Cat In My Lap

I turn 68 in a couple of days, and it has gotten me to thinking about aging and how we experience it.

The primary effect I've noticed, for a long time, about getting older, is that one's perception of time seems to speed up. Things take me longer to do, and the time passes so very quickly. But someone once explained part of that to me as a matter of proportions. For instance, when you're 10 years old, a year is a whole tenth of your life so far. At 60 years, one year is only a sixtieth of your life so far. It's a much smaller chunk of time in proportion to what you've already experienced.

In my own experience, other than that sort of time warp that happens, age has little effect on my state of mind. I still always have plans and ideas I want to carry through on. Possibly even more, now that I have more time to think about them. While I tend to think longer about things, that's because I've learned from experience that reacting too quickly is what can get me into trouble. It's not the mind but the body that starts to get in the way of doing everything the same as I used to. And yet, there are things that can affect the mind in ways I hadn't considered before, and they're maybe not so much about aging, but about the state of the world, and indirectly a result of aging, of retiring, of medical problems that seem to sprout like weeds as we get older. Side effects of aging, not the process itself.

For about four weeks now I've had some lower back issues, but instead of getting better on its own as it usually does, it has gotten worse. Now it's affecting one leg, all the way to my knee, and that knee refuses to do the things it normally is happy to do. It's beginning to get me down. 

I had a court date last Friday (I'm being sued over some debt - I tried to do debt settlement and while two credit card companies agreed to settle, one bank decided to sue). So I had to walk a little ways in the court parking lot and then through the courthouse, both coming and going, and on the way out, my knee decided to give out on me, and I nearly fell, and then barely made it limping back out to the car. It's been bothering me ever since, and with the debt we're dealing with already - some of it medical - I'm trying to just take care of this on my own.

I think the back problem not getting better right away has more to do with anxiety over the lawsuit than about age, because when I'm anxious I tend to tense up, and I've been in an almost constant state of anxiety since I started this debt settlement journey about 1-1/2 years ago, and that anxiety has ramped up quite a lot since the lawsuit began in late April. But even before that, I had noticed that my anxiety was having an effect. I had started making a pair of hand-knit socks that wound up being so tightly knit they wouldn't fit, and I didn't even notice while I was knitting them that I was knitting so tightly. I'm an experienced knitter, and these were not my first socks, so it wasn't that I didn't know how. It was stress.

So this back and knee problem has given me some idle time to think about age, and how it works.

The body may slow down, and yes if there's cognitive decline the mind as well, though thankfully that's something I'm not dealing with, at least not yet. But while the body starts to go, the mind still feels young. Experience changes that a little, but honestly most of the time I still think as though I'm a young woman. When I dream at night, my dreaming self is maybe in my twenties or thirties. It's hard to say, but there's definitely no question of aging. There might be older people in my dreams, and I'll think of them as old, but not myself.

My mom used to say, in my parents' later years, that my dad was a  young man in an old man's body. He would still try to do things around the house that he had done when he was younger, and didn't seem to accept that he couldn't. I recall once calling them, when if I recall correctly they were both in their mid-seventies, and her telling me my dad was up on the roof. I sort of panicked and asked what was Dad doing on the roof!? He was trying to do some minor repair there and had no patience with waiting for or attempting to get someone younger to do it.

That's how it feels. You still have all these plans and ambitions, and even needs, and it's hard to tell yourself you can't. I'm not even sure it's a good idea to tell ourselves we can't. But slowing down is always, I think, even when we're young, something to consider doing. Thinking things through, planning out how one will accomplish them, and not just reacting to everything. That's always good advice. So maybe the advice for aging is the same as that for growing up. Don't be in such a hurry.

I'm determined to not chalk my current limitations up to age so much as to stress, and thinking about ways to deal with that. There was a time, years ago, when I used to meditate every day, and I'm open to trying that for a while to help with this current anxiety. I'm still determinedly, inside, that woman in her twenties or thirties, with plans.

Yesterday was World Tarot Day, which I posted about on my blog, Spirit Blooms.

For those who've ever wondered about the effects on the environment of books in various formats, you might be interested in Books and Carbon Footprints on Mystery of a Shrinking Violet.

 I've been blogging over on Mystery of a Shrinking Violet (MSV).

My December 15 post, Revisiting Two Favorite Austenesque Stories covers my reread of two favorite novels, one that includes a spin on a traditional Christmas carol, and the other one with Mr. Darcy sending valentines.


How did Jane Austen celebrate Christmas? I asked that question and followed a meandering path into the past on December 25th.

On December 27th, I followed up with a previously unknown-to-me Tolkien story, Father Christmas and the Goblins, as well as a knitting video from Fruity Knitting that includes a fascinating visit to a Medieval-themed Christmas Market in Germany.

There are a couple of newer posts as well on my knitting blog, Swatches Yarns and Frogs. They're mainly links to a couple of knitting videos on YouTube, one covering the Clasped Weft Join for joining non-felting yarns, and the other sharing a video on some knitting history.

I hope to share a lot more in the new year. Right now I'm tired. I did really well increasing my sleep hours earlier this month, but suddenly this last week of December I can't seem to get more than 5-1/2 hours a night. It's having an unfortunate cumulative effect on my energy level and brain power. We had some rain last night, and usually rainy weather helps me sleep, but nope. Maybe tonight. I still need to set up my bullet journal for 2023, which isn't really a big deal, as I keep that really simple, but it takes a little thought and time to get it ready.

I wish you a wonderful last few days of 2022, and Happy New Year!

