Flip Side

I was all about to write a litany of complaints vis a vis the foot (starting to consider whether I've torn ligaments, since I'm still bed bound at the end of day 6 and I'm occasionally losing my mind about it), when it occurred to me that I've really got to change my attitude.

Today I was talking with my friend Sandra, admonishing her for not being adequately grateful for her mobility, when it occurred to me that I was sitting there bitching at her instead of being grateful for my healthy arms (which are using the computer to work from home), my strong constitution, my every breath - you get the idea.

So here's a list of opportunities (and gratitude) about living with a healing (really hideous, painful, dare I say severe) foot sprain:

• It appears that I've been going at rocket pace for months now (ok, years, but you get the point). I'm starting to wonder if any other kind of injury could have required me, so succinctly, to sit in one spot and rest.
• I don't have the flu, which is truly the worst illness ever.
• My office (specifically my manager) has been insanely accommodating, facilitating my remote work arrangement as I heal. I am truly grateful that, instead of making me feel guilty for this injury, they are encouraging me to take care and giving me opportunities to work despite my immobility.
• This happened the evening of (i.e. right after) the final big work project I've been alluding to for months.
• Online shopping lets you buy food from the UK and clothes for your kid - all in 10 minutes. With sales, if you're smart.
• I am an competent practitioner of Iyengar yoga - my only method of exercise (nay, movement) right now. It's also foot therapy. I've got a post coming up on this in the next couple of days.
• I only had to wait 3 hours in the emergency room and I got excellent care and it was free. (Thank you socialized medicine.)
• I'm not going as crazy as I thought I would. A woman I work with managed to (in a freak accident) fall off a ravine in July and she broke her foot and ankle. She went through major surgery, followed by 3 months of bed rest, and just returned to work 2 weeks ago - in an air cast. When I heard about this I sympathized tremendously. I grieved for her. Man, I thought of her with all of my positive vibes because I couldn't imagine a world in which I might be immobilized for 3 days, much less 3 months. There's a sweet sort of irony about this, no?
• I'm not outrageously hungry. Of course, I'm not doing much moving, but I never knew how much movement and hunger correlate.
• I can't get to the food easily. I don't need to explain this one, right?
• My husband has to do all the fetching and carrying - can't say how much I appreciate not doing any cooking or cleaning up.
• I have wine and the internet!!
• As Cal says (though she had a little help from the Buddha): It is not what we carry with us, but what we let go of that defines who we are.

Here's to being here now, peeps. xo

PS: For y'all who've recently dropped by to see my sewing posts, please don't lose interest. I do lots of them (too many, according to some!). Just having challenges sewing and photographing due to the injury. I'll be back to a cross section of sewing posts soon.

Update: I must have been in a wine-haze happy place when I wrote this. Today, my zen perspective is all shot to hell. For starters, I just dropped the phone (model circa 1990 and it weighs a pound) on my face and now I suspect I'm going to have a mega black eye as my eye is all weepy and puffy. WTF?!?!?!? (Did I mention I've now officially run out of arnica?) This is to say nothing of a second degree burn I gave myself about 2 weeks ago, pressing some fabric, which is still ugly and scar-ry on my forearm. Scott just advised that he wants me to sign an affidavit indicating that he blameless re: my numerous injuries, and I can see why. Oh, why are all of these things so ugly, even as they are painful?

Update 2: I can't believe I'm posting this, but I feel the need to show y'all the state of my foot seven days after the injury:

This photo is from Scott's cell phone and I can't figure out how to make it bigger... Like you want to see it bigger...

Informed Consent

Being infirm, as I am, I finally did watch a movie on Netflix, The Business of Being Born. Y'all are a pretty savvy crowd, so maybe you've already seen it. The combo of my a) never watching movies and b) having lived through my own home birth (from which I'm still recovering more than a decade later) has precluded me from seeing this film till today.

I watched it alone - Scott and M are out for dinner - and I have to say it was rather affecting, if mainly in a PTSD kind of way.

Let me start by saying, I am not the poster child for home birth.

Oh, I've been a yoga teacher since I was 19 and my parents are holistic health practitioners. I see a naturopath. I believe in the body's ability to function and heal. I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, we are - most of us - designed to have children without intervention, with all of the intensity of the natural experience.

But there seemed little naturalness about my child's unmedicated birth and, on some level, I've been grappling with it ever since.

