Tomorrow!

At this time tomorrow, I will be at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival! As any of you who read my blog last year this time, this is even better than Christmas for me! And this year, after expecting to not have any money at all to spend on it, I will have more than usual!

One of the major things I want to make sure to check out is the new Majacraft Serenity Wheel. It's being introduced at this year's festival! Here's the schedule, if you want to find out more about it. They haven't leaked any photos, and people who saw it at their spinning camp have been sworn to secrecy, but they have shown some of the yarn that has been spun on it. As you can see, if you click on the "yarn" link, it's been developed to spin art yarns and novelties, and I am going nuts with suspense about it! From what I can tell, all of the Majacraft wheels have the potential to spin art yarns, so I can't imagine what they've done to make it even better!

The other major thing I want to look for this year is kniting bags. I don't know why I've gotten on that kick this year, but for some unexplained reason, I have.

Which probably means that I'll find something wonderful that I've never seen before, and once I've seen it will realize that I can't live without it! That's the way it usually works.

Holly and I have also decided that we're going to take lots of photos this year. He camera just broke (actually, the battery in it broke), so I'm lending her my tiny, carry-it-all-the-time camera (which is older, and has a lower resolution) and I'm going to use my super-duper, fabulous camera. I want to replace my old camera with this:

It has a 4X optical zoom, and most cameras only have a 3X zoom. I like the zoom control, too. It's very responsive, and easy to zoom to right where you want it! It also takes the same memory card as the better camera I have. One of the reasons I like it is because it takes AA batteries. That makes it just a little more bulky, but much easier to deal with. You can buy rechargeable AA batteries (and I already have some, plus a recharger), but if you absolutely use up all your batteries, you can buy new ones anywhere. I once went to Pennsic with batteries in my camera, and took one photo, and the batteries died. The camp store had AA batteries for sale, but the camera took esoteric camera batteries that were not available within 100 miles. I know because I spent hours of my time there driving around looking for the right batteries instead of enjoying Pennsic! I took a grand total of one photo at Pennsic that year, and don't ever intend to repeat that!

So, all this is what I'm concentrating on, not some of the other, less happy parts of this post.

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When it comes to the less happy parts of the post, that happened yesterday.

I got to see the results of the CT scan yesterday. It was amazing, and also not really very good news.

The doctor explained (as was pretty self evident) that the lighter parts of the scan showed more thickness or density on the image of my head. He showed me my left ear, which is OK (aside from the fact that it can't really hear well). You could see my outer ear, and the structure inside. It looked just like one of those inner ear illustrations.

Then he showed me my left ear. You could see my outer ear, and then, right inside, there is a big white blob. The bone right inside my outer ear has gone berserk and just grown solid. No wonder I can't hear out of it!

He said that there's an operation they can do which is classified as an exploratory operation. He said they might or might not be able to fix it, but that no matter how the operation turns out, people with Paget's usually have the bone grow back even more aggressively, and wind up with an even worse problem than they started with. He didn't recommend the operation.

He also noted that some sinuses and other parts of the inside of my skull have warped and grown in odd directions.

In other words, it's a strange and twisted place inside my head. Actually, it was strange before I got Paget's, but that's a whole other story.

He said the same thing the other doctor said, which is that I really need to see someone who knows about Paget's and has treated it. He said a rheumatologist would be a good idea. He recommended that I call John's Hopkins and ask for a recommendation from them. He said that they would almost certainly know of a good doctor for me.

Paget's is rare enough that most doctors have never treated a case. I almost said that most doctors have never seen a case, but that's probably not true. I had probably at least 20 doctors comment on my alkaline phosphatase test (which indicated I have Paget's, although it can indicate other things) without having a clue what they were looking at. So, doctors actually see it, they just don't recognize or treat it!

The ENT doctor that I went to also doesn't do hearing aids, so I have to go do something about that myself. I'm thinking of going back to the VA Hospital in DC for that.

I may ask them about Paget's treatment. I won't take them up on it if they still have that same idiot doctor I saw about it before. He didn't seem to want to prescribe anything for me unless it would cause really BAD side effects, but he was happier about prescribing something that would be lethal.

I can't really do anything about this over the weekend, so I'm going to forget about it over the weekend and do something about it on Monday. It's depressing me, and I want to forget it and have fun this weekend.

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There will be a new Doctor Who on BBC in America on Saturday evening! Plus the usual schedule for tonight and the weekend. Enjoy! I'm too distracted by other things to really pay attention to all this, although I set my DVR to record everything I want to see.

I hope your weekend is as fun as mine is going to be!

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Oh, I nearly forgot! I saw this wonderful knitting pattern today, and wanted to pass it along!

And, while I'm thinking of it, I am looking for a copy of a knitting stitch called net stitch. I own a copy of one of the Walker stitch library books (it's the charted book, in the uncharted section in the back) that has it in, but can't find the book (it's around here somewhere), and I was hoping that somebody out there, reading my blog might have a clue where to look. I don't really want to spend money on another copy of a book that's that expensive, especially when I already own it, and I was wondering if it was published elsewhere. I haven't been able to find it on the internet.

