NaBloPoMo: Preemie Hat Pattern for Charity

For a few years now, I have been making preemie hats for the local hospitals. They work up about as quickly as a washcloth. I use acrylic, worsted weight yarn and a size 'h' hook. I don't knit them because I'm terrible at knitting in the round on double pointed needles. I am a slow knitter as well, which makes the project a source of frustration. 

Acrylic yarn is hypoallergenic, which is super important for preemies because their immature immune system. You don't want to use fuzzy or extra fluffy baby yarn for these hats. The basic yarn is what you want because the other yarns are overstimulating for their still developing nervous system. I don't use baby yarn because the holes in the hat are bigger given that the yarn is thinner than the sport/worsted weight yarn. We want to have the holes small to help the babies keep their heads warm. While you could use a smaller hook to make the hat with the thinner yarn, it makes the project just as annoying as knitting it for me.

Starting chain: Chain 30 stitches plus 1 to turn.

Rows 1-60: Work single crochet into every stitch.
Bind off at end of row 60 with a long tail.

Fold hat in half and whip stitch to the corner where the fold is. Bind off and break yarn.
With another length of yarn, whip stitch from where the end of row 60 and starting chain meet to the corner where the fold is. Bind off and break yarn.

This size hat will fit a 3 - 5 lb preemie. You want your hat long enough to cover the preemie's eyes when they're under the bilirubin lights in their incubator. This will protect their vision from the effects of the lights. 

NaBloPoMo: Ideas evaporate.

I had insomnia last night. As I laid in bed trying desperately to sleep, I had all of these grand ideas for my serial stories and how to resolve a quandary in the book I'm currently stalled on. I then fell asleep and woke up with only vague memories of the over arching theme of it. It was most vexing. I consoled myself with cuddling next to Beloved and taking a morning nap after my youngest son was out the door and off to school.

I would keep a notebook beside the bed but the last time I did that, my insomnia got worse because I sat up writing. If I were in my 20s, I would bounce back from losing a few hours of sleep writing in the middle of the night. At 47, that doesn't work so well.

NaBloPoMo: My brain hates me.

I woke up today at 0630 and thought I was going to have a productive day. It is currently 2034 (8:34 pm) and I have just begun my writing for the day. I spent most of my day just staring blankly at the computer, the snow falling outside, or my coffee cup. I just had my brain go blank. Did a few errands, so the day was not a complete waste. I wasn't happy with the situation. Beloved tells me to be patient with myself and the process. He tells me to keep in mind that I'm out of practice at doing this stuff. I get grumpy at that fact. But, it is a fact that I can't avoid. It's why I have nothing written at all for NaNoWriMo. 

NaNoWriMo & NaBloPoMo: The wind's shifted.

NaNoWriMo word count: still 0 (it's hard to find time to work on a manuscript right now.)

This morning, I had to step out to run an errand. The first thing that struck me as I stepped out the front door was I could smell snow on the wind. The lower atmosphere is too warm for snow to fall but those clouds are billowing up above. The low tonight is supposed to be 33 deg F. That's just above freezing but I think it might dip into the freezing zone. I don't think we'll wake up to everything blanketed in snow (or ice). But that raw, bitter cold is on it's way in the immediate future.

In some ways this is reassuring. Before climate change kicked into high gear, we'd typically get our first snowfall somewhere between the last week of October and Thanksgiving. The last several years of unusually warm Novembers has had me concerned. I'm a farmer's daughter and I tend to look at the weather patterns from the perspective of how it is going to influence the growing season. It's just something I grew up doing and never really stopped.

We're currently in a serious drought. Whatever precipitation we get would be helpful. Last winter we ended in a drought. It doesn't make sense to say that we were in a drought in winter, but we were. The growing season started late this year because of the flooding and lots of mud that we had in the early spring when planting usually goes on. The summer left us shy of rain and a lot of fields were stunted because of it. When the corn being grown barely comes to your shoulder and in a good year it's taller than you are, it's a rough season.

