All change

First of all, some knitting. Since finishing that baby blanket I've been rather more productive! This Ishbel was started on Boxing day and finished on 12 Jan. It was just enough knitting for me, being the small neckwarmer size rather than the large shawl. My first lace shawl, first time blocking a scalloped edge, really quite smug with myself. :)

Here is a compare between how it was when finished knitting...

....and how is turned out after blocking.

Like wings!

I also did a Star Crossed Beret for mum, who has an ancient one from the 70s which she wears around the farm in the cold. It's rather thin and weary looking, so hopefully this will be an OK alternative for her.

I love how the random cables look sort of like tree bark. It's done in Rowan Cocoon yarn which is lovely and soft, bouncy and drapy at the same time.

So, now we're up to date on the knitting what about the other stuff? Well, we moved house. It went through very quickly, luckily - we viewed in November and moved on 11 Jan. It's been a bit of a culture shock, going from a one and a half bedroom flat into a 4 bed townhouse - lots of rooms which we don't know what to do with, a bathroom each, a garage for junk, two flights of stairs... my legs are going to get more toned! Not least because we've not sorted everything out yet and whatever I need is usually at the other end of the house...

Best of all though, because we have so much space at the moment, I can have a craft room.

So far the only storage I have is what the old owner left behind (yeah thanks for leaving your crappy shelving unit) but I'll gradually get this all usefully arranged I'm sure. I've already scoped out a big L shaped corner desk from Ikea for a starting point, and The Man's mum has mentioned a big dresser which she used to have in her kitchen but since she upgraded it she's just kept in her garage. She's just as keen for me to have a fully functional craft room as I am! (It's possible since she now has a key I may come home to find her in it quite often.) It will be wonderful to have everything get-at-able. I aspire to having one of those workspaces they feature on home and lifestyle blogs, with useful shelves in the right places and chi-chi pots for your pens and paint brushes. Hey ho.

Here is a new house / new table combo pic. This new (old) table is rather orange because it's in the process of being 'revived', having been in the barn at home for several months waiting for a new home.

It's been given a drink of a woodworm treatment shooter followed by a beeswax and noxious solvents cocktail. In two days we are allowed to buff it to a sheen. Meantime hopefully it will have absorbed what it needs and the solvents will have evaporated and it will go back to a sensible colour. It has started to already so I should really trust my (furniture restorer) brother not to leave me with a tangerine table.

Here is some old woodworm damage - love the crazy pattern. I think it looks a bit like that tubes screensaver they used to have on Windows 97.

Yesterday we had our washing machine delivered. The Man's plumber mate is on hols so we thought we'd plumb it in ourselves. How hard can it be? There's an instruction manual and everything.

Just in case, we put a washing up bowl underneath to catch any drips for the first cycle.

Ahem. Yes, well. This has now been rectified.

All this house roaming fetching things from upstairs when they're needed downstairs is just as well, I had a serious gym session with my trainer yesterday and I hurt in strange places, and if I sat down for too long I think I'd cease up. Balls of my thumbs? I presume it's due to having my first session of pad boxing, which is much more fun than ten minutes on the cross trainer.

It's taken a while but I'm starting to get into the mindset that not everything in this house needs to be done immediately, which is quite a new thing for a child of the Now generation like me. It's lovely just doing a little chunk at a time, and thinking that we can write a list and cross things off slowly. It's also lovely watching The Man getting to grips with my power drill. Hee hee. He's somewhat of a DIY virgin but seems keen so far, which is ace. There'll be plenty of just-jobs* in the next few years I'm sure.

Since Friday though he's been very happy because the Sky man came and made Sport happen again (or indeed any telly, we've been surviving on DVDs), so now we have golf / cricket / football in HD on the big flat telly, and on Saturday his mates appeared to sort out the surround sound, so we also have Kef eggs (this is a technical term apparently) around the room and disconcerting noises coming from under chairs and in the bookcases. I have to plead to being terribly girly and being happy with the telly not set to HD and with its own speakers, but apparently I'm being a Philistine and Must Not Utter words like that.

Finally, hurrah for being able to see the roads again and them not being white and skiddy, but some doom-mongerer said the other day that we might be due one or two more snow snaps this year. Noooo! I've already had six (yes, six) days when I couldn't get into work because the trains weren't running, enough is enough!

* Can you just...?

Ah.

Here follows a lesson in why you should not do anything more complicated than a stocking stitch square at knit group:


Can you see the problem?

Click on the pic to view in its full glory. This is also a lesson in making sure you pick up the same number of stitches going up as coming down. Buggrit.


