The struggle is real, people. Plain and simple, my elbows still hurt.  And I can’t knit very much in the name of resting them, but resting them is hard because you need your arms/elbows for, oh, pretty much EVERYTHING.  This is not going to be a terribly whine-y post, I promise!  I’m just putting it out there to apologize that even though my blog is called Lizy Tish Knits, I don’t knit (very much).  And I might not for a while still and won’t have too many knitting things to show you. So I’m struggling a little because knitting is MY THING.  It’s what I LOVE. My license plate makes that very clear:

And I’m going a tiny bit stir crazy not being able to knit ALL THE THINGS, ALL THE TIME.  So, I will do my best to blog about ALL THE OTHER THINGS besides knitting, with a tiny bit of knitting thrown in and hopefully you will still come back and read.

I am trying to make the best of the situation by knitting the little that I can and enjoying every few minutes of it!  Here is my work-in-progress of the Amy Shawl by Romi Hill that I am knitting on commission:

I think it is very pretty.  I am a little less than halfway done with the applied border.  I knitted the body of the shawl first, then I am knitting perpendicular to the shawl to apply the border, joining it to the border as I go.  It looks like there are a lot of stitches on my needle to knit, but I’m only working on the 34 stitches of the border and on every other row, knitting one of the rest of the stitches. Pretty cool how it goes. It will look great when it is blocked – all those lace-y holes will open up and really show the pattern.

I also went ahead and ordered the Knit Picks Options Foursquare Interchangeable Needle Set.  The square shape of the needle tips are supposed to help with the strain on my hands and therefore elbows too.  I can’t, however, change my needles in the project above because with the square needles, your gauge changes so that would not be good!   Next project, I’ll use these.

And I’m doing things to treat my arms/elbows right:

The thing on the right is an arm massager!  You stick your hand/arm through it and move your arm in and out.  Feels great!  A friend of mine very nicely gave this to me but you can find them (or things like it) here:Forearm Massager.  I also got this great Therapy Massage Ball Set which I can not only use on my arms but everywhere else!  It comes with links to videos and I followed a great one for massaging the bottom of your feet.  Felt soooooo good.  Click up there or here for more info:

In other news, Paul and I went for a quick mid-week racing test-and-tune session:

He is getting ready for a special kind of drag racing event.  Usually, he races and in between runs, tweaks motor things if needed and then races again. He also, based on the time of his races, chooses his dial-in time to race against.  In this race, he has to drive around town for 30 minutes, then make three back-to-back passes down the track and try to get as close the time of 11.0 seconds as he can.  He has to do all of this without touching anything on the motor or making any adjustments etc.  Definitely a little more challenging, especially since he doesn’t usually keep much gas in the tank (to keep the car lighter and hence, faster) so he’s not really sure how much to put in the tank to drive around for 30 minutes and then make three passes.  Should be interesting!

Also, we have this exciting-ness going on:

(That’s our friend Tyler in the hole.)

(Paul moved that whole pile of rocks himself because…my elbows.  I’m extremely a tiny bit not sad that I couldn’t help.  Don’t tell Paul.)

Hooray for a new deck!!

And the blue heron came to visit which is always fun to see:

They are very tall and very graceful and very stealth when catching frogs!