since i did start this as a knitting blog, i suppose i should show some pictures of my knitting. before i went on vacation i was working on the marsupial bag from Stitch n' Bitch for my niece Melissa (very late Christmas present). i decided to use lamb's pride bulky instead of the worsted that the pattern calls for so i'd get a thicker, bigger bag, and i already had blue in bulky. i got some red since she requested University of Arizona colors, and then i read the pattern. the bag is actually made with two strands of worsted held together, which turns out to be more bulky than the bulky yarn. way to be prepared. so i tried to normalize the gauge, but then who knows how it will felt differently, and i want it to be big enough for a notebook and other school crap, so i did some random calculations and multiplied all the numbers by 1.5. it will be interesting to see how it turns out. these pictures don't really show the bag that well but they do show how good i am at torturing pets.





i am quite positive that oscar is missing snuggling with me. (sad moan)



i made the red flower washcloth from the first pattern in Weekend Knitting using crystal palace cotton chenille. it was the first thing i made on circular needles. i liked how it turned out, and the cotton chenille is nice and soft, but it was a lot of work for a washcloth. my sister is definitely worth it, though.



and this is my sunflower variation. bryan came up with the idea while i was making the red one, and his sister Cheryl loves sunflowers, so i thought it would be worth trying. crystal palace doesn't make a yellow that was bright enough, so i used some lion brand microspun because it was the right color. it was too thin so i held two strands together, but i think that turned out a little thick. the brown middle is the cotton chenille, and i like how it's a different texture that the petals. if i did it again i would try to find a different yarn for the yellow. maybe i could dye the white cotton chenille? i have another friend who loves sunflowers, so i'm sure she'd love one of these. and she's worth it, too.



in other news, it turns out i didn't have to worry about my presentation (yet) because my eye turned into a giant swollen ball of painful hurtiness. i hope the gross picture of my eye doesn't startle anyone. i don't understand the infatuation i have with my eyeballs lately. thank goodness bryan spent tons of money on a good macro lens, or i would never be able to show this.

i started having pain in my eye yesterday around one in the afternoon, and since bryan and i had some strange tropical eye infection for three days about a week ago, i thought it was coming back. but it got very bad very quickly - we took the picture at nine o'clock. heather's diagnosis was infection by a tropical eyeball-eating worm. that's pretty much what it felt like. i became quite concerned and called my boss to ask his doctor wife her opinion. i took the picture to email it to her so that she could help me figure out if i should run screaming to the emergency room. from the picture and the fact that light was hurting my eye, she said that i should err on the side of caution and go to the emergency room, which at least gave me the perfect reason to cancel my presentation since my boss knew i wasn't just being a lazy flake. i decided to go to a very small little emergency room medical center place that i went to once and it was pretty fast because there was only one other person there. i don't really understand how they could still be open, but they were. i unfortunately picked a time when lots of people with life-threatening emergenies wanted to go to the emergency room too, and they took priority over my exploding eyeball hanging out of its socket by its optic nerve, as well they should. but i had to wait a long time. bryan fell asleep bent over in a chair in a very impossible-looking sleeping position and finally went out to the car to sleep. the only doctor there finally had a break from doing real doctor work and came in for about 72 seconds to put a dye in my eye and then shine some sort of blacklight on it and say, "oh my, did you get lots of sand in your eye or have you been in extreme sun?" and it turns out that she said i had two corneal abrasions. i have no idea what could have happened - i was around lots of sand and extreme sun in costa rica, but that was 8 days before. very strange. perhaps i should stop using my sand and broken glass citrus-mango eyeball scrub for a while.

she gave me a presciption for antibiotics drops and told me to go to the eye doctor. i was relieved that my eyeball was not being eaten by a microscopic army, but it was still hurting really bad. i had never thought about what a swollen eyeball would feel like. lots of painful pressure and the fear that my eyeball would explode, if you had ever wondered. she gave me a presciption for antibiotics and told me to go to the eye doctor as soon as possible.

after sleeping poorly due to dreams of rupturing eyeballs, i went to the student eye center today for about three hours, and they discovered that they weren't just wimpy corneal abrasions, they were corneal ulcers. when i get strange and unexplainable eye problems, i do it right. one is so big that you can see it, i'm told. it's one millimenter in diameter. they dilated my eye with super-duper mega dilation drops, because for some reason that i don't understand yet the chance for infection goes way down if you dilate the eye. my eye will stay dilated for at least 24 hours. yay!

it looks really freaky to have dilated eyes, but to only have one looks even freakier. i know that it will be an overload of eyeball pictures on this blog, but i'm totally taking one later and posting it. i can't see anything closer than five feet away with my bad eye, so i have to block one side of my glasses to prevent my head from exploding. good thing this is berkeley, because i looked like a nutcase with my cheap eye-doctor-just-dilated-my-eyes-wraparound "sunglasses" under my glasses and a piece of pink paper taped over the right lens. talk about hot. i'm pretty sure i'm going to start a trend. bryan went to work constructing me a lovely shield with black velvet and paperboard over the right lens of my glasses, and completed it with a big red X on the front. quite an improvement from the pink paper. what a great husband i have.