Ten things about me

This is a Knitting and Crochet Blog Week Post

Talking about yourself.  This is not always the easiest thing to do, nè, because although there might be a million things to say, what do you actually say? So I'll try and go with the first ten random things that pops into my head. 

1. 

I love my laugh/life lines.  (I'm lucky to not have frown lines :-) . I thinks it adds so much character to one's face, and therefore I will never try to peel it, fill it, botox it. 

2. 

I have ocular myasthenia gravis (which is why I will never botox).  With MG, your overactive immune system blocks the messages from your nerves to the muscles, preventing them from doing their work - I walked with droopy eyelids for a couple of months and my face felt half frozen.  Why would you want to do that to yourself with an injection?

I thank God for my Mestinon pills that I carry with me, and I am even more thankful that I haven't had to use it for 5 yrs now. 

3. 

I train hard.  Because of MG, I want to be strong.  I recently started with CrossFit and I'm growing to like it, and I'm recovering from this morning's bike ride (a new thing :-)

Tut tut, now don't laugh, that's me learning to do a dead lift. Or something. 

4. 

I twirled around a pole.

Not really!  I did Pole Conditioning for 18 months, and that was some of the hardest training I ever did. I have so much respect for anyone who can lift herself up into an invert and then flag (horisontal), what not to say the various methods of climbing, standing, sitting, sliding - sometimes all of this on a spinning pole, and not falling on you head.   It took me a month just to get my feet off the floor for an arm hold.

I trained with these girls.  They're good!

A benefit of Pole Conditioning is Really Strong Arms and Shoulders, because you work on a upright pole (static and spinning), parallel bars and high bar, and the added benefit of that is...stronger crochet arms, elbows and wrists!  It fixed my sore-ish elbow in no time.

Knees to elbow?  Bring it on. 

5. 

I can do artificial insemination on cows.  

(Many moons ago I did a BSc Agric in Animal Husbandry and Plant Production)
(That is why I can also eat pizza while doing in vitro digestibility studies ;-)

6. 

In my life-before-being-a-stay-at-home-mom, I was a professional ecologist. 

After an Honours in Rural development and MSc Agric in Plant Production, I did environmental impact assessments for various types of developments in rural Limpopo. 

I saw some of the most beautiful landscapes in South Africa, encountered women who still walk around bare-breasted, kids got scared of me because I was the first white female they had ever seen, I worked in a village where on the same day a lion was killed (escaped from Kruger Park), I had to stand on top of my bakkie to try and get a mobile signal so I could call for help when getting stuck in deep sand and learnt to drive really fast and really well on gravel roads.

One of my first site visits, Mamvuka village, rural Venda. 

7. 

I fantasise about doing off-road rally driving 

(see nr.6)

I went there.  See, I can do it :-D

8.

I love travel but hate flying.
I've been so fortunate to have visited Northern America, Europe, Australia, Asia/Middle-East, and of course live in Africa.  I would love to see parts of South America, but Antarctica...best leave it clean and untouched by tourists. 

Love the views

9. 

I was named after my grandfather Charl with the second name of Charlé.
(Didn't like it when I was younger,  but now I do.)

(And now I'm really interested in genealogy and slowly researching the unknowns in my family history).

My grandfather Charl, oupa Sakkie.

10. 

I love love love great coffee.  To the point that I would rather have tea if I'm not sure of the way a cappuccino is prepared.  I buy freshly roasted beans at a local roastery and also get my cappo there most mornings.
That is my vice.  

This at my old favourite, Pure Café

That is also where I'm going now, before picking up boys from school :-D

That's it, ten!

(And on the hooky side, the current PHD is a cowl for school.  Then another one!)

To see other blog posts on this topics,  search 6KCBWDAY2

Done! The Snowflake Scarf

And the Snowflake Scarf is finished!

(I promise it is not glow-in-the-dark green...but Blogger insists on uploading my perfectly normal aqua-teal-tiffany blue scarf  with these greenish highlights).

