Note to readers: the knitting part of this entry starts a few paragraphs down.

This afternoon I spent an hour reading knitting blogs and one blog referenced this website: http://www.sfgate.com/alicia/ , about a young woman's experiences and emotions as she fights her second battle against cancer. I cried and I cried, because I could relate to the fear and confusion upon learning one has cancer, and later in her series of articles, when she relates the love and longing she has for her mother, who also died of cancer. After my second chemo, I had what I would call an emotional breakdown. I spent the five days that the poisons coursed through my body crying and wanting my mother,unable to move and so very nauseous. But the nausea was nothing compared to my wanting to be held by my mother, who had passed away 5 years before. My children were away at college and I was all alone during my chemotherapy. When you are sick, you want to be held by someone you love, and someone that loves you back! Whether they want to or not! I wanted so much to be enveloped in my mother's arms, and I am sure I talked to her as I went back and forth between sleeping and trying to sleep. In my heart, I truly believe that my mother was there in spirit, watching over me, worrying about me, loving me as only a mother could.

My ex-husband was kind enough to fly our children in, one at a time, every other weekend, just so that they could see me, see for themselves that I was still alive and that I was going to make it. I loved seeing them, but really, there was not much they could do to help me, other than to hold me and to tell me how their lives were going. Which was a lot. But still, I had to still be the mother and care about them and their lives and solve their problems while lying in bed, when at that point all I really wanted was to be the child. I wanted to be held and comforted.

My cancer support group helped a lot. After my second chemo, after I suffered so much more from the longing for my mother, I went to the support group and my friends there--after hearing of my distress--all gathered around me to give me the hugs and love that I had been wanting. It was wonderful.

And so, because of this experience, I have so much more empathy for those who are sick and sickly. I am more tactile now, and I am not really a touchy feely person with strangers. But, if they are sick and if their eyes tell me that it would be okay, I give them a hug, a pat on the back or on their hand. Sometimes when we are sick, we isolate ourselves, the better to deal with our sickness in our minds, when all we really want/need is to be with others and to have others understand our pain or suffering and to assure us that we are still part of life, that we are still alive. Another person's touch can do so much to alleviate our suffering.

Now for the knitting: well, I finished the bands of the brown shell, but realize that it is a little too short, so I will have to add an inch or two more to the bottom and finish the hem. I cut off all the little strings hanging from the jacket and the skirt. I had a photo shoot (I love that phrase.....it makes me feel like a model) for the cancer suppport group calendar last Saturday. I brought my knitting machine, my two mannequins, and lots of stuff I had knitted (all of which, by the way, were unfinished!) to the photographer's house and we took pictures for an hour and a half. I can't wait to see some of the shots, which of course I will post here. I goofed big time in that I got a haircut on Thursday, and of course my hair was too short. Since I also had my hair colored on Thursday, it was looking and feeling a little dry, so I deep-conditioned it with coconut oil. I forgot that after you deep condition with this oil, you can't just rinse it out, you have to shampoo the oil out. So of course, my hair looked totally greasy at the photo shoot. Oh well...live and learn....at least my makeup looked good! (and so did my knitting!). I wore my brown suit jacket and skirt, and also a red top I had knit 2 or 3 years ago. The photographer promised that he would send me some pictures.

Earthquake Country

We've had four earthquakes in the last week or so. While I am not prone to panic during these episodes, it does give one cause to think. And prepare. I spent about 30 minutes looking for an earthquake kit on the internet this afternoon. They can be expensive. I also looked up what items should be included in an earthquake kit, and I have about 75% of the items, so I guess I will drag out one of my plastic bins and place all of the necessary items in one place. I paid $300 for an emergency kit about 10 or 11 years ago and now I can't find it. I bought it just before the Northridge earthquake and fortunately, I didn't need it.

My home at the time was built on rock and sustained only 1 superficial crack on a wall. Most of the homes on my street fared fairly well. When I drove down Ventura Boulevard later that morning to see what the damages were, it was absolutely astounding. On one side of the street, the buildings were normal. On the other side, whole facades of buildings had fallen. Some buildings needed to be propped up. Driving down Ventura Boulevard was like driving down a street in a war-torn, bombed-out country. And this was only 1/2 mile from my house.

