Eyeless at 103 degrees

Well, I haven't lost my eyes, and the 103 degrees is the temperature outside — not mine :-) — but I had to do without the computer for a few days. I'm back! I got some sort of odd viral infection or inflammation (docs weren't too sure) that affected the nerves under my eyeballs. The pain was pretty unpleasant, and I was told to rest in a dimly lit room and stay away from the computer. It healed fast, though; I'm pretty decent now as long as I am taking ibuprofen and acetomenophen, and I expect I'll be 100% in another couple of days.

I did manage to knit, because I don't need to look closely at my knitting with this pattern. It really is SO easy to memorize. Though I admit I had to drop it back and fix a few booboos from time to time, chiefly because the yarn is slippery and it's easy to accidentally knit two stitches together and not notice for a few rows.

I like this pattern, but you can't sleep when you're reading it. On the front, you're told to execute the armhole and shoulder shaping "as for the back." But you have to be watchful; "BO 8 stitches at the beginning of every row 6 times" is really "BO 8 stitches at the beginning of every right-side row 3 times" when you're only doing one half. Fortunately I had done all this fancy shaping before I got the eye problem; the back is the part I did while semi-eyeless.

Another interesting thing about the pattern is measuring length. Notice the way the back looks a bit scalloped at the bottom? That's because, unblocked, the Y-shape column is significantly longer than the seed stitch sections. The cable columns are roughly in between. I measured all three for each step (when to start decreasing for the neck, when to start binding off for the armhole, etc) and then took the average. Hopefully this will turn out okay. You might think I should take the Y-shape measurement, but I don't know precisely how this will block out. I don't know if I can actually block the seed stitch to grow that much, and I may want to try to press the Ys closer together. So I'm crossing my fingers. I really want to wear this puppy. (Though that's hard to imagine right now, when our bedroom is 84 degrees at night. Alpaca and tencel. Goodness.)

The eye thang made the three-day weekend a little useless; I spent Friday and Saturday on the sofa with the shades drawn, listening to podcasts with a cold-pack on my eyes and knitting occasionally. Sunday we made it out to a party for a few hours. Today, I finally felt well enough to try to catch up, and managed to do a bunch of work on my finances, prepare some of Grasslimb labels for shipping (it comes back from the printer this week), and launch an assault on the Argentine ants that have taken over the house (ugh).

Rob wasn't idle either; he worked on putting up our gargoyle doorbell (after 7 years of hanging upside-down from a hole by its wires) — pictures tomorrow when the glue is all dry — fixed our solar power system, which had gone bust sometime last month (not noticed, alas, until the electric bill came and showed twice the usual usage), and vacuumed out the coils under the fridge. They were really nasty. Want to see something gross?

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Just so you don't get too yucked out, we'll end with something good to come of the persistent over-100-degree temperatures: