Hooray! By this time tomorrow I should have a new hip! I will be able to walk with no fear of the thing sliding out of place at the least opportune moment. I will be able to bend without wincing and I won't be such a whining pain in the ass anymore.

I finally found out after 2 days of frantic phone calls that I have coronary artery disease and a heart that thumps around and misses a beat more often than it should. Meds were prescribed and taken. Blood was drawn. More calls were made. I now have clearance for take off and I'm very relieved. I'm not happy that I have the dreaded family heart disease and I'm going to have to change some things in my life but I am so damn happy that I don't have to cancel the surgery that I am actually looking forward to it and my morphine drip.

I believe I am almost prepared. I have washed my sheets, washed the clothes I am going to wear tomorrow, given 7 tubes of blood and found buttons for my sweater should I feel good enough to knit on it. I just have to fill out more paperwork, eat Jell-o and wash myself down like I'm the one performing the surgery. I just hope that I don't have to stitch myself up. Wish me luck.

Alas, the new microwave is still in it's box sitting on the living room floor which is a perfect spot for a good toe stubbing. Hubby can't get the old microwave out. It won't come off the wall or off the underneath of the kitchen cabinet. The screws appear to be welded in place with a mixture of bacon grease and dust. Even hitting it with a hammer doesn't help and that is hubby's go to method of fixing things. I cut things, he hits them with a hammer. We both curse. We make a perfect couple. There are no thoughts yet on how we will remedy this situation.

I also have not heard the results of my heart scan from last week. Seeing as though my hip surgery is supposed to be the day after tomorrow this kind of concerns me. Will I be able to get my new hip or not? I put a call into my GP yesterday morning and received a message from her nurse late in the afternoon. She said that the doc had the results but that she couldn't read them. Too technical, she said.  Well, hell. I then put a call into my cardiologist and was transferred to her nurse's voice mail. I had been on hold for a bit before I got to the voice mail and the message I heard cracked me up. 'If you are having chest pains call 911'. Hah! I am having chest pains just trying to get my test results. The message continued on to tell me that if I had called after 4 my call probably wouldn't be answered until tomorrow. What kind of dog and pony show is this? I had placed my call at 3:50 so no...there was no return call.

The good update is that I am motoring along on my Dark and Gloomy sweater. All the stitches have been picked up for the front and collar ribbing and it is moving along nicely. I am knitting on pure adrenaline but hey, if it works, why not? I don't think I have buggered anything up. I read and re-read the directions numerous times before I started and counted stitches to infinity and beyond. I should be golden.

I did something today that I don't think I've ever done....bought a book in a hardware store. Oh, I may have purchased a book on feeding birds or building a deck or how to have the garden of my dreams but never a paperback novel. What can I say? It looked good.
Hubby and I had been at the hardware store trying to buy a new microwave oven. It should have been easy. It wasn't.  We had to pick out the right oven and that took a long time. I had written the dimensions of our old non-working microwave on the palm of my hand with an ink pen. And I brought a measuring tape in my pocket. I was purseless for this trip. I have so much crap in my purse right now that it's too heavy to carry around and I really hate cleaning out my purse.

Our microwave is so old that they don't make that size anymore. We measured the ones in the store and tried to make a decision.  We would pick one out and then it would be wrong somehow. Then we would pick out another and that one would be just too big. Or not have enough watts of power. Or not have a turntable. Sigh. This went on for a good long time until we finally, finally settled on the exact right one. Nobody had wandered over to help us in any way so we wandered around to find some help. There was none. We wandered around some more. I started looking at refrigerators and then a nice electric stove. Hubby just looked for help. There were quite a few wanderers looking for help and pretty soon we were all banging around in the same area like a mess of wind-up toys in a box. I swear, if that one lady banged into my shopping cart one more time.....

We were desperate to buy this damn microwave by now. We just had to have it. It was the right one, it was black and it was on sale. We must buy!  There was more banging around while 2 guys got a really tall ladder type thing and climbed all the way up to the ceiling to see if they could find the microwave up there. Nope. Not up there. They moved the ladder. Not up there either. The guy on the ground and on the computer said that yes, the computer said that they had one in the store somewhere and the two guys would have to just look again. So they did. They climbed all the way up and looked . No microwave. Hell. How in the world could we go on trying to heat up leftovers on the stove top and how much longer would we have to be in this store? 

