Sickness = Knitting Productivity

I am sick. I caught one of those nagging colds. It's mostly annoying from the perspective that I am trying to study and when I try to read I get a headache. Thanks to my sister I am surrounded by everything a person needs when they have a cold: Tylenol, OJ and Ginger Ale, chicken noodle soup and lots of kleenex.

Happily for my knitting, some of it will start fulfilling its destiny since knitting doesn't seem to worsen the sinus headache. I finished a present for next winter:

It's been awhile since I finished anything so the feeling was good. I can't post the pattern because it's from a WW2 knitting pamphlet, the wool is LionBrand Fishermen's Wool, which I personally really like because it felts really well. They are actually the only thing I have every felted and it was purely by accident, my fiance wanted to wash the mittens and he put them in the dryer and lo and behold, they were felted. The result was better than the original product because they were even warmer so he felted the second pair I made him. If anyone wanted the pattern I could email it to them.

Following this bout of sickness I may have some more finished projects to post soon! Then I'll get back to studying...

99....98....97....96

The last 2.5 weeks have been incredibly busy; very little by way of knitting or studying actually happened. Separation anxiety from my knitting settled in after 3 days, oddly enough I don't get separation anxiety from my textbooks though. To relieve this I did what always works: I daydreamed about owning sheep (I think just one, but maybe two. I wasn't sure if it would be sheeps since that sounds funny so I left it ambigius). See, I have big dreams for these sheep, I would pet them and brush their hair until they had nice luxurious wool and then I would shear them and spin the wool and knit lovely things.

Just a few minor problems exist with this plan. I have no where to put a sheep, much less sheeps. I don't know what they eat or drink (?water...or do they need variety?) or if they need to be walked (since I have no backyard maybe they would need to be walked. But how would I get a leash on it?) or actually how to shear one. Can I just chase it around with my fiancee's head shaver thing getting little strips at a time? Would it be safe on the leash if I had a shaver in my hand?

I also don't know how to spin.

I feel like these are all relatively minor problems I could overcome.

These are the things I think about when I'm on call and I'm hitting the refresh button for the thirtieth time waiting for bloodwork to magically appear. Hilariously, many members of the public have recently expressed shock at the resident duty hour discussion going on right now (mostly on facebook but sometimes on CBC). It seems weird to me when people don't know that we work 26hour shifts (or longer on the more demanding specialties, no idea how these residents do it for 5 years....they actually deserve medals in my opinion). At least I can go home and dream of sheep.

Uh oh

I did not bring enough knitting to academic day and it's only 10am. Two more inches and I need to switch colours, but I forgot to bring my contrasting colour. Maybe I can find string somewhere...

On the plus side, I just learned what a "K hole" is. Ketamine, a potential drug of abuse, can produce a catatonic state that is also known as a "K hole." Medicine never ceases to interest me.

20% Off!

Thank you everyone for the emails/texts/posts for Tiki. Torch is still adjusting to being the only dog in the house but he is coming along.

So I was promised a trip to the big knitting store by my fiance and I was extremely excited to go. I decided I had to sort through all of WIP's and items in my queue to figure out what I really needed to buy; so I sorted everything and separated the projects that were all ready to go. Approximately an hour later I was finished. And then I was dismayed:

I had 6 projects all ready to go, not requiring a single thing from the yarn store! Six projects will keep me knitting for awhile, however I went to the yarn store anyway and lo and behold they were having a 20% off warehouse sale! Just for fun, here is another picture of the knitting corner after little Tiki crawled into it:

I'm not really sure why this looked like a comfy place to nap, but she slept there for a long time

Purchasing yarn is just so much fun that I bought some sock yarn, and then of course had to buy the "2 at a Time Socks" book by Melissa Morgan-Oakes so I can increase my efficiency. Reading the 71 page Guideline for Primary Care Management of Headaches in Adults has given me a headache this morning, so I'm going to go take a knitting break and maybe dip into the new bag of fun stuff. Hopefully the next post will have some actual knitting progress to post!