Surprisingly, there was enough of a harvest that the next town over was still able to hold their annual corn festival like there was no problem. I'm hoping the farmers around were able to get a decent profit off of their corn. It seems like more of that stunted corn was chopped up for silage to be fed to the dairy cattle during the winter than was brought to market to be sold for human consumption. There's a bigger problem than my region's drought, however.

The western and midwestern US have been in extraordinary drought conditions for a couple of years. This is making it hard to grow enough produce, grains, and feed for livestock. As a result, we're operating on a beef shortage for at least the last year. I think the reason why the president is sinking money into the Argentinian economy is because their major export is beef. That's the only logical reason I can come up with.

All these tariffs are hurting the economy here. With bad growing seasons and a major drought spreading slowing across the country, only a fool who is disconnected from where their food comes from would be making these policies. I can only hope and pray for rain or snow. The rest of it falls out where ever the dice land. I'm frustrated that I wasn't well enough to keep a garden this year or do any food preservation. The victory gardens of old are starting to make a comeback as people are doing their best to learn how to preserve their food. People can smell trouble on the wind. It's going to be more than a bad snow storm.

NaNoWriMo &NaBloPoMo: The rules are all made up!

 NaNoWriMo Word Count: 0

 I had a minor freak out yesterday over all of this. It didn't help my migraine any. I panicked that I wasn't going to be able to write again. It had been so long since I had a productive streak on any front that I was afraid that I lost my voice and my ability to tell a story. It wasn't pretty. I ugly cried in the bathroom where no one could hear me for a bit.

 Then a realization hit me. The only one putting pressure on me was myself. It was a rather silly feeling to realize that. I wasn't on a deadline. There wasn't a paycheck waiting for me to meet one. We're not dependent on my writing to pay the bills, keep the lights on, or get groceries. There wasn't anyone stomping their foot and throwing a temper tantrum. It was just my anxiety running riot. It has been doing that a lot over the last year.

I can do my NaBloPoMo posts and work on my NaNoWriMo word count at separate times. I don't need to sit down for 4 hours and write. (Your butt goes numb at about hour 2.5, ask me how I know.) I can write a bit here and there. I just have to schedule and stick to it. There's lots of random downtime in a week that I can use to write a whole lot of words. No need to panic.

NaBloPoMo meme edition with cats!

 I have been stalled on everything. It doesn't help that I've had a migraine for the last 4 freaking days. I blame the weather.

NaNoWriMo & NaBloPoMo meme edition

 

Up coming recovery period.

 Dear Reader,

I am taking the next three days off from blogging all over creation. Sunday's Craft of Writing Post will be back to back with Monday's Flora & Fauna post. I just need some time to recover from this migraine and head cold. I'll see all y'all on Monday. ♥

Word count? What is that you speak of?

 Dear Reader,

Here we are at the final day of NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo. Many people are at or real close to the finish line. Others are slogging along, possibly cursing their decision to participate in these challenges. Word count is the big gauge of success and source of stress during this month. Posting across six blogs, I have absolutely no idea what my word count is. It took some stress off my shoulders, but six blogs ... that was a lot of work. It has cemented in my mind that some of these blogs are going to be updated on a weekly basis.  Because updating all of them in one day eats my entire morning of writing time.

The serial stories are stalled right now. The science fiction book is stalled because my notes in pencil are become illegible due to fading. At least I found them. The series of modern fantasy is on hold as I am awaiting contact back from the person who requested the work to be done. We had a gentleman's contract initially based on a virtual handshake. I have four books written and a fifth started. It is time to take that gentleman's contract and put it on paper to make clear what is expected of everyone involved. I'm having difficulty contracting him, because he's in grad school right now and busy as heck.

