I’m Ba-a-a-ck!

It’s been a long couple of weeks, not to mention an expensive couple of weeks (Who ever heard of a $150 bottle of cough syrup?) but I’m finally starting to feel like myself again. I’ve stopped coughing from my toes and when I go to bed, I no longer think that there’s a Geiger Counter going berserk in my lungs. (Very strange…for all the congestion, I never had a problem breathing–my nose wasn’t clogged–but the noise, especially when I was trying to go to sleep, was ridiculous.)

Anyway, I’m still taking my antibiotics and taking it slow. My body’s telling me that I’m one, maybe two, stupid moves from a complete relapse.

There are things to be said, though, for spending a couple of weeks not getting out of my chair without a really good reason. I did some reading, some dozing (the Geiger-Counter effect was less noticeable when I was sitting up), and I figured out how to knit socks.

I’ve been knitting since I was about six when my grandmothers taught me the basics…which was a life-changing experience in and of itself: my dad’s mom, who was English, taught me the English method where you carry the yarn through your right hand; and my mom’s mom, who was a woman of the world, taught me the Continental method where you carry the yarn through your left hand. It kinda blew my six-year-old mind to realize that you could produce the same thing in two very different ways…also that it wasn’t really a good idea to knit the other way with the other grandmother. Eventually, like when I was in high school, I came up with what I thought was a completely original method of holding the needles and carrying the yarn…only to eventually discover that knitters in the Greek islands had figured it out hundreds of years ago.

Still, I looked at socks and said, no way…all those needles, turning the heel, grafting the toe…just didn’t sound like fun at all. But knitting has changed in the last fifty years. It really isn’t my grandmother’s knitting any more. My friends up in Gainesville are sock mavens and the Brilliant Lawyer had sent me Sensational Knitted Socks (which is less about socks as patterns than it is about socks as a math/engineering challenge) for Christmas, so I was primed, but until I got bronchitis, I hadn’t taken the time.

No more…I’m a two-sock veteran now…

(That’s Feather giving me the evil eye between my toes.)

I started another sock, because socks, apparently, are like that: once you start, it’s all over, you’ve got to make more. I’m using yarn that the Brilliant Lawyer sent along with the sock book. It’s what they call a self-striping yarn in a colorway called 1776 — which is to say mostly it’s red and white stripes with an occasional blue-and-white stripe. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with patriotic wool socks come July in Florida, but I’ll have them…probably…now that I’m feeling better, it’s time to get back to work…writing work…