And just when you think....

And just when I thought it couldn`t get worse yesterday....the builders managed to cut the telephone wires somewhere. So we,`ve been without our two landlines or internet for the last 36 hours.

(No internet for 36 hours, folk. Think about it.......*eek*)

Several phone calls (thank goodness for mobile phones!) and a lot of yelling as to whose responsibility it became to fix it, given that our phone provider is not BT but the wires belong to BT, the connections have been restored. It did however give Mr Builder and I something else to discuss in a "full and frank manner", as my BIL puts it.

On the plus side however I can`t fault the speed and efficiency of Mr Builder and his band of merry men when it comes to actual work. Slates are off, timbers cleaned up and the main roof felt is on. So we are watertight again, which is just as well as it was pouring last night.

And I went to a felting workshop this morning and I have made a hat. It`s not finished so no pix yet plus it looks like a cross between a green flower pot and something a hobbit might wear, but it`s definately a hat. I am thrilled with it. Does not mean I will ever wear it, but that`s not important. It`s a hat, you know?

Fig Rolls?

I feel it may be the time to start sending the emergency Fig Rolls, peeps.

They started stripping the slates from the pitched roof today. Now this is good, but.....

...they didn`t tell me they were going to, despite Mr Builder and myself agreeing I would get a couple of days notice of any work that was going to intrude into the interior fabric of the house. So that I could take down curtains or move furniture or put down dust sheets. I hadn`t yet dust sheeted the attic which contains computer and photographic equipment, fleeces (mercifully in plastic bags, yarn, camping equipment, a world class collection of vintage Playmobil, two spinning wheels, fabric, documents, the kids Christmas pressies. And the men were up there, ripping out the hundreds of eighty year old slate nails, each one leaving a tiny hole that dropped a trail of eighty year old building dust into the attic space. Not to mention eighty years worth of dust that was clinging to the underside of the rafters. Dust? Grit, grot, grime, general stour....

......ALL.....OVER....OUR....STUFF.........

Well, down the length of one side of the attic anyway, but that was bad enough. Think of a dirt layer, forty-five foot long, ten foot wide, one half inch (yup, one half inch) deep. Over everything....

What could I do about it? Absolutely zilch, apart from ringing the builder, the surveyor, Hubby. The men were winding down for the day so no point to me scalling the scaffolding and throwing them off the roof. Not their fault anyway. Mr Builder`s fault, for not giving me the agreed advance warning.

He wasn`t in when I called him, but by God, I`ll get my hands on him tomorrow, I swear. You will hear me in California when I do. I am pissed off.

The other thing I`ll be doing tomorrow is a little dusting. I think, though, it`s time for the Fig Rolls, don`t you?

Christmas is sneaking up on us...

I just realised a couple of days ago that it`s only six weeks come this Monday to Christmas. Eeek!!!!

One thing for sure...the building work will not be completed. In fact my best guess is that the work will be at its most horrible, messy and disruptive, not to mention the roof will probably be stripped fully just before the workmen leave for their two weeks of holidays over Christmas and New Year. Double eeek!! But can I do anything about it? No. So I`m trying to cultivate a Zen-like acceptance of what`s going on. There really is nothing to be done about it from my end. So I might as well go with the flow and concentrate on Christmas.

I don`t do knitting for Christmas presents because I`m far too slow. I`d need to start two years ahead, trust me! The adults in our family only give token presents to each other anyway. So mostly I get to concentrate on the kids, which is fun, because I really like hunting down all sorts of weird and wonderful (and cheap!) things for them. I don`t like, for instance, just going out and buying Mairi the whole pile of curent Disney or Barbie themed pink plastic. She`d like it, of course, but she`d also be bored with it all by the New Year. Nope, she likes notelets and sticker books and little making things kits and a constant supply of good quality felt tip pens and paper. Anyone else reading this intending to give their daughter a 500 sheet pack of A4 paper as one of her Christmas presents? She`ll be really pleased with it too! Of course, I`m sure there`s going to be a Barbie in there somewhere.....

Duncan is getting more and more difficult to buy for. He`s ten now but not a sophisticated ten so he still wants toys, but not babyish ones! He`s got a computer and telly and lots of the latest beepy things and more wargames stuff than he could eat in a year, so this year has been a problem. (We did finally come up with something nice and quite grown up as his main present that he`ll love, but he sometimes reads this blog so I`m not saying.) But toys? He`s not particularly a Lego type and we have plenty anyway. More than plenty. Same with train sets, Scalectrix and robotic stuff. What toys do you buy for ten year old boys?

Apart from that, we`ve got Christmas dinner arranged at my BILs, a trip to see Cinderella in pantomime at the the Kings Theatre, a trip to see the Singing Kettles at the Festival Theatre (The not so sophisticated ten year old wants to go too "Just to help look after Mairi"), two school Christmas parties, rugby club Christmas party, Mairi`s ballet show, Scout Christmas Fair, Watchnight Service, school church service, school Nativity Play, two meals out this side of Christmas, Boxing Day with my sister and her family and a lunch out just after Christmas.