This is Helena and is normally really cute, if you do the neck band according to the pattern. I read the instructions about counting section 1 to flange B, section 2 to the left armpit intersection, place marker and knit to section 22(a) subclause viii, and thought stuff it. Ha, said the pattern, you fool! So now one side has not enough stitches and pulls up, and the other has way too many and hangs down. Clearly at some point my fingers defrosted and the hot chocolate kicked in and my picking up rate changed. Yeah yeah, excuses...


This will be fixed, oh yes.


I must also share with you this:

A mutant got through the unigrape scanner. Check out this monster!

It was like three or four grapes had grown together and formed one super grape, about to Take Over The World, I tell you!!!!

The Man ate it. With great relish.

(He'd offered it to me but I was too scared. )

Moving junk

Oooo, I slept on my neck funny last night and it’s just getting worse and worse.

Back at work. I have sooooo much to do at home, but here I am twiddling my thumbs in the office. Do people who work from home do this? Sit at their laptop and think they can’t possibly just nip out and put a wash on? I think not. But, there may be another snow day in the offing if the BBC weather service is to be believed so perhaps I can be more productive than I think.

Things to do this week:

Pack up the entire flat – this will hopefully involve a lot of throwing away too

Eat as much as possible of the contents of the fridge and freezer

Minimise the laundry situation

Do the rest of the recycling and drop offs to the charity shops

Order a washing machine and (depending on the vendor accepting our offer for their old one) a fridge/freezer

Send off three parcels for presents for people (two to the States) (and possibly four if I finish the latest knitting project in time)

Read the meters

Things to do after we move:

Read meters and call utilities people

Call BT and have longwinded and ultimately futile conversation about (lack of) moving broadband over

Call Sky likewise re telly reception*

Unpack contents of flat

Take delivery of new TV**, washing machine and possibly fridge/freezer

Get Sky man in to fit new dish and gubbins for sky multiroom

Take a trip in a van to The Man’s mum’s house to pick up a load more stuff

Take a trip in a van to my mum’s house to pick up a load more stuff

Take a trip to the physio to fix my back

Get someone in to plaster over the artex ceiling in the sitting room (why? WHY???)

Sit down and have a well-earned drink (or six)

* I called Sky last week to inform them of change of address and get man booked in to install new dish etc, and they still had our old address because some mouth-breather had put our last moving date in as 2088, not 2008, and not ticked a box somewhere. So of course as 2088 has not come along yet the system still thinks we’re at the old address, and as it’s over a year later the call centre can’t amend the record, they have to ask Sky IT to do it, and apparently that could take up to 30 days. Allrighty.

**Ah, the new TV. One of The Man’s mates came along to help us decide, as he knows all about Making A Noise with sound systems. With the voice of ages, as we walked past Fenwicks’ sale and viewed the bunfight inside, he said, ‘Ah, loads of people spending money they don’t have on things they don’t need.’ True, very true, we thought sagely, heading into the Sound and Vision store to drop a couple of thou with the pimply salesman. I think the irony was lost on the boys. Clearly big TVs and fancy dan speakers fall into the ‘Life’s Essentials’ category.

The parents, like parents the world over I’m sure, are overjoyed at the prospect of ‘getting their houses back’ when we move as we’ll have space for all the stuff we’ve been storing in respective parents’ houses for years. Ha, misguided fools. They said that when we (generic, universal ‘we’) went away to uni, they said that when we left uni to get Proper Jobs, they said that when we moved again, always hoping, hoping, that one day the junk would find another home. When will they learn it will never happen? We take what junk we need and leave the rest, which gradually accumulates and accumulates, merging with our siblings’ junk and more parental junk until, basically, the attic floor gives way.

After the wedding I’m going to hire a skip and one of those dustbin chute things and go up into the attic with my parents and throw away all the crapola that is never used and often tripped over. There are strings of lilac fairy lights from my brother’s wedding five years ago, a BBC Acorn computer, broken chairs, old clothes (lots of old clothes), ancient tapes and CDs, old mattresses, a broken easel, baby toys, a model ship, zillions of crappy books no one is the least bit interested in, nasty pictures, macrame plant holders, old files from the office, toy prams and tea services, fishing kit and just JUNK. Piles of it. Argh!! The trouble is this theme extends to other parts of the house, most notably the office. My flesh crawls walking into my parents’ office, and it’s not just an allergic reaction to the dust (a mixture of real dust, dried mud and clarts), pet hair and cobwebs. There can only be about 12 square inches of actual desk visible. The rest if covered by the PC, two printers, his’n’hers in trays, the desk diary, a phone/fax monster, and several mountains of sliding paperwork and magazines. The pen pot has one, maybe two pens which actually work, not one ever actually having been purchased but all having come free with vet drugs orders or wormer samples or seed catalogues. There is a pen holder in the shape of a hedgehog with a pencil sharpener nose which I remember being there when I was about seven years old, with the collected scunge of ages in the bottom. Ditto two other pen holders (yes, three pen holders and two working pens). There is a collection of rubber bands and paper clips and stamps held together by dust bunnies. The wall is papered with notes and phone numbers all of which are so faded they are nearly impossible to read. The wall shelves bow under the weight of long unused files. I daren’t ever open the desk drawers because if you actually look for anything and thereby rearrange the contents you never get them closed again.

