Knitting success!

As many of you know I am a bit of a frustrated knitter. I work very slowly, and I am easily distracted. With the arrival of cooler temperatures, and a new niece, I found motivation to pick my knitting back up. A pink chenille sweater for the niece is well underway, and I have completed my first project in a LONG time.

Now that I'm teaching more, I feel compelled to wear hats more often, since I get frustrated with kippot (yarmulkes) that slide off my hair. When I checked out the most recent issue of Knitty a few weeks ago, I took note of a simple, adorable hat--Urchin. I love berets, and I'm sort of bored with the plain Parkhurst cotton berets I frequently wear. Unfortunately, I get extremely irritated from wool, which keeps me from buying most of the cute hats I see in stores. Once I picked the Urchin pattern, I needed to find an appropriate yarn with minimal, if any, wool. On eBay, I found Classic Elite Bubbles, a cotton-blend in #2410, a blue tweed. I knitted it on size 10 1/2 needles, even though the pattern calls for size 11.

In less than a week, the hat is done. It fits. I am very happy. Photos will follow.

Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness?

At the apartment in Berkeley (where I lived with female J.), we didn't have a dishwasher, but I wasn't particularly disturbed by the state of our dishes. Like most older apartments, there wasn't good lighting. If our dishes were anything less than sparkling, I didn't usually notice. Every once in a while, I'd "reject" a washed dish and put it back in the sink. J. felt the same way. Her only preferences were about the type of sponge we used (Dobie) and that we shouldn't use the natural dish soap. In everything else, we were all-natural girls, but dishes just didn't seem as clean.

Ever since I moved into this apartment, I have had a goal. And it is cleanliness of the dish kind. You see, the townhouse's kitchen sink is just below a window. Once again, the only dishwashers are human. At first, I noticed the grime and the filminess. Then, I realized that there was a huge difference between the cleanliness of the dishes I did in daylight rather than at night. Now I just accept that I will have to re-clean dishes washed at night, when my insufficient kitchen lighting fails to provide sufficient task lighting for the sink.

I changed my dish soap. Since then, I have tried at least 6 different dish soap formulas. I still haven't found the right one. The current tester: Method, unscented. (I could also rant for a while about my distaste for the scenting of every cleaning product imaginable. But that is for another time.) I'm not sure it's up to the task, but the jury is still out.

Meanwhile, J. (that is, the husband J.) and I just bought a condo. With a teeny, tiny dishwasher, one that at first glance appears to be a garbage compactor because of its narrow proportion. I really, honestly hope the little machine does its work. I think I even still have my beloved Ecover dishwashing tabs from years ago, when I last had a dishwasher.

In Sickness and in Health

Okay, so J. and I didn't take the standard American, Christian vows... but less than two months into marriage, and we have already had more than one test of the "sickness" part of partnership. As Joshua is taking care of me today--getting groceries, doing dishes, calling attentively to check on me--I figured I should reflect on this a bit.

As a few of you already know, J. was in the hospital less than two weeks after we got married. Six days after the wedding, he started having neck pain. The next day, Sunday, he had neck pain so bad that he couldn't turn his neck at all. On Monday, J. woke up with a fever. At this point, the Bride insists on his seeing a doctor. Fever plus neck or head pain of that severity equals potential meningitis. For the next few days, we went to multiple doctors for multiple imaging procedures and blood tests.

That Thursday, J. got a phone call from the doctors telling him that his blood culture was forming as-yet-unidentified bacteria and he needed to go to the hospital immediately. So, a quick packing of a bag, and we were off to Stanford Hospital, where J. got the best of care and a lumbar puncture to rule out the meningitis. We were there for just over a day. The bacteria turned out to be an unusual strain of salmonella para typhi which manifested as blood poisoning before showing gastrointestinal symptoms. A day of massive antibiotics took out the salmonella very quickly, but the lumbar puncture left him with an absolutely horrific headache that ended up lasting for 8 or 9 days, and was worse any time he was even slightly upright. (After that, he was fine.)

And--oh, yeah--this all happened just days before we were to leave on our honeymoon. He got home from the hospital on Friday, and we left on Monday for Fiji and New Zealand.

For J., it was a massively stressful, scary, and painful experience; for me, it was massively stressful, scary, and exhausting. It did, however, leave us feeling very close to one another, to review our priorities, and appreciate the wonder of marriage. J. was very glad that he had me to take care of him at home and advocate for him at the hospital. I literally mopped his sweaty brow. For my part, I gained first-person insight into the weighty responsibility of being responsible for another person's health and well-being. The idea that I was now responsible for emergency decisions and even had Joshua deferring to my opinions on his non-urgent hospital care was clearer than ever. And both of us spent a lot of time contemplating how singles living far from their parents--particularly single men, who are less likely to have networks of friends who are willing and able to make the necessary sacrifices of time and energy--ever cope with being REALLY sick.