Work-in-progress report today:

Multnomah is in trouble! When I picked it up to work again on the border there was mysteriously one less stitch than what I needed for the row. Grrrrrrr! So, I ripped back to my lifeline which I had placed at the beginning of the border. I’ve got my needle back in place but I haven’t even counted the number of stitches. I’m so mad at it right now! So, it’s called Multomack! at least for the moment.

My sister-in-law is going to New York to celebrate that she just turned 18. She had asked me for a slouchy hat a little while ago. I had been looking for a slouchy hat pattern because we weren’t quite on the same page about what she wanted. One afternoon I was searching on Ravelry for a slouchy hat pattern and I found the Sockhead Hat. I took a cell phone picture of the screen and texted it to her, luckily she loved it. It was just what she wanted, we finally agreed on what “slouchy hat” means.

I went looking in my stash for a sock weight yarn that I thought she would like. I didn’t really find one so I went hunting for some. I happened to go to JoAnn to find some fabric and I happened to walk through the yarn aisle, I found JoAnn Sensations Truly sock weight yarn in a charcoal color. It’s a wool blend – 55% wool, 30% nylon, 15% rayon from bamboo. It comes in a 60 gram skein with 262 yards. I bought two, just in case since the pattern says less than 437 yards.

I’ve made a bit of modifications, more details to come when I post my finished project report about it. I’ve got about 5.25″ length complete of the 13″ length from the cast on edge before I start the decreases. I’m hoping it will be quick working in stockinette stitch using sock yarn on size 3 needles. No picture today since it’s overcast and we’re expecting rain tomorrow. Boo! I’ll get a picture of it once it’s finished and on my sister-in-law’s head. She leaves for New York tomorrow and is hoping to have a warm hat to wear. I better get back to work on it.

In case you were wondering, I decided to read the next book in the Stephanie Plum series since I’ve got some momentum going right now with that series of books.

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I’m linking up for WIP Wednesdays and at Yarn Along.

This past week I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to read very much. Like I said in yesterday’s post my evenings were busy with Mr. Bubba being out for meetings at work. I had snuck in a few minutes here and there while waiting in the car to pick up the kids but on Friday evening I was able to curl up on the recliner in my pajamas with a blanket and my book, One for the Money by Janet Evanovich. A friend of mine, Molly, had recommended this series of books to me months ago.

On New Year’s Eve, hubby and I decided to take the family out on a date and we went to watch The Muppets at the movie theater. We saw the poster for the movie version of One for the Money. When I was talking about it with Molly we decided to watch the movie together but only after I read the first book. So I went on Paperbackswap and searched for the books, not just the first book but the entire Stephanie Plum series. I had a lot of credits stashed away on Paperbackswap…

Look at what I got in the mail:

A nice big stack of books! I was so excited to see all these books coming in… Now, I’m at a crossroads, I finished the first book:

It was great, as I said on Pinterest, it “cracked me up, made me gasp and sucked me right in once I actually sat down to read.” I really liked it! I saw mixed reviews on Goodreads but everyone is entitled to their opinion. It was a fast read for me, I read the majority of it in one evening. As my husband likes to remind me, I read fairly quickly.

Now to my dilemma: At the beginning of the year I posted about a stack of books that I already have that I would like to read in 2012 but now that I have this whole new stack of books that are in a series, should I read the series or go back to my original stack of books?

I think that if I read the next books of the series, I’ll get through them quickly and put a big dent into my reading goal for the year. The only thing is that I don’t want to forget about the stack of books I already have.

What do you recommend? What would you do?

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I call it DEAR Monday because when I was in elementary school, yes I know that was in the last millenium, the reading time during school was called Drop Everything and Read or DEAR. I also found that I would complain a lot about another Monday coming along and I decided to be nicer to Mondays. Mondays are the days I come to my little corner of the Internet and write about what I’ve been reading or plan to read.

I took this picture on New Year’s Eve as we drove alongside Ocean Beach in San Francisco. It seemed so symbolic to me to see so much space spread out before us with all the opportunity of an open ocean and of the coming of a whole new year with the promise of time, new opportunities, a fresh start.

A few years ago, I came across the idea of coming up with a word for the year in an article on Christine Kane’s blog. I’ve had different words different years but just like with resolutions I forget about them. This year, I decided to share my words here so I not only have a place to come back to so I can remember what they were but also in order to have a sense of accountability. I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of weeks. I have a hard time committing to one word, so I chose two: courage and freedom.