Under the desk there is no room for actual feet. There are assorted boxes of cartridges, piles of jiffy bags (some reused and some new! Shock!) and other packaging, vast leaning towers of eggboxes, boxes the computer equipment came in (throw them away!! All you need is the paperwork!), some other stuff lurking at the back and The Bin. Now we are all supposed to be eco friendly the bin has become the Paper Recycling Bin, which basically means the same stuff goes in it but it gets emptied less often so there is a wire bin somewhere under another mountain of paper. All of the above is distributed among liberal amounts of dust and fluff and hair. Yum.

So you can see I can go either of two ways: either I’ll react against all this junk-keeping or I’ll bow to genetics. I know someone at work whose wife is a professional declutterer and if something in their house has not been used for a year (or if he’s not worn a particular shirt in three months) then it’s out. Scary. But, you can see why this could be a good thing. We do all indeed have loads of Stuff We Don’t Need which we’ve spent Money We Don’t Have on. I am getting better at realising when that pretty sparkly thing with 20% off (or ‘80% on’ as I read somewhere recently) is in fact just Something Else to Dust rather than a functional item that I need. I need to get better at doing a similar thing with clothes (getting better at remembering if I have one almost the same) and books (hopeless – books just have to come home with me). It will be interesting to see exactly how much junk I do own as opposed to things I need and use.

I am so glad we booked a removals man this time….

Lists

Everyone is talking about resolutions again. I suppose this time it’s not just a new year but a new decade, which adds a certain quelque-chose. Was Y2K really ten years ago? Sheesh.

Last year these were the goals I set myself:

1. Find out what I have to do to achieve to get a promotion at work
2. Learn to crochet and do one of those amigurumi things, possibly a ninja vampire.
3. Buy a house
4. Lose a stone
5. Decide a direction for the wool business
6. Keep on top of the home filing

Have I actually done any of these things? Well, maybe one of them, and that was cutting it fine! We exchanged on a house last week, and we’ll be moving in January. Number 1 should be a quick question to my manager really, I don’t know why that wasn’t done. Lose a stone – I think I’ve lost a few pounds but over the past few months I’ve really got back into exercising so hopefully that should go a bit better now. There are so many things I’d rather do than go to the gym but I do feel better for it afterwards. Home filing has been reasonably well looked after, but I am looking forward to the new house when there will be space to have some decent systems in place for things like that. It’s not hard, it’s just little and often and dealing with things as they come in. The wool business is still languishing, and would involve sitting down with mum and dad and thrashing it out, but getting them to a) sit around a table and b) talk about the same subject for more than about 15 minutes without the phone ringing or a crisis of the sheep getting out or the tractor breaking down or someone not being available for babysitting the grandchild or a vet emergency happening or even just being able to not get sidetracked and start talking about who’s died recently or if some forms came in the post or have I got enough chutney? is slim in the extreme.

Crochet progress has been woeful. I have purchased two books on the subject and that is all. The knitting group girls are trying to encourage me to do the Ravelympics 2010 learn a new yarn skill event and actually crochet something during the 14 days of the Winter Olympics. Is that rather optimistic, or is it the deadline I need? Also, what should I crochet? Does one granny square count?

2009 has been a positive year though, on the whole. Good things that have happened:

1. We got engaged in April
2. We have bought a house
3. Lots of good and positive things have happened at work – this job seems to be suiting me
4. My back has got 99% better (yay!) which means there are no excuses now about exercise (bum)
5. I finished a life coaching course and am nearly qualified (just need a few more hours practise)
6. I have in large part sorted out the wedding7. The Man became an uncle
8. We travelled to the States twice (Arizona in Feb and Florida in October)


2010 promises to be a very busy year and I’m feeling exhausted at the prospect of it. The main events will be:

1. Move house
2. Sort out said house
3. Working in the Paris office for a month
4. Walking the Yorkshire Three Peaks for a work charity event
5. Get married
6. Do Christmas.

