Getting my mind back after an anesthetic, even one of only 25 minutes duration was always going to be an interesting experience. One of my tests for regaining normal brain power is doing a crossword puzzle, and I have to confess that seven days after the fact, I’m still floundering in that respect. I successfully solved the Decoder Puzzle but am having a lot of trouble thinking up the required words for the Crossword Puzzle.

The eight letter US state had to be Arkansas in the end. Delaware just didn’t give me the right letters.

I remember my mother, Hendrika, complaining about a fuzzy brain after an operation in her eighties. It took her fully three weeks to remember, after knitting four or five false starts, how to knit socks. When she did finally remember the pattern, she never knitted anything else apart from 10 cm squares in the last three years of her life.

A few of Hendrika’s grandkids wearing her socks. She knitted about a thousand pairs in her later eighties, donating them to charitable groups after the family were supplied.

It has been suggested that as eldest daughter it would be fitting that I undertook that same project, but I’m afraid I might’ve built up a bit of steam and blown that suggestion out of the water. Seriously? I love knitting, but don’t have my mother’s fortitude to be knitting the same pattern over and over, and for years on end producing two or three pairs a week.

In fact, I like to invent patterns as I go. I started on a vest with the new yarn. Knitted a few experimental squares but decided in the end to go with diamonds. More on that project in a post.