Days later, I drove by Ground Zero of the Northridge quake. One apartment house had fallen flat like a pancake. The first floor was totally squashed. It looked like it had never existed. The second floor was now the first floor, and so on. I saw pictures of the cars in the carports and they looked like the Wicked Witch's shoes peeking out from Dorothy's house in the Wizard of Oz. A nearby park became a tent city for all of the people who had been displaced, not only from this particular apartment building, but also from other buildings throughout the Valley that had been condemned because of the damange.

Am I scared? Not really. I have complete faith in our emergency system here in Los Angeles. Am I nervous? A little. If an earthquake happens, I hope that it happens at night, when people are sleeping and not too many people are up and about. If an earthquake happens, I hope that my children and my father and brothers will be safe. I hope that we will be able to communicate with each other and assure each other that we are safe and sound.

When the Northridge quake hit, the people of Los Angeles really pulled together. I am confident that this will happen again. Los Angeles is such a blessed city--a truly wonderful place to live--that earthquakes, landslides, runaway fires, tsunami warnings, riots, drive-by shootings, and wife-killers/child-molesters-that-get-exonerated-by-crazy-juries are a small price to pay for living here. I wish these things didn't happen, of course, but because Los Angeles is such a wonderful city, I cannot imagine not living here and will gladly put up with such natural and unnatural disasters.

And apparently, a lot of other people feel the same way.....according to U.S. Census data, about ONE MILLION people have moved to the LOS ANGELES/LONG BEACH metro area in the last 10 years.

Here are some links/interesting info about living in Southern California:
http://interactive2.usgs.gov/learningweb/students/landpeople_s_la_hazards.htm
Living in Earthquake Country Southern California is home to more than 20 million people and is vital to the Nation's economy. Unfortunately, the region is also laced with many active faults that can produce strong earthquakes. The San Andreas Fault is the best known. It runs almost the entire length of California and generates shocks as large as magnitude 8. In Southern California the last magnitude 8 earthquake was in 1857. But smaller temblors, like the 1971 San Fernando and 1994 Northridge earthquakes, occur more frequently. Both of these magnitude 6.7 quakes were very damaging.
An earthquake is a sudden, rapid shaking of the Earth caused by the breaking and shifting of rock beneath the Earth's surface. This shaking can cause buildings and bridges to collapse; disrupt gas, electric, and phone service; and sometimes trigger landslides, avalanches, flash floods, fires, and huge, destructive ocean waves (tsunamis).
More Earthquakes to Come
Southern California has a problem with earthquakes - it hasn't been having enough of them. After the 1994 magnitude 6.7 earthquake in Northridge (northwest of La Crescenta), scientists used new techniques to study seismic activity. They have discovered that Southern California has not had enough large earthquakes to release all the pressure building up underground.
When the tectonic plates under the Earth's crust grind against each other, energy builds. In Southern California, the stresses are distributed along the San Andreas Fault and other smaller faults. When too much stress builds up along a fault, the earth's crust cracks and earthquakes occur. Quakes must occur to relieve the pressure along the faults.
But a look back at the earthquake history of the last two centuries suggests that Southern California should have had seven times as many Northridge-sized earthquakes as it has had. The scientists' conclusion: in Southern California, the probability of a magnitude 7 or greater earthquake by the year 2024 is as high as 80 to 90 percent.

http://gis.esri.com/library/userconf/proc02/pap0535/p0535.htm
Liquefaction-related ground failure historically has caused extensive structural and lifeline damage in urbanized areas around the world. Recent examples of these effects include damage produced during the 1989 Loma Prieta, 1994 Northridge, 1995 Kobe, and 1999 Turkey earthquakes. These and other historical earthquakes show that the distribution of liquefaction-related damage is not random, but generally is restricted to recently alluviated areas that contain low-density, saturated, granular sediments. Extensive young gravel, sand, and silt deposits in the Oxnard Plain and along the Santa Clara River, shallow groundwater, and the presence of nearby potentially active faults, indicate that parts of Ventura County are particularly susceptible to liquefaction-related hazards. During the Northridge earthquake, liquefaction occurred at the mouth of the Santa Clara River in Oxnard/Ventura, in Simi Valley, and along the Santa Clara River between Fillmore and Newhall (Barrows et al., 1995). Settlement and lateral spreading caused by the earthquake resulted in rupture of an oil pipeline near the I-5 crossing of the river, directly east of Ventura County, and initiated an oil spill that contaminated large portions of the river downstream.
The potential for liquefaction depends on both the susceptibility of a deposit to liquefy and the opportunity for ground shaking to exceed a specified threshold level required for liquefaction to occur. Liquefaction susceptibility is the relative resistance of a deposit to loss of strength when subjected to strong ground shaking. Loss of soil strength as a result of liquefaction during an earthquake can result in ground failures at the earth's surface. These failures, including localized ground settlement and lateral spreading, can cause significant property damage. Physical properties of surficial deposits govern the degree of resistance to liquefaction during an earthquake. These properties include sediment grain-size distribution, density, cementation, saturation, and depth. Sediments that lack resistance (susceptible deposits) commonly include saturated, sandy young deposits. Sediments resistant to liquefaction include older deposits that are dry or sufficiently dense.