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Addition:

I found a photo of the new Majacraft wheel! It doesn't show much, but at least it's a photo.

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Another Addition:

When I found the photo, I put it up there, but I just now really looked at it. It looks like it's double drive! and it looks like you can change the ratios between the flyer and bobbin! instead of having one long drive wheel to drive both the flyer and bobbin, there appears to be a separate drive band for each! I've never seen such a thing on a spinning wheel before! I had a Schacht Matchless wheel, so I've tried double drive and I like it. It helps you spin yarn that is much more consistent. But the possibilities of having the flyer and bobbin driven separately, with choice of ratios is mind boggling! I haven't even seen one in person, and I'm already amazed and impressed!

A Day of Extremes

Everything so far today seems to be some kind of extreme, either good or bad.

When I went to the doctor the last time, she recommended that I talk to the people at NIH because they are doing some clinical trials for Paget's Disease, and I could get free treatment there. I tried to explain to her that without a car, this would entail nearly a whole day to get there and another day to get home, with probably some camping out overnight involved, and she didn't exactly say it was my problem, but didn't offer any solutions.

I've tried several times to get information about these mythical trials from their website, and there not only isn't any info, but they leave you with the impression that nobody in the whole building has a phone or an email address. After the fourth information gathering attempt today, I finally found an information phone number for them.

They don't do research (according to the woman I spoke to), but she referred me to the National Organization for Rare Disorders, who are also not giving out information about where to find doctors or trials. And they impressed on me how rare this disease is, and how few doctors actually treat it. If I can find a doctor, though, and can't afford the doctor or treatment, they may be able to help me with that. I guess that's a ray of light in the darkness.

So, I'm really bummed. Maybe I can try to find more information another time, but I'm so depressed about this that I just can't do it anymore today.

This is probably a bad time to do all this research, too, because I have an appointment with the ENT specialist tomorrow. That means probably no blog post tomorrow.

It also means that I'll get the results of the tests he gave me and the CT scan and find out if there is something they can do to help my right ear.

And now that the time approaches, I'm afraid they're going to say that there's nothing they can do, and I'll not only have no hearing in that ear, but have to put up with the pain, pressure and itching in that ear forever.

They said that there's almost no hearing problem that can't be helped with the right kind of hearing aid, but it would be nice to be able to hear something without an aid. For instance, if I sleep on my left side and there's a fire alarm or somebody knocking on the door, I'll never hear it.

So, tomorrow is probably going to include some news that is either really, really good, or really, really bad.

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The good news is that it looks like (if everything goes well) I may have some money to take with me to the Sheep and Wool Festival!

The people I'm doing the game art for liked what I did and thought they'd told me that, but they hadn't. There is a smidge of work yet to do, but they're willing to send me a cashier's check for the whole thing right now. I'm thrilled.

So, I'm still entering contests for an iPad so I can get a copy of the game I did the art for on it.

Holly bought a Sony Reader a few weeks ago, and she loves it! I love the idea of it, and would like something like that, but it and the Kindle are both limited to black and white, and I'm not really happy with that. I thought I'd like an iPad better, and I probably would, because it can do a lot of other things in addition to displaying books.

I came across another reader that I like a lot. It's the Barnes and Noble Nook. It costs about the same amount as the Kindle, so it's more expensive than the Sony Reader that Holly got, but a bit cheaper than the Sony Reader Touchscreen model. But the Nook has color and a touch screen, and can let you play games and also access and send email. So it's kind of an option between the Sony Reader and Kindle on the low end, and an iPad on the high end. And about the same price as a Kindle or a Sony Reader Touch.

Then again, there's the cost of the actual ebooks. Changes is about ten dollars in hardback on Amazon. I paid $13 for it including shipping from them, but they haven't even got it listed as available for Kindle. Holly bought the same book for her Sony, and I think the price was about the same as the hard back, but, of course, there was no shipping. It's available for the Nook for about the $13 I paid.

Possibly the best news in all of this is that there will be a Nook application out sometime this year for my phone! So, all I have to do is wait a bit, and I'll be able to buy the software for hardware that I already own! Oh, and the Nook and Kindle software is also available for iPad.

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My garment steamer, the thing that I use to block most of the stuff that I knit that needs blocking, is incontinent! Yesterday morning, when I got up, I discovered it had made a puddle on the floor.

I am thinking about fixing it, but I'm a little worried about fixing something, filling it with water and plugging it into the wall. I discovered that some steamers have drain plugs. Unfortunately, this one does not. I need a screwdriver with a long reach because the screws are recessed. I also want to give it a chance for some of the water to evaporate.

So I'll give a shot at fixing it later.

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Merlin, the TV series, is just now coming on SyFy, and will be on this evening, and I want to go watch it!

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I'm rambling, so I'll say goodbye for today, and try to put up a post on Thursday!

Have fun!

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Addition:

Here's something to cheer you up! It's a batch of photos of funny signs at zoos! this one is my favorite: