*Knit, rip, repeat. *Knit, itch, repeat.

When I was at KnittingDaily TV filming they had some yarn leftover from last season and let us have our pick. I snagged an afghan kit from Colinette yarns, one of those really expensive pretty ones, SCORE! I’ve always wanted one, not to knit a blanket but to do other things with. It was perfect. Then I knit up my idea using two selected skeins from it and well, it turned out gross. Not up to my standards. DO NOT LIKE. Not the yarns fault exactly, it was not my first color choice but also the design just didn’t come out like I imagined. I love their yarn and still do, it just didn’t work. I didn’t actually rip it I just slipped the needle off and left it in my knitting basket.

Then I found a stash of Debbie Bliss Bulky cashmerino in my closet. So I cast on to make up another idea. It also has not turned out, I ripped and I do plan to cast on for that one again for sure but sorta lost my juice after several rips and repeats. For each one of those ideas I actually cast on and ripped a few times to get the look right as I went.

Rowan plays Temple Run next to sick mommy in bed.

Two-weeks ago exactly from today I got a very small rash on my back right rib-cage. I could not figure out what I had come in contact with, it looked a lot like poison oak. We put kids icey Benadryl on it, it helped some. Sunday night at the fair I started to feel pretty miserable and a pain on my front right rib-cage also began. Monday morning at 2am I woke up from the pain and was un-able to fall back to sleep. By then I was freaking out, what is under the right rib-cage? Was something bigger wrong with me. I had 6 hours until immediate-care/patient-first would open and there was no way I could go back to sleep. The pain was a 7. So I told my husband I was driving myself to the ER I was worried something else was very wrong. Off I went.

The nurse knew exactly what was wrong with me immediately. If you catch Shingles within the first 70-something hours and get on an anti-viral you can greatly reduce the amount of time you will be sick. I straight up do not remember the first week very much. I was on percocet pretty much the entire time and it rained and rained. I didn’t go outside and I rarely got out of bed. I slept and watched tv and knit a little. I cried sometimes when I woke up in the mornings and the medicine had worn off.

My view for a week.

Here I am exactly 2 weeks later and I am pretty much all better (which is best case scenario for shingles). I’ve had my blood tested and I don’t have any sort of auto-immune disorder. People of any age can get Shingles (if you have had chickenpox previously), you can NOT give someone else shingles, but you can give someone the chickenpox IF they have never had the vaccine and never caught it before. Everyone loves to say “isn’t that an old person thing?” no it is not. They don’t really know why people get it, but most of the time attribute it to stress if you have no other healthy problems. I was actually not very stressed at the time it happened tho I had been previously.

I am so happy to be feeling better, and my family was really wonderful while I was sick and amazingly enough the girls didn’t catch any colds during the rainy time as one sick person in the house was more then enough! Now to attempt to get my knitting mojo back, with a successful FO!