The Sayings of Skysinger
Old is not a pejorative term. We can’t change when we were born any more than we can change the location or our genetic heritage.
If you tell the truth as accurately as you can, you’re neither bragging nor complaining.
~ Avery Brooke, Seabury Press 1983
We have to figure out what matters and what doesn’t.
It’s terribly important to figure out what’s merely scary and what’s genuinely dangerous.
“By the time you are real, you will be all wobbly in the joints and your hair will be all loved off and you will be very shabby indeed. But when you are real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
~ The Velveteen Rabbit
“The older I get, the more beautiful life becomes.”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
There are an infinite number of ways things can fit together perfectly.
We live awash in acronyms, and they’re a hoot. IICI means “If it commends itself.” Without this expression I wouldn’t have the nerve to suggest all my crazy ideas!
Don’t compare yourself with other people. It only makes you feel inferior or superior. Either is narcissistic.
Live so your life makes a good story.
“The world is too dangerous for anything but truth, and too small for anything but love. We have to learn to be merciful because we are at each other’s mercy.”
~ William Sloane Coffin, 1978.
“In order to avoid the sin of reviling the world, we have to love the world, and love it more fiercely the crueler and more irreducible it becomes. Then, little by little, we shall see the universal horror relax and enfold us in more-than-human arms.”
~ Teilhard du Chardin
In order to avoid the sin of reviling the world, we have to love the world, and love it more fiercely the more cruel and irreducible it becomes. Then, little by little, we shall see the universal horror relax and enfold us in more than human arms.
~ Teilhard du Chardin
is my own copyright sign. Use whatever commends itself to you without cost, but always with this symbol.
What I actually see...
I try not to complain about it, but this is probably about as good as my vision is going to get. As long as I’m telling the truth as accurately as I can, I’m neither bragging nor complaining. right? The first picture was taken looking out the window in my side door, cropped and bordered with Paintshop Pro 2011.
The second picture is what I see through my left eye. It’s worth noting what I can see with my left eye. I see only what I look at, what I move my eyes and head to get into two fields of vision. Everything is blurry except for a little area to the lower left, where I can see well enough to thread a needle on or before the third try.
Above that I have a strip of intermediate and distance vision about 2/3 of the way up. Through this I drive and read street signs, which I’m very thankful for. My computer monitor and my tv screen come through, but tire me after a while. With this area of clarity I can use my sewing machine. I can see the composition of a picture or scene, the lines and where the light and dark colors are. I also see anything else that catches my eye, which enables me to see some spills and spots around the house but not others. I didn’t have this area of clarity with the secondary cataract, and I appreciate it a lot.
My left eye likes to go back and forth from these two fields of vision. I can sew or crochet while I look at TV intermittently and tire less quickly than looking through either field singly. However, I can’t see both clear fields at the same time. Sewing, for instance, can look fine up close and quite misshapen when I look at it from farther away.
The third picture is what I see with only my right eye. This is why I have no depth perception and am really, really careful going down stairs! This is why I carefully cultivate patience and my capacity for tediousness.
Losing most of the vision in my right eye had a mixed bag of side effects. My right eye used to be my stronger eye. Since it was hotwired to my left brain, I used to speed read like a house afire. Now I read very slowly and miss occasional words. Instead of reading books, I listen to recorded books, on tape, on cd’s and Audiobooks online.
On the positive side, I used to be accused of being “too left-brain oriented.” Since I can only see with my left eye, which is hotwired to my right brain, I see art and composition differently. I appreciate different color combinations. My struggle to understand color better had gone on for years. All that doesn’t make up for reading, but I’ll take whatever compensations I can get!
Things I haven’t learned to do:
Throw or catch a ball.
Swat a fly.
Walk easily on uneven ground.
Things I have learned...
Drive carefully! I continuously move my head and my eyes, I don’t allow myself to get distracted, and I stay in familiar territory. Whenever I’m aware of having done something stupid, I change my driving behavior so it’s less likely to happen again. For instance, I don’t make a left-hand turn onto a busy street unless there’s a traffic light. I plan my routes to turn at traffic lights. Having a yellow VW Beetle helps too, because everyone else on the street can see me.