My fantasy series is on hold because I'm correcting errors in one book and trying to make things work according to my plot map in the other book. Hopefully books six and seven of the Umbrel Chronicles of Evandar will be out by late spring. In case you are curious, the story arc plotted for the whole series takes place over thirty books. I have snippets and bits of ideas for the other books, but I have to finish what I have on the block first.

I have nothing witty or insightful for you today.

 Dear Reader,

Dealing with the stress of how health insurance is a protection racket has rendered me markedly devoid of ideas for this blog. I could talk about how bad it is or how it should be illegal the way they screw people over, but everyone knows this. Don't even get me started on dental insurance or vision coverage. Those are luxuries.

To say the least, my afternoon turned sour and has successfully shot down what plans I had for writing. I suppose it is time to go work on some dishes or otherwise try to be useful. I'm sorry y'all.

Flora & Fauna: No magic plants today.

 Dear Reader,

I have been so busy trying to keep my real plants alive that all world building regarding plants has fallen by the wayside. I would share with you a picture of my small indoor garden, or as Beloved calls it, the jungle. The problem is the plants are in sorry shape. I have three that need to be potted up. They're in bad shape because they're rootbound. I have others that have this weird white fungus growing on the soil. I don't know how they got infected with this, but I have some Neem oil to spray on it and kill the fungus. Long story short, I have quite a few plants that look more dead than alive and I'm trying to fix that. It's not going that great. But as long as I keep trying, I'll probably manage to nurse them back to health.

Craft of Writing: Something funny but useful.

 Dear Reader,

Here's a tip for keeping your preteens and teens from completely invading your writing time. Fart. My boys will either run away going 'Oh Gods, MOM!' or back off a solid eight feet waving things in my general direction that they hope will make the fart go away. If you're lactose intolerant like me, the farts smell worse (or so I've been told). Compared to my husband's gassiness, I am an amature. 

Once, he dropped a bomb that had me reaching for my inhaler. That evil creature locked the windows of the car and cackled all the way home as I was choking and digging through my purse. So, sometimes, I will threaten them with having their Dad fart at them.

Remember, if anyone objects, let them know if we don't fart, we'll explode.

Have a great Sunday and I hope you had a laugh.

The Family that Writes together, leaves Mom to edit.

 Dear Reader,

At the beginning of the month I explained what NaNoWriMo was and invited the boys to participate. First week in, my youngest son announced that he had won and handed me his best effort at a graphic novel. There was a lot of foul humor in it and air horns galore. But, he's 14, can I truly expect anything different. His elder brother finished up a train story he was working on over the last two weeks in between doing school work and watching cat videos.

Now, this week, he is nine pages into a new story about a firefighter named Johnson. So far, Johnson has yeeted himself out a window to save a family of pigs, yeeted himself down a flight of crumbling stairs to get to safety, and let off steam from that difficult fire call by raging at his gaming system on video. I'm not quite sure what is more amusing that my son used the word yeet in all seriousness or gamer rage for an audience to laugh at.

He's been laughing as he is writing. I figure that is a good sign. If you can make yourself laugh at a scene, there's a chance a reader will do the same.

The worst plan in the world.

Dear Reader,

When you have a book to write, no money coming in for it, and a ton of other responsibilities, it is the worst plan in the world to devote all your available time to it. Dishes pile up in the sink, you find yourself having weird food combination for your meals (peanut butter and onion sandwiches, anyone?), and the laundry will eventually form a militia and start demanding rights. This is why you have to pace yourself, especially if you are super excited about the idea that you are working with.

You can't let that excitement overrun your responsibilities. A schedule that is detailed may help you get everything done, with writing time as a reward for when you complete crucial tasks. If that doesn't work for you, try out logging tasks and writing time. For an example of what I am describing look up the Bullet Journal format invented by Ryder Carroll. (I may have misspelled his name, but the system is definitely called the Bullet Journal.) Or you can mash the two together as I have to stay on top of things. Pictured below are my planning pages. Every Thursday, I reconcile calendars and plan my next week. (Some how I have become the scheduling maven of the household.)

