General news and gossip.

Update?

The house is a swamp....eight loads of washing, canvas and camping equipment everywhere. All waiting to be cleaned or hung up or folded or put away. After a month of absence every surface is dusty or covered in cat hair or both. The kitchen and bathroom both need cleaned as a matter of some urgency. And we are close to running out of toilet rolls and bin bags, not to mention that I've not quite got into a shopping routine again yet so there are erratic gaps in domestic supplies. And I haven't even opened up the trailer tent to unpack it.

Of course I have been back for three days so I should have been able to deal with all the above. Nope. I've been gardening. Much more interesting. Princess and I went up on Saturday for three hours of picking (her) and weeding (me) and I was up again on Sunday for another three hours. My sister joined me yesterday so that I could "put her to work" but I knew she wasn't serious when she turned up in white trousers and strappy sandles, hoho. As revenge, I put her to picking blackcurrants. Do blackcurrant stains come out of white chino fabric?

Anyway, quite a lot of the allotment is looking a whole lot better. "Coarse" weeding, when you rip out practically everything, is fast and dirty but effective. I have cleared the top end totally and there's only three more beds that urgently need attention in order that the actual crop plants in them have a chance to grow. I've harvested quite a lot too (fortunately several of my neighbours actually like courgettes). There is still a lot of work to do but I'm confident that three or four more sessions will get it up to speed again. It just shows though the difference it makes when you can go up two or three times a week and keep on top of things, and when you have to leave long gaps between sessions. My friend Jean always bemoans the fact that her vegetable gardening is not as succesful as mine but I'm absolutely certain that's only due to her not being able to visit her plot as much as I do. If she was visiting her garden three times a week, every week, it would be a showcase dripping with produce, I'm sure of it.

Knitting? Nope, none to report. It's still all packed in the trailer tent. I am however going to the Ravelry Weekend at Stirling on Friday, to meet up with a few friends and (ahem) maybe have a look round the stalls. I did intend to book classes at KnitCamp too and even got so far as to fill in the booking form but didn't in the end because our own family holiday was so close. Now I'm glad I didn't. The classes I wanted to book and the tutors I wanted to meet vanished off the list long ago, and there seems to be some worrying last minute glitches developing in the program, but no-one seems to know what's happening and the organiser has gone to ground. Hopefully her silence means she's working on the glitches but no-one seems to really know. It's worrying. I have several friends that have taken holiday time and invested a lot of money in classes and accomodation for this week and I hope things work out for them. The worst that can happen to me is that I'll loose £10 on a two day weekend ticket, but I'm pretty sure the Ravelry Market won't be affected.

I won't be going on Saturday as originally planned though. I realised that the Broughton Gathering is on the following Saturday and it's a bit much to take two full Saturdays off in a row. I've also found out that Jess and Casey from Ravelry are having a meet-up in Edinburgh that afternoon so guess where I'm going? Even Hubby approves of this....he's got no interest in knitting but he highly approves of Ravelry as a site and uses it frequently as an example of excellent use of site design in his lectures in Media Studies. So I have a mission to convey this opinion to Casey, lol.