A couple of weeks ago I shared the following quote on Facebook and here on my blog:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs

For some reason, this quote resonated with me very much. I think the fact that I’ll be 35 this year, oh my goodness! that’s the second time I admit that here, is staring me in the face. I’m realizing all the ways that I haven’t listened to my heart and intuition, the ways I’ve lived worried about what everyone else thinks, the ways I haven’t honored my SELF through all of this journey called life.

I’ve been sitting with this quote, knowing that it’s something that I want to incorporate for my word(s) of 2012. I picked up on the word courage in the quote. When I showed it to my husband he immediately said freedom. Those two words immediately clicked for me. In essence, it’s about me having the courage to be free to be me, just the way I am. I need to be me just for me, not worrying about what everyone else will think or say. I’m okay with being me, I want everyone else to be too.

I also read this quote a couple of months ago:

One of the most important aspects of our lives is that they are our lives. No one else could live them exactly the way we are living them. Everything that happens in our lives is an opportunity for learning. Those moments of frustration often turn into moments of joy and creativity. – November 20 From Meditations for Women who Do too much by Anne Wilson Schaef

I figure that much of what I write about is how our hectic, chaotic lifestyle is normal… at least normal according to us. This is our life. This is what normal is to us. If it’s not normal for others, we just have to agree to have a different definition of normal. We’ve come to love and accept our version of normal, as crazy as it can be, so we’ll just continue living our normal life. And I’ll continue to write about it here…

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Do you have a word for 2012? Please share it with us in the comment section or a link to your post if you’ve written one about it. Thanks!

Image: sippakorn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

During the past week and a half I had been having pretty bad muscle tightness, especially in my legs. I tried stretching, I tried icing, I tried taking ibuprofen, I tried everything. I told the advice nurse and the rheumatologist that if I could I would have taken my left leg off at the hip, kind of like a mannequin. My left leg was killing me! My rheumatologist attributed it to the fibromyalgia. Apparently, my fibromyalgia flare this time decided to include muscle tightness.

So my rheumatologist told me I should take muscle relaxants, 2 of them 3 times a day, and to double my dose of Lyrica to 2 pills 2 times a day. So I started with the muscle relaxants… ahhh, relief! It felt a lot better pretty quickly. Since I know my body can react pretty dramatically to changes in medication I decided to take the muscle relaxants for a few days with my regular dose of Lyrica and not increase the Lyrica at the same time. That was a good call!

This morning I started my double dose of Lyrica… oh boy, what a day I had. I’m so glad I was able to be at home all day and not have to interact with others. I don’t know what kinds of things would’ve come out of my mouth. Here are some thoughts I had though:

• I’m not kidding when I say I think I felt the rotation of the Earth. 
• At one point I could feel my heart pumping in my chest, not the usual baboom, baboom like the pulse but could actually feel the contraction of my heart muscles. 
• I could feel my hair falling out (a side effect of the methotrexate).
• I could hear my thoughts developing in my head, kind of like my brain having a conversation with itself.

I’m so grateful that I have a friend close-by with kids at the same school as my son. I was able to text her and ask her for a ride to pick up my son. She’s wonderful! She gave me a ride there and gave us a ride home. She lives a few minutes away and I’m so glad she was willing to go out of her way for us. There was no way that I should have driven my car today.

My husband and I decided that I’ll contact the rheumatologist and discuss these side effects of a double dose of Lyrica with him. I don’t think any benefit from it outweighs the risk of me being loopy all day. It’s like being under the influence and there’s no way I can go through like that. I need to be able to function throughout the day. Maybe a double dose at night? I don’t know. For now, I’ll laugh at the craziness that was my day. By the way, I wish I could stretch like the mannequins in that picture.

Mr. Snugglebunny started 3rd grade this past Tuesday, with a 2 hour school day – I’ve never understood that by the way. I ended up being the only person to mention anything about the room parent responsibilities to last year’s outgoing Room Mom. So, guess who is going to be the 3rd grade Room Mom. Yup, that’s right, it’s me. Not very hard to guess, huh?

This is the part where I get on my soapbox:

Wednesday morning another mom approached me and asked me if I knew who the Room Mom was going to be. (I also don’t understood that it’s a Room Mom and can’t be a Room Dad, but anyways that’s a whole other soapbox) I told her I was going to do it because no one else expressed any interest, not even a peep, about anything related to being the Room Parent. We talked a little about it and she said she might be able to help out a little bit, I got her phone number and email and sent her an email from my phone right then and there so she could have my email also. She went on to tell me that the ideal Room Mom would not work so she could have a lot of time to do the school stuff. I went on to tell her that I don’t work and that even though I don’t work I have a lot of stuff going on too and that I don’t have a lot of free time either.

