Midnight Maven

Dealing with a chest/head cold this week, and sleeping an inordinate amount of time, it seems.  Chugging away on the Invalid Sweater, and a one-skein purse to felt.  Both pretty straightforward tasks – no fanciness for the moment, since my medicated head probably wouldn’t even accept the info.

Interesting world map about H1N1 (Swine Flu).  Not a pleasant picture.

Be sure to check Goodbye, Vietnam, just posted by Bonnie.  It’s always a bit of a sad thing to leave a hospital after days, and sometimes weeks, of such warm and solicitous care.  In my experience it’s tough for the staff as well, because the danger of getting too close to the patient is always present.  If they could display their feelings each time a special patient leaves, it would make doing their job very difficult, and professionalism could be compromised.  And it’s too bad – but a friendly goodbye wave is better for them than any hugs or tears.  On to the next sickie! – must be their mantra.  So not easy for them either……But getting well is the best prize for everyone.  It’s always good to see a smile like that!!

A dreary day to sit by the fire with a cuppa.  To work with soft, cuddly yarn.   And begin to think of buttons.  Now buttons can certainly have an effect on a knitted garment.   If the sweater is to provide warmth and good feelings, the buttons must aid in that effort.  Metal army buttons, for instance, wouldn’t suit at all.  Blue squares or red balloons or spiky sunflowers or tiny white shirt buttons – oh, no.                                                        (  Am I a sweater yet?)

Yarn speaks, of course,  in its mysterious whispers.  Sometimes yarn SHOUTS – “No, I definitely don’t want to be this pullover!!”   Sometimes softly, “Ah.  I will gently soothe your tootsies in these socks that are touched with aloe.”  Sometimes poking out from other colors and hiding amidst bigger skeins – “Pick me!   Pick me!  I’ve been hiding here in your stash for ages and ages! “  It’s important to pay careful attention to yarn – so many wasted hours can be avoided.  And when new bundles are introduced, the residents often try to push and shove to the front, crowding out the Aran and laceweights and brilliant self-striping sock yarns.  It takes a strong and strictly firm knitter to keep everything in place.  Sometimes even a system (oh, no!) is necessary to manage the turmoil that can often erupt.  Ah, a knitter’s life……..

A lovely moment in a dreary day is a bowl of Mexican Ham and Bean Soup.  This is a keeper.  I used chipotle powder instead of the chipotle chile, and topped each serving with sour cream, a must with all this tangy flavor!

The Invalid in Malaysia has quieted lately.  Too many sights to see.  Too much loving care.  And a difficulty in reaching out, cyberly (cyberly?).  Romain or Vincent must help Bonnie’s wheelchair over a step to get to ground level outside the large apartment building (among dozens of others!) and thus reach a signal to the Internet.  Perhaps a tent could be pitched down there…….no, that suggests too many personal problems!

Please leave a comment if you are here – I love them!

The sun is hiding this morning – else we might have a 70-degree day, mid-April!  But it’s too dangerous to put sweatpants and jackets in their summer storage homes.  The Master Gardener in the house warns of the inevitable mid-May freeze.  Too bad.  There are lots of little spiky green leaves reaching to the sky around the house as their own winter straw is removed.  The crocuses, white and yellow, have come and gone.  Or is it croci?  The dictionary allows both – didn’t know that!

They were pretty, anyway.

The Invalid has “checked out of the hospital”, collected her passport, and now is the guest of Romain and Vincent in Malaysia.  Kuala Lumpur, to be more precise.  How spoiled will she be?  The mind boggles…..

All sweet great-grandchildren deserve equal time in cyberspace.  Here are the rest of them -

(Sleepy) Noah, Bella, Camden and Austin

Bella’s got quite a bit of spitfire in her, so I imagine she’ll always be able to keep those boys in line!!

BBC now shows 6 hours daily of  “Cash in the Attic”, “Bargain Hunt”, and (British) “Antiques Roadshow”.  Some are reruns, but all are still fascinating.  Many of THEIR antiques are hundreds, nay thousands of years old.

Of course with spring comes . . . . . . . .baseball and my Cubbies!  They are still teasing my old heart, close but no cigar.  Er, no World Series rings.  But I’d give quite a bit to sit in a left-field seat at Wrigley Field today, down along the foul line, even in my parka and long underwear.  Occasional TV and regular games on my computer will have to satisfy me.  They keep trading some of my favorites and completely ignoring my suggestions.  What suffering folks we fans are!