Our microwave has been torturing us for about a year now. Sometimes it works and just when you want a nice hot cup of cocoa it doesn't work. Oh, we could open the door then slam it really hard and it might pop back to life. Or we could try pressing all the buttons in rapid succession and it maybe would turn on. Or...sometimes all it took was to turn the stove fan and the light on and off really fast. Then we could have some popcorn. We really needed that microwave because we had suffered long enough. Turns out the store had found the one we wanted in a store a couple of towns away. We hopped in the car and took off because really...we had to have it right now.

I had a good long time to think about this on the ride to the other store. Here's the deal. I had managed to cook entire meals for my family for god knows how many years without a microwave. How is it that now I have to have one just to heat up water and make popcorn? And to heat up the thing I put on the back of my neck when I have tight shoulders from the stress of having a non functioning microwave? Have I seriously lost my grip? I have to instantly have hot water? I have to instantly have a microwave magically appear before my eyes? I have to have a book to read and a Coke to drink right damn now? Apparenlty I do. I hate that. I hate that I have become what I used to complain about.....impatient. As a result of my impatience and my need for instant gratification I consequently have lost the smell of oil heating up before I toss the popcorn into the pan. I have lost hearing the whistle of a tea kettle. And the delicious apticipation of a cold can of Coke waiting for me at home in my fridge.

Sometimes I just do not like progress. I think I'll text my daughter about this right now.

I believe in the American flag, apple pie, the church of baseball, looking for the union label and the right to work at whatever job I choose for a living wage. That doesn't mean that I support the 'Right to Work' bill that is now being jammed down the throat of the public. The Right to Work bill is a mosnomer. It's the old shell game played on a dirty TV tray at the corner of Sad and Misinformed. It's not for the right to work. It's for the right to work for less.

There is no right to work. There shouldn't have to be an amendment to the Constitution giving us the right to work. How silly. We know we can all work, right? We know that we need food to eat and clothes to wear and we don't need anyone to tell us that. We just need to make a living wage. The Right to Work deal will take away that living wage. People who work in union jobs won't have to be in the union anymore. Nobody will have to be in a union. Nobody will have to pay union dues anymore if they don't want to. Consequently, they will be paid less for what they do because they won't have the union to be negotiating their living wages. The boss can cut wages all he wants. They also probably won't have medical coverage anymore or a pension but hey.....that's okay because they won't have to pay those pesky union dues. That's their right. They can get asked to work way more than 40 hours a week, have no vacation, no time off, no benefits, no nothing but a job.

To me it boils down to this: if you don't like paying dues find another job. It's your right to work wherever you want.

Seriously. I should be banned from knitting. My picture should be hanging in all yarn shops with the words, 'don't sell yarn to this woman' written beneath it. Sigh. I should drag it all out into the back yard and set fire to it. I'm supposed to be having fun here and I'm not. It's supposed to be relaxing. Crap.

After a particularly trying day at work with two very fussy clients I settled in on the couch tonight to get knitting toward the end of my Dark and Stormy body. I was pretty excited because I had finally made it to the beginning of the ribbing. Hooray! The ribbing! I was finally almost done...except for the sleeves and the giant hunk of ribbing from the bottom of one front up around the neck and back down to the other bottom front...but still, almost done. I watched American Idol and knit. I answered the phone twice, talked, and then knit some more.  I knit, I petted the cat and then knit some more. K2, P2, K2 and my K2's matched up with the big cables in the back. They looked so pretty. It was going to be a beautiful sweater. The tiny cables that I had buggered up last week had been fixed. I had obsessively checked those things all the way down the back. Beautiful. I was thoroughly enjoying knitting the ribbing and decided to take a little break in order to read the pattern over just to see how long I was going to be knitting it for.

For crying out loud! I hadn't bothered to read the ribbing directions and had just blindly started with the K2, P2's. I was doing it all wrong! Damn. I am now going to have to rip it back and start over again. It's only about 6 rows so I guess it's not all that bad but really. This is starting to become a habit for me. Knit, then read the directions and rip. I guess the only excuse I have is that I have had a lot on my mind and it still mulls things over while I'm not paying attention to it. Or other things. I'm surprised that I'm not taking after Madame Defarge and knitting words into my sweater. They wouldn't be a list of my enemies...just curse words and the solutions to games on Wheel of Fortune.

I'm going to have a better day tomorrow.

