Opposable thumb

There's something wrong with my right thumb, which I have self-diagnosed with the help of the internet as trigger thumb. The diagnosis seems pretty sound; I've got all the symptoms. It seems the worst in the middle of the night, when waking up and flexing my thumb makes me gasp with pain, but that may just be because it is the middle of the night, when most everything seems more dire, and there aren't any other distractions.

By morning, it doesn't seem too bad, but it gets progressively worse during the day. Yesterday it was awful, but it's a little better today. Last weekend it didn't bother me much at all. It must be a repetitive stress-type injury, and it must be mouse-related; I don't exactly know how to improve that situation.

Hm. I just realized that with the desktop computer not working at home, I'm using the laptop exclusively, and with the trackpad, and not having to hold or move a mouse, I'm only using my thumb for the spacebar. Last week when I was complaining, Bob said, "Well, what do you use your thumb for anyway? The spacebar? Just use your left one, you only need one."

I've discovered that thumbs are pretty important. Shaking hands, when I met some new clients last week, was very painful. Writing is sometimes difficult. Dave suggested I take a pain pill yesterday, which I somehow always forget -- I only think to take them when I have a headache, for some reason. I had a bottle of Advil in my purse, but it had one of those caps that you have to push down and turn, and I couldn't open it and had to take it in for him to open. In my defense, it was a pretty tight lid, and he had a little trouble with it, too.

Any kind of jar is pretty much impossible. I've found that I sometimes have to use my right hand to change gears in the car when it's particularly bad--thankfully, I don't drive a stick shift. (And just to be clear, it usually only comes up when I'm either putting the car in park to, well, park, or putting it in drive to pull out of a parking space, it's not like I'm shifting while I'm driving.)

I have an appointment with a hand specialist on Tuesday, so hopefully she'll have some advice for me.

New sets of prayers beads in the shop.

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Commitment

Bob was upstairs this morning getting ready for work, and I was in the kitchen making his lunch -- a ham sandwich on rye bread, Fritos, and a little container of pineapple chunks and mandarin oranges. When he came downstairs to get coffee, he said, "I read your journal entry. Sabrina wants to know what you've been eating." I laughed, and said yeah, I had seen that. He said, "I always enjoy the ones about what's in your purse." I'm pretty sure that was sarcasm, although he said not.

As far as what I've been eating, for lunch I've been taking a sandwich--Gouda or Cheddar cheese on rye bread with Dijon mustard--and potato chips (the Target brand (Archer Farms?) ones, the thicker-cut, crunchy kind. Sometimes I just want something that's really normal. Another favorite is "Vigo" brand saffron (yellow) rice with green onions olives. My friend Anna at work told me about that, and she also gave me a recipe for something else I've been eating lately--a black bean salad/dip that is similar to recipes for "Texas caviar" (black beans, vinaigrette, tomatoes and onions) with tortilla chips.

And as far as what's in my purse, well, maybe it's the purse itself that's a little more interesting. This summer I've been carrying a Vera Bradley tote bag, and using my matching accessories. I don't usually do the "matching" thing, but with Vera Bradley things, it seems to work.

"My" pattern is Emily. I remember buying my first bag several years ago with some birthday money, and thinking a long time before I chose a pattern. I picked "Emily" because I thought it was pretty classic, and would go with a lot of things, particularly jeans, given that it's a lovely medium blue, with red. I also liked the lining fabric, which is a very pretty red, blue, and yellow plaid. The one I bought was the "Miller" bag -- a medium-size tote bag with a zipper, long straps and inside pockets.

Over the next couple of years, I bought a few more pieces--a smaller bag ("Betsy") that is very similar to the Miller bag, just smaller, and an open tote bag ("Toggle Tote"), which I'm currently using to carry my Franklin Planner, handily combining two obsessions into one.

Then, of course, the pattern was discontinued.

Up until then I'd never really been a particular Vera Bradley fan or collector. I liked the bags, I thought they were exceptionally well made, and for whatever reason I just really liked them a lot. The Vera Bradley company is pretty smart. They retire the fabric patterns every couple of years or so, so if you start buying a particular pattern and want more pieces, you'd better buy them, because they won't be available forever. I hadn't bought any of the accessory items, but once I knew the pattern was discontinued, I started paying attention, seeing which things I wanted to own before they disappeared.

There's always eBay, though, of course. So over the last year or so I've been buying accessories--a wallet, cosmetic bags, an eyeglass case, and a coin purse. I also have a couple of "wristlets" in the two different sizes, one of which I use as a case for my digital camera, and another that I use to hold knitting odds and ends when I carry the toggle tote as a knitting bag. I'd love to have a cellphone case, but unfortunately, they discontinued the Emily pattern before they started making that piece, so there won't be an Emily cell phone case.

I purchased a laptop bag on eBay, but decided that it was too expensive to justify for the amount of good I would get out of it, so I put it back on eBay and resold it. I never did buy any of the huge luggage-type bags or totes, and I kind of wish I had, but it's too late now.

