At Least I Got the Yarn

The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art. --Leonardo da Vinci

So, I got a new accessory. Nice, isn't it? Sort of space-age, moon boot style. I had to do some special stuff to get it:

To explain, I must rewind back to Friday. I'd taken the day off so that the hubby and I could spend a weekend in Victoria for a short break. We had intended to go a couple of weeks ago, but I was ill and just didn't want to go. I was happy to be able to let him have a chance to get away.

We arrived, checked in to our hotel, and then went over to Victoria Public Market for lunch:

After that, he asked me what I wanted to do. I had spied Beehive Wool Shop across the street, which I'd never visited before, despite all our trips to the city. I went in while he waited outside enjoying the sunshine:

I found these little pretties, which are from Ancient Arts Yarns, from Alberta. I hadn't intended to buy anything, but the price was right and the yarn was lovely, and I thought it would be interesting to try to combine the two skeins:

They're slightly different: one is in a colourway called Inuit Art, and it has more grey and is generally darker. The other is called Great Blue Heron, which is the one I was attracted to first. I don't normally choose such speckley variegated yarns, but I was so drawn to these that I thought it was worth the gamble.

So, bag in hand, we set off back to towards the hotel to drop off our things and go for a walk in the park...

I don't remember exactly what happened, but I must have stepped on some uneven surface of the pavement, and turned my foot outwards. Pop, crunch, yelp... I hobbled over to the side and clutched the building in pain as the sweat started streaming down my face. I tried to walk a couple of steps, but I just couldn't. I managed to get into a shop, The Running Room, ironically, where the manager tried to help as much as he could. I bought some tape and bound it up a bit, and then the hubby went back to the hotel to get the car so I could somehow get back.

I iced it a bit, but then the hubby convinced me to go to a walk-in clinic, where I was then referred to the hospital for an x-ray.  The report read:

Subtle nondisplaced fracture is present at the proximal diaphysis of the right fifth metatarsal bone. The fracture extends from medial to lateral across the base of the fifth metatarsal bone and is nondisplaced.

So, I broke my foot. Not the whole foot, just the bone that attaches the pinky toe to the ankle. That one. And it's not super-broken. It's "subtle." A crack.

I wish I could say the words I said when I hurt it were subtle.

Apart from the pain, I felt terrible. I still do. If I'd only worn runners this wouldn't have happened. I wore low, half-inch wedge sandals... I never dreamed that turning my foot in them would make this happen. And I feel so bad that our weekend was cut short, after spending only a couple of hours there, and then many more hours with doctors and hospitals and pharmacies and buying air casts and crutches and all that. I feel bad that the hubby didn't get his time away. And this stuff does not happen to me. I have so many things to do. Four to six weeks is a long time to wait.

I guess I'm not done feeling sorry for myself.

So, for Mother's Day, I gave my mom a bunch of worry by telling her I'd hurt myself. I suppose that's nothing new: I think that, once you have children, worry is a way of life. I don't even like to tell her when I have a cold. I figured this one would be a tough one to camouflage. Sorry, Mom.

I'm working from home now for the next week or so. I like being at home: it's my favourite place to spend a day off, but this is not how I hoped to get more time at home. I'm learning about all the things that are more difficult when you are on crutches, which I think we all know in principle, but when you actually have to do it, man is it hard. My left leg is going to be an awesome, muscled sculpture, by the time this is all healed.

I guess I have some time now to work on my current knitting project, which has not entailed a lot of actual knitting thus far. I'm making this top from Sirdar's Summer Color Collection, but I was having a lot of trouble reading the pattern since the lace pattern is written out, not charted. I can usually get by with the written patterns, but I was going cross-eyed trying to figure out what was going on. Last week, my pattern looked like this: 

I was getting it ready to convert into a chart using Stitch Fiddle's Free Online Chart Maker. I entered it in last night (I did it while watching The Revenant, which has its own share of crunched up bones). It's a really good tool, because if your pattern is symmetrical, you copy the first half and then tell it to mirror the stitches on the other half. It now looks like this:

It took me ages, but I feel so much better having done it. Not only can I see what it's supposed to look like, but I now know the stitch pattern so well that I can mostly eyeball it while knitting. And now that I've done the chart, I've managed to knit a fairly decent panel, with relative ease:

Patience does pay off, it seems.

I guess I'm going to have lots of opportunity to cultivate patience now with this foot. I don't want to make it worse, but man do I want it to be better. For now, it'll be a lot of resting, drinking milk, taking my vitamins, and not trying to go up and down the stairs too much. I think I might just camp out on the couch...

... which, come to think of it, given the name of this blog, might not be such a bad place to be. Off to do more sitting. Happy Mother's Day, everyone.