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 Last week, I asked Ryan, my HBOT guy, if I could have today off in honor of my parents’ visit.  I wanted to go skiing.  He granted my wish.  Then, yesterday afternoon, I started to feel sick.  I’ve got a cold, but (thankfully!) it hasn’t migrated to my nose yet; it’s just hanging out in my chest.  However, it stole my energy.  Last night all I wanted to do was lie on the couch.  You know that cloud of misery and exhaustion I described having around my head after my strokes that the HBOT has helped get rid of?  It came back!

I’m feeling better today, thank goodness.  I’m still sick, but my energy has returned.  It still hasn’t hit my nose, and I’m grateful for that.  Perhaps my immune system HAS returned …

I’ve been having fun with my parents.  My mom has been helping me to make a skirt, and that’s been very educational.  She’s made me rip out the stuff that I would’ve just left if I’d had to do it on my own, and it’s looking really good.  Pictures to come …

I finished another quilt! Yay!!!!

This one turned out really well, if I do say so myself. It is very flat. It’s made from the “Twin Sisters” pattern in “Quilting in a Day,” but I didn’t like that name. Because it is so perfectly flat (a first!), and so bright (like the sun!), I’m calling it “Flat Sunshine”. Which is kind of a play on words; photographers refer to boring light as being “flat”.

I finished hanging that around 2pm, then had lunch and talked to Ben over Skype. We got video chat working, which is FANTASTIC. I don’t know why I prefer video to simply chatting like normal, but I suspect it has something to do with my aphasia. If I forget a word, I can gesture. Since I know I can do that, I’m not nervous, and therefore I don’t forget words. That’s my theory, at least.

Then, at the ripe old hour of 3pm, I took Chaco skiing. We just went to Mud Lake and did the 1.9 miles of trails up there. It was *fun*. We were alone out there — not another car in the parking lot — and nobody around to watch me fall. Which I did a lot of =) I geared the pooch up in his car seatbelt, the closest thing I’ve got to a real harness, and attached the leash to that. (I’m going to order a real harness from blackicedogsledding.comI lost my credit card last week so I can’t. Yet.) I put my skis on, grabbed the leash, and said,”Ok, go!” Chaco jumped forward six feet — the length of the leash — and stopped promptly at the end. I repeated the command ten times and got the same result. All that heeling training is killing us. We’ll work on it.

When we returned, he limped around the house. I feel so bad for him; the same thing happened yesterday after I took him to play frisbee in the park. When we woke up this morning and I let him out of our room to head outside and take care of his business, he walked slooowly up the stairs. (He usually bolts.) It looks so painful, and I can’t do ANYTHING about it. Poor Chaco. I hope he feels better soon!

In honor of my parents’ visit next week, I called Monika and arranged a grooming session for Chaco. He hates it, but he’s doing better than he did last time. That was in September, when it was warm, so he got to skip the bath; he swims a lot, and stays pretty clean. No such luck this time, though! I gave Monika full permission to do whatever she pleased.

He got a bath, and then came the hair dryer, which he abhors (I left, as it’s too noisy for me — annoying noisy, not loud noisy):

And then he got trimmed all over:

And now he looks very pretty:

And here’s the bouquet Ben sent me while he was away last week. It looks pretty, too!

… my new sewing machine! I got her last Friday. Picked her up at Target for $130. Why did I need a new sewing machine? My old one broke. I could no longer fit needles in the needle-hole, so I took it to a repair shop. A lady took a look at it and said, “Well, it’ll need a servicing, too. That’ll be $89.95 … do you want to spend that much?” Not for a machine that cost me $75, thank you very much! She immediately showed me some new machines, starting with a fancy computerized number. “It does embroidery,” she said. “Like this. It stores names to stitch in its memory …” and then she tried to use the computer. She couldn’t figure it out. She tried again and again and again while I waited impatiently for her to get it to work.

“Um … how much does this cost?” I finally interrupted.

“$799, but we’ve got it on sale for $650 right now,” she boasted.

“That’s about a factor of 8 more than I prefer to spend. Can I please look at your bargain models?” Good grief. Besides the price, I don’t WANT a machine with a computer to remember words. I don’t need help remembering my NAME or whatever it is you’re supposed to put on quilts these days.

Matilda in all her glory:

Anyway, the saleswoman showed me several of her cheaper machines. She tried all her tricks to entice me to buy one. “You’re going to be quilting?” she asked. “I’ll throw in a quarter-inch quilting foot if you buy this one.” I told her I was going to shop around but that I would be back.

I found Matilda at Target and she was a fantastic deal. I thought she sewed letters, but I was mistaken; the letters on the dial are merely stitches you can select. (Oops!) Also, she has some problems with the bobbin thread. When I started sewing, my first fifty stitches resulted in about forty peeks into the bobbin container to see what the matter was. (Sorry, I’m a little tired. Is container the right word? D*mn aphasia …) I couldn’t, so I’d have to remove all of the bobbin thread and re-thread it and hope that it worked and then start again. Fortunately, it seems to have resolved … I don’t know what I did, but it works!

I returned to Sew ‘N Vac and bought the quilting foot and a free-motion quilting ankle. (Is that the right word? I got the whole thing — the foot and the thing that attaches it to the whatchamacallit, the post that attaches to the sewing machine.) The saleswoman looked like she was going to cry or throw a fit. “Would you like a machine with that?” she asked. When I told her no thank you, I bought one at Target, she said, “Ohhh … well, that’s too bad.” :P

Welcome, Matilda!

