A plate, felted knitting, ONSTIM/migraines, and profanity in YA lit (yeah, for a person who sleeps all the time, I've got a lot going on in my head.)

I took 9-year-old Amy and her friend to the paint-your-own pottery place last week, and made this masterpiece.  I borrowed the saying from an expensive mirror I saw at a store.  (Does that count as plagiarism?  I hope not.)  I painted splotches of rainbow colors on the plate, covered them in a coat of blue, and then scratched the design in the wet blue paint.  It looks like I should have added another layer of blue, but I'm not sure if the scratching technique would have worked through a dry layer of paint.  I guess it looks cool enough as-is, though.  And I do love that saying, and send thanks through the ether to whoever came up with it.

I've also started knitting my felted laptop sleeve.  It took me two tries to get my practice swatches to felt (by washing the knitted wool in hot water.)  My 6"x6" square

shrunk to 5"x5", which means I have to knit the sleeve that percentage bigger than the laptop and then hope for the best.  Pictured are my felted swatches, and the bottom of the laptop sleeve, with the front and back spread out a bit and the left and right edges starting to build.  

Other than that, I've been getting a lot of sleep.  I've had a bad migraine this week, thanks to letting my rechargeable ONSTIM battery die as sort of an experiment.  It proved to me that yes, my ONSTIM IS doing its job.  My migraines have been less severe lately, even though they I still have them every day.  Even though I only left the ONSTIM off for a few hours, it's taking me days to recover.  I won't try that stupidity again.  Thank you, Medtronic, for your wonderful device.  

Work on Spinning Coins is slow (not enough brain cells to be creative lately), but I have started some preliminary research on the Reformation in France for a sequel.    Oh, and I renamed a fairly major character in Book 1 with a name I found while doing the research for Book 2.  It's going to be an adjustment for me, because I know and love him as Oscar, but Oscar is now Josse.  

My biggest struggle at this point is over the use of profanity in Book 1.  Polly, my atheist character, most certainly does use the occasional four-letter word.  So far I've limited her to what you could hear on network TV.  But there's situation in the story where even I, a staunch non-swearer, might be tempted to use a much stronger epithet.  A "weaker" word doesn't get the emotion across in the same way.  I don't want to alienate or offend any potential audience, though, and I've been assured that using this word would do just that.  Comments on this issue are most welcome.  

Who Am I?

Who am I?  I'm a wife and mom, daughter and granddaughter, sister and aunt.  I'm a writer and a reader, and a knitter.  I'm also a migraineur - a chronic migraine sufferer.  And it's my migraineurship (I guess I made that word up) which, for ill or good, is defining my life these days.  But I don't want my identity to be solely, "Migraine Sufferer."

I started knitting as a way of making myself be productive instead of just laying around feeling sorry for myself.  I could (can) no longer work as a computer scientist.  I often can't think straight at all, between the pain and the meds.  But I don't have to think straight to knit.  I just have to knit.  Purl.  Knit.  Purl.  And I have to say I've made some beautiful things in this year of pain.

Same with the writing.  I can't drive myself to work, spend eight hours at a job which requires logic and attention, and then drive myself home -  but I can spend a few hours here and a few hours there writing.  At home, on my laptop, when I have a few blessed lucid hours straight.  It's taking a long time (over a year already) but my YA alternate-reality time-travel novel, Spinning Coins, is almost done.  I can go weeks or even months at a time without adding a chapter, but it's always there waiting for me.  Unlike my computer science job, where, oddly, they needed me there regularly.

I do have hopes of ending this seemingly-endless migraine abyss.  I already have an ONSTIM (Occipital Nerve Stimulation for the Treatment of Intractable Migraines) which gives me what lucid hours I have.  The ONSTIM is basically electrodes in my head which interrupt the pain signals between my occipital nerve and my brain.   (The rechargeable battery pack is in my left buttock; my nine-year-old is amused when I "can't get a signal out of my butt" to recharge it.)

And soon I'll be having surgery to fix my PFO (Patent Foramen Ovale), a tiny hole between the top two chambers of my heart.  PFOs have recently been linked to chronic migraines, since unfiltered blood can pass to the brain.   

In the meantime, I continue to try every migraine med known to man, and may go for Botox injections for other nerves soon, too.