this is totally worth a blog post

A little bit of color on a grey morning. Perfect. I realize I'll be demonized for saying it, but I'm loving the overcast weather these last two days. Sorry, summer lovers.

I would like to do a baby picture montage here:







I really can't believe this one tiny little seed sprouted into a plant as tall as I am, and is bearing fruit! It's like having a baby, except the kid grows up in a couple months, and never talks back.

seven hungry caterpillars

My kale had a rough weekend. I wasn't here, but apparently it was very hot, and I came home to find it drooping almost all the way to the ground. A bit of water revitalized it, but later in the day, I noticed these almost completely camouflaged caterpillars. Lots of them! All over my kale leaves! I thought it would be ok for a couple hours, until I could enlist Geoff to come remove them, safely and organically, by hand. I was so wrong. I came home two hours later to a kale plant stripped of its lush leafiness.



I sacked up, put on some gloves, and plucked the little guys off. I even found a tiny eighth little caterpillar, which doesn't reassure me. I suspect there are many more lurking in the stems and leaves that I can't see.



I took them outside and dumped them in some more foliage, far away from houseplants. This is a sad day in kale ownership.

Oh, did I mention I moved?

jenna's glowing blog recommendation

Back in October, just days after my one-year climbingiversary (that's a technical term, there), I tweaked my wrist picking up a box at work. It's pathetic. It felt like a pop and then a shot of pain down my forearm, and I couldn't make a fist for the rest of the day. So I rested it, iced it, took some time off climbing, and when I finally went back about a month later, I still had pain and weakness in my left wrist. For the last 9 months, I've been climbing at 50% strength, and avoiding anything remotely slopey or left-hand-intensive.

A few weeks ago, after months of limiting myself to v2s (I even stopped knitting for a while!), I figured it was time to just play through the pain, and spent an entire lengthy (comparably) climbing session working a challenging v5. My soon-to-be-roommate Amber gently advised against this, but naturally I didn't listen. The next morning, I could hardly move my left hand. Any amount of impact (pushing, twisting, lifting) was excruciating. I scheduled an emergency appointment for that afternoon with my primary care physician - yes, I have one of those despite not having any health insurance. The potential cost forgotten in my pain, I had an x-ray. The doctor called it tendinitis, a diagnosis which frustrated me to no end. The stretches she assigned me were impossible due to the extreme pain; I couldn't bend my wrist more than about 30 degrees in either direction. I had a nagging feeling this wasn't tendinitis.

Days later, I get a call from the doctor. The x-ray results showed a calcification in my wrist, just above the wrist bone directly below my little finger. I had even seen it on the x-ray. It looked like a little triangle of white mass right in my wrist joint. So that was somewhat satisfying, because at least now I knew what I was really dealing with, and how to treat it. Except they recommended acupuncture. I had a brief "WTF" moment before deciding I'd give it a shot. Acupuncture isn't that expensive. And this is Portland, after all.

I left after the first appointment feeling disheartened. My pain was somewhat alleviated, and I had napped for almost two hours in the middle of the day, but I was going to have to receive treatment at least twice a week for a month. I just couldn't afford that. I remembered a Facebook post by my friend Jeff talking about a low-level laser treatment he was going to receive for a tendon injury. Months ago, he'd suggested it might work for me. I finally followed up on that, and went to see Dr. Rob.

Dr. Rob, not to mince words, is a fucking miracle worker. My first session was less than half an hour. He scraped at my wrist with some metallic scrapey-tool, and did four minutes of LLLT on my wrist. Without even seeing the x-rays, he knew what to treat. And holy shit, if I didn't feel amazing the next day. I had my range of motion back, and significantly decreased pain. Three more sessions and two weeks later, I can put weight on my wrist enough to do a pushup, finally. I was able to help carry my couch when I sold it two days ago. The pain, stiffness and weakness I've been enduring for most of a year are all 90% gone.

And, hey, climber friends! Dr. Rob used to climb too. If you have any sort of climbing injury and you are being an idiot like I was, and not treating it at all, I highly recommend him. It's totally affordable. And it was 100% worth it if I get to climb again, which is looming on the horizon.

You should know that if I'm blogging about something, it's because I really like it. So do it! Get some laser on your injuries!

carpal tunnel, here i come

Working on some super top-secret double knitting today. I'm finally getting accustomed to holding two strands of yarn in one hand.

the best sandwich ever that i just devoured

This is my go-to. I feel a need to post it, due to my intense love of it, and desire for everyone to know how to make it.


Not such a beautiful picture here.

I have adapted the TLT recipe from 101 Cookbooks to include bacon - I'm not a vegetarian, I can eat delicious, delicious bacon. In my tempeh-liking opinion, this is a major improvement.

I used to make it on bagels. Toasty gluteny bagels. But those days are over. Udi's gluten-free hamburger buns substitute nicely. I didn't notice much of a difference, because I ate it too fast. And because everything else was so overwhelmingly amazing.

