Hell Hath No Fury Like a Monster Scorned

I knew it! Remember when I said that YFIT wasn't bringing packages on the Yarn Fairy's day off? It was confirmed today by two things: a) the sheer volume of yarny goodness which you are about to feast your eyes upon; and b) the Yarn Fairy telling me that YFIT and some others weren't delivering parcels on his day off. Wait until Hubster hears this. He's going to be pissed.

Thank goodness the Yarn Fairy was here today. Otherwise, he might have needed a hand truck to bring everything up on the porch. Here, for your pleasure, are two pictures showing what arrived today.



This picture contains The Painted Tiger in "Wind" (Merino/Silk) and "Crisp Green Apples", the little bear sitting on those cakes is "Acid Panda" by sunfleur1, Curious Creek Fibers in "Birches in Norway", Lavender Sheep in "Truffle", Zen Yarn Garden IN-SNYC in "Apricot Kiwi", and Zen Yarn Garden 100% Cashmere in "Terracotta".



This picture contains Smoky Mountain Fibers in "Lavender Blue" and "Turquoise Jewelry", and Spinning Yarns Online in "Gecko", "Dark Foliage", and "Regal".

I also got a couple of bags of moth-deterrent herbs and some books (two technique, one pattern, one novel, one spiritual - all knitting). Jen at Woolgirl was also kind enough to send me another skein of the club's yarn so I'll have enough to make the socks offered last month.

So what the hell does all this yarn have to do with the Monster? Everything.

You'll recall that I mentioned karma biting me in the ass - yesterday, I think it was. Karma not only bit me in the ass again this morning, but I almost was in fairly serious trouble for a while.

The usual ensued last night. We both fell asleep after dinner, and it wasn't until close to 4:00 a.m. that I picked up my needles. I got a fair amount of knitting done on the Monkeys when disaster struck. I don't mean your ordinary "Oops, I dropped a stitch" disaster, either. I mean start the fucker over disaster.

I have no idea of what happened, but I was doing an SSK. Somehow, one of the stitches slipped off the needle and began it's perilous journey down the sock. I watched where it went and thought, "No big deal. I'll just grab it and bring it back up."

If only it were that simple.

What happened next was a comedy of errors that wasn't funny in the least.

Before I had a chance to fool too much with the stitch, I dropped my lighter. Instead of just dropping the foot rest, getting off the Monster and picking the lighter up off the floor, I did something really stupid. I decided to get on my knees on the cushion, lean over the foot rest, and pick the lighter up that way. Unfortunately, when I did that, I couldn't see where the lighter was. So I began to move backwards to drop the foot rest. That's when the real horror of the morning occurred.

As I was teetering on the cushion at an odd angle, the Monster decided to take revenge on me for all the coffee I'd spilled, all the ciggies I'd waved over it, every bad word I'd ever said about it, and snapped the foot rest shut. On me. I was trapped between the chair and the foot rest by my legs.

As if that weren't bad enough, the entire chair then tipped forward on top of me. What made it really horrible was that I was bracing myself against the floor with my hands, had my legs and right hip literally trapped in the jaws of death, and the entire weight of the chair pressing on my hips and back from behind. We were both at a funny angle, and I quickly realized that I couldn't get out. I couldn't move. In short, I was stuck fast.

So I did what any other sane person would do. I yelled at the top of my lungs for Hubster and began to bawl.

You see, I have an auto-immune disease that has decided to take the form of a muscular and joint degenerative condition. My immune system, instead of fighting off disease, is a disease. It eats whatever it attaches itself to - cartilage, muscle, etc. It perceives my body as a giant intruder that needs to be disposed of. On top of that, I have fibromyalgia. Not only did I have my legs trapped, the chair was wrenching my joints at an unnatural angle, thereby causing them pain. A LOT of pain. The more I struggled, the more I got stuck and squished, and the more it hurt. The more it hurt, the more frightened I became. If Hubster didn't hear me screaming, I'd be stuck like that for over an hour until he got up. Fortunately, he heard my screams and came charging down the hall, got me untangled, and put the chair back upright. Unfortunately, my knitting and everything that was on the chair or foot rest also came crashing to the floor. Hence the unfixable error in the sock - the yarn got ripped out of whack as it got caught while falling.

I did everything I could think of. I dropped the whole decrease area down to see if I could just reconstruct it. Nope. I tried weaving the stitches back the way they were. Nope. Nothing worked. Then I realized that the yarn must have caught on the edge of something, because a piece of it was pulled out longer than the others, and a couple of the stitches were tangled together. So then I decided to pick up a row above the heel, rip it back, and just knit the section over. Nope. I couldn't find a straight row to save my soul. That, of course, is part of what makes Monkey Socks so beautiful - the way the lace pattern forms, the way the pattern moves and breathes, how everything intertwines and blends in with the next set of the pattern. I think because of the trauma of the fall, it somehow got mangled up just enough so that I couldn't find a straight row (or at least one I could follow around and pick up). I had no other option.

I swore a lot, cried some more, and cut the yarn. I've just cast on to begin all over again. I know now what I'll be taking to Stitch 'n Pitch with me. So now I'm covered with bruises on my legs, my hip hurts like a bitch, my wrist has a rip in it where it raked across the edge of the chair when I was falling, my knees hurt, and it hurts to breathe. But I keep one thought in mind as I labor over the socks yet again.

At least it wasn't buffalo.