Grateful

First thing this morning I get a call from my Mom's boyfriend telling me that she had been in a near fatal accident this morning. On her way to work she hit some black ice on the entrance ramp to I-83. For those of you not familiar with the MD/PA area, that is one big highway, like 95, and it's a major trucking lane. Her car skidded straight ahead instead of following the curve of the exit and she landed perpendicular to the highway in front of a truck. She's okay, but all shook up. I'm a little turned around at the thought that I almost lost my Mom this morning. I don't know what I'd do without her. For virtually all of my teenage years all we had was eachother. Most of her family had died and I was an only child (on that side. I have 4 half siblings from my Dad). It was just her and I in the house alone. Me struggling to grow up and get good grades and meet boys (how you do this in an all girls school is still beyond me), and her trying to be a single mother and raise her child the best she could. When I think about all the things that she went through, raising a child while going to Nursing school and working, then managing to take care of a fiesty teen age daughter and care for her own ailing mother, then sending her only child off to school 800 miles away and having to deal with a truly empty nest, all while keeping her sanity and never compromising her relationship with me or anyone of her friends or family, I'm astonished. She is an amazing, giving, kind, wonderful woman. She is truly fabulous in every sense of the word, a strong role model, and a loving friend.
I couldn't be more grateful for whatever split second that she made up for this morning that caused her miss that accident.
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In knitting news, I have cast on (repeatedly) for my sock. Beth asked how I would pick a pattern with so many good ones! I totally agree that if I had a clue about how to knit socks, I'd be at a loss too. However, this being my first sock, I went with easy. That narrowed the field to the ribbed socks that start the book off. There's an explanation and picture with of each kind of heal and toe and I picked the ones that I liked the most. Luckily the Oak Ribbed sock has both the heal and toe that I think will work for me, so I'm going with that one. In the future I plan to try all three ribbed variations to see what I truly love, but you got to start somewhere. So this picture is the beginning of the sock. I worked on it durning lunch and got to the required 15 rounds for the cuff. I haven't measured it yet, but it looks about right. The pattern calls for size 1s, but I decided to go up a needle size since the measurements were for a size 8-9 shoe and I wear a 9. I just don't want a tight sock. Plus, while my length measurements were the same as the pattern, the ball of my foot is almost a full inch wider around. I was hoping it would be the other way around since it's fairly easy to just do a few more rows to make the sock longer. I don't know how it works on the foot after the heel, if there's any convenient way to add stitches down at that part or if it's frog central if you get there and it's too tight. We'll see. Right now I have no major rush for any of it. I'm enjoying the process. Hear that Marjene?? Despite my general finish or perish sense about me, after rushing through all that Christmas knitting and getting geared up to knit to Olympic proportions, I'm taking the tortoise route on this. I know the chances of the sock working out the first time are slim, so I'm not getting my hopes up. That makes it a lot easier to frog at the end of the day (or toe as the case may be).