The Other Half of the World

I got my hearing aids on Wednesday of last week. They're very small and hard to see, but it definitely takes a little while to get used to having something in my ears all the time. I told Mr. T that taking them off in the evening was like taking off my bra at the end of the day, but he couldn't relate.

Wow, I had no idea just how much I was missing! I did not know that when I pressed the button on my key fob to lock my car, it beeps! Now I tell the boys to turn the television down, instead of asking them to turn it up!

The aids also have this neat little program that allows me to dampen out background noise if I'm in a crowded place. I press a little button and the background noise is much lower, but speech isn't affected. So when we're at a crowded restaurant or basketball game, I can hear people who aren't right next to me. I feel so much more engaged in what's going on around me. I think the weirdest part is hearing myself talk -- I hear myself in my head as normal, but then I hear an amplified me as well, kind of echoey.

It really is like a whole other half of the world appeared out of nowhere. I love it, but part of me feels really sad that I didn't do this earlier, or that it wasn't done FOR me when I was a kid. Water, bridge, sigh.

One of the events this weekend where the aids were a great boon was the bike team's annual awards banquet. Mr. T is president of the team this year, and Sr. Jr. received two awards, even though he is technically no longer a team member. He won the Junior Racer of the Year award and the Novice Cyclocross Racer of the Year award. I think he will miss racing with this team, even though he will love the new one. The new team is all kids under 19 years old. It's nice that he will have kids his age who are as passionate about bike racing as he is, but I loved that all the guys on the old team took him under their wings and mentored him. They were a great bunch of adult male role models for him.

As usual, not a lot of knitting or spinning time, but things progress in between all the other things that go on.

The handspun sweater marches slowly downward. I'm a little concerned that the armholes might be too small, but no one who has knit this pattern before has complained about that, so I'll just have faith.



As I work on this handspun sweater, I'm spinning yarn for another one. I'm not quite sure yet what I'll knit. As I was spinning the second of the two skeins I've finished so far, I was concerned that it was not going to match very well with the first, which would give me quite th Frankensweater. After I plied it up and skeined it, I was less worried. Nonetheless, I may spin up some plain white yarn in case I want to break up the colors a bit by knitting a striped sweater. Even that has me concerned, since I'm not sure that striping this yarn with white yarn is the best way to go. I'll figure it out at some point, I'm sure.

Here are the skeins so far (the fiber is from Southern Cross Fibre, a shetland wool in a colorway called Timberwolf):


And here they are with a swatch I knit from a test skein:


It's very different than the stuff I usually knit for myself. Outside my color safety zones and my patterning safety zones. But I kind of like it. We'll see how it turns out. I hope I don't hate it, because knitting a handknit sweater takes a lot of work!