I prepare the tomatoes like Heidi does. Let me please note here that I did not eat tomatoes until these. I am not kidding you. These are so deliciously tangy and sweet and soft and flavorful that I changed my dietary habits for them. My mouth is watering again.

I also prepare the avocado the same. It's good. So good.

And then I fry up a few slices of bacon. Five should do it, but you can make more if you like. I've done it with more, too. I make this sandwich a lot.

That's all I have to say about this. You, too, can eat delicious and probably unhealthy food, even if you are gluten-free.

a tale of two scarves

I remember this clothing swap, back in October. Rachel had this pink scarf she was swapping, in some hideous shade of bright magenta. It was finely-knit 1x1 ribbing with a weird flare at either end. It was all sorts of misshapen, and full of holes. And it was 100% cashmere.

I knew about recycling good quality sweater yarns (none of those cotton/poly blends, ew) but I never figured it was worth the effort. Something about this ugly duckling scarf awoke the urge in me. I needed to turn it into a swan. So I snagged it, revealed my intentions to Rachel, and immediately that evening began snipping away at the ends until it unravelled.



It was time consuming. At first, I just unravelled like a crazy person, piling loose yarn into a lump. Big mistake. It tangled when I tried to wind it; I figured out I had to wrap the yarn around my hand, to be felted and rejoined into continuous strands later. I had little curly balls of pink yarn bouncing around everywhere. I think it took something like a week before I formed two complete skeins.





Bear in mind, this was before I discovered what setting on my camera produces real-life colors. It was a little more ugly in person.

Then the fun part! I dyed it, using tea bags and a splash of red food coloring. I didn't want to deviate a ton from the original color, just tone it down a little (a lot). The result was fairly successful.





See the difference?

The original scarf was maybe 4 feet long. I figured, I'd hold the yarn double, work it in lace, and end up with something light, airy, warm, and crazy long.

Rachel right away expressed interest in it. It's not really a color I like, but it's right up her alley. According to Ravelry, I started this scarf in January, with the secret intentions of giving it to Rachel at some point. I anticipated working on it for maybe a couple of months, at most.



Here's where I was after one month.

Fast-forward to July! Rachel's birthday is coming up, and this scarf has been at the bottom of my bag for six months. I'm procrastinating by starting new projects left and right. It's hard, guys. Lace knitting is not great. The pattern took me months to get accustomed to. I forced myself to work on it, and it's slow going. The scarf was about three feet long when I started worrying that I'd run out of yarn. I toyed with the idea for about 20 seconds of unravelling it and starting over. Oh god.

But then it just kept growing. And growing. And growing. And soon, it was a snake:



The day before her birthday, literally (July 28), one of my skeins ran out of yarn. I wound them unevenly. I was so grateful for that. I just bound it off there, and immediately washed and blocked it. No time to waste!



Blocking something you've worked on for ages is easily the best part. It's all soft and pliable, and you can shape it however you want. For this scarf, I decided to leave the edges a little scalloped. That's how they wanted to be!



Post-blocking: the scarf is now super long, super crazy airy, super light and luscious (hey, that's the name of the pattern!) One of the things I'm discovering I love about dyeing with tea bags is the multifaceted color. It really pops in natural lighting, but it takes on a different appearance in different environments. (There's also the fact that I discovered the next day which setting on my camera produces good colors. I'm going to harp on this until the day I die.)


I took some artsy shots:







In the interest of sounding like a broken record, nearly all of the yarn in my Etsy store will make a much, much longer scarf. This is the least amount of yarn I've ever acquired from unravelling something. It seriously blows me away how much mileage you can get out of a lace pattern. Go get some!

first basil harvest

I prefer to do my gardening by floodlight at 11 pm.



Here's what I plucked from one (1) of my basil plants today. It's been producing like mad, and just started flowering the other day, so according to my sources that's when it is good to eat. This is one of many enormous leaves that are literally the size of my fist. They are beautiful and amazing, and soon I will eat them. But for now, they are in my freezer, because I am not cooking at 11 pm. Just gardening.

pecans are the best nut.

Gluten-free rolled oats just made my life a lot simpler and happier. I made this old standby power bar recipe which used to be a staple in my gym bag. This recipe was only made possible by my recent discovery of oats sans gluten! The future is amazing. I also replaced the almonds with double pecans, because while almonds are good, pecans are even better. (I dipped into them a bit before catching the photo, oops.)

Here's the recipe, and if you aren't making it right now you should be. Next I would like to tackle the ANZAC recipe. I'm hoping I can sub in GF all-purpose flour.

In other news, my first week of gluten-freedom was interrupted by a misunderstanding at a local pizza joint with gluten-free options. It's not all gluten-free! But now I'm back on the wagon and I guess I will have to be more diligent in checking menus.