Pairs of socks knitted in 2014

  • Roxanne's socks
  • Brian's Cascade socks
  • Shirley's lacy socks
  • striped Meredith socks
  • striped stranded #1

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Totally worth it!

I've been doing a lot more spinning lately. While the several tons of fiber I've accumulated over the years does provide a nice amount of insulation, it's been taking up space. Without turning into yarn. In spite of my best efforts, no amount of wishful thinking makes roving spontaneously metamorphose into yarn.
Apparently, I forgot about the most important step of the process to change the fiber from nice fluffy batts of wool to yarn I can knit with. Spinning!
Carol is walking (when she feels like it) and crawling all over the place. Now that she's fully mobile, I'm trying to train her to ignore the spinning wheel. She'd have to try hard to injure herself with it, but she's a clever lass. I'm certain she'll figure out a way.
So every time she touches the spinning wheel, whether it's in motion or not, I slap her hand and say "no touching the spinning wheel!"
As I was spinning some silk today, the drive band kept falling off the wheel. Carol, of course, tried to "help" me fix it. After that, when I didn't notice that she had been playing with the wheel, she got my attention and did it again. She spun the wheel, and dutifully held out her hand to me for a disciplinary smack. I could almost see the gears turning in her baby head.
"I want to play with the beautiful spinning thingy, but every time I touch it, Mama smacks my hand away. But if that's the price of playing with it I think I can live with it. Maybe I should make this process as easy for Mama as possible--just smack my hand so I can get back to playing with it!"

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

"Are you on meds?" and other questions

Can I just say that I'm sick of answering stupid questions about my mental health? I hate the stigma that surrounds mental health problems, but I harbor an even greater hatred for the well-meaning but completely asinine questions people ask about mental health.

"Are you taking any meds for depression? I saw a commercial for...."
Yes, I have major depression. Yes, I am taking prescription medication. (No, I will not share.) The rest is none of your business.

"Is it contagious?"
Depression? Under normal, abnormal and even highly impractical circumstances, no. Not even if you watch a lot of cable news, and then the depression just gets worse instead of better. (Although I suppose if you watched cable news with other people and they got depressed, you could theoretically claim that major depression is contagious, but then you'd have to count the cable news as a vector so it still wouldn't be directly communicable person-to-person.)

"If you're a psychiatric nurse, why aren't your children better-behaved?"
They're CHILDREN. Given that they behave better than half my co-workers and three-quarters of my relatives, I'm not sure what my choice of profession has to do with this discussion. If I wanted robot slaves for offspring, I would have created robot slaves instead of reproducing in the conventional manner.