The only things I seem to find now on eBay are wallets, and I don't buy used stuff, so unless someone has a secret cache somewhere, I think I have all I'm going to get. My bags are still in really good shape--even though they're cotton, they seem to last a long time, and I take good care of them, being sure not to get them wet or dirty, or anything like that. But they won't last forever. And then what? I would have to choose another pattern, and I'm just not ready for that. It seems like a big commitment--oh, Bob will laugh at that, I'm sure, although I just remembered that he has a favorite camo pattern, and anytime he buys a new piece of camo clothing or accessory, it has to be that pattern, and you just don't mix and match unless you absolutely can't help it. So he should understand.

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Thursday, a terribly unoriginal title

I put three sets of prayer beads up on my Etsy shop just now. There will be more posted once I photograph them, write up the descriptions, and get them up there.

I'm having computer issues -- my eMac has apparently bit the dust, so I'm working on the laptop. Not to go into any great detail, I can't connect to our wifi network with the wireless card in the laptop, so right now I'm tethered to the eMac's ethernet cord with the laptop balanced on my knees. So not terribly comfortable. But usable, just barely.

But I wanted to let you know they were there -- several people asked me to let them know when I had posted some. If you wanted some and missed out, don't worry, there will be more.

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Revelation

I had a bit of a revelation just now. I mentioned awhile back that I've been working on prayer beads. I've made several sets, and I ordered some beads through the mail last week so that I could make more. But I'd been having trouble ending them -- if you don't make jewelry, this may not make sense, but the way that you keep strands of beads from coming apart is to use what's known as a crimp bead.

A crimp bead is a somewhat soft metal bead, either a round bead or a tube, and the theory is that you attach whatever you're going to attach, a bracelet fastener, say, put on a crimp bead, then smash the crimp bead so that it holds the wires in place. There's a special tool called a crimping tool, and you're supposed to use one part of the tool to crush the bead, then another part of it to fold the crushed bead in on itself so it becomes round rather than flat.

In the past, although I had the tool, I've just smashed the crimp beads with needlenose pliers. I knew they didn't look as good as they could, but I just wasn't very interested in learning how to do it differently. Then, a week or so ago, I got my daily email from Beading Daily (I'd link to the article itself, but you have to be a subscriber), and in it was a tutorial on using the crimping tool (turns out the procedure in the article was wrong, but in any event, it got me interested).

The article said:

I'll admit, when I first started beading I didn't want to buy yet another tool, especially if it was just for one purpose. So I just used chain-nose pliers and squished the crimps shut. I got so much razzing from my friends about it! My jewelry fell apart and my, oh, my . . . those unsightly little silver squares. I now know that using crimping pliers is the classiest way to finish this type of strung jewelry and certainly one of the most secure.

I practiced and practiced, and did it right a couple of times, but most of the time, I would break the bead trying to do the second step. I finally thought, well, I'll give it a try, and I went ahead and tried it with some of my prayer bead strings. When I made my first ones, I started with the tail, put on the decorative beads, then strung a crimp bead, then strung the circlet, passed the wire back through the crimp bead, and invariably broke it when I crimped it.

And there was no way back--the crimp had to be where it was, and it was right in the middle of all of the beads, so I had to start over. After stringing most of them two and three times, I got a few of the crimps to work, but it was oh, so aggravating.

Then just now I read this article, by Kimberly Winston, who wrote Bead One, Pray Too, which I have, and have read, but obviously not closely enough.

What she says to do is string the circlet, then bring the two ends of the wires together and string the "tail," and put the crimp bead right before the terminating bead, then pass the wire back up through the crimp. So -- this is the revelation -- if the crimp breaks, you would only have to remove one bead to fix it. And it would be less weight on the crimp, too. If I'd only read that sooner . . .

I'll talk more about these, and get them up in the Etsy shop later in the week, probably, after I fix the crimps. ;)

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Not really an explanation

Sometimes, when I write here, I'm able to pretend that no one else is reading this, that I'm just basically doing it for myself, as I've always said. I'm able to do that most of the time. But several things lately have made me question that, and I think I need to step back a little.

I've been doing this for about 13 years, and over the years my postings have become fewer and fewer. That's due to a lot of different reasons -- I'm busier than I used to be, for one thing, and for another, way back when I started, the internet was a lot smaller, and there weren't that many people out there who had access to it, and even fewer people that I actually knew.

I've always been really careful about what I say, careful not to mention names or talk about things that are too personal, either to me or to other people. Sometimes that gets really hard, both hard to do and hard on me emotionally. But there's really no alternative. It puts me in a really awkward position. I know that people have wondered why I'm not writing more, and most of the time it's just that I don't really have much to say (imagine that!) or that I just haven't had time or, if I have had time, I just couldn't get motivated, or had something I would rather do.

Anyway, a few things have happened lately that have made me question what I do here; I don't intend to stop writing altogether but I'm thinking that, at least for awhile, until I figure some things out, what I write here is going to be less personal. I know that's not really much of an explanation, but it's the best I can do.

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