Remember The View last month?  Well, tomorrow it's a Field Trip -- I absolutely LOVE this idea.  I think it was just last week (or maybe the week before) that I was email-dreaming with Carole, imagining a bus full of knit-bloggers on tour, touring each other's homes (show me the yarn -- and the antiques -- and then let's have cake and cookies), stopping at LYSs and fiber shops along the way, spotting farms with sheep, knitting...  Anyway, I'll be participating in "The Knit-bloggers' Back Yard Field Trip," and I hope you will, too.  (Y'all know who has one of the best "back yards" around, don't you?  And the best pictures of it, too!)

I'd also like to point you in the direction of Christine -- here, here (adorable picture alert!), and here, and finally, here.  She is collecting blue knitted squares to make into a blanket for her brother, Jef; in fact, the project is called "Comforting Jef" (see the snazzy button?).  In that last entry, she wrote that she hoped to have too many squares -- enough to perhaps make a second blanket for my brother; that would be "Comforting Mike."  She didn't tell me about that, though she has been leaving me comments, so I ran across it in my regular blog reading and... Wow, Christine, I am verklempt.  Just when I think I'm verklempt enough, I get verklempter.  Christine and I are fairly new to each other's blogs, I think it's likely a happy (and hopefully lasting) side effect of the Knitting Olympics.  Thank you, Christine, for such a sweet thought.  I'll definitely be knitting blue for your brother.  Comfort.

I'm really torn about the blogging, blogging about my brother, specifically.  His recovery could be very, very, v.e.r.y. long -- he could be in ICU for a long time, with no real change.  Or he could wake up tomorrow.  His wonderful p.m. nurse of the last few days gave us a bit of a reality check yesterday, and I'm glad.  The bottom line is, there is no "timeline," everything is dependent on something else; there is a process to recovering from major head trauma and he has to work his way through it; he hasn't responded to commands the past few days, but it's hard to draw any conclusions about anything right now -- No One Knows.  It is very scary.  And maybe I should just not be blogging about him.  I don't want to be the Bummer Blog, I want you all to come and visit me over here (because, really, I am all about the comments and the visiting), I don't want you all to not know what to say or to feel uncomfortable, I don't want to make you sad, but I know, too, that a lot of you are enjoying my little stories.  Maybe I should put that part in "extended entry" or something, or not do it everyday.  I don't know.

When Michael was on the cusp of adolescense, our then single-mother struggled with how to talk to him about the facts of life.*  Right about then, she came home with the book, "Where Did I Come From?" and sat us all down to read it to us.  I was 16 at the time (yeah), so Mike was 12.  When she got to the part about men having er*ctions, he innocently and enthusiastically blurted out, "Hey, that happens to me!!"  Naturally, we all responded with fits of giggles.  The poor, poor kid... it's a wonder he turned out at all.

*We were really a family of innocents.  Just a few years earlier, the older sister and brother of a friend of mine actually had me believing that every night before bed their mother told them one fact of life, as if there was some master checklist somewhere.