Yes, the families have decided that as we’re going to be in a big house, we can host Christmas next year. Lawdy. No pressure! Moving house in itself is OK, if you’re organised, but this house will need some redecorating and also possibly a new boiler and rewiring. Perhaps those things can wait until 2011… Plus we need to furnish somewhere much bigger than we’re used to, which to me sounds rather expensive (you should see what TV system The Man is planning!), before we even get to the wedding. Argh. You can see why I’d rather just stay in bed with the duvet over my head at the moment, wibbling softly to myself.

So perhaps I shall only set myself a very small set of goals because I will be busy enough with all these things as it is. Things I would like to do:

1. Go to a dance class; tango is looking favourite at the moment, or maybe jive or something energetic too

and

2. Learn to bloody crochet.

Do you remember this post?

Look what The Man got me for Chrimbo:

He swears some computer hiccup meant that both initials came out the same. Double scary!!

Nice though aren't they? And very comfy! Hopefully leak proof and squeak proof. The old pair have gone firmly in the bin - hurrah!

Oooh, shiny.....

I thought I should also do a knitting roundup because there have been some Finished Objects happening, saints be praised.

First off, a baby blanket for Baby Cusack, due any day now. I started this in September and finished it on 12 December. You can imagine the joy...! I have learnt my lesson re baby blankets, don't worry.

It's called the Lace Panelled Baby Blanket and the ravelry link is here.

Very pretty edging but after you've knitted about four yards of it, you've had enough.

Need to work on my labels I think. I've seen some beautiful ones out there that people have designed for themselves. Something to do in the new year.

We also have another bear from Erika Knight's Simple Knits for Cherished Babies (rav link) which is going across the pond to some friends in Atlanta who have just had a baby girl.

I knitted him in a day and my shoulders really knew about it. But good to get that off the list.

Also finally got some time do to the Shalom cardigan! I bought some baby alpaca in the states, the last 4 skeins in this colour, and I was hoping and hoping that it would be enough. Well, I had a satsuma sized ball left after this, so it was perfick. Phew!

It took ten days of on and off knitting.

Love it. The yarn is the softest yummiest warmest cloud of gorgeousness, the pattern is straightforward and I think it looks rather classy, and more complicated than it is. I made a few mods (on rav page) but they were pretty minor. The yarn does shed a little so will be interesting to see what happens when I dare to wash it. May also stretch to bu99ery so I may be taking some friend's advice and fishing it out of the sink in a colander...

So then I was left with nothing on the go! (Well, socks didn't seem to count.) So I cast on an Ishbel with the secret santa yarn I got at knit group - RYC cashsoft 4ply.

And I'm also going to be making a Helena for yet another baby who has popped into the world. What is going on with all this procreating??? I can't keep up!

In other news, we have bought a house. I should be wildly excited but at the moment I'm 50:50 scared and feeling exhausted at the prospect of all that organising of moving over the gas, electric, phone, internet, sky, bank details, and the gazillion other people you have to notify of your change of address. And then we have to contend with a possible rewiring, boiler replacement and redecoration of somewhere much much larger than we're used to. Sigh. It's good timing though, because hopefully we can get all these things sorted out well in advance of the wedding. We have nine months, so hopefully most of it can be done by then. And the families have announced that we'll be hosting xmas next year. There may be at least a dozen. No wonder I'm feeling tired already by the prospect of 2010!

More snow pics

These are from the Common yesterday.

And here, due to a gas leak at Hoopers (which seems quite serious as it's been going on nearly 24hours now), are people walking up Mount Pleasant in the road, because they can, because it's closed to traffic.

I've really enjoyed these snow days. I've spent some lovely time with The Man, had some time to appreciate T Wells, got some fresh air, sorted xmas, been entertained by the general goings on in town and appreciated people's cheerful wonder about the snow, which let's face it, while it may have been inconvenient to some, has been very beautiful.

Baby it's cold outside...

No work today because when I looked outside this morning it looked like this:

Actually it looked like that last night when I got home (at half past midnight due to train nightmares due to (shock) SNOW!!).

However, it turned out to be a lovely day.

The Man's car didn't think so though.

The Pantiles looked beautiful.

Look how deep the snow is!

The sky was bright bright blue. This looks like a picture taken in America somehow, what do you think?

I measured the snow on the way down London Road and it came all the way to the top of the cuff of my gloves. Which, as it turns out when I measured it when we got home, is almost 9 inches. Nine!! For gosh! No wonder SE trains thought it was a good excuse.

We had a productive day though, finishing the Christmas shopping (we walked in the roads all the way there because they were the least icy place, there was hardly any traffic and Mount Pleasant was even closed by the police), visited a Very Quiet Sainsbury's (bliss!) and then we went browsing for wedding rings. For a relatively simple item I think it's going to be as complicated as choosing a dress.

