Hello Dolly!

Well I finally did it. I found an Angora bunny! She is a beautiful black pedigreed German Satin doe. She was just weaned when I brought her home at 8 weeks and already she was growing the prettiest, thickest coat of wool. She'll be getting her first haircut around the first week of March, at 12 weeks of age, and then approximately every 12 weeks there after. I am going to try to get a white buck as her mate. Her bloodline has quite a variety of color in it, so with a white buck, I should really get some great color variations. I figured since I can't have sheep right now I might as well have bunnies. I have a feeling that it won't be long until I have plenty of angora fiber for my own personal spinning use and I'll be able to sell some of the left over's. That's what I'm hoping anyway. So, meet Miss Dolly........



My knitting is coming along quite nicely these days. I'm all finished with my sisters set of winter warmer's. I made her a scarf, fingerless mitts, and a calorimetery head warmer out of the new Chrystal Palace Taos yarn. I really like that yarn. It's 100% wool and very soft. It is self striping, but the stripes are very subtle. Nothing like Noro or other familiar self striping yarns. My only complaint about the yarn is that to me it looks like they splice it with Russian joins and where they join the ends, they don't trim it very close and it kind of has little fuzz balls. Other than that, I give it high marks.

My next project has got to be another tote bag for International Tote Exchange III. It was hard picking out a pattern for my assigned partner. I've never had a partner with her special needs before. I'm glad that the hostesses gave me such a unique pal to make for because I'm going to have alot of fun making this bag!

On the home front, things are definately looking up. My DH is going into the hospital on Wednesday for surgery on his lumbar spine. I know, I know, I just heard the collective gasp from you all! But seriously, it isn't as bad as it sounds. His doctor is awesome. He has really cool toys! Tony will get to take a little nap and the doctor will make an itty bitty incision and then he will use this laser inside of his body to carve out that portion of the disk material that has oozed out and is rubbing up against his spinal nerves and causing him all this pain. After the doc gets all that mess cleaned up, he'll put in ONE stitch, slap a bandaid on him, call it good, let him sleep it off for a while and send him on his merry way.

After he has time to recover a bit from that procedure ( about a month or so) the doc will go in agin. This time he'll be going into his cervical spine and doing the same things. The doctor said that these procedure's give Tony and 85% chance of healing these ruptured disks, and becoming pain free. That means that he can avoid the big surgery.........cervical fusion. He does NOT want to go through that at all. He is scared to death of that. More especially after watching what I had to go through all during and after mine. If he has to have major surgery/fusion on his cervical spine, he wants to go to Germany for Cervical Disk Replacement. They have been doing disk replacements over there in Germany for about 20 years whereas here in the U.S., we are still in "trial" and the proceedure has only been approved for the cervical spine by the FDA . Tony has actually spoken to two or three people who have gone to Germany and had the surgery done themselves. If Tony has at least half the success of those guys, than going all the way over there, plus the expense of the surgery out of pocket will be well worth it!

So that's about it for now. Au revoir.