Knitting by Blind Faith

This week has been about like last weekend. Time just keeps flying by.

RAM and I have been working some long hours this week. On Tuesday, I was at work at 7:00 A.M., worked a full day, came home, took care of the girls, and dropped in to Knit Night to say hi to the girls before jetting off with RAM to take our friend, S., to Sam’s Club to pick out a battery backup for her computer system. We got home at 9:00 that night and ended up bringing home takeout because we were too exhausted to fix dinner.

We both went in early again yesterday, and RAM was supposed to work until 10:00 last night, but he came home for dinner and surprised me. He folded the laundry while I whipped up dinner (isn’t he a sweetheart???), and we had just enough time to eat before he made the 17 mile commute back to work, and I met I. for our bridge walk. I had planned to eat dinner alone, so this was a really nice surprise.

When I came back from the bridge walk, I finished cleaning up the kitchen. That gave me about an hour for knitting before I took the girls out for their last walk of the night, prepped for the morning, and flopped into bed. Needless to say, I haven’t made as much progress on the diagonal baby blanket this week as I would have liked, and this weekend doesn’t look promising.

RAM and I are both amateur radio operators, so we will be helping to provide communications for our local March of Dimes walk-a-thon this Saturday. The March for Babies raises money to help all babies get a healthy start in life. I am a premie who got off to a pretty shaky start, so this is especially important to me.

I plan to bring my knitting, but I’m not sure how much I will get done. If I work at one of the water stations or in a mobile vehicle following the walkers, I should be able to combine some knitting time with my communications duties. However, if I am net control (like base command), which I usually am, the knitting will have to wait.

After the walk-a-thon, I am going over to S.’s house. She wants to learn how to knit. I have never taught a blind person to knit before, so this poses an interesting challenge, which I am immensely eager to tackle. I am working on teaching strategies in my head, since traditional ones may not be the most effective. It will be hard for her to tell what I’m doing by feeling my hands, and I won’t be able to touch her hands to see if she’s getting it right without distracting her, since she is a new knitter. On the other hand, having struggled to learn myself, I’m hoping to use that experience to help her avoid some of the struggles I faced as a new knitter.

Mom, Dad, I love you, and I promise that calling you really is on my to-do list!