Day 4 -- No Knitting -- The Rules -- The Eye Pillow

AAAHHH.

Hopefully this post will not be quite as boring as it admittedly sounds. My challenge is to make a post without any mousing at all, due to my hand injury. Um, and without any knitting progress at all, also due to my hand injury. Sad to say, these things mean - no uploaded photos of my own. I am forcing myself not to knit until I recover from January's mouse-inflicted hand injury.

Rule #1 -- Must. Not. Knit. This rule applies on any day where I was not symptom-free on the previous day. The insidious thing about over-use injuries like my tendinitis is that they creep up on you, and often there is a delay between injury and onset of symptoms. Knitting can cause a relapse, and I might not know until the next day. And despite avoiding the mouse for the most part for a couple of weeks now, I am still feeling the symptoms. Some of the worst symptoms occurred after I had stopped mousing much. However, I think I am now improving slowly.


Rule #2 -- Must. Not. Mouse. I am a telecommuter. The office had major technical problems in January, for weeks on end. My cable connection died and had to be replaced. My laptop may have had a virus, and was replaced. Some sort of perfect storm, or convergence. It sucked, big time. The temporary replacement laptop didn't fit the docking station that lets me use a regular keyboard and monitor. So for a couple of weeks I had to connect the laptop over the internet to the office computer to download my documents into emails, open the emails on DH's desktop computer and work on them there. With his mouse.

I should have known that this might re-injure me. Should have taken more care as time went on and the situation was not remedied. Should have taken the trouble to somehow make the situation better ergonomically. Shoulda, shoulda, shoulda. But I didn't. It was a time of great stress -- for days we had to make lame-sounding excuses to our clients about why we couldn't get their work done, without making it sound as though it was our fault in any way. And when I finally got the laptop-without-docking station, it seemed like great progress -- I could actually connect to the office again. Happy day! So with trying to catch up on all the work that the clients were clamoring for, ergonomics went by the board. Bad telecommuter. And I am suffering for it.

Rule #2 applies pretty much like Rule #1 -- no mousing on a day where I had symptoms the day before. The only way that I know how to store, do my lame-ass editing and upload photos is to use a program on DH's computer. Ergo (LOL), no photo uploads.

However! Instead of whining any more, I can show you something else that I made. Or at least a photo of how it is used.

I have a silk eye pillow filled with flax seed, much like the one way back there at the top of the post (I sure have blathered a lot), which is available here.

If you have never tried one of these, well -- you are really missing something. When I am trying to go to sleep, it is so relaxing to have this on. Something about the complete darkness and the weight of it. It was invaluable a few years back when I was in the hospital after my appendectomy (and yes, it was an emergency -- everyone asks that. There is pretty much no other kind, people). It never really gets dark in a hospital room. My eye pillow was my friend.

DD, who is slow to get to sleep, took mine and wouldn't give it back. Aargh! The outrage! What to do? I use mine most every night. It occurred to me that I did not need to hunt it down in her room and re-take it by force, since it would be a snap to make another.

There is an extremely detailed set of instructions here, and I am sure many other places on the web, also. But it doesn't come down to anything more than making a small fabric pouch (each of ours is 4" x 8") and filling it with flax, rice, lentils or such, adding lavender if you like (I prefer 9 oz. of unscented flax, cuz that's what my original weighed, flax is what I had on hand, and I'm not very fond of scented products). In our fabric stash we had some nice stretchy fabric and the resulting eye pillows resemble those squishy "Koosh" pillows you see in airports and in bed and bath places.

So now between myself and DD we have three eye pillows, the original and two new ones. The new ones were made completely from materials on hand. And I don't have to arm-wrestle DD (she'd probably win) for my eye pillow.