I have written about my parenting ambivalence, post-partum depression and anxiety and the challenge I faced in bonding with my daughter after she was born. I haven't talked much about the birth itself, to some extent because I don't remember it very well. I've pieced it together from stories told after the fact by my (insanely competent) midwives, my husband and my mother.

My story is complicated by a potential (but not actual) health issue my daughter was thought to be experiencing a couple of days after her birth (as I was desperately trying to recover and adapt), which resulted in a) days at the hospital and invasive procedures of the like I had so stridently tried to protect her from by having a home birth and b) a moment where doctors prepared me for the possible death of my newborn (because they didn't know what was wrong, if anything).

It goes without saying that I am eternally grateful for her health. She has thrived despite her slightly unusual physiology. I am grateful to every practitioner who worked to confirm her health. I am profoundly grateful to my parents (who, bizarrely, experienced a very similar thing with my sister at her birth - the birth, on some level, I was trying to avoid in my decision to have M at home). They stayed by my side and supported me and my husband. My friend Hilary came back from a stint in BC to be with me at the hospital and to advocate on M's behalf (she's a neonatal specialist).

But this is about the birth, not the aftermath.

It started off well - M was 2 weeks early. I passed the mucous plug early in the morning (warning - this post is not for the faint of heart) and waited for the labour to begin. By about noon I felt contractions. I could manage them. I used yoga technique. I have a high pain tolerance (my sprain, for example, which is terrible to look at, has only necessitated the ingestion of 2 Advils and 3 Tylenols over the past 60 hours. The hospital has prescribed 2 xs Advil and 3 xs Tylenols 4 times a day...)

We called the midwives as the contractions intensified. They arrived an hour later, at 2 pm (it was Easter, if I remember correctly), at which time I was in transition. The midwives decided it might be best, given a few factors, including M's slowing heart beat, to break my water. I agreed. From that point on it was all. fucking. over.

I'm not sure if you've ever experienced intense pain. I can tell you that the intensity of the pain I felt after the midwives broke my water was like nothing I have ever felt. I had a back labour from that point on. I tried getting into the tub, which only made me want to kill myself and everyone around me. I felt like I was falling up - so massively ungrounded was I. The only person I could tolerate was my husband who needed to simultaneously push against me and prop me up (with serious muscle power) seemingly endlessly. I would regularly vomit - pain didn't even register at a certain point, this was my body's way of managing it.

Between contractions I mentally bargained with God. I begged for increased duration between episodes. M's heart beat kept slowing and the midwives were increasingly concerned. They gave me oxygen, they urged me to push. I could barely register their instructions. I was stunned by pain. Eventually (though this happens only in 2% of midwife-assisted childbirths) they told me they would have to give me an episiotomy. Without any pain medication. I was so far gone, I didn't even care.

My 6-hour labour, while very fast by all accounts, was the longest, by hours, that any woman in my family has ever encountered. At this point, I was in hour 5.

By hour 5 and some, one (of my 3) midwives called the paramedics. I won't tell you of the shocking things my mother and husband were instructed to do to encourage contractions.

The midwife put her hands inside my body (both of them) to pull out M, at which time they discovered what they'd expected. She had the cord wrapped tightly around her neck 4 times. Nonetheless, due to my midwife's skill and foresight, M was healthy. She scored high on the Apgar test almost immediately.

The paramedics burst into my bedroom as all of this was happening. I don't remember it.

As soon as she was born, M started to cry. My husband and mother, the midwives, were all incredibly relieved to hear her. I felt utterly overwhelmed, half-dead. I screamed at them to get her out of the room. I heard M squeak from the other side of our condo (where we lived at the time). I just wanted her to be quiet. To leave me alone.

They almost had to transfer me to the hospital to sew up my bits (and because they were worried about hemorrhaging). I had 27 stitches - I told you this was not for the faint of heart. It took them an hour to suture. For that, you may be happy to know, they gave me medication. Happily, they did an awesome job and I was entirely healed in 2 weeks (a miracle). Far easier births can result in reproductive and other problems that persist for years... Interesting side note: Part of the problem, in terms of delivering M, was that I had done so many "perineum strengthening" yoga moves and kegels during my pregnancy, that my pelvic floor was an inflexible rock. So I guess you can be too fit. I shook from shock for an hour.

This was all before the hospital experience that followed 2 days later.