Sad Day

This week was a sad, sad week. One of our little Pekingese dogs, Tiki, got very sick and had to be put down, late Thursday night. I've cancelled my trip to Toronto to see family/friends because I was too tired to drive and thought I'd be sad all weekend and that's no fun to put on everyone else. So instead I will just stay here and maybe get some distracting work done. I didn't pay great attention in teaching yesterday so I might review those topics, knit and clean, and do other distracting things. Most of the friends I have told have a similar story of losing a pet, often a childhood friend, and commiserating yesterday certainly helped.

No knitting pictures today, just Tiki and her best friend Torch.

On their way home from the shelter, Torch (left) and Tiki (right)

Tiki with her new sweater on

They liked snuggling

Always wear grey pants to an interview, no one can be offended

Two very exciting things happened yesterday. One, I finished the monkey socks. Also, I finished the monkey socks way ahead of schedule! The second exciting thing was that I met with someone to talk about jobs. Gah!

It was kind of like a job interview, in a weird way though. We talked about contracts and remuneration and work hours and the like, but it doesn't feel right because there are lots of family doctor jobs out there and it's more about me making a decision then them. The whole situation did take me back to age 14 when I was interviewing for my first real job, I remember putting on the only dress pants I owned, a pair of light grey pants. My mother drove me there and waited in the parking lot of the dry cleaner warehouse so I could interview with the three large Italian owners (I was a bit intimidated). All went well and I ended up working there throughout high school. When I arrived at Second Cup for my current interview I realized I was wearing similar pants and I felt 14 years old again, pretending that I was all grown up.

Well enough of that boring stuff, here are the socks! And they are the same size as each other!

The Monkey Socks turned out to be a well written pattern. I think the choice of yarn worked fairly well, Indigodragonfly, which is a Merino cashmere sock yarn. A lighter colour would have shown the pattern a bit nicer but overall I'm still happy with it. Now if only I could figure out how to make all the pictures show up in the same row.

Reset

It was -10 degrees outside. Apparently my internal thermostat has reset itself after the week of -30 to -40 and now -10 feels so warm outside I had to have an Iced Coffee to cool myself down. Baffling what us Canadians think is reasonable, isn't it?

Someone who knows me very well pointed out several more ways in which I am like a 90 year old, much to my chagrin. I left that party when it was bedtime for me, which was around 10pm...I think that is a completely reasonable time to leave a party. My sister, while planning an event, mentioned starting at 7pm. Since I thought the plan was to include dinner I said if we started at 5:30 or 6 we could have dinner too....yeah she meant 7pm was to start dinner at 7:30. How could I eat dinner so late?! That's right before bedtime!

I was quite focused this week with the podcasts and knitting so the first of two mittens is about half way done (first of two does actually need to be emphasized because the last time I made these mittens one was lost immediately so it became first of 3 mittens). Hopefully the intended owner of these mittens will be more careful.

Mittens continued....made from Lion Brand Fishermen's Wool and the WW2 pattern. Pretty soon I will start the finger part and you will be able to see how they are rifle mittens. I think it's cool.

One of my friends just had a baby girl! So she will get the little purple and pink girl sweater from List minus four projects. That was a perfect baby sweater to knit, super fast and easy and only one button to sew on. You can find the pattern on Ravelry at May Baby Sweater.

Hmm....I'm not sure how I feel about this pattern. I followed the measurements but the hood part came out pretty big. Babies have big heads and all but adult size big, not quite....unfortunately the hood part fits me. It's going to make the baby look like yoda.

I am starting to worry a little bit about my upcoming graduation, namely whenever I learn something and think, "hmm shouldn't I already have known that? It seems important..." This week I learned that smokers need a special formulation of Vitalux (if they are using such drops) without beta carotene because the beta carotene puts them at higher risk of lung cancer. Lung cancer is about as serious as it comes...so then I stop and think, have I ever put someone on Vitalux? No, thankfully, because I would not have known that since I just learned it. I think the bombshells will just keep coming, that's what the upper years told me anyway. Avoidance is probably not going to be the best strategy for this. Back to studying.