I think I need to go out and buy some alcohol too, just to get me through all this. Not that I drink much, but I feel I might need to!

MatchPot Land.

In an effort to distract myself from the noisy mayhem outside, I`ve been creating a little mayhem of my own inside. In our very long hall, to be precise.

When we moved in to this house eight years ago the hall, to our complete mystification as to why, was "panelled" in rush matting up to shoulder height. Yup, you heard me right, rush matting. Of the type used to floor conservatories and such. Wierd or what? But it turned out to be very, very useful with two boys of four and two riccocheting around as it acted as a sort of padded cell for them. And over the years we sort of got used to it, even though it shed all over the carpet and bits fell off occasionally. After all, it could be changed "after the major work gets done outside".

Eight long years pass........

......and the kittens arrive. They really liked the rush matting. They could climb it. Trouble was, both the matting and the glue holding it to the walls (always a bit dodgy, that glue) was getting old. The matting began to fall off the walls in ernest, leaving yet another legacy of the previous owners taste behind. Glue. They loved glue. They must have used gallons of yellow tinged lumpy contact adhesive all over the wallpaper beneath just to hold the matting on. ("Why"??? I repeat? Why matting????)

So I`ve been faced with stripping, repapering and repainting our thirty foot long hall. With ten doorways to work round, five interior corners and an exterior corner. (Hall is L-shaped.) I can paper, but my dodgy ankle was going to be a bit of a handicap on top of a ladder reaching to our fifteen foot high ceilings. Big job. Too big. Can`t afford a decorator to do it. Quick fix is needed.

The solution has arrived in the form of our big wall sander, unused and forgotten since our last major bout of DIY twelve years and two houses ago. The adhesive is literally getting sanded off the walls. The paper beneath is textured...now don`t ask me why, but I can reduce the glue to the level of the random texture and when you paint over it...eh voila! Not perfect, but not at all bad. And painting the hall with a couple of coats of emulsion is do-able.

Which leads me to the MatchPots. Little pots of sample paint colours, for the American readers. You can paint a couple of square feet of your possible colour onto the wall and see how it looks. Because of course, the colours look nothing like the charts or names might suggest.

"Honeygold"......bright synthetic orange.

"Natural Calico".....dirty grey-white.

"Barley White".....dirty brown-white.

"Havana Intense".....sixty ciggies a day smoked underneath for the last ten years. "Nicotine Intense" would have been better.

"Natural Teraccotta".....dirty bricks.

"Natural Straw"......baby poo.

And so it goes on. I may go with the Magnolia yet, lol. 99% of British homes have, or have had, a room painted in Magnolia sometime in their history. You know where you are with Magnolia. (Just about anywhere, really.....)

"Magnolia".....scientifically proven to be the most inoffensive colour on the planet. A sort of pale cream.

Magnolia it is, then.

And the walls came tumbling down....

Well, the workies are here, the windows at the study, loo and Mairi`s room are boarded up and they`ve started to strip the render. I don`t know why I had this vision of dwarvish hammers tinkling away delicately chipping it off, because in reality they`re using a sort of flat pneumatic drill. Or rather, three drills. The noise is incredible. Render is flying everywhere outside, lumps are falling off and I`m quite convinced that they`re going to drill through the walls. No wonder they took internal pictures of all the cracks!

Great fun. I may have to go and live in the allotment shed during the day if this keeps up though. One small mercy is that the kitbits don`t seem in the least bit fazed. They are sitting on the living room window ledge craning their necks to watch. Laid back kitties or just plain daft?

Glasgow Hobbycrafts show.

I went across to the Hobbycrafts show in Glasgow last weekend. To be honest, there`s pretty slim pickings at it for dedicated spinners and knitters as most of the stalls sell scrapbooking and cardmaking supplies, but there`s always a few knitting related things to look at, plus lovely quilting fabrics, beads and embroidery stuff. Also you get free entry to the next door show at the exhibition centre, the Crafts for Scotland show and that`s always worth a look round for early Christmas presents. My local church embroiderers group runs a coach across to it every October and are always keen to fill the bus up to keep costs per head down, so you even get an hour of knitting time each way. Well worth going for a day out.

As usual I headed for Black Sheep Wools and their often very interesting yarn mountain, where they often have packs of Rowan etc at 2/3rds off.



This is for a spring/summer jersey for Mairi...she suits these shades of sea blue, but it`s difficult to convince her that they`re appropriate for a girl. Pink, purple or nothing, according to her!

The only spinning purchase was from Mo Bair.