By the time my kid was home again, a week after her birth, I was so afraid of everything I could barely function. The only impact, as I can tell, that oxytocin had on me, was to make me freakishly hysterical about the germs that might touch (and kill) my child - who, frankly, I couldn't bear to be around, anyway. For a year, I wouldn't allow meat into my house. (Somehow I felt that meat would transfer germs to M's food and poison her.) I couldn't sleep for worrying about her dying. But as I watched over her, in my delusional fatigue, I only wanted to find the peace I imagined death would bring. Don't get me wrong. I wasn't suicidal. Suicide was the luxury of non-parents. Parents were simply strung into an existence of terror and sleep-deprivation, of loss and being trapped.

It was a truly terrible time during which I should have been medicated. It lasted for 3 years.

So as I watched woman after woman sagely giving birth in tubs during The Business of Being Born, I couldn't help but feel really fucking cheated. That's what I'd signed up for. I knew it would be impossibly difficult. I was cool with that. I felt I owed it to my child, to my body, to feminism, to nature. I was on board.

I didn't rush to the hospital to be induced then numbed then induced more then numbed more, only to have an eventual C section. I dimmed the lights, people. I eschewed medical intervention.

I don't kid myself. Had I been in a hospital I'd have been candidate no. 1 for a C section. After it was all over (and to this day) I like to tell people, were pregnancy to happen to me again, which it won't, I'd be knocked out and woken when it was over.

And yet, fundamentally, I believe in the alchemical miracle of natural birth. How could I knowingly deny myself or my child the one-time opportunity to live that primacy, to be there unobstructedly at the first, tremendous moment of extra-uterine life?

Except that didn't happen. I went through all that shit and I came out the other side hormonally unprepared, loathsome of parenting and more fearful than I'd ever been. It changed me for the worse in so many ways. It robbed me of myself as it changed me. I did not look in my newborn's eyes with love. I felt panic tinged with resentment.

To this day, even as my tweenie child is a compelling, charming, hilarious and loving soul, I don't know how to make sense of it. I suppose I should just buck up and be grateful that it all worked out alright. And when I'm not watching movies about the miracle of natural birth, that's generally how I roll.

Don't Do It

There's an argument to be made, given my compulsiveness, that I do not "relax" unless some stronger force compels me. It's a kind of beating me at my own game philosophy. Emphasis on the word "beating".

For example, my idea of a sick day is to (between hacking away and feeling like death) do laundry and organize my papers and cut out a pattern. I know I should be lying down, watching Netflix, but I can't budge the thought that I'm wasting time.

It's incredibly strange, therefore, to be lying here doing utterly nothing (except the occasional time-sensitive work item and reading blogs and talking on the phone, which in my world is nothing).

Here are the things I feel I should be doing today:

• Putting away the overflowing basket of clean laundry. It is taunting me with its messiness.
• Making cookies. I'm really wanting cookies.
• Doing some yoga - even if it's mega-restorative/therapeutic for the foot yoga only, it's necessary action.
• Cleaning up M's room, which is like Satan's rumpus pad of hoarded tchotchkes and crap.
• Tracing the pants pattern for V1166.
• Cutting out the fabric for V1166 and another one of V8634.
• Making some more Xmas present circle scarves. I've got 3 of these lined up.

Here's what I'm actually doing:

• Lying in bed blogging and reading blogs. (Why is it US Thanksgiving? - all my bloggers are eating instead of blogging!)
• Wishing Scott would finish his teleconference upstairs so he could help me get to the washroom. No dignity peeps.
  
• Wondering what I'm going to eat next.
• Considering how I haven't had a shower since Wed. and it's disgusting. I suppose I could take a bath but I loathe baths. I feel taking a bath is like soaking in your own dirt. Which is better than being dry and grimy, how exactly? Fact is, I have no interest in figuring out how I will get into and out of the bathtub.
  

In truth though, it is rather relaxing.

Update: I took a modified shower which involved a make-shift step stool (an old toys bucket of M's) and Scott holding the shower head. Talk about undignified. Oy. On the plus side, I'm clean. But the shower is a veritable death trap when you've got an injury - it's all hard, pointy, wet surfaces. On the way out I fell over onto the ankle - exceeding briefly - but it was SO painful. Icing it again and lying on the couch. You know, I woke up (after 13 hours) at 11 am this morning. It's 2:15 and I can barely keep my eyes open. Oh, and I'm totally beyond hungry. And not just for fun food. I can't see how inactivity and consumption are a good combo. The only thing I can come up with is that I must be expending more energy hopping (and crawling) around than I think I am.