Oh to be young again

I came to a very disturbing conclusion last night while counting sheep (which clearly doesn't work or I would have been sleeping instead of having the following conversation with myself).

How I am unlike a 90 year old woman:
?

How I am like a 90 year old woman:
1. I knit
2. I don't understand pop culture
3. I drink fiber every day and the only thing I want to talk to my family doctor about are my poops
4. My vitamin D tabs are soft chocolate chews
5. I say things like "When I was young... (we used warfarin instead of dabigatran and squirmed in our seats when being pimped rather than surreptitiously consulting an app)"
6. I went to a party on the weekend and I was one of the first to leave because it was bedtime (I was one of the chronologically youngest people there)


So 6 to 1....it's not looking so good.


On the more hilarious side, here is a picture of a knitted object from my women's health elective:

It's a vulva

I haven't progressed much on my own projects except for the baby wrap, it's almost done. Too bad it's -30 out and all the babies are concealed in snowsuits all the time right now...no babies for playing with!

Time to try and think of a youthful thing to do.

When all else fails...verbal diarrhea

I guess I never got around to putting up the pictures of my cast-on frenzy. Here are a few:

Using some random cotton yarn I found in my stash this will magically transform into A Hooded Baby Wrap which is a nice free pattern from Lion Brand Yarn 

Another Lion Brand Yarn project, although the patter is for Rifle Mittens for he who shall not be named (I've been watching the Harry Potter movies for study breaks) and I cannot post a link because it is from a World War II pattern book a very good friend gave me. They might be a present for the 2013 holiday season so their actual destined recipient will remain in the dark.

Nice King Cole Bamboo Cotton yarn will be made into a cardigan for a little one with this free Ravelry pattern Silver Cardigan

The knitting has taken a back seat to a few marginally more important projects, such as studying for the licensing exam, so the projects are not much further along. Also more important is the first day of a new block; despite going through this every 4 weeks, I still get a bit nervous before rotations where I don't know what to expect. Rotations I have gone through before don't have an effect, not surprisingly it is only the new ones. I study the weekend before so I at least have some random facts I can verbal diarrhea when all else fails, but I still get nervous. There is no real point trying to work on this issue since I only have 2 more new rotations, and after today just 1. Yea!

On a side note, I love and hate the new $20 bills. They frequently stick to each other, which is bad for counting them and looking in my wallet and thinking I only have $40, but great when I feel through them and discover I have $60! Then I go buy potato chips.

The Post Holiday Hangover

So my sister does read this. Apparently I must thin of another way to hide future ink stains.

Cast over hangover, that is what I have today. I went on a casting on binge and now I have way too many WIP's. Rather than headache and emesis though I feel tense and edgy. It's quite tempting to stay up late knitting but I have an out. The project I most want to work on, the monkey socks, are at the perfect point (heel flap) for brainless knitting and I have a friend coming over to knit on Sunday. Thus I am saving them for that.

Monkey Socks made with Indigodragonfly merino sock yarn

(No one knows the monkey socks were supposed to be a Christmas present for someone...they are now magically morphed into a birthday present. This gives me until March. It'll be our secret).
I found a new way to embarrass myself at work the other day, that's always fun. Turns out when they say hand wash only on your favourite front clasp bra they mean if you repeatedly wash it in a machine it will weaken the clasp. This will cause said clasp to give way while you are bent over examining a 4 month old. And of course, this was the only baby I've seen brought in by the father, I feel like it would have been much less awkward if it was just the mom. Running out the door while mumbling something about drawing up the vaccines was also not the graceful exit this situation required. The bra has been retired. I am considering writing a letter to the bra manufacturer.