knitting – Page 18 – Deborah Makarios

May 10, 2014

I am the Chipmunk Queen!

Queen in exile, obviously, there being no chipmunks in New Zealand.

I had three of my wisdom teeth extracted on Thursday, and now sport a square, manly (if somewhat lopsided) jaw. I look “bloody, bold and resolute” – especially bloody, but let’s not go there.
I was expecting to have all four of my wisdom teeth out, but after the whole jaw x-ray (look! your spine on both sides of the screen!) the dentist decided one was too likely to pop into my sinus if messed with. And then apparently they’d have to cut my sinus open to get it out. No, thank you.

I’d never been sedated before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I remember chatting to the dentist after he’d put in the line for the intravenous sedation – mostly about blood pressure, as the monitor on my thumb was betraying my nervousness – and having great difficulty corralling my words into line when telling him about all the monitors I had stuck on me when I went to hospital.

According to the Caped Gooseberry, I got even more inarticulate and unintelligible after that – babbling was the word he used, as I recall – and when he left (no friends and family allowed in during the operation) I was beaming happily away in the chair. I have no memory of this. One can only presume I shut up long enough for the dentist to get the teeth out.

I was fully expecting to be foggy-brained when I came out from under the sedation, but to my surprise it was like flicking a switch: I knew where I was, what was going on – I even had a mutually intelligible conversation with the dentist, who insisted that I have a nap in the recovery room before being reunited with my husband (to ensure I slept instead of nattering).

To be honest, I didn’t think this was necessary, but to my surprise I found on rising that while my brain was working fine, my body was in overcooked spaghetti mode. The dentist and his assistant had to help me round the corner to the recovery room (reclining armchair and duvet) where after a brief spell of boredom I did actually fall asleep. When I woke, the dentist had returned with my Gooseberry, who took me home.

And that was it. Woozy, snoozy, and it was all over.

Of course, the biggest thing with wisdom teeth is the recuperation. I lie. That’s the second biggest thing. The biggest thing is, of course, my jaw.

Did I tell you they carved bits out of my jawbone? Apparently if your wisdom teeth don’t emerge from the jaw of their own accord, the dentist goes in after them and drags them out, kicking and screaming. (You never know. I’ll never know – I was out of it.) Two of mine had wedged themselves in sideways in a vain attempt to evade extraction – Action Dentist carved out the jaw to gain access and then took them apart where they lay. I have the pieces to prove it.

Recuperation seems to be mostly sleep, soft food and prescription medications. Soup, stewed apple, hummus, ice-cream, peanut butter, pills. Many many pills. Fortunately I have the use of the Caped Gooseberry’s brain to organize them, or I’d be taking the wrong ones at the right times. Or vice versa. Three sorts of painkiller (two in one pill) and an antibiotic. The round white ones (paracetamol 500mg with a kick of codeine) have to go in flat like coins in a slot because my mouth won’t open any further.

I think the worst of the swelling is past, thanks to the frozen-vegetable face-packs sandwiching my head on Thursday afternoon. I do detect some tendencies toward jowliness though – gravity at work, one presumes. Apparently the bruising doesn’t come in until about a week post-op, so hopefully I will be spared the indignity of being jowly and jaundiced-looking at the same time. The dentist has promised me that unlike this poor fellow, I will not have a black eye. Pays to go to a good dentist.

I’ve been passing the time in between my tortoise-paced meals by reading mystery novels – as is my wont. So far I’ve read four Agatha Christies (in the one I took to read in the waiting room, the dentist dunnit – glad I didn’t wait long enough to find this out), one of Laura Childs’ tea-shop mysteries, and a Miss Julia novel by Ann B. Ross.
This afternoon I intend to follow my other sick-leave tradition of curling up on the couch and watching the entire 1995 BBC Pride & Prejudice mini-series (all 5 1/2 hours). I may also knit.

What are your favourite things to do when recuperating? Had your wisdom teeth out? How’d it go?