Here’s the latest quilt I’ve made, with the help of my new sewing machine:

It’s made out of flannel so it’s good for snuggling. More to come …

I was a freshman in high school, and I had a biology test that day.  Which is why I went to school in the first place.  Before the bus came, I threw up in the bathroom.  “It’s probably just a fluke,” I told myself.  There wasn’t much to it (I hadn’t eaten breakfast yet), and I felt fine afterwards.  I didn’t tell my mom about it and boarded the bus like nothing had happened.

Then I got to biology class.  I was feeling a little bit … funny.  My stomach wasn’t quite right.  As I finished the fill-in-the-blanks section, I felt like I was going to hurl.  Could I make it to the bathroom in time?  I got up to get a pass (which was required in our school, and which lent it the air of a prison) and upchucked all over the room.  The teacher got me a garbage can and I puked again.  It was embarrassing and uncomfortable.  I went to the nurse and went home.

I threw up 16 times that day.  I was the worst 1-day stomach flu I’ve ever had.  16 times is a lot.  I couldn’t EAT enough food to throw up!  I was contracting so violently that I blew the blood vessels in my eyes, leaving me bloodshot for the next couple days.  It’s not exactly the way you want to look when you return to school, but my soccer team had a championship playoff game and I HAD to be at school to be eligible to play in the game.  In the end, we compromised; my mom drove me to the game, and I watched from the sidelines, still weak from my impressive display the day before.

My German teacher handed back quizzes that day, and said “The only one of you who did well on this quiz tossed her cookies in biology and couldn’t be here to get it back.” I don’t know why I thought that statement was so funny, but it struck me as hilarious.  Hilarious that Frau Williams knew about my stomach upset in biology that morning, and that she said, “tossed her cookies.”  I’d never heard that before.

ANYWAY, Rich was in town today!  He took the SkyRide to Boulder and I picked him up at the bus station and took him to dinner.  (Ben’s out of town.)  We went to Lausidio, an Italian place that Ben and I celebrated our anniversary at last year.  I ordered spaghetti bolognse.  It was pretty good!  I ate half of it and then started to slow down.  Then I started to feel a little sick.  “It’ll go away,” I told myself, just as I had 13 years ago.  Then I started to feel really sick.  I debated trying to make it to the bathroom, but I didn’t want to interrupt our conversation.  Then, all of a sudden, I hurled.  Oh my goodness … it went EVERYWHERE.  All over the table and all over me.  Then I did it again.  And again.  And again.  FOUR times!  Rich, bless his heart, didn’t run; instead, he offered me his napkin.  “For your face,” he said.  Then, while I was busy losing the rest of my dinner, he rounded up napkins from ALL the neighboring tables.  Thank you, Rich!  I didn’t hang around to see the waiter and explain that yes, I threw up, yes, I was done, and thank you for caring and sorry about the mess, but I did leave a nice tip.

I hate throwing up.  It’s gross, it’s uncomfortable, it smells, it ruins your clothes, and I’m not doing it again, thank you very much.  The good news is that I think I’m done, knock on wood.

Today, I bravely ventured out onto Eldora’s cross-country trails on my brand NEW backcountry skis.  It was fun!  I spent three hours out there, which is impressive given my previous two-hour post-stroke record.  I also skied some pretty hard (well, hard to me) stuff!  I followed Susan up a black diamond.  Was I good at it?  No.  I have trouble on the uphill; I keep sliding back down.  Praise to whomever invented the chairlift.  When we got to the top (finally!) — which I eventually reached by popping my skis off and hoofing it — we had about a half mile of nice, flat terrain, and then began the downhill.  I didn’t think about the downhill on the way up, and I can’t figure out why not.

The problem is I’m not good enough yet to stop.  On our way to the double black diamond of death, we passed over some pretty good hills, at least by my way of seeing it, and I went down them really fast.  “Susan?” I asked, “How do you stop on these things?”  She said to snowplow.  I swear I did that!  Really, I did!  I kept that pizza pie in prime shape, but to no avail.

Then we had to come down the Slope.  I fell something like five times.  Susan, bless her heart, didn’t complain about my slowness, but sometimes it took me, like, fifteen minutes to stand up again.  I was sitting in the snow where I’d fallen, looking back at my skis, and contemplating how to stand up again.  HOW???  It doesn’t look like it should be so hard!  Luckily, I learned how to do this on downhill skis, or else I’d still be stuck at Mammoth trying to recover from one of my many falls.  But on nordic skis?  The snow was so deep I couldn’t push myself up from it.  It wasn’t really all that steep, so I couldn’t point my feet downhill and stand up that way.  Eventually, I took my skis off and barely made it to a standing position.  I consider it a miracle that I did so.

I brought my camera, but didn’t take any pictures — I was too busy concentrating on not killing myself.  Sorry.

My overall impression?  It’s fun, but it’s not the sort of thing I’m going to do for the sake of skiing.  The skiing is pretty boring, actually.  I’m not a future racer.  However, I think it would be amazing to ski on trails that we hike in the summer.  Watch out, world — here I come!

Thanks to Susan for taking me skiing this morning and not pulling her hair out.  =)