it'll catch up with you!

geez, i haven't posted in forever!  well, it's been a heck of a month.  i don't usually post about personal stuff, but last month my fella had a heart attack!  he's only 42!  it was quite a life changer!  to make it worse, i had just left that morning for a meeting in Seattle - and something was telling me that i shouldn't go before i even left Dayton.  I'm not usually all superstitious like that but he dropped me off at 10:30 for a noon flight and I didn't get out of Dayton until 8:30 that night!  flights were pushed back then cancelled, then I rebooked, etc. - i was thinking to myself while i was waiting in line at 8pm that it seemed like this was a sign that something bad was going to happen if I left!  But i finally got on a plane and got to Seattle at midnight (that's 3am Ohio time) only to have a voicemail on my phone from a friend of his telling me that he had started having chest pains and was at the hospital getting tests run.  that's not a call you want to get when you are as far away from Ohio as you can get but still be in the US.  it's not a good call to get anytime!  needless to say, i flew back to Ohio just a few hours later.  He's ok - they caught it early, but he had an angioplasty and a stent put in.  Apparently a life of smoking cigarettes and eating too much macaroni and cheese will catch up with you!  even though i really thought we didn't eat terribly, i've realized that we ate too much of the stuff we shouldn't, and not enough of the stuff we should.  now it's low sodium, low fat, low cholesterol.  i weigh out portions and look at grams of saturated fat and whether or not stuff is whole grain.  Here's my advice - find a happy medium for yourself before this happens!  Most days he's super positive about it all and he's doing great with eating well and walking on the treadmill every day (even weekends!) but other days it's all I can do to bite my tongue because he find a way to see the negative in everything and acts like life isn't worth living anymore.  I know it's normal for people to feel that way so I try to just let him vent when i want to tell him he ought to be thankful.  You really can't talk someone into being thankful.  i also know that life changes are hard when you didn't make the choice to change.  He had all but quit smoking entirely - so cutting out the few cigarettes when he was with his friends was easy, but taking a 180 with eating (and salting!) is hard when you didn't really want to do it.  it's also frustrating because between the healing time and the medication side effects, he doesn't always feel great - and when he does, he knows he isn't supposed to exert himself too much until he's healed, so that's frustrating.  I'm hoping that losing weight will make him feel better and motivate him to continue (he's lost about 20 lbs - of course, i've only lost 10!  you'd think with our new super healthy diet, we'd both have lost 50lbs by now!  i guess losing it slowly is the healthy way to do it.)  So anyway, heart healthy recipes are my obsession now.  I'm trying to keep food interesting to divert attention from the smaller serving sizes and less salt.

I have been knitting occasionally - I started this for my meeting trip, and continued it in the hospital:

It's all seed stitch and quite wide - i'm hoping I can make it pretty long.

And for my mother's birthday, I started this set of placemats for her.  I used a bluebird patten on my embroidery machine and changed it to the blah neutrals that she likes!