And for those very few of you who have been playing Rip Van Winkle the last week,  here is Susan, to humble us all……………

No, I haven’t forgotten that I have a blog, just because Bonnie is kind of up on her feet – or foot.  She was exploring the nearby environs in Saigon by wheelchair over the weekend.  The hospital felt that she needed a bit of exposure to the world again, before her final escape.  Thanks to the timely visit of her friend Romain, from Paris but currently working in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, she saw at closer quarters some of the sights she had only peeked at from her window.  He happily pushed the wheelchair so she could also do a little necessary shopping.

Now planning her exit at last from FV Hospital, and on to a whole new set of experiences, Bonnie is feeling great and anxious to be on her way.  Bank accounts and wire transfers and credit cards are actually cooperating with each other, language notwithstanding.

Pastor Lynn inquired after Bonnie on Easter, and hopefully when Bonnie is here in June we can visit one Sunday to say thank you for all the prayers that came from the Zion congregation.   Bonnie has played handbells there at Christmas and is well-remembered.

Busy, busy, busy!!  That’s the story up here in sunny, thawing Minnesota.  Bob is getting more impatient every day to start raking the straw from all the flower gardens.  He’s planning the new fences, rails with embedded electric wires in between, that must surely be the perfect answer to marauding deer.  The days are already long and the sun is warm.  Snow is gone except from those spots on southern slopes that see little sun.  Our gravel roads are rutted and muddy and need a good leveling by the big machines. A certain unnamed motorcyclist can attest to that wet, sandy mud.   But the Easter eggs didn’t break!

I’m finalizing some late taxes for a few clients, including our own, and soon it will be time to move on to some of those nagging chores in the house that have been patiently waiting.  Organize the medicine/toiletries cabinet………. get some of those piles of magazines and books out on eBay….price more items for the antique mall…..inventory yarn (again!!) and gather up some unusable skeins for the community center.  And continue to attack the UFOs that await, from sweaters to socks to shawls and scarves…….

But on Easter Sunday I sat on the porch and rocked in the sunshine for a little while, and it really felt like summer.  And the never-ending tasks in the house seemed far, far away.

It IS Easter Week for many of us, after all.  The best possible news that could come today is that a thoughtful and anonymous caring friend of a friend of Bonnie’s is loaning many thousands of dollars to her.   The amount will be enough, with all the small loans from friends in Paris and around the world, to pay the total ransom to the hospital to get her passport back.  Her bill has become substantial, and she will be so thankful to see the “Paid in Full” stamp applied to it.

This additional money will also allow her funds to pay for the wheelchair, cover a few days’ rest in hotels, get to Cambodia to collect her belongings and return to Paris for additional medical care, physical therapy and rehabilitation.  She may need to stay in a hotel in Paris, since she no longer has an apartment there.

The massive pile of receipts she’s been accumulating will be presented  to the French Social Security society, and also to her supplemental insurance company.  Between them, almost all of the expenses related to her accident should be reimbursed, and thereby the generous many who have come to her rescue can also be repaid.

This is nothing short of a miracle, because without paying the hospital, her choices were not savory, to say the least.  She couldn’t leave Viet Nam without her passport.  A nearby hotel would have been her option, so she could get to her daily physical therapy sessions at the hospital, while she continued to raise enough money.  Getting back and forth, restaurants, etc., would have created even more expenses.

Do you think the Knitting Police will be tough on me if I put a thing or two into Time Out so I could turn this lovely yarn into a sweater for the invalid?

It’s soft Malabrigo from Uruguay, in the Applewood colorway – her own color choice.  The pattern is February Lady Sweater, a very popular design on ravelry, the knitters’ worldwide online community.  She may need the sweater when she’s here in June, since she is rather convinced that it snows in Minnesota in June.  And I’m not sure I can  guarantee a warm visit!  She’s usually here for Christmas, so it’s no wonder she has shivery snow and below-zero memories!

Did anyone else notice that the little Italian lady of ninety-something, when asked how she passed the time over two days of being buried beneath a house after the recent earthquake, replied with a big smile – “by knitting!”? And stood there demonstrating?  And coyly asked for a comb before being interviewed on television, because her hair was so messy?  Viva knitters everywhere!

I thank all of you for your prayers and thoughtfulness that have supported Bonnie so well in these strange days.  Have a blessed Easter.