On Friday, another mom asked me how things were going. I told her we’ll start to get busy next week for Back to School Night and as we begin to prepare for the Fall Festival. She asked me if I work (Why do these people keep asking me that???) and I told her I don’t. We kept talking and then she asked me if I get bored with all my free time.

I’ll give you a moment to digest that…

Really??? All my free time??? Does she follow me around all day and keep track of my time and what I do??? Oh that’s right, it’s because I sit around at home all day scratching my balls with my thumb up my ass… isn’t she lucky we shook hands?!

So, as you can imagine I’ve been quite irritated by these women I’ve interacted with this week. I have plenty of things to do that keep me busy without a whole lot of free time. However, even though I have a lot going on I am volunteering the little time I have to participate with my son’s class because I want to do what I can for him and the other kids to have an enjoyable and positive school experience. I don’t understand the people who sit back and complain and don’t do anything about it. I get that people don’t volunteer for a million reasons, to each their own. My husband is on the school’s advisory board too so it’s not like we needed the service hours (we’re required to do 40 during the school year, like every other 2 parent household).

What do you think? Am I overreacting?

This was my 5 minute Stream of Consciousness Sunday post. It’s a five minute brain dump. This week I wrote until my thoughts felt complete, for now…  Link up at all.things.fadra

That is the question… I just saw that one of the local yarn shops (LYS) that I shop at is now hiring for several part-time positions. I have said several times that I would love to work at a LYS but I have several reservations.

I resigned from my last job because the stress of the job sent me into a tailspin of a flare that I still don’t feel fully recovered from. My last day worked was at the end of March 2008. Several times since then I have looked on several websites, gone to a couple of job fairs and applied for a few positions. The process of researching available employment sets my body in knots, the tension in my shoulders and back becomes intolerable. That’s just the job search, not even a job.

My body has been inconsistent and unreliable lately. Many days I don’t know what to expect – some days are fine, other days not so much. While I know that some employers may be understanding, I don’t know how understanding a boss would be if I had to call in sick all the time.

I wish my body would just be consistent, so I would know what to expect. I guess I just have to believe my doctor who told me “off the record” to just expect that things will stay the way they are. I never thought I would’ve retired at age 30…

What do you all recommend?

This was my 5 minute Stream of Consciousness Sunday post. It’s a five minute brain dump. Link up and read what others dumped this week at all.things.fadra.

So I’ve still been working on my Multnomah shawl. I got to the point to start the feather and fan border but decided to switch to the 36″ cable because it was a bit too scrunched up on the 29″ cable. In this picture you can see the tip of the new cable going in from right to left, like a lifeline would go in.

I really like using the Clover Takumi Combo set. I was able to thread the new cable in and just switch the tips from shorter cable to longer cable. After I had everything switched over, I counted my stitches on the needle and realized that I have 6 extra stitches. I did an extra repeat. So now I’m going to have to take out two rows.

I’ve also cast on for another project but I can’t tell you about it. It’s a secret project for the Color Swap on Ravelry. I’ve got an awesome partner to make a fantastic package for. I won’t reveal anything here about my package, what if my receiver reads my blog??? I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.

Go check out WIP Wednesday with Tami’s Amis for some fun projects from other bloggers. What are you working on?

This weekend you’ll find me in San Francisco at The Women’s Building attending all 3 days of the Conference of Creative Entrepreneurs.

Today was the first day and it was amazing! The morning set-up was very interesting with roundtable questions at each table, giving us a chance to talk about something with people at our tables we may not know. A slow, casual start to the morning, capped off by an awesome keynote with Jeff Rudell.

Let me say that if you have an opportunity to hear Jeff Rudell speak, make sure you take advantage of it. Especially if you find him talking about his creative work. His speaking about his creative work is infectious and exhilarating!

There were 4 other great sessions that I attended in the afternoon. I’m looking forward to 5 sessions Saturday and 5 more on Sunday. I’ll definitely be sharing more about what I’ve learned in upcoming posts.

It was also a lot of fun to reconnect with friends I met at BloggyBootCamp San Francisco in 2010: Holly from 504 Main and Jenn from Rook No 17. Nice to see you again ladies and I look forward to chatting more throughout the weekend.

Stay tuned for more about what I learned! You can also follow me on Twitter @simplygabriela and look for my tweets with the #CCEWest tag to see some of what’s going on during the day.