I am almost down to where I start the ribbing on the Dark and Stormy sweater. Almost. It seems to be slow going but I'm happy to be getting closer. I keep checking the cable stitches over and over to make sure I haven't buggered those things up again because it is just no fun to take a 3 stitch cable back down a mess of rows and knit it back up. I'm also to the point in the knitting where I don't have to look at the cable chart in order to knit the darling little shittin' zig zags. The pattern is finally embedded in my brain. If I only didn't have another couple of sweater monkeys on my back I could start looking for buttons

What is weighing me down is that Listeme is still languishing in her bag because...hell...I did the same thing and knit the second side front wrong and that has to be ripped out. She is almost a sweater but not quite. I can feel her looking at me from the corner. Add to that more yarn that came in the mail for another sweater  and is so lovely that I keep staring at it instead of knitting. It's a beautiful robin's egg blue and it's the color of spring. I want to knit it up so bad that I can almost taste it. I'm knitting a dark and stormy winter sweater in 70 degree weather when I really want to be knitting spring and robin's egg blue. Hell. And I'm also itching to knit lace. I have diagnosed myself as an ADD knitter who is almost done with a lot of things.  I wish there was some kind of medication for this and that my knitting didn't mirror the rest of my life.  I feel as though I should have a mess of the old Nike logos hung up all over my house. Just Do It.

I'm not going to sugar coat it...I do not like statistics. They make me crazy because I don't understand them. There are so many variables and so many ways to skew a pie chart or whatever kind of chart this is to the left that the chart becomes useless to me. Perhaps if I had taken statistics in college I would have a better grasp of things but if that had happened I would had to have had a totally rewired brain. The artistic brain I do have just sees the pretty colors and how they are placed on the page. I just don't see the reason for it.

I also don't get the need to 'collect' statistics. The weather has been unseasonably beautiful here but the weatherman is driving me crazy with his non-ending list statistics on the subject every evening. Oh, he's happy as a clam to be able to spout these numbers and days and years and how warm it was back then but it drives me to distraction. I would just like to know what it's going to be like outside tomorrow. Please.

Baseball and football stats fill me with the same dread.  A non-ending list every time a player steps up to the plate or runs onto the field is hard for me to listen to. It makes me jumpy. Maybe it makes me feel as though every one's life is just one big statistic...one big pie chart...and I don't know what mine means. But I feel I don't need to know how many sweaters I've knit or how many dresses I have sewn or how many bulbs I've planted. Or even how many books I've read. I certainly don't want to see a chart that shows how my parenting skills panned out or how adept I am at being a caregiver to my mother. I believe I would have to just go to bed and pull the covers over my head. Ah, maybe that's the gist of it....I just don't want to know. I don't want to know how I stack up against a green line of other women my age, my height, my weight or my intellect and survival skills.

The statistics that are the most useless to me right now are the stats on who is reading my blog. And they are the most annoying besides the ones the weatherman gives me. I get to see the statistics but I can't make heads nor tails of them. I know how many people read it but I don't know who or why. Or really...how they get there. I am supposed to be able to tell this but it's all Greek to me. I have read the website help page concerning this issue over and over and it still makes no sense. I click on one button and I see the number 48. I click on another button and I see the same 48 drop to 22. What? How is this helping me? One day the number rose to eighty something but that was the day that my blog title was 'Contest'. Sorry about that. And really....how did so many people find out my blog was titled contest? Who are you all and where did you come from? It's a complete mystery to me just like the weather stats are.

The only statistic I do enjoy is a quote by David Sedaris that states: one in three Americans weighs the same as the other two. That I can understand.

My grandma had a 'bum ticker'. My sister and I always knew she had a bad heart but we really didn't know what that meant. Grandma just said, 'sit on the other side of me because of my bum ticker'. Or 'your mother has to hang all my wet laundry because of my bum ticker'. The term bum ticker didn't sound nearly as bad as myocardial infarction which is what she died of at the age of 63. I miss my grandma. And now I have a bum ticker of my own.

I'm 60 years old but I don't feel like it. In my mind I'm still 38. Granted, when I look in the mirror I see the years but my body doesn't feel them. And if I don't think about my sliding hip joint and the upcoming surgery to fix it I always think I can do just about anything I used to be able to do except for the splits. I don't look like my grandma did when she was my age and experiencing heart problems. There are no flowery house dresses in my closet, no lacy hankies in my pocketbook, and no orthopedic shoes on my feet so I have a hard time realizing I'm just as old as my dear grandma. I loved her to pieces. She was the one who taught me how to sew and knit. She passed on her passion for creating things to me and I think about her often. Now I'm thinking about her every minute because she also passed on her 'bum ticker' and I'm stunned by it.