Trading Off

Cooler temps (but not heads) prevail at this time of year. They make me want to bake everything I can imagine. Of course, there are only so many hours in the day, and in the absence of vacation, given the ongoing coat project, I don't think I'll be doing much baking in the next couple of weeks.

A girl can dream though... On my hit list:

• Fleur de sel caramels
• Sable
• Croissants
• Quiche
• Pots de Creme

On a side note, or maybe I've just been working up to this, I am feeling truly worse for wear (physically) for having avoided conscious movement for the last, um, two plus months. It's really not going well for me. Everything hurts.

It's a terrific irony IMO, that I am working my fingers to the bone to create a beautiful garment that will not benefit, at least initially, from the canvas of a carefully-maintained form. Don't misunderstand, I'm not suggesting that I am a hag for two months of underfunctional self-care. But I feel so removed from myself in this state. My muscles don't tone to my skeleton in the usual way. My stomach is soft. My shoulders and low back ache. I find it practically daunting to stretch.

In case you think that a life of exercise, when put on hold, buys you exemption for any length of time, then you are obviously very young!

But what am I to do? How do I build this sewing skill (a veritable passion) and still work all day and help my kid with homework and give some well-deserved attention to my husband? How do I make sure the house isn't a grimy pit (it really could use an overhaul of basics from IKEA, not that it's in the cards for the next few weeks) and that I eat food that doesn't come out of a package and yet have an hour for yoga - yoga of any sort - never mind the kick-my-ass kind that this woman of a certain age could really use.

You can see why I won't be baking any pies this week :-)

So tell me: How do you manage to work sewing into your busy life? Or yoga? Or baking? Or parenting? Has your fitness routine hit the skids lately? Maybe we can comiserate...

Update: I just reread this bourgeois gumbo of a post and it makes me want to smack myself. Jesus. Is it not enough that I have the space and brains to sew? That I have the funds to make beautiful food whenever I decide to desist from one of my other fabulous personal pursuits? I mean, life is about making choices. I have chosen to ignore everything on the planet that will allow itself to be ignored in the interest of developing a skill I value.

So there. I've said it for all of us. Still, my back hurts and my stomach squishes. That's something everyone can relate to, right?

Bye Bye, Drape Drape

The Drape Drape no. 3 Gather dress has been the subject of a few posts, and most of my brain cells over the past month. I have written about this thing scarily frequently...

You know I made the (original) rayon jersey muslin, realized there was much to be desired (though, overall, I was thrilled with my progress), and I proceeded to make it again. Like 6 times.

It's starting to feel like bra-making all over again! :-)

I could show you breakdowns and photos (more than the ones in the posts I've linked to above), but really, who cares?

Seriously though, here's what I did:

• Traced - that an Olympic sport in itself - and cut original L pattern to make original rayon dress. I wanted a woven dress though (no stretch) so I proceeded to...
• ...Revise original L bodice, adjusted with FBA, and traced, cut ML skirt
• Made muslin which was laughably small. It's amazing I didn't have a nervous breakdown.
• Despaired until my husband agreed to help me try to fix it.
• He had a fun time drawing all over my (muslined) breasts and slashing the fabric with scissors. (Whatever gets you through, that's what I say...)
• Redrafted the bodice. Didn't work, so...
• Redrafted the bodice pattern from muslin markings (that sounds easy but it's like rocket science).
• Made muslin. Almost worked so...
• Redrafted the bodice pattern from muslin markings.
• Made muslin. Almost worked so...
• Redrafted the bodice pattern from muslin markings. Eureka! Seemed to work so...
• Attached the bodice to the skirt (went back to the L skirt just to avoid grading nightmares).
• Last minute: Decided to drop waist by 2 inches cuz the original, ill-fitting muslin's waist was too high. Word to wise: When you alter everything else in a bodice, the waist is just as likely to lengthen as anything.
• Made dress with fashion fabric. Painstakingly bound edges, spent 2 hours working on amount to trim back seam - it was complicated.
• Finally tried it on and...

...the dropped waist wrecked the line of the dress, which was then too big in the midriff (should have considered that biggening up the bodice and dropping the waist would have this effect but seriously, what was left in the universe for me to consider?!

Sixty-plus hours later: Dress over.

I will not remake this thing. In the vein of a beloved song that one hears so many times it eventually becomes a torturous twang, I just don't want to know of it anymore.