The improvised pincushion. This crazy thing holds all my different kinds of pins and all my various sizes of needles. My small, sharp scissors is tethered to it. The outer layer of yarn wrapping keeps them all safe. The sand inside keeps both pins and needles sharp. Contrasting rick-rack shows me where everything is on the irregular topography.
Crocheting. I used to knit, but I can’t do that anymore. It works for a while, but if I drop a stitch, it’s gone from my sight forever. I’ve crocheted little sweaters for all three of the remote controls for my television. They’re all tethered to the arm of the chair next to me. They get tangled up, but they don’t get lost! I learned to make sweaters for my cell phone as well, so that I can wear it around my neck and have it with me at all times. They’re all color coordinated with various outfits.
A different system of measuring. I used to measure in inches, but now I can’t get the measurements positioned right. Instead, I hold this up to that and stick a pin in it. I can’t count stitches anymore, but I can hold my crocheting up to my phone or remote and get the openings in the right places. It’s easier to do this with crocheting than with knitting.7. How to thread a needle.
Thread the Needle
The old saying is a lie: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
I say, “If you don’t succeed after the first three tries, do something differently!”
This is particularly true of threading a needle when your hands aren’t particularly steady and you can’t see worth a darn. Here are some things you can know about needles and threads that can tip you to different things you can try:
1. Turn the needle around. A needle has a front and a back; one side of the eye is bigger than the other.
2. Needles are different shapes and sizes for different kinds and thicknesses of thread. Self-threading needles are too big for my taste, though they may be useful for some people or for some purposes. Consider using a standard needle with a bigger eye. Embroidery needles with elongated eyes are easier for me to see than regular sewing needles. There’s no law that says they can only be used for embroidery.
3. It’s usually easier to see the eye of the needle if you’re working on a white background. I keep a sheet of white paper nearby when I do hand sewing. I have a tiny piece of white tape on the presser foot of my sewing machine, so I can see the needle eye better. If you’re using white thread, a very dark background may be easier to see.
4. Snip off the end of the thread with a very sharp scissors. If you can sharpen your scissors, do so. If your scissors are all dull and you can’t sharpen them, a brand new razor blade might work. The ends of the thread sometimes fray microscopically or untwist ever so slightly, and this can play havoc with threading a needle.
5. Thread has knap. In other words if you run it through your fingers one way, it’ll feel smoother than if you rub it the other way. If you can’t feel the knap with your fingers, run the thread along the skin under your nose. Generally, thread is twisted so that when you thread the end away from the spool through a sewing machine, it goes through smoothly. You want to thread the part away from the spool through your needle. Old time hand quilters, some of whom could see better than others, used to thread 10-20 needles at a time onto thread still on a spool, and pull out thread and one needle before they cut thread. I’d lose the needles that way, but the image helps me remember which way the knap runs. I thread the needle before I cut the thread.
6. Since I don’t want my needle to come unthreaded, I knot both ends together. This means that one side of the thread is pulled through the fabric against the nap. The needle will always be on the same spot in the middle of the thread, so sometimes the thread breaks easily there. Pull on the thread, not the needle
7. Use shorter lengths of thread.
8. Just for fun, learn to do a quilter’s knot. You can find a tutorial on the internet with any search engine. A quilter’s knot involves winding the thread around the needle a specific number of times. A quilter’s knot lets you control precisely the size of knot. If you want a big conspicuous knot for basting, wrap the thread around the needle four or five times. If you want a tiny knot that will go through one layer of fabric, you wrap the thread exactly twice. It’s called a quilter’s knot because it allows a hand quilter to hide the knot and the end of the thread in the quilt batting. The tutorial I found did not point out that if you’re only knotting one end of the thread, knot the end with the thread’s nap going toward it. Otherwise, you’ll be sewing against the nap and your thread will get all upgetangled. I don’t know whether it matters which direction you wind the thread. It does matter that the needle and the thread point in opposite directions. Experiment. Practice a little. The only thing that will happen if you do it wrong is that the needle will pull all the way through and there’s no knot in the thread. Remember how it looked when you did it right. Besides being able to control the knot’s size, when you’re making a quilter’s knot, you look way cool!
Just Google quilters knot tutorial.