Finished Zen 2 last night (a ten-day sweater, new record). Darned in all the ends, washed it, blocked it, went to bed. While it was wet, Sekhmet wadded it into a ball and slept on it, so this morning it looks like, well, like a cat wadded into a ball and slept on it. So I'm gonna wait on the photo. The yarn didn't relax as much as I'd hoped, so I'm still not sure it'll fit me, but I'm thinking it'll fit the Goober for a year or two the way she's growing, and that's just fine. Who knows, maybe I'll lose more weight (I am finally down ten pounds) and it will fit me by next winter.
And maybe purple piggies will fly on stealth-bomber wings.
This is the start of Memorial Day weekend for those of us in the US. Monday is a federal holiday, and the long weekend is treated as the official start of summer. Mother nature has started things off with a bang in the form of a massive thunderstorm this afternoon. You know, since that rant of mine on the environment, we seem to be having an awful lot of close lightning strikes. I tell myself it's just that I'm noticing now, but DAMN, I hate hearing that zap.
My plan for the weekend involves dyeing some silk and some wool, writing a Knitty article about it (I'm calling it "Dye Another Day"). I'd like to re-code this blog, with a different template, and I wanna fool around with this lino-cut printmaking idea I've had, and making my own logo sort of thing. Had a bit of a brainwave last night, sort of Japanese iconography meets Meg Swansen. Here's hoping it works.
A quick word on the sulfur allergy - it isn't a true allergy, in that I doubt my immune system is involved. I just call it that, out of habit, because otherwise doctors ignore me, give me weird drugs, and I wind up in the emergency room (yes, it has happened). Sulfur compounds of all types that I know of give me vertigo and nausea. It varies, from mild nausea lasting two or three days after a heaping dose of guacamole full of raw garlic, to being unable to stand, walk, or drink water without vomiting, after a couple doses of sulfanomide antibiotics. For a long time I thought it was me, but I did some research and realized a lot of other drugs I had bad reactions to - Vioxx comes to mind - have sulfur compounds in them. So... whatever it is, it isn't an allergy, but I think it's a legit reaction to nearly all forms of sulfur. A friend of mine is a chemist and has told me to buy some granulated sulfur for some learning experiments; I haven't had the nerve to do it.
So there you go, far more than you ever wanted to know about things that make me puke.
Gonna be an interesting weekend. I can tell.
3 comments:
Sekhmet is a twisted kitty. Why sleep on a wet sweater? But hooray for a ten-day sweater! Looking forward to photos.
Sulfur sensitivity? Makes sense. Lots of people have iodine sensitivity (No shellfish) so why not sulfur?
I admit to having aced organic chem. Sulfur is used all over in the human body, including in a couple of the essential amino acids, cysteine and methionine. (The "thio" tells you there is sulfur in there.) The other two sulfur-containing amino acids, the ones we can synthesize, are taurine and homocysteine.
But other sulfur compounds -- yeesh, there are hundreds and thousands of them. Completely possible, probable even, to be sensitive to those. Thiols, allyls, sulfides & sulfites, etc. Lots of people can't tolerate the sulfite group.
What about egg yolks or crucifers? Besides alliums, those are other sources of dietary sulfur. I won't grow crucifers any more because I can't stand the smell of them decomposing. Blech. There is nothing like the smell of dead Brussels sprout plants thawing in the spring.
Ah, and that is another thing: sulfur scent-tags a lot of its compounds.
I've been trying to find the research I read where allergies to one thing got associated with a smell, and then the smell in the absence of the allergen triggered a histamine reaction.
So yet another hypothetical possibility could be that you are allergic to/intolerant of one group of sulfur compounds, and react to other groups because you can detect the sulfur by smell.
(It's so much fun to trade geekery with you.) I'll just shut up and go knit me some nice Niebling now, eh?
I have a MILD reaction to amoxocillin, so one ear infection, long ago, they gave me sulfa drugs.
I blew up like a poisoned toad, turned pretty colors, and shot a temp of 104.
I looked so bad when I went into the doctor that all the little old people there in the middle of the day at 'adult medicine' who saw me walk in, migrated to the other end of the waiting room like turkeys in the rain. It took me two weeks of prednazone to lose the purple tint between my fingers.
Believe me--I don't take sulfa-drug allergies lightly.
But your weekend sounds like fun--I can't wait to see the cat-tested sweater!
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