Two hundred grams of lovely soft hand dyed merino. Yum. Funnily enough I got stopped by four different women asking me where I got this as I wandered around carrying it in a clear plastic bag. All of them were spinners and desperate to find fibre in the show. I hope they got to Mo Bair before she sold out, because she only had one crate of fibre there. This was the only stall I found spinning supplies at last year as well...I got some lovely hand dyed silk noils there.

Craft fabric for lavender sachets to repel moths.



The Christmas cats will be for gift sachets, the funny cats at the back are for me.

I also found these highly useful embroidery thread boxes on sale for a measley £1.99.



I bought three...one each for the kids to hold their escapologist Hama beads and one for me for my more mundane bead collection. Well worth every penny.

Apart from that I bought some Christmas themed stamps and pads for the kids to make their Christmas cards with, some peel-offs ditto and these....



They`re called Scraps, for these of you that don`t recognise them. I remember playing with them a a child, and I know some designs date back to the turn of the century. Not entirely sure what you were ever intended to do with them except for cut them out, look at them and swap them with your pals, which was what I did, but the kids liked them. (The cats were for Duncan, the fairies for Mairi and I bought more for Christmas.)

I also stopped by the Knit and Natter stand and met
Yvonne who runs it. Always fun to meet a fellow blogger when you`ve been reading their blog for ages.

A week of minor irritations.

I did actually think I was going to be able to post some knitting content this week! I had a pair of Opal socks on the needles I was determined to finish by the end of the month, just to say I`d been a vague and unfocussed member of Soctoberfest. I finished them sure enough....I`ve even worn them, but can I find them to take a photograph? No, I cannot. There can only be one of two explainations...either Mairi has swiped them to put in her secret treasure stash (they were pinkish, so she would have thought them rightfully hers) or the kittens have them. In which case, I may never get them back.

Bah to Soctoberfest then. Sorry, Lolly! I did cast on another pair directly after I`d cast off the Opal ones though.



This is a ball of the Regia Silk that I bought at Woolfest, and it`s irritating me. I`ve knitted a bit more of the leg than you see here and it feels lovely and soft, but it`s not as easy to work with as an all-forgiving 75% wool 25% nylon blend or similar. It knots in an instant, it pills and my usual perfectly adequately stretchy cast on is oh-too-tight. Also it`s "speaking" to me of a lacy stitch, not ribby. So it`s getting frogged.

Incidentally, I finally came to the frogging decision yesterday when I was grabbing half an hour of uninterrupted knitting time in the car outside my daughter`s ballet class. however...I didn`t have any other knitting with me, or even a book, so guess what I did? Yup, kept right on knitting, lol. Even I knew I was going to rip it out. Sad, addictive behavior, no?

I`ve also come to the conclusion that I`m a sock addict. Yes I know I`m a slow knitter and a pair of socks takes me a couple of months when done inbetween other projects, but since I learned to knit socks last year there`s never been a time when I didn`t have a pair on my old, well loved charity shop sock needles. Which is why though I`m going to leave the Regia Silk for a while till I find a nice pattern that will do it justice, I`m now going to go and investigate the sock wool basket and see what socks I`m going to cast on tonight.

Other minor irritations this week?

On Saturday night Mairi came through at 2am to tell me she`d thrown up. Being a tidy child (in some ways) she`d done this in her waste paper bin, which earned a lot of praise from Mummy! But she was sick a couple of more times that night and she did need a cuddle each time, so I had a bad night. And she needed a quiet day on the sofa with lots of Barbie DVDs the next day, so no allotment time for mum.

On Monday evening Duncan started throwing up....

...and it was my turn last night. Fortunately it`s one of these bugs that make you violently sick for 2-3 hours, then rubbish for another 12-24, then you`re fine. However Hubby is on a work trip in London so I haven`t been able to have my day on the sofa watching DVDs, sadly.

Because.....last and most important "minor" irritation of the week is that the washing machine died. Or almost...Washing Machine Repair Man Dave seems to think that as it`s a mighty German built Bosch that has performed magnificently over the eight years we`ve had it (10-12 loads a week, every week, or around 5,500+ washes) then it`s worth giving it a full organ transplant, ie a new motor. He seems to think (no reason to doubt this man, who`s been fixing washing machines for our family and friends for thirty years) that an eight year old German built Bosch with a new motor is still vastly superior to the current non-German built ones. Makes you think, eh? For a "mere" £150 our washing machine should be good for another five years, says WMRM Dave. Better than a £500 replacement that will only last five years as well, apparently.

Though I suppose it`s not in the commercial interests of a washing machine company to have their washing machines last for too long, is it? I hate this disposable society.

Rant over. I`m off to take Missy to the vet to get her stitches taken out. (She was neutered ten days ago). Don`t cats look peculiar with their fur part shaved off?



She didn`t want me to take a pix of her looking less than beautiful, clearly!

And as a finale.....Have you heard the expresion "It was like herding cats"? Too true....