May 4, 2014

How to Avoid Taxes

Not that I am suggesting anyone fail to pay their lawful taxes – look where it got Al Capone, for a start. Instead, I turn to the time-honoured practice of the cash-free economy, as a convenient way of reducing or minimizing tax incurred.

A wise and talented friend of mine suggested some time ago that we could swap skills to mutual benefit. I knit, she doesn’t; she is a professional artist and I can’t even conjure the artistic verisimilitude of a stick-man.

So, I am going to knit her a warm wooly winter hat and scarf (patterns selected from Ravelry, the only online social network to which I belong) and she is going to draw a portrait of me (which I plan in due course shall grace the About page).
Let us hope, for the sake of the sighted public, that her kindness as a friend outweighs her accuracy as an artist…

This is not me. This is Oliver Cromwell.

There are a lot of benefits to entering the cash-free economy.
For example, the lack of tax. Yes, tax is still payable on the materials, but the labour is untaxed, as is the final product.

Consider: How many hours at the DDJ would it take to earn the money to pay for a portrait? More than I care to think of, particularly considering that the government would insist on taking a nice fat slice of tax off the top. Shudder.

So much more pleasant to knit instead, which is a) something I enjoy, b) something I find relaxing and c) something I can do while either watching a DVD or listening to my husband read – it doesn’t get much better than that!

There’s also the social aspect – particularly important for those of us who work at home. I spent a very enjoyable morning with my friend going through patterns and then selecting yarns and needles. As Marianne asks, “is there a felicity in the world superior to this?”

What skills do you have that others might have need of? Conversely, what skills are you in need of? Cash can be a convenient arrangement when there isn’t a directly reciprocal need, but why go via cash (and be taxed) when you don’t have to? It’s worth asking around – most people are happy to be offered a chance of legal tax avoidance.

Barter, cashless economy, payment in kind, quid pro quo – call it what you will, it’s a great old idea. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to put my feet up, have a cup of tea and knit.

February 9, 2014

the Master Metaphor

I recently read The Creative Compass by Dan Millman and Sierra Prasada, and came across the really rather interesting idea of the Master Metaphor. To quote:

“At some point in your life, perhaps more than once, you achieved something, despite the odds against it, because of a longing or determination that you can’t fully explain. It might be a skill that initially seemed out of reach or a one-time accomplishment: jumping off the high diving board, delivering a speech at a school assembly, or travelling to a distant country. That experience, as distinguished by the inexplicable feeling that accompanied it, forms your Master Metaphor.”

It doesn’t have to be an accomplishment that the world deems great, it just has to be something that was hard but you did anyway. A symbol of your ability to succeed against whatever’s pushing the other way – tiredness, lack of ability, your own character flaws.
It’s the ace up your sleeve you pull out when the chips are down. (Mixed metaphor? Not sure.) I did that, I can do this, you tell yourself.

It took me a while to figure out what my Master Metaphor could be, given my propensity for giving up if I don’t get it right the first time, a besetting flaw if ever there was one.
Then it came to me. Socks.

Not the sort Polly Oliver uses to -er, bolster her male impersonation, nor yet the shortened form of ‘Socrates’ with which Walter Judson tries to maintain a philosophic calm on the golf course.

To be precise, turning the heel when knitting a pair of socks. I have mentioned before how long it took me to figure out how to do it, even with a clear and simple pattern to hand. I’m surprised I persevered, given that I had no pressing need to knit socks, only a pressing desire, and that much shaken by repeated failure.

The problem was that I couldn’t see how what I was doing was going to produce the desired result. I couldn’t visualise how it all went together, so in the end I just had to carry on in faith that it would turn (pardon the pun) into a heel. And it did.

That’s a good metaphor for writing right there. You get your structure sorted (the pattern) and then you just keep going even if it looks like nothing on earth, trusting that it will come out the right shape if you just keep going.

So what’s your Master Metaphor? And do you know any good patterns for socks?