The most entertaining thing of the day was watching what traffic there was trying to get anywhere, especially the genii in rear wheel drive cars who were going nowhere fast, and where they were going was mainly sideways. One BMW tried to get around the roundabout and ended up doing a crab manouvre and coming back the same way but on the other side of the road and backwards. There were lorries stopped broadside across the High Street trying to go up an uphill turnoff and left with nowhere to slide, cars just left abandoned at the bottom of hills and dozens of people slipping over and landing on their arses. But it was so pretty!

It's due to snow again tonight. Snowmen tomorrow!!

Preparation's what you need....

My eyes are turning square today. Too long parked in from on the monitor looking at smaller squares and trying to make the numbers at the bottom come out differently. (Silk purse and sow’s ear comes to mind…)

We have Quite A Lot On at the moment. For instance:

1. Planning a wedding
2. Buying a house
3. Getting ready for Xmas
4. Hospital visits to Grandma
5. Xmas social calendar
6. Work

Which doesn’t leave a huge amount of time for things like:

1. Food shopping
2. Laundry
3. Cleaning
4. Sleeping
5. Speaking to each other. It seems that we do most of our conversing over email these days! Although The Man did come with me last night to visit Grandma so we had a good catchup while walking up the hill to the hospital. Ah, multitasking…

So, how is the run up to Chrimble going for you guys? I don’t usually feel this shattered until the 15th at least! I am now, sitting at work about to go out for my second (no, third!) restaurant dinner of the week (yes, I know it’s only Wednesday), about to start writing Christmas cards. I am shamed that this year (same as last) they are not homemade – while some amazing person at work has even made her own wrapping paper. Just to set the bar somewhere ridiculously high. Sigh. One day I shall do that, and all the gifts will be handmade too. Yeah right, who am I kidding. *;)

Ho ho ho

New pattern shortly to be up on Aragon Yarns' website.

Anyone else getting into the festive spirit, or it is just me?!

Golf shoes

On Friday I played golf with work, which was scary in prospect but in reality turned out not too bad. Apart from one manager saying, 'Are you caddying?' and then later, surprised, 'You look quite golfy!'. Well, grrr, he'd better watch out, I'm not taking any of that male chauvanist crapola.

The worst thing was my golf shoes, which used to be mum's, are about 15 years old and leak like a government back office. The Man, now I'm showing I'm serious about the golf lark, might arrange some new ones for me. Apparently the golf shoes to get are Footjoys, and on their website you can design your own personalised ones. How cool is that?! So I had some fun playing with the (shorter) batch of colours in the women's section.

And then you can put your initials on them if you like.

How freakishly scary is that, seeing your to-be initials for the first time?

Old and new together, for the changeover period.

Nope, it's just too weird. I'm going to have to come back to this.

Katie…must remember that listening to audiobook versions of I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue on packed commuter trains is not a good idea. It’s hard to have hysterical laughter quietly.

Ah, audiobooks. Why didn’t I download some of these before? If anyone has some good recommendations, please let me know. I’ve just started on The Historian, which is about Dracula, so we’ll see how that goes. It's been good so far apart from having what seemed to be a Brooklyn policeman based in Oxford. Why do so many American publications have these glaring editorial errors? At least now I can read and knit at the same time. In effect…

As promised, here are some pics of the other half of the Florida trip:

Intracoastal waterway, with some sort of egret on the dock.

Nuclear sub coming out of port, with two shield ships.

Daisy on the beach.

The Man's choice of motor.

Things I have also done (but which there are no pics for):

Been on a business trip to view some distribution centres for a very large highstreet clothes chain, which was huge and mainly automated and involved lots of robots and conveyor belts and did indeed in places look like the door storage area in Monsters Inc in its vastness.

Visited some friends and their new baby who is only a month old and still in the floppy poo-scream-eat stage but still super cute. I felt bad invading but Jo seems to be totally in control and the whole family (including the dog) working like a well-oiled machine. Impressive!

Made half a santa hat. But then I saw someone on the train wearing a variation of this, and I thought that I could improve. Trouble is I was meaning to whizz this pattern off in a few days for the Wealden Times Christmas fair which mum is manning a stall at, but I fear I’m now cutting it rather fine…

Tomorrow I'm off to Bristol for another work thing, and I've signed up for golf on Friday. The only girl to play, with about 40 men. (Essential comma there.) I'm scared!! How embarrassing, I shall be particularly rubbish, but hey ho, you have to start somewhere.