Let me explain what you see in this picture. The header has space for me to mark down the liturgical date of a kinda obscure religion I follow. That is the short line on the left. The larger line in the middle is for me to write down the Julian calendar date that everyone else follows. And the final short line on the right is for me to note the day of the week.

The column of boxes on the right side are for health tracking stuff. Because I am diabetic and I have some pretty serious mental health problems I'm being treated for, I made some trackers. The first one under the day of the week is tracking how much water I am drinking. The next one below is to track my medication compliance. Following that is my mood scale to help me track my bipolar mood states. In a similar format is the anxiety scale to help me track my CPTSD and general anxiety states. The tracker below that monitors my fasting morning blood sugar.

On the left there is a column of boxes and lines associated with each box. This is where I write tasks, appointments, and important information. I have been using a modified version of the Bullet Journal's symbol code to note appointments, tasks, high priority items, critical priority items, and similar things. The last line of this side of the page is for noting what I am cooking for dinner that night. It works better than having a menu hanging on the blackboard in the kitchen. (It's not a very good blackboard but it's pretty.)

On the back of the page is a series of ruled lines that I use to log major activities and notes of the day. It is basically my mini-journal that talks about important information in a bulleted series of notes.

This system of organization works really well when I remember to use it. But when I get sick or depressed, I forget all about it and everything turns into a mess. Why? Because all my time to do things gets eaten up by being sick or brain fog. I'm still working on finding a way to resolve that challenge.

I knew I should have gone digital with my notes.

Dear Reader,

I found my notes for Dacia's War. The notebook is ruined because of an overwatered plant. As I was working in that notebook, I had the nagging feeling that I should be making a document on the computer with those notes in it. I pushed the feeling aside and continued to work in the notebook. And then after my plants dried out for two weeks, I watered them and the notebook got soaked. A tragedy but one that can be overcome. 

If I can rewrite my first novel after someone deleted it and someone else shredded the paper copy, I can rewrite some plot notes. After all, rewriting is a thing at many stages of the writing process, right?

I need to write on the calendar the days I have to water my plants. This business of getting depressed and not remembering to water them is just not good.

Four posts to be back on track

 Dear Reader,

Between migraines, terrible sleep, and the huge interruption of Turkey Day, I have fallen behind on my post count.  Somehow it is worse in my mind to fall behind on post count than it is to fall behind on wordcount. I don't exactly know what to post this morning. A part of me says I should post a casual poll on what is the best beverage to have at hand while writing. But I don't know how to make a poll on here and it's a stupid question anyways. Everyone knows it is coffee while working on the first draft and tea for editing. The coffee makes you type faster even as you vibrate through space and time while being able to see sound. (I drink a lot of coffee. LOL)

I'm listening to music inspired by the Nordic and Germanic people of antiquity. It gets a little challenging to make sure that they're not promoting Nazi values, White Supremacy, and similar things. I try to keep my listening and the media I consume free of that garbage. One, I know the kids are watching. They're still absorbing information like a sponge. Two, it runs contrary to my religious beliefs. Beating bigots with a bat is more inline with it, and I have worked very hard to control my rage and be a peaceable woman. 

As such, I try to vilify these things in my writing and some of the logical extensions of their extremist arguments. My science fiction series is more than a pulpy romp through space with random jargon. As I get the original material out of my archives, I will be showing it is a fight for equal rights across a stratified social system. There are the wealthy with their designer genes, clones, and designer babies. (Imagine a baby born with a Coach birthmark as a sign of their social currency value.) There are the middle class crushed as brutally as they were in the early Industrial revolution. Included among them are the cast off children of the wealthy. The lowest strata is the poor who live an almost Dickenson like poverty.

Sure, there's going to be pulpy goodness, it's fun to write. But there's going to be some hard looks at the social system that I see evolving over the years. It will be an inquiry into the outcomes of many social pressures currently at play. It will be an inquiry into what makes a person have value. I'll even be taking a look at what makes a person.