 I've been busy the past week, working on some projects that are likely to take a long while to bear fruit, and which sometimes make me wish I was triplets, that is, if all three of us could agree on what needed to be done and when. But I'm staying busy and having fun. Meanwhile, every now and then harsh reality breaks through, such as the night we went outside and found water flowing out of the street.

The main water pipes on our street are quite old, and the upper part of the street, north and uphill from us, had pipe repaired several times last spring, and then replaced completely during the summer. The water company told us then that we could expect our end of the street to have pipe replaced early in 2023. But the pipe didn't quite survive that long. When the pipe burst just north of us the other night, they shut off the water, and worked all night long, making a lot of noise that badly freaked out one of my cats. But that also meant some hard work for the repair team, and a boon for us, when the water was back on by morning. It's just a patch. They'll still be tearing up the street out in front of our house sometime in the next few months.

I've also been reading, knitting, and blogging. Some book reviews, and other blog posts from the past 2-1/2 weeks:

On Mystery of a Shrinking Violet - my books and writing blog:

Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku, by Natalie Goldberg

Grammar for a Full Life by Lawrence Weinstein

The Classic Tradition of Haiku: An Anthology by Faubion Bower

The Flame Ignites by Donna Fletcher Crow

The Last House in Lambton by Grace Gibson


On Swatches Yarns and Frogs - my knitting blog:

Thrift Shopping Again with Arne and Carlos


On The Journal Project - my blog about journals (including planners and note-taking):

Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte

A Brief Followup to Building a Second Brain

I am so inspired by this YouTube channel, Edible Thoughts Makes. Most of her videos are longer, between 50 minutes and an hour, and they always feel like a visit to a friend who loves to knit.

This is just a short, 4-minute take on how she folds her hand-knit socks. I like this method, as with only one toe tucked into a leg, the leg doesn't get stretched out.

I finally am close to having enough hand-knit socks to dedicate an entire dresser drawer to them. A small one first. Later a larger drawer! There's nothing I find as cozy as hand-knit socks - yes, even here in Southern California.

My novel, Shadows Fall, written years ago, is available again, as a Kindle-only ebook at Amazon, to purchase, or to borrow from Kindle Unlimited:

Shadows Fall on Amazon

I like to think I'm a minimalist, but my homes, and even my bedroom as a kid, have never shown any indiation of that. I guess I like to think it only because I detest housework so much, especially dusting, and a little minimalism would definitely cut down on the need for that silly, overrated, overly-perfectionist thing called housework. Especially the dusting part. Yuck! But let's face it, I'm a clutterbug, and I don't clean very often or very well, and I'm quite relieved that the cats like it that way, well at least most of them. Tara is a bit of a clean freak and she's always trying to tidy up after the rest of us, to no avail. But she keeps trying. She is even the first cat I've ever known who doesn't mind the vacuum cleaner. She also has the perfect coat for dust-mopping, although we don't currently have the right flooring for much of that. Poor thing, her talents are wasted here.

So what does any of that have to do with Russell Crowe you ask?

Well it all started with an article linked on Facebook, about knitting being good for you, and that article's mention of Russell Crowe knitting, and a link to another article about that, and me wanting to see a photo of him doing so (I mean, come one, don't at least half of you want to see that?), and a search that almost failed because WTF is wrong with Google today? But I came across a non-knitting blog that had the photo I was looking for, and off in the margin the blogger had linked to a tour of her house that had been posted on a design site. I looked at the photos tagging her home as maximalist, and oh gosh I thought I'd come home - not to my real home, alas, but to a home I could love. Her final photo of a pile of glitter with this written in it was the clincher:

"My favorite thing about my home is it's okay to make a mess."

Searches online can be so weird, leaving the oddest trails, something that fascinates me no end. I discovered this as soon as the world wide web was born, at a time when I was writing fiction, and my research time suddenly went through this weird sci-fi-ish time dilation phenomenon, and I knew I was in trouble because the internet would suck me in and I'd forget where I lived if I wasn't careful.

P. S. Apparently Russell Crowe does not knit, the photo was staged. Well poop! It's a nice photo anyway and a nice plug for knitting.

*Public post*

I found a few gems today in the Ravelry listings of sock patterns. Now and then I find a pattern I'd really like to try that isn't available in English. Some are in Japanese, which I haven't yet found a solution for, so I just try to ignore those patterns, but it's kind of like trying to ignore a chocolate cake.

One of the patterns I looked at today was in German, and although the designer didn't provide any translations, she did provide a link that seems really helpful, it's to a pdf International Glossary of Knitting Terms. So I thought I'd provide that link here as well as a few others. I don't usually make my posts public, but this one will be.

Vogue Knitting English to various languages (select your language and click "Go")

VK International Knitting Terms

The blog String-Or-Nothing links to the pdf I mentioned in my first paragraph above.

The forum Dave's Garden has a page full of international knitting term links, here.

Happy knitting!

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I fnished reading The Voyage Out last night. This was Virginia Woolf's first novel, which took her years to write and went through major revisions. While I liked the story a lot, I also found it quite sad, and it made me think about Virginia Woolf's life, especially her breakdowns, or what little I've read about them, which seemed to occur for the most part after deaths of people she loved. Grief was something she dealt with a lot in this book, at least toward the end, but all through it there were one character or another's fears about loved ones, or feelings of loneliness. This was a book about relationships. There seemed to be a lot of emphasis on how little we know of even those closest to us. So much of who we are is beneath the surface, seldom looked at even by ourselves.

There were a few quibbles I had with the book, but they were minor. It was a rich read overall, so I won't go into those. I'm looking forward to reading more of her writings.