After a long hiatus, I've finally made it back to the world of blogging. Albeit with some new hardware. On June 6th I had surgery for a herniated disc that caused a vertebral collapse at C5 and C6, was pressing on the nerves and had leaked, severe degenerative arthritis at these vertebral levels and cervical radiculopathy of the left arm. Now I am the proud recipient of some fancy permanent neck jewelry that shall forever remain invisible. After months of physical therapy, there's still some pain and stiffness that may remain for months, maybe forever, but I feel very blessed to be able to function at a level that allows me to at least go to work and move around for part of the day. Being able to do something other than just forcing yourself to get dressed every day in order to keep some semblance of normalcy because you can't do anything else is finally over.
I've begun knitting again. At first the left hand didn't work too well, but everything is starting to come back together again. It took me 3 weeks to knit a pair of Broadripple socks. The only downside is that now they think that I have a torn rotator cuff and couldn't tell because the pain from my neck was so completely dibilitating. Such is life.
Now is the time to start preparing for Xmas. I've made 1 1/2 pairs of mittens and picked up some of the new Opal Handpainted sock yarn. Beware of this yarn. I was warned by Maureen of the fabulous Hook-n-Needle that she had some problems with fraying where the darker colors were added, so I bought it for cost. After winding 3 balls and not having any splitting or fraying in the process, I'm hoping I got lucky. I'm going to use it for the Falling Leaves shawl. Here's hoping that it's not a collosal failure since I've never knitted a shawl with sock yarn. Ta-ta for now.