Who is tempted to take their writing project to Turkey Day dinner?

 Dear Reader,

This happens to me every year. I get to a point where I am eyeballs deep in a project and Turkey Day hits. I know it would be poor form to bring my project on the computer with me. Something about being engrossed in a laptop, tapping away at the keyboard, is more off putting than counting stitches on a holiday knitting project that you're desperate to get done. Some how, it's just more socially acceptable to be at work on knitting and ignoring everything instead of typing and doing the same.

I am still tempted, even if what I am doing is blogging instead of writing a novel. I just don't want to get behind and I can't stand the thought of breaking my streak when I do manage to get caught up and actually on one. In the morning, I'll be prepping food to bring. In the evening, I'll be burned out. It's rather tiring.

Pencils vs. Pencils vs. Pencils

 Dear Reader,

My sons are highly creative. One enjoys making things and creating his unique version of graphic novels. The other is determined to right "real" books and has been filling up A5 hardbound notebooks as a prodigious rate. They like to swipe pencils from me. Some how, my pencils work better or something? Magic? I don't know. Maybe just because they're mine and the boys see me writing all the time in various formats.

I have a favorite mechanical pencil brand (those yellow ones held up by my pinkie finger) that the kids have liberated often enough that small group of mechanical pencils are all I have left. So, I have decided to be clever. I picked up that box of rainbow colored pencils. Because they're more colorful, the kids have been more inclined to consider them for use. Hopefully this means I get to keep my favorite mechanical pencils for journal writing. They have gone through my other favorite pencils and left me with two. Which is funny, because they are the old fashioned yellow, number two pencils that you have to sharpen.

When I get the time to write in my free writing journal, I use those number two pencils. As they wear down and eventually get small enough that sharpening them with my manual sharpener, I put them in a jar and refer to them as my dead soldiers. I have a whiskey bottle full of pencils as long as my pinkie finger. Since I can no longer enjoy whiskey or wine due to my diabetes and my other medications, I am now filling up a glass peanut butter jar with dead soldiers. It is my reminder and motivator to keep working. A visual thing that helps me keep at it when the depression isn't too bad. And, if I ever take up golf, I will have my own pencils to keep track of scores. LOL

Science Fiction Book on Hold.

 Dear Reader,

The backstory of Angel, Aeolus, and Dregan is currently in a holding pattern. I found my notebooks from '96 where I wrote much of the original story. One slight problem, the pencil is fading. So, I have to attempt to recreate the story via bullet points that I can draw out of the less than legible pencil. Also, I must confess, my handwriting from '96 is rather atrocious compared to today and that makes it a bit harder to read.

Give me a few months and I'll probably get the beginnings of a working draft out of that mess. With how life is going, that book is going to be the NaNoWriMo project of next year. A good amount of what I have is disjointed and a mess. But that's what a first draft is like when you're in high school.

If only I had written it in pen. Ah well, you make do with what you have and try to get the best out of it.

I was going to write another installment of Dacia's War ...

 Dear Reader,

I was going to write for you another installment of Dacia's War but this migraine is making it like thinking through mud. Also, my notes for where the plot was going next have gone missing. I suspect my son, who is attempting to write his own novel, swiped the pages to use the blank sides. As such, I have to re-read the entire serial story and figure out what I was up to. With the chaos of turkey day coming up, it may be two weeks before I post the next installment. I ask your forgiveness. Similar difficulties are going with the Iron Lily.

On one hand, it's awesome that my son has taken to writing like a duck to water. On the other hand, he's going through paper like it's going out of style. And already used up half a package of pencils in the course of two months. He's been eyeing my mechanical pencils covetously. Much like his brother, the artist/crafter, has been eyeing my sharpie pens. Gods help me, these are my children. Chaos is going to happen any moment.