So totally love it Thursday

It was foggy in North Carolina today. Like, the kind of foggy where I kept missing my exits because I couldn't see the signs foggy. There was no way the flying tin can was going up in that, and if it was, there was abso-fucking-loutely no way I was going to go up in it. I get scared when the FTC flies through a solitary fluffy cloud. It's a ruddy tin can! The size of my car! That's somehow supposed to stay up in the damn air a mile above the earth! ACK!

So I drove to the coast. Because I was on walk-ins last week, so couldn't go, and then called in dead the previous two weeks when I had the plague, and then there was Thanksgiving in there somewhere...so, it's been a while. I figured it was worth making the trip, and when I finally got to the group room where we have morning team (I was a little late and then blustered past them "Hi-I'm-here-3-hours-in-the-car-gotta-pee!") they seemed happy to see me. I went out with the peer counselor, and we saw three patients clients consumers individuals people we serve (or whatever the hell we're supposed to call them now). The first one and the third one were relatively quick. The second woman we saw...wow, the whole thing broke my heart. So we walk up to this double-wide with six cats milling around our feet, gingerly step over the dead roach on the front porch, and have to knock four or five times before she actually answers. And she opens the door and is like, "I hurt myself." Which, in my world, usually means "I cut" or "I tried to kill myself." But, no, she'd fallen. Okay. And then she holds out her arm, and there's this giant bruise above the elbow...and, let's just say, from her elbow to her shoulder was not a straight line, as I imagine it was yesterday morning. So I look at this, as I'm walking through the door behind the PC, and said, "Hi, I'm Dr. Kate. You need to get to a hospital. How are we going to do that?"

We ended up calling an ambulance. We probably could've put her in our car and taken her, but I'll be damned if I was going to accept the liability of this otherwise medically fragile woman falling again or having any of her chronic issues kick up on the way there. Plus, they have things like pulse oxymeters and accuchecks and oxygen and arm splints on the bus. But while we waited, I sat and talked to her, got my exam in. We sat, in her filthy kitchen. With bugs crawling up the wall. And years of nicotine and tobacco smoke staining the ceiling tiles. Half the floor tiles were up, which gave her plenty to trip over. She herself was greasy-haired, dirt caked in the beds of her fingernails, in a stained t-shirt that was two sizes too small. She was dirtier than most homeless people I know. Poor sick old lady. And her husband shows up at one point, and says, "her damn arm ain't broke." The paramedic says, "Sir? Have you seen it?"

Alls I can say is...bless his heart....

But we were done by 2ish and so I hit the road, got some lunch, and before I truly pointed the wagons west, I stopped at my favorite not-so-local yarn store. And I made one of the coolest yarn finds to date.

Check this out.

I thought it was a scarf. But, no! It's basically sock yarn, knitted into a big ol' rectangle, with a provisional bind off. They call it Flat Feet. The idea is, you knit straight from the edge of the fabric, unraveling as you go. So no winding, no ball to mess with, no tangles, no problem! You can even cut it in the middle (there's another bit of provisional thread) and do two socks at once!

Here's a close-up of the hand-dyed-ness.

Seriously cool. I can't wait to see how they knit up. If, you know, I didn't already have three pair of gift socks on the needles...

Oh, but since we're talking about socks, check out this new and oddly addictive web-based game, Sock and Awe, in which you get to hurl shoes at George W. Bush's head.

Only in America, my friends. Only in America.