I got a call at work yesterday from my doctor's office. I was expecting it because of the hideous stress test I had suffered through on Monday. What I wasn't expecting was bad news. I had to have the gal repeat what she was saying over and over because I just couldn't wrap my mind around what she was telling me. They had already made an appointment for me to see a cardiologist. Today. Because the stress test showed I had a bum ticker. Huh? I had failed the stress test. I had some kind of blockage somewhere. Blood wasn't flowing like it should. There might be some damage in the center of something. I needed to see a cardiologist right damn now.  I'm heartsick. And here I was worrying like crazy about my upcoming hip surgery never thinking my heart might not allow the surgery to be performed in two weeks.

My grandma never let her bum ticker slow her down. She wasn't an invalid...she was a vibrant, busy, creative woman still cranking out sundresses and school dresses for my sister and I. There is a lot of my grandma in me and my heart aches when I think if all she gave me. But I'm heart sick that I also got the bum ticker.

No, I'm not having a contest. Sorry. Although it would be nice if I did, I have no idea what the contest would be or what I would give for a prize. Perhaps the contest should be the 20th person who leaves a comment could win...um...a book! That's it. A book. I have quite a few books and they need cleaning out. Or a hank of yarn. I have a ton of yarn as well. Oh, I guess I could just go buy something brand new for the prize but I don't know what that would be yet. Or even what the contest would be so no....this isn't a contest.

I'm feeling like a contestant lately in a very bad game show. Step right up and play the crappiest game in TV land. Spin the wheel and you could win a new car, a great vacation or a trip to hell and back while having a chemical filled non-walking stress test followed by taking a class about having a hip replacement. And then you would be able to talk to your mother for a couple of hours about her house and finances! Yes, indeedy. That's my prize.

I'm waiting for the results of the damn stress test while doing my mom's bills and thinking about the silly class I had to take last night about my upcoming hip surgery. Oh, I guess it wasn't silly because there were people in the class who had never had a hip replacement and needed the info. I need a better word to describe it. Stupid? Two hours of time I will never get back? Two hours of time I could have used to knit on my airplane socks while I listened or two hours of time I could have used to pick out and buy a new microwave. Hell. I knew all this hip stuff already. Why did I have to sit through it? As it turns out I had to sit through it on a very hard chair because we were given special soap and instructed on how to wash ourselves at home before coming in for surgery. I am not making this up. We were also told to wash our sheets, our jammies, and all the towels we would use for all this showering and bathing so that we would be clean as a peeled egg when we got to the hospital. Apparently a patient now preps at home. The irony of hubby and I having to visit someone after the class who developed MERSA while in the same hospital where I would soon be cut open was not lost on me.

I used to trust the medical community. For years and years I believed every damn thing someone with a degree and the paper to prove it said. Sadly, I do not anymore. I have a bunk hip that wasn't put in correctly and now needs replacing. I need to be afraid of catching some hideous illness in the hospital because someone didn't wash their hands after going potty. I have to hear a two hour talk given by a gal who has a degree, has been doing this presentation for 2 and a half years but can't manage to keep her materials in order or remember what info needs to be imparted next.  I won't get to actually talk to my surgeon until right before the surgery. I will be able to talk to this person and that person who will either answer my questions or relay them to another person who could probably ask the surgeon and then get back to me. I could call my surgeon's PA and talk to him and if he couldn't answer my questions he would email or text someone who could maybe ask the doctor. But really, all I needed to know was in the handouts we were given during class. The ones that had fallen on the floor like a game of 52 pickup and needed to be reorganized. 

I think my prize for participating in this game show from hell should be that I actually wake up from the surgery without any additional problems. The bonus prize should be a nice steady morphine drip because in spite of what the gal with the degree told us all in class last night, it's really gonna hurt.

Well, color me excited. I just signed up for Yarnover this year and got the class I wanted. I am doing a happy dance in my mind. Hooray! Anne Hanson from Knitspot is one of my favorite designers and I managed to snag one of the last spots in her lace class. Somersault. Cartwheel. High kick. Being that I love to knit lace, especially Anne's lace, I am in heaven over the fact that I get to meet her and listen to her talk for 3 hours. If I didn't have this bunk hip I would be jumping up and down like a little girl at the doll store.

Oh, I know this doesn't sound like much to people who don't knit but really, it's a huge thrill for me. By the time Yarnover rolls around at the end of April I should have my new working hip and will be able to cruise around the market like a race horse. I will be able to sit through a long class without the hard school chair making my hip joint howl with pain. I will get to meet Anne Hanson who is kind of like Justin Beiber to me. And...if I haven't lost too many more brain cells from the upcoming morphine drip, I will learn something new. I just hope I don't make an ass of myself. Do you think it would be too much if I made a big sign that says' Anne Rules!' and held it up during class?