Geez! It’s been about 4 months since I’ve posted a WIP Wednesday. I haven’t had much time or motivation for crafting in the past few months but it’s started to come back.

About a week and a half ago I cast on for the Multnomah shawl by Kate Elsa with Cascade Yarns Heritage Paints in color 9824. I’m working through the garter stitch section and I love what the color is doing. I’m glad this project calls for 1 skein of yarn since I only have 1 skein of this yarn that I received in a swap on Ravelry. Pardon the picture, our camera decided to just stop working so I had to take a photo with my iPhone. That marker you see in the front is to give me a visual reminder of which side the odd rows are, since the odd rows have different increases than the even rows. I also have markers separating out the center section.

The Stitch Minder app on my iPhone is wonderful for keeping track of where I am in the repeats. The top row I have set to mark rows 3 and 4 since those are the ones repeated throughout this first section. I’m also keeping track of total rows as well as repeats (row 3 and 4 = 1 repeat) so that I have a way to double check where I really am. I’m glad to always have my counter with me.

This is my first project using my Clover Takumi Combo set and it’s great, I love having pretty much any size needle I could imagine needing at my fingertips. The join is very smooth and I’ve had no problems with it at all.

I know I have several other projects that I haven’t blogged about. I’ll blog about them as I get to them, I promise. What are you working on? Please share in the comments and link up over at Tami’s Amis for other Work In Progress Wednesday posts.

Are you on Ravelry? Find me there as GabyKnits

We spent three days in the parks of the Disneyland Resort. We enjoyed exploring California Adventure Park, if you go there you absolutely have to watch the World of Color show – it was amazing! We’ve always had a good time at Disneyland. In all of our lifetime, we had never seen anything like what we experienced on our last day there.

On our last day at Disneyland we decided to go to the Davey Crockett’s Explorer Canoes since the older kids decided to skip Splash Mountain we needed to get on at least one “water ride” or at least a ride in the water. There were five of us, Mr. Skinny and my 17 yo SIL sat in the row in front of Mr. Snugglebunny and I with Mr. Bubba sitting behind us. If you’ve ever paddled in a canoe with lots of people you know that it’s hard to coordinate the strokes and that inevitably water will get splashed around.

So Mr. Snugglebunny was working very hard to paddle correctly – mind you, he is 8 years old and had never been in a canoe before. Mr. Skinny was in front of him and they were trying to keep their paddling in sync.

There was a woman, probably in her mid-50s, sitting in front of Mr. Skinny. Apparently, she had gotten splashed a couple of times, she wasn’t soaking wet or anything, she was just a little splashed. She then turned around and with her paddle decided to throw water in my 8 year-olds face shouting “I don’t want to get wet” or something like that… Mr. Snugglebunny was stunned and started crying because he had no idea why this grown woman was yelling at him and throwing water on him. My SIL came to his defense and yelled at the lady who decided she now needed to argue with a 17 yo. At this point I was doing my best to console my son while trying to reign in my momma bear and not just push the lady off the stinkin’ canoe. It got to the point where everyone was yelling – the psycho lady, my SIL, my husband – who never really yells, and me.

Surprisingly, the Disney cast members on our canoe had no idea what to do to diffuse the situation. They basically wanted us to keep on paddling faster so we could be done quickly and even said “the faster you paddle the sooner you can all be away from each other”.

In the end, the psycho lady got a bunch of water thrown on her, got yelled at, almost thrown into the lake, she embarrassed herself, her husband and her own daughter – probably about 10 years old. Her husband didn’t really say much, we think he was afraid of her. She even cussed out my husband in whatever her native language is, I didn’t recognize it so I can’t say for sure what it is.

In hindsight, the staff members should’ve called security to sort it all out. I think they just wanted all of us to be as far away from them as possible. I truly believe that she should’ve been thrown out of Disneyland for behaving that way, particularly towards a young child.

We went on to The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh ride, where my 8 yo told me that we should never get on the canoes again. I wonder how long he’ll associate the canoes with that awful experience. It took us all a bit to calm down from it all, we all reminded each other that the more upset we all stayed the longer Mr. Snugglebunny would stay upset too. Mr. Bubba did go back to the canoe ride and spoke to the acting supervisor and relayed our experience. The supervisor had already heard about “the two women almost getting into a fight”. He obviously didn’t get the details about the grown woman throwing water in a child’s face. He gave us a readmission pass – I think that’s what they call it, it’s basically a cut to the front of the line pass that we used to get on Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage.

Have you ever had a crazy experience at a theme park? How would you have handled this situation? Let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear other stories.