Brown jacket on the knitting machine

Brown Suit Photos Below!

Here are the promised photos of the mysterious brown suit. Unblocked, unfinished, but undoubtedly mine! I will work on it this weekend, really I will, and ask another friend to take a picture of the finished product sometime next week. Now that I've seen the suit in photos, I don't know if I want to model this for the calendar. I might just make a cardigan to go with that green shell and wear it with black slacks. Or else I could finish up another shell (red this time) and make a cardigan for that one.

I am sorry, but I really don't know how to put all the photos in one post. I use bloggerbot, but the instructions for posting are not very good, nor are they clear.

And yes, I know I need to lose weight. I am working on it!!!!

Detail of sleeve edging. Technique courtesy of Sonja from fusionknitting.com.

Forgot the brown shell, so here's a green one instead. I am planning to make a cardigan to match this.

The skirt (I goofed on the waist size, just in case you were wondering).

Unblocked, unfinished brown suit jacket

I goofed on the sizing. I am an optimistic person. I just really don't see myself as a size 14 or 16 person! But I don't care. I am going to wear this suit anyway.

Feeling Better Now

I'm feeling better now. In fact, I felt better right after my anti-kid rant the other day. Soooo....let's talk about knitting.

I was asked to be in a fundraising calendar for the cancer support organization that I volunteer for on Tuesday nights. It will feature cancer survivors as well as women in treatment. The calendar will focus on what has inspired cancer patients/survivors during and after treatment, what makes them feel better. One of the featured women said that she feels inspired when she is surrounded by men (so they took a picture of her surrounded by men!). Another said her favorite activity is to lie in bed (I wish I'd thought of that! It's my favorite activity, too!). And one of my friends said she loves to do tai chi, while another woman (60 years old, no less) said she took up rollerblading. Well, given the range of activities of the other women, I said I love to knit. So they are going to take pictures of me at my knitting machine surrounded by cones of yarn and stuff that I made. So I guess I am going to have to finish the brown suit to wear for the photo shoot, as well as take back the sweater I made for my friend's son's graduation, and do the fringing on all the shawls I have sitting in a pile. All that in the next week. Fun!

By the way, I borrowed my son's digital camera and brought it to work. I will ask one of my co-workers to take a picture of me wearing my unfinished suit. I'll try to post it later this afternoon.

Been Out of Sorts, But I Found the Brown Suit

Since we last talked, a lot has happened. I lost my unfinished brown suit when I was running around town trying to get errands done before I left for my daughter's graduation in Boston. Problem was, I discovered it at 6:45 p.m. the evening before I got on a plane at 5 a.m. The stores/businesses I had gone to were closed. I was not able to retrieve the suit before I left. I cried and cried all night because I really wanted to wear the suit to K's graduation! I was really upset.

My friend looked up all the stores' numbers and I was able to locate my suit Friday morning when I was stuck in Milwaukee. The owner of the shoe repair shop assured me he would hold it until I returned to Los Angeles.

Here's a picture of the suit (which, by the way is still unfinished):



It is cute, but it is now summer and it is already becoming very hot (90s today in the San Fernando Valley). I won't get a chance to wear the suit before October, so what is the rush to finish? Anyway, my youngest isn't graduating from college until 2007. Hopefully I will finish it by then!

Another reason I haven't blogged is because I've had a very very busy 3 weeks at work. Job evaluations are being conducted and I want to look like I'm productive! Also, I went into shell shock and a bit of a depression when one of the hospitals in our network fired us. Not because of anything we did, but because the pushy doctor I had talked about in an earlier blog wanted to run his own show and do the programs in-house instead of paying us to do the job. Thank God my boss understood it wasn't my fault....but it sure looked kind of bleak for me for awhile, coming as it did so close to the time when the powers that be discuss RAISES.