Apparently wearing my Docs yesterday was a bad choice – I have lace-up boots with a high heel, and the heel didn’t combine well with my sore legs from doing squats Saturday. The soreness is much better today, fortunately, because I need to erg tonight (I did a short erg piece Sunday, but don’t think it helped much).
I also finished sewing the picot hem and weaving in ends on my socks yesterday. I think I will knit socks for my incipient nephew and a lace headband for his sister next. I also want to start fingerless gloves for me; I’m going to write out a pattern for the socks I just finished, to post on Ravelry (free). Someone suggested reversing the stitch pattern on the left sock; I don’t really feel like knitting a third one, but I do need to test-knit the reversed pattern to make sure I get it right and the gloves will let me do that while still making something new. (I could test a swatch in the round, but gloves are more useful.) I just have to decide now whether I want recruit test-knitters for the whole pattern.
Is it bad that I have six patterns in my mental want-to-do-NOW list? There’s the baby socks, little-girl headband, fingerless gloves, socks for Mom, socks for MIL, lightweight sweater for me (either Whisper Cardigan in laceweight from Spritely Goods or Cecchetti in Wollmeise.) There’s a February deadline for the first two and one of Mother’s Day for the two pair of adult socks.
In addition to the glut of projects, with Ted away I’ve got a glut of food. On Saturday I took a couple of chicken breasts out and put them in the fridge to that. I also bought some stir-fry veggies (a pre-sorted package so that I don’t have weeks’ worth of veggies to spoil) as well as grape tomatoes and mozzarella for a salad. On Sunday I decided to take advantage of a free day to make a pot of chili. My solution was to eat the chili Sunday night, broil all the chicken and stir-fry the veggies last night, eat one piece of chicken and freeze the other, eat all the veggies (surprisingly), and plan to eat the chili tonight and Thursday. I have a birthday celebration to go to Wednesday night. Maybe if it doesn’t involve much food I can eat the tomato salad then.
OK, so that was the inconsequential chatter, now for the embarassing part (because I do want to record this). Ted’s away, so I’m driving myself to work. I think I’ve figured out something: I’m still not quite sure about the initial episode where a rolling wave of dizziness came over me unexpectedly while driving to work, but I think I understand the feeling of incipient dizziness I’ve had while driving since then. For most of my life, my reaction to nervousness been in my gut. (I am the only pilot I know who preflights a plane, then ducks back in the FBO for a final bathroom break – though that was as much about nervousness at no bathrooms for the next couple of hours, as about nervousness at the actual flying.) But I seem to have developed a new reaction to nerves: my breathing pattern gets erratic. Then either I breath too fast or I notice the problem and take deep breaths to fix it. Either way it results in hyperventilation and wooziness. I’ve begun trying to breathe more normally in those cases but it’s difficult, because when you are breathing normally you don’t notice the pattern and when you do, you no longer know what “normal” is. So I’ve begun to focus more on breathing *out* than *in*, on the theory that I actually need less air in than I think I do and CO2 is really the culprit. Also, I’ve begun trying some half-assed DIY cognitive therapy: I keep trying to focus on the thought that driving is fun! After all, lots of people really do like it. So I think about the fun side of feeling in control, of the good feeling being able to hold the line on the road efficiently as it curves and being able to go as fast as I want. (I need to be careful of that one; getting a ticket would be counterproductive!) It seems to be working OK so far; I noticed that this morning I wasn’t having to watch my breathing and my heart wasn’t racing – it did a tiny bit yesterday. It helps that the car we have now handles reasonably nicely (we turned ours in when we went to the US and picked up a new rental car. It even seems to feel a bit familiar; it’s a Ford Focus, and my very first car was an Escort GT that I drove from 1989 through 1996. It’s what passes as a solid car, for here; you feel like there’s a lot of car around you. Tomorrow I have a birthday gathering to go to – just barely off the road I drive to go home, but it’s one I haven’t driven on before though I have biked it. That will be a little practice for Friday when I have an off-site meeting that I actually need to do some highway driving for. At least it won’t be a Taiwanese highway: less chaotic traffic and I won’t be driving through the sky through multiple levels of road. I think that weird perspective contributed a little to the dizziness.