Now, don't pity me. I can't tell you how much I learned. (Wait a minute, perhaps I can!):

• Figured out how to work from muslin to paper.
• Figured out how to alter collar height on one piece pattern! (*The fewer the pieces the harder the adjustments because every change effects every element of the dress.)
• *Lowered armscyes.
• *Did really complicated FBA that worked!
• Learned Japanese :-) (OK, this is not true but I did work with Google Translate rather professionally.)
• Improved my spatial reasoning re: sewing and techniques like invisible zips and binding.

My husband, a true inventor, having the brain - though not vocabulary, thank God - of an engineer, was indispensibly helpful. (Engineers, please don't be offended that I'm sterotyping you as inarticulate. I also generalize that you are mind-blowing smart when it comes to, let's say, nuclear science or making buildings.)

As a skills development tool, Drape Drape no. 3 Gather Dress, I respectfully bow to you. As a finished product, not so much.

Maybe I'll find it within myself to take a photo of the final blue dress, before I put it out on the lawn for some unsuspecting treasure grabber, soon to own an ORIGINAL K.Line :-)

Courage

It's a hideous day here - damp, cool, raining like a banshee. One of the fringe benefits of recording my every thought in this blog for the last couple of years is that I've come to understand how fully my mood depends on sunshine. This is more than slightly unfortunate given my geographic location.

At any rate, we've just returned from dropping M off at the school bus. She's on her way to camp!

I've spent much of the last decade acting as educator (along with nurturer, protector, disciplinarian, conscience, nag), so it's a table turner what M has taught me today. This little 9 year old just got on a bus with a whole bunch of kids she's never met to go an hour and a half away from home (and keep in mind she gets so carsick that Gravol and bags play a part in every road trip) to see a new location she can barely imagine with no hope of return for 2 weeks. She's never been away from us before (save sleep overs). She's never been to camp. She's such an urban kid that cows and silos are the stuff of movies where spiders talk to pigs and eventually come to an untimely demise.

Talk about defining the spirit of adventure. Every person who's ever undertaken a great risk for a great gain learned that skill through early experience. I'm so hopeful that my baby will be rewarded by some fabulous memories for her courageous leap.

(Now on with the debauchery and dining out!)

My Baby, Myself: An Epic

You know, a couple of years ago, I was very strung out. I've always been an intense person, very energetic - almost compulsively so - and I've hovered at the margins of anxiety since early childhood. Some of you will know how exhausting it is to live so fast, always evading the voices that loom large.

Nine years ago, I had M - a person who's been running the show ever since. She arrived on the scene in a fashion that would render the most moderate of women total mush. First, there was the damage to my own body (enitrely drug free home birth, complications, paramedics in my living room as midwife literally scooped her hands into me and pulled my baby out). Thank God the baby scored high on the Apgar scale moments later...

My psyche, fractured by 9 months of constant nausea and vomiting - and a surge in anxiety and depression I couldn't even recognize (so far gone was I) - was not quick to rebound from a trip to Sick Kids two days later, motivated by midwives (health providers with whom I would gladly trust my life again) who observed that M's resting heart rate was exceedingly low for a newborn. That whirlwind trip to the hospital was the beginning of a days-long ordeal during which my baby was poked and drugged and prodded up the yin yang, during which doctors with years of experience advised she might die (though they couldn't say how exactly). I should mention that my aversion to hospitals and germs is such that I chose to have a home birth so my newborn would not be subjected to the very kinds of things she ended up experiencing so fulsomely two days thereafter.

There's some irony for you.

Bear with me as I mow through this "here's how I went kind of nutty" thread by saying that I am tremendously grateful to everyone who participated in the "adventure". The care - from midwives (who were astonishingly capable), doctors and nurses, and in particular from my dear friend Hilary, now a pediatrician with years of emergency room cred - was first rate.

Truly, I can never express my gratitude adequately to Hil - who jumped on a plane from BC - where she had only just arrived 24 hours before - to spend days in the hospital with us, advocating, working with the doctors as they did 3 lumbar punctures on M, keeping me sort of sane though I was practically catatonic. I remember asking her how she thought it was all going to go. (It's still hard to write this, to remember it, a question no parent should consider...) And she told me, which gave me more hope than few other things ever have, that she'd seen many sick babies in her time - held some before they died - and that in her official opinion, M was not a sick baby.

Turns out that M was not a sick baby - thanks to all the powers in the Universe - just a bit different, but it was almost impossible for me to accept that - hormonally unbalanced, physically traumatized by a birth that was so not textbook, hallucinogenically exhausted - worse still, innocence snatched. Never again would I see the world gently, through the prism of immortality. I'd observed the crush and chaos of bringing about life and being powerless for all of that. I was terrified.

Years went by. Early parenting with no family support structures and very busy, unsatisfying, precarious jobs, did not improve my marriage. I loathed parenting. I did not want to be alone with M. She was challenging. She didn't sleep. I couldn't really engage with her. I was compulsive about keeping her away from germs. I had to keep her safe. It was an endless, fruitless effort.

You'd think, having dodged a bullet, I'd have been on cloud nine to "mother", but the more I did it, the less I suited it. It made easy things hard and everything else that much harder. I was trapped by the burden of excessive responsibility. I was trapped by the omnipresent feeling that there was no good alternative. I was trapped by the gut instinct that I would have been better off to have foregone this reasonably common, if profound, life experience. I was angry for having brought it on myself. I was angered by my powerlessness - but I was locked in my brain with it.

Lots of things happened in those years, and I know many of them were very good, but I don't remember much. Eventually, after burning out my brain chemistry on hideous anxiety, sleeplessness, horrible amounts of junk food, caffeine, booze and other mood alterers, I woke up one day and recognized that I couldn't keep living my life that way because it sucked. I know, this whole post is rather drama-plus, but don't wander off now...

I blogged about this part of the story in lots of detail last summer, during Health and Lifestyle theme week. This is where I got really sick, and in my time of reflection (two weeks bedridden) decided that I had to do something transformational. I know, big ideas... But there's one thing you really should know about me: when I finally decide to do something, get the fuck out of my way.

Two and a half years ago, I made some pivotal changes in my attitude which led to huge improvements in the health of my mind and body. Of course, my baby is now 9 and increasingly independent in all ways. I love that. I love the balance in sleeping well (most of the time) and eating well and exercising (which I always did, admittedly) and being vaguely moderate despite my love of all things immoderate. The impact of these changes is a better relationship with practically everyone I know - specifically my daughter (whom I now allow to touch public door handles - joking, sort of).

I'm not going to lie to you. I'm not going to say I love full-on parenting because, really, I don't. I do love my child (irrationally) and I want the best for her. I look forward to seeing where this is all going (though I recognize we are energetically at odds, some of the time, that it may be an ongoing challenge for us). I still panic when she gets a cold, but I'm trying to have perspective.

Recently, it hit me - like a punch - that I have been irrevocably changed for the better, by motherhood. I spent a long time feeling like a movie stand-in, oddly disassociated from the role. (You know how so many mommy bloggers tell the tales of their immediate, visceral affinity for parenting? Well needless to say, I have only ever read those blogs to more effectively imagine what that's like.)

Saying this, I know now that I am not the person I would have been if I had not had a kid, that I am someone who has been markedly challenged - and truly improved - by the job. Not bad gain for the pain. If nothing else, I could run a small country on the efficiencies I've learned :-) Hmmm...

Soft Focus

Till a couple of years ago, I was one of those people who categorically hated having her picture taken. Seriously - maybe there are 10 photos of M and me in her first 4 years. Back then, I couldn't operate the camera (not that it was fancy), much less bear to pose for it. And you know how intensely stressed and hideous I was back then... Well, unless you know me in real life, you don't. Which is just the way I'd like to keep it.

Anyway, eventually I got a grip on the stress and changed the whole lifestyle and started a blog about my true love (fashion) and the next thing I know, there I am taking pictures. (If I'm going to brag about that new gorgeous thing I've bought, I'm sort of obligated, no?) And then Scottie got me a cell phone for my birthday - which truly, I could care less about but for the pedometer and the built-in camera - and suddenly I was waiting in restaurants, taking pictures. Walking down the street, taking pictures. Going into vintage shops, taking pictures. Doing crazy eye-makeup, taking pictures. You see what I mean...

Somewhere along the line, Scott - who, for his many flaws, has supported my habit completely - went out and spent a living fortune on this SLR camera so that he could take photos of me and my stuff for the blog. Natch, he gets the occasional opportunity to snap "artful" shots for personal use which, in his opinion, justifies the cost completely. :-)

The fascinating thing about good photographers is that they capture what they see. I love this one, taken of me by my husband, because it shows me who I am to him: