by putzing around the internet. And so it has been for the past week.  Me sleeping late, doing nothing, and sleeping some more.  My body aches and screams when I push it each time I climb the stairs.  My own personal Everest those stairs are.  But no one is cheering when I get to the top.  Just me, letting out an exhale of relief that it’s only flat ground until I reach my bed.

This is a downer of a post.  I know, and I apologize.  It’s posts like these which I avoided writing for so many months while I have been neglecting this blog.  I promise I won’t write too many of them.  I do believe that I have found that special thing that is needed to keep me going forward and living with this illness, living with this body and not fighting against it.  Part of that is being honest though. Honest about my joy, about my struggles and honest about my victories as well as my failures.  They are all important. They are all me.  They are all divine and they all keep me crafty - looking for a new way to do things, creating a life worth talking about.  Even if I am just talking to myself.

Marche’ Saint Pierre - 6 floors packed with fabric.  Need I say more?

My daughter displaying my rapidly growing stack of payment tags for my purchases - as I am intently wheeling myself and amassing my booty.  Good thing I left room in my suitcase to bring it all home in!

He loves me, but fabric shopping is not his idea of fun.

I on the other hand was in heaven!  (Yep - that is my new avatar.)  Paris fabric shopping induced bliss!

I will be blogging over at Beneath Our Feet with more pictures of our travels in France, so be sure to stop by there and check for updates.  After we left Paris we went to the Rhone Alps region where we are hoping to launch our dream venture from.  More on what that dream is later…

I was on a mission.  Of course I had a flare of my fibromyalgia for a few days after I bought the paint so it sat quietly on a shelf waiting for me to get to it.  When I felt better there were other more pressing needs in the potting shed and in our allotment. (Which I really should blog about - allotment politics and gossip are the best!  Gardening in it is fun too.)  At last the day arrived when my body and my schedule were in sync so I set about my task.  It happened to be the day before a big BBQ party at our house. As I worked I imagined myself proudly presenting my new red bin to my guests amid oooohs and aaaahs of my crafty frugality.

Documenting the bin au-naturale.  It served us well when our kitchen was black and silver industrial when it was first purchased. After we moved out of that flat the poor thing has been somewhat of a eyesore and been mistreated.  I scrubbed it up nicely and readied it for it’s makeover.

Next I set up a paint booth by stringing up a couple paint drop sheets all over the patio. The wind was blowing towards the big bush so I tied it up and around it to spare it from getting sprayed. An up-ended recycle bin served as a base to prop the bin on and lucky thing - it was red so the paint didn’t muck it up. (Can’t have my recycling bins looking shabby now can I?) Thanks to the swine flu craze all the masks at the paint store were sold out so I donned a high tech breathing filter courtesy of my farmer husband (which I did not document in photos, but if you do work with spray paint use some sort of a mask. That stuff is awful. Were it not for the greater good of my kitchen decor I would not have used such a vile medium.)

Several hours and 4 coats of spray paint later …. My beautiful red rubbish bin!!! (Fully deserving of all 3 exclamation points.)

Ain’t she a beauty? And for a mere fraction of the cost of the extortionately priced ones. The bin cost us £14 when we bought it 4 years ago and the spray paint was £7. I used 1 whole large can of paint. The gray metal showed through for the first 2 coats and the 4th,final coat gave it a nice even shine. I had no idea going into the project that it would take so much paint and originally contemplated buying a mini can. Thankfully I went for the big can or I would have had to buy 3+ of the small cans at a much higher end cost. (full disclosure: actually I used a whole large can and 5 squirts of another can but that was because some fluff flew onto the final layer of painting the lid. I had to buff it out with some steel wool and give it an extra coat. Were it not for the wayward fluff it would have been a one can project. )

Oh - and at the party I did indeed smile with pride as my guests commented on my lovely bin and were duly impressed with my ikea hack skills.

I know there are a few of you who stop by in hopes of finding something new, only to leave shaking your head in dissappointment.  I appreciate your loyalty and want you to know that I hear your knocking and I am not ignoring you.  It is just that I get distracted on the way to answer the door.  Countless times a day I think to myself “I should blog about this.”  only to be squashed by the giant killjoy in my head that says “Not now, do it later. And only if you can make it really interesting.  Which it won’t be.  So don’t bother.”  Either that or the trickster will fool me into thinking I am too busy to stop and write.  Because refreshing facebook again to see what my friends’ Top 5 Favorite Pickle Flavors are is top priority, you know.

I don’t really have anything in particular to write about today, but since I have been trying to get my twitter list going and realized that I had linked this site from my twitter that I should either get things going again or consider abandoning it all together.  Not being able to stomach the thought of abandoning it all together I am here now - babbling about nothing.  Hoping that this little babble will turn into more babble and that more babble will be able to silence (or at least babble louder than) the ‘voices’ (don’t worry, they aren’t real.  Not all of them anyway. ;)  )  and maybe even I might start writing for real again.

What I do know is that I will never post a “I’m back” post again because doing so is a guaranteed assurance that I will not actually resume posting.  So let this be my first official “I’m not back” post.  If I prove myself wrong by actually writing then hooray for me and reverse psychology.  If I don’t, well then - I told you so.  I’m not back.

Happily spring appears to be trying to break through and with it I am experiencing a renewal of my own.  I recently started a new medication that while still early days has me feeling optimistic about getting some of my spark back.  I’m not looking for a miracle cure but to have a bit more fire burning in me is a very welcome change.  There have been treatments in the past which have given me a little boost but unfortunately they all seem to be short lived.  Not wanting to count on this boost being a permanent thing I am taking it one day at a time and trying to simply appreciate each day for what it gives me without putting stock in what it may or may not mean for the future.  In the true spirit of zen - living each moment as it comes.

