Vera's Shawl

On May 5th, 2005, my husband's mom, Vera, was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. Just two months and one day later, on July 6th, she died.

This year, to celebrate her life and mourn the fifth year anniversary of her passing, I will be designing a shawl and releasing the pattern for sale on Ravelry. 50% of the proceeds will go directly to the Alberta Cancer Foundation.

The mock up is finished, and as soon as the shawl I'm working on is complete, I'll cast on for Vera's Shawl.



Provided everything works out according to plan, the shawl will be up for sale on June 6th, 2010 at 7:16 a.m., exactly five years to the minute after we lost one of the brightest, most loving people I have ever met.

Come on Spring!

Elodie and Mommy want to get outside and play!!!

We've been stuck in the house for nearly six months now, and this tease of warmer weather is making us itchy! We did manage to rake the yard over the weekend (meaning I raked and Elodie jumped in the grass and caught ladybirds), and we've been going for walks whenever we can, but SRSLY, enough snow already!!

In knitting news, to combat the stir-crazy blues, I've been knitting avidly on my Oriental Impressions Square (rav link), and I picked up some hand-painted merino/seacell blend that I've been (slowly) spinning. It's lovely and soft, and I'm thinking I'll weave a scarf out of it.

So now...we wait for spring, by which time I intend to be finished my shawl and wearing it. Maybe that's it!! Maybe spring won't get here until I finish my shawl! Well....crap. Suffice it to say that the square thing, while great that I don't have to purl at all, is maybe not the best idea I've ever had. This shawl is going to be massive, already kicking around 900 stitches on the needles with two-and-a-half sections (at least 150 rounds) left to go. I'm considering wimping out and doing the shorter version of the shawl, though I purchsed enough cashmere/silk/merino for the full version.

I hope spring has sprung for the rest of you. If Mother Nature is waiting on me to start the season, it's going to be a while...

Book Review: Book of Negroes

So I finished this book, which had been recommended to me by my mother and several friends, the Book of Negroes. While I enjoyed the idea of the book, the book itself disappointed me. I found the plot to be highly unlikely, and the book to be kind of poorly written. I felt like the author's pacing was off, and that he used big words and horrific events to cover it up.

I read the book over the course of about five days, and overall, I found it to be an easy read. As I stated before, the main character's line in the story is highly implausible, an African-born woman who is stolen from her country at the age of 11, sold into slavery, and whose life follows a series of unfortunate and fortunate events. While it's not my opinion that having implausible or unlikely events in a book is erroneous, I do believe the book would have fared better and seemed more believable in the hands of a more capable writer.

The Book of Negroes did, however, interest me in the Canadian "free" colony in Nova Scotia (although I wish the author had spent more time discussing it), and in Canada's (Britain's) role in ending the thievery of native Africans and their subsequent sales into slavery in North America and Western Europe. I intend to visit my library and read some non-fiction works regarding this subject thanks to this book.

Final Star Rating: 3 out of 5 stars. Roots, this is not, but a decent book on an interesting part of the world's history.

Into the Light

I've always found blogging rather cathartic, and so today I'm turning back to this medium to cleanse some heavy issues off my shoulders.

My husband and I have been trying to get pregnant for 16 months now. Back in December, I got a positive pregnancy test, but two days later, the test was negative, and I started bleeding. So an early miscarraige.

I went into the doctor and he sent me for an ultrasound, just to be sure that everything was cleared out of there. Everything was fine in that department, but they found two 2cm cysts on my right ovary. We waited a month, and then I went back on Wednesday for another ultrasound to see if the cysts were going away or getting bigger or if there was anything new. Unfortunately, there was something new in the picture. The cysts had grown, and there was stuff in them; something more than fluid.

So now I'm off to see a specialist, probably in the next month. This could be anything from nothing at all to endometriosis, which runs in my family, to ovarian cancer. Turns out that my difficulty getting pregnant could be much more than just not getting pregnant. It could be something is wrong. With me. With my body.

I am completely, totally, seriously afraid. The doctor has put me on a do-not-make-a-baby order until we know what's going on, and I'm sad. I'm worried that it could be cancer, and that's a scary thought.

So. Now you know what's going on. I don't have to go through this alone, thankfully, and I have the full support and backing of my family. But if I'm not around, it's not just the rennovations (the floor is looking really nice). Keep me in your thoughts, my friends.