Met a fun person today – she gave me my monthly foot care at Bigfork Hospital.  The regular nurse was teaching a class, so Trish took over.  A neat young woman!   Spent years as a forester in our county, has a horse farm not far from Mike’s place, and after leaving the county with a settlement from an employment claim, got her nursing degree.  A few years ago she needed a hip replacement from being under a horse’s hoof when she shouldn’t have been.  Her plan was to go to Mayo and have it done with the new re-surfacing method.  But her medical insurance wouldn’t pay for it.  So off she went to India, and it was done for a very reasonable amount of money!  And of course, folks, all deductible on her taxes…….She was up and sightseeing after a few days.  One of these days the US is going to wake up and find out that many of us are going to the Far East for surgeries, and calculate the money that’s going with us.  Will they wake up and renovate our health care system?   Do you think?

Yesterday Bonnie had a first – a trip to the mysterious environs of the Physical Therapy department at FV Hospital.  A little banged up, but the same smile is there!!

“The road home, whatever you perceive that road to be,

is paved with the music of Bach….”

-  heard on Minnesota Public Radio

What a treat!  Tonight for about an hour Bonnie and Michael and I were on a real-time group chat on our Google accounts.  Bonnie and I have been chatting for a week or so, but tonight she figured out how to get Mike in on it as well, and we had a good old-fashioned 3-way gabfest.  It was great!!  We just shut down a few minutes ago, after midnight, because Mike has to get up for work in the morning.  He’s doing so well in the mining technology school in Eveleth.  I didn’t know until tonight that he made the dean’s list!

Bonnie is healing and moving about with tentative abandon.  She’s now able to stand on a tiny piece of the broken foot to pivot into the walker to get into the wheelchair, so she can journey to the bath and shower.  A relative of a friend at the American Church in Paris brought her some new clothes, and fruit, and chocolate chip cookies, among other things.  A friend of mine on the worldwide ravelry group who lives near Hanoi in northern Viet Nam sent her some skeins of yarn and crochet hooks.  Something to keep her hands occupied!  I’ve introduced her to amigurumi, the little crocheted toys that originated in Japan.  They are such fun to make, from all I’ve read, and Bonnie is quite taken with the prospect.  She wants to design some of her own. Of course.

Bonnie plans to leave the hospital a week from now, with a friend from the orphanage as escort.  She wants to go back to Wat Opot to collect her belongings and say goodbye to the kiddies.  Not a fun happening, I think.

Then back to Phnom Penh and a flight to Paris, where she will have weeks of rehabilitation.  We really hope to have her with us here in Minnesota for some time in June, God willing.  She and I are planning some crafty days.  Mike is planning to take her on some mine tours.

Bob and I took a trip to Duluth today.  I stopped in at the Yarn Harbor and made a few new friends, who are already on ravelry.  Found some Malabrigo in a really unusual color for me, browns and  greens and yellows. This is destined for my February Lady Sweater – but Bonnie’s will come first.

Also stopped at Michael’s Crafts and Barnes & Noble,  which we never miss, wherever we are.  In Albuquerque last October, as I went into a mall to stop at B&N,  I was interrupted by two women in a car, needing directions to a local movie theatre.  Turned out they were sisters from Minnesota, Stillwater and Edina, and one was there to give a watercolor seminar. They invited me, but we had other plans for that evening.

Had a marvelous lunch of soup and salad at the Olive Garden this afternoon, which was packed at 3 p.m. with at least a half-hour wait – what a surprise.  No recession there!

Grey, cool weather, with the snowpack melting more and more each day.  As a result, the Red River valley in western Minnesota is now anticipating another crest, within a few weeks.

A new month, and hopefully spring can locate us up here in the tundra, sooner or later!  5 inches of snow today, and more coming overnight.  Not quite time yet to dust and oil the bicycle, I think.

When I called Bonnie this evening I interrupted her Vietnamese language lesson.  The nurses want to practice their English, and of course Bonnie had a deal they couldn’t refuse!

She feels fine, although a bit tired and not quite ready for a tennis game, but looking forward to it all the same.  Three incisions below the knee indicate all the work done by the doctors, and they seem to be comfortable with her progress.

The standoff with the hospital accountants continues.  We all are hoping that the French Social Security department, which administers her medical insurance, will see fit to come to her aid in this matter.  It would not be sensible for the hospital to discharge her medically and then she’d have to live in an apartment in Saigon while trying to gather the money to ransom her passport.  Can you say Catch-22?