In my hiatus I was not all together a slug.  I did finish the pair of socks I started way back in August and have gotten much love and warming of my feet out of them during the cold days.

Of course with my feet all toasty warm, my hands were feeling a bit left out so I obliged them with this lovely pair of mittens.

Which led to my husband wanting his own knitted warmth, so I obliged with these fingerless gloves. He started working for the Royal Mail in December so he needed something to keep his hands warm but left his fingers free to sort mail as he delivered.

In making these I did my first attempt at knitting on two circulars as opposed to DPN’s and must say that I am a committed convert. The speed at which I knit these was truly amazing and I found the method to be overall much less fiddly than using the DPNs. I have since cast on a pair of socks on two circs, and while they have been sidelined for another project (of which I will write more on another day) I am pleased with the speed and ease. If you haven’t tried the two circs, you should give it a go. There are some great tutorials on you tube to get you started.

And to round it out, and show that I do indeed do other things besides knit - a project that I had been planning to do for ages but never made the time to do. Recovering an old stool that we had in our kitchen. Previously it was a robin’s egg blue which was nice, but the giant hold in the middle with foam sticking out kind of ruined it’s aesthetic. A square of oil cloth, a few minutes of labor and hey ho - a newly covered stool that fits nicely into my slowly becoming retro red kitchen. I really love this stool now.

There have been other projects, but I won’t go into them all. In my flickr you can see some more and if you happen over to Beneath Our Feet and follow it to my family flickr you can see some projects around the house that we have been working on over the winter. I have lots planned for the spring and looking forward to being back and sharing them with you!

Let me know if and of you are inspired to give it a try and be sure to pass the word on!

Never fear - I am still finding time to bead and knit.  I accidentally made the first of my monkey socks 5 extra rows longer which is cool because I like long socks.  It may mean that I will need to buy more yarn to get a pair.  They are going to be really nice when they are done.  I hope soon.  I am on the foot of the first one and then it’s a speed through the second one.  I don’t get second sock syndrome too badly.  I beaded these key chains for the keys to my scooter, which I have dubbed my “clown car”. They are done on double stranded thin wire in hopes that they are fleixble but long lasting. I made them with bead my mother bought for me while I was in the US this summer. Thanks mom! My mother reads this blog - so wave hello to her. I hope she is resting and feeling well.

It hasn’t been all roses and honeymoon for me and my scooter, but I’m coming along with it.  We had a lovely event in the village yesterday and I was full on scooter girl.  More about that at Beneath Our Feet later this week.

Today I am resting with the curtains wide open, lying in the spot that the sun hits my bed.  We have had the most beautiful sunny days recently.  Each one makes me thankful.  This weekend was simple pleasure in the countryside and I put my all into it.  I am really happy that I did what I could and am going to be equally as grateful that I can rest for a few hours today before I go get my youngest from school.  On my little clown car.  I am grateful for that too.

I nearly forgot to mention.  I registered for French language course at the Open University.  I won’t go deep into why right now but I am quite motivated to learn.  A dishwasher won over a weekend in Paris recently, so as you can imagine it would have to be something really big to get me go back to school for the first time in many many (I think this merits another many) years.   And proves that I am crazy.  Which of course was not really in question for some time now.

School starts in a week so it is now time to start looking back on the summer and sharing some highlights.  It started off quite wonderfully with my youngest brother’s wedding.  It was so much fun to see friends and family that I have not seen in a long time  (some since I was a child) and to meet new people that I am lucky to now call family.   My family  - the one for which I call myself mother - stood still in the same place long enough to get our picture taken.  A feat that has not been accomplished in a very very long time.  It makes my heart swell to see how my daughters are all growing so much.  Even my baby is no longer a baby. And it’s good to know that we all clean up nicely.  Living rurally like we do that is also a rare occurence.

Once back from the trip, as I mentioned earlier, I have been pretty much sidelined by my health.  It is something that I am still coming to grips with.  I have come a long way in the past several months in accepting where things are, but it still is quite raw with me.  One thing that I have had to accept is that walking more than a few meters at a time is a thing of the past for me.  This has meant that I have been more or less housebound for some time, and when I did venture out it meant days of pain for having over done it.  On our holiday we rented a wheelchair and it opened back up parts of life that I had not seen for such a long time.  So it was decided that I needed to get some wheels of my own in an effort to get out more. Since I don’t have the energy to be wheeling myself around I chose to get a mobility scooter so that I could get out without needing an attendant.  My new wheels arrived on what was lucky enough to be a sunny day.

My maiden voyage on it was to the park with my youngest who has been trapped at home with me.  We took a side trip further into the village to our local yarn shop and I treated myself to a skein of sock yarn.  I cast on Monkey from Knitty Winter 06 a couple nights ago and have been joyously rediscovering the fun of sock knitting.  I had been jonesing for a good sock knit for quite some time and am thrilled to have finally given in to the urge.

This weekend we are moving into a new house, which is something we are all looking forward to.  The new house has a real kitchen, unlike our current house which has a closet masquerading as one.  We just moved into this house 6 months ago and were less than thrilled to learn that the landlord was selling so soon afterwards, but it has turned out for the best and we have been looking forward to the move all summer.  Unfortunately we will be without internet for a week minium, so I will be AWOL again.  But when it is back up I promise - for real promise - that I will be back and posting regularly again. I promise!