The idea was to make up a scarf with different types of snowflakes, to resemble MG as the "snowflake disease", that is - each and every person would differ in the presentation of their symptoms.  I ended up using  three snowflakes patterns, after realising that I just do not have the patience to figure out how to make all these different motifs fit together in a cowl.  So I hooked three separate strands, one per pattern, where I joined the snowflakes as I went along, and then I threw my hands in the air as I could not decided what to do next.  

(Okay, Blogger is going crazy)

I took it along to our Crochet-in Public event where I hoped to get good advice

(which, of course, I did).

A very good idea was to pre-join all the motifs with stitch markers, and I literally strung it around this cushion to keep everything in its place, with no twisting of the strands.  I positioned the snowflakes so that each loose point of the middle row flakes could join with two joined "arms" of the snowflake below or above.  Then starting from a random point, I literally hooked a chain, linking up and down between the nearest points, trying to balance it as equally as possible. 

(This is the absolute nearest to freefrom that I will ever get)

And then it worked!

I'm thinking of giving this one away at a MG group, and do another one, this time in a brilliant bamboo by One of a Kind yarns, in the same lovely colour.  Might make four or three strands then, but for now, I'm happy :-)

(Isn't it bloody difficult to take a selfie when you need to 'model' something? Eeeek, akward.)

Patterns used:

Lucy Croft's Frosted Flurry - Simply Crochet vol 13

Tuula Maaria's 2-row snowflake

Red Heart's Snowflake Ornament (with a slight change in the 2nd row)

Do you have a medical issue and has crochet helped you in any way?

Head over to Kathryn's blog to complete her survey:

I'm a little snowflake

For the month of June, this will be my Facebook Cover Photo:

I am also a snowflake.  

Not one of us look the same, our symptoms vary, like snowflakes!

I was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis in 2009, after arriving on a visit to Ireland, and struggling to keep my eyes open the next day.  And then I got double vision...45º.  Try driving while closing one eye at a time! For the next two months, I juggled and struggled and fought with doctors, until a neurologist confirmed what a GP wouldn't test for.  He immediately offered me a thymectomy, which basically boils down to cracking your sternum open and cutting your thymus gland out.

Eeh...no.  

That's me in orange.  See the lazy eyelids?  Looks like botox flopped.

I made all the right noises, took my script for meds, and made for my car.  I started Googling other neuros while driving (see, I had some background knowledge - my sis was diagnosed with ocular MG the year before, and she saw a world leader in the field, so I remembered hat he said).

My second opinion  agreed that a thymectomy was by far not the right thing for me, confirmed the script, and a couple of months later my eyelids had their life back and my left cheek did not freeze on me out of the blue.  

Five years later I am off meds, (but I always keep some with me, in a nifty little pill holder).  I know to pace myself when training, get enough K and Mn with all the other vitamins and paraphernalia, take immune boosters throughout the year and avoid and manage stress at any cost.  

What I am also doing this month, is to crochet a snowflake cowl, in the above blues.  I'm trying out a few snowflake patterns, and have yet to come up with a plan on joining these.

Here's my yarn:

I Love Yarn's Imagine

And here's my first snowflake:

...with some birthday cake at I Love Yarn 'headquarters'.

It's officially winter in South Africa and it's snowing on the southern mountains.

Myasthenia gravis - a chronic autoimmune neuromuscular disease characterized by varying degrees of weakness of the skeletal (voluntary) muscles of the body. The name myasthenia gravis, which is Latin and Greek in origin, literally means "grave muscle weakness."

It is caused by a defect in the transmission of nerve impulses to muscles. It occurs when normal communication between the nerve and muscle is interrupted at the neuromuscular junction—the place where nerve cells connect with the muscles they control. Normally when impulses travel down the nerve, the nerve endings release a neurotransmitter substance called acetylcholine. Acetylcholine travels from the neuromuscular junction and binds to acetylcholine receptors which are activated and generate a muscle contraction.

In myasthenia gravis, antibodies block, alter, or destroy the receptors for acetylcholine at the neuromuscular junction, which prevents the muscle contraction from occurring. These antibodies are produced by the body's own immune system. Myasthenia gravis is an autoimmune disease because the immune system—which normally protects the body from foreign organisms—mistakenly attacks itself.

- National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke -