Daylight...*eek*!!

I can see daylight today. Good? Well, this is through some of my walls, so perhaps not. The workies are renewing the string course today. Wasssat? It`s the band of stone that trims off the top of the shop frontages and our front room walls sit on top of this. The only thing that now separates us here from the outside world is the skirting boards. (Wooden trim round base of walls inside, for our foreign readers.) There are gaps, top and bottom, where you can put your fingers out and wiggle them in the fresh air. Bit disconcerting, really. What`s keeping the walls up??????

I did stick my head out one of the windows and asked the foreman if this was the was it was supposed to look from the inside. He seemed most cheerfully confident that all was well. Hmm. Have I faith in this man? Maybe..... Are they a reputable building company. Yes, actually, appearances to the contrary. Shall I just go out shopping and try not to think about it? Possibly, yes.......

And a bloke came round to give us an estimate for the cavity wall insulation we`re thinking of getting installed if possible. He blinked a bit at our massive three and a half storey gable end and mighty rear elevation. Bit different from the usual three bedroom semi. We`ll have to see just how much it will cost before we decide but it would certainly be a good idea for our cold, draughty Thirties house with its three huge exposed sides. I just have this horrid vision of them pumping the powdery insulating material in and it coming straight through the cracks round the skirting boards. Then the rooms gradually filling up, and up, and up.....

Maybe I should ask Santa for a new Hoover for Christmas?

The Planning and Building Warrant applications went in yesterday, so that`s progress. I was getting pretty sick of sitting in the planning offices yet again, waiting for the long suffering but very helpful duty Planning Officer to tell me I was short of yet another piece of essential paper. It all takes time.

And it`s the 6th today, and that means nineteen days to Christmas. Argh!! I`ve bought some presents and put the Advent calendars up, but that`s all so far. Usually we do Christmas crafts and gluey stuff and all the rest, but who`s got time? The kids seem to have so many activities...swimming, ballet, judo, basketball, rugby, Cub Scouts, music practice, wargaming and homework. I have the building works clogging up so much of my time, and trying to keep some vague order in the house. (This last ain`t working, belive you me.)

I did however go to my spinning group yesterday. There`s something very soothing about a dozen women sitting around in the upper floor of an old historic mill room, weaving and spinning and knitting and talking. It`s tranquil, and also very timeless. If we had different clothes we could be in any time in the last three centuries and if we got rid of the wheels, longer than that. It was a glorious sunny day, we could see the swans down in the millstream guddling around and someone had brought home made cake. Well worth going to. We`re a very miscellaneous bunch of women with a lot of different interests besides spinning but we are a tight group and we all get on well. No personality clashes to disrupt the harmony.

And I`ve got them all knitting socks! For a couple of weeks I`d only been able to stay for an hour or so and it wasn`t worth lugging a wheel around for that so I`ve just been taking in knitting. All I`m making is another plain pair of socks from the eternal freebie Opal pattern, but the lure of the self-patterning yarn is strong and there are six people knitting socks now, including three sock virgins. I`m hardly any sort of expert given that I`ve only been knitting socks for eighteen months, but in some ways that`s an advantage when you`re demonstrating to a novice. You remember what bits you found so hard first time around.

Even thinking about knitting socks is soothing.....remember Nero who fiddled while rome burned? Perhaps I should just sit here and knit socks while the house gradually collapses into a heap of dusty bricks around me? And I found just the right sock pattern....The Sock of Doom.

Not Knitting.

I just don`t have time to knit these days, it seems. I don`t have evenings in front of the telly any more, evenings when I could crank out most of a sleeve or similar. Nope, my knitting is done two rows here, two rows there. It`s frustrating. Spin at home? Not a chance. I`ve got bobbins full of singles everywhere, just waiting for plying time. Not this side of Christmas, sadly.

Yesterday, for example, I went to the allotment. Had to really...I haven`t been there for weeks. Now if you`re going to neglect an allotment then November is an ideal time to do so, but there are limits. It was pouring with rain when I arrived so I was just going to dump the wood and compost things I`d taken up, grab some veg and run but then the sun came out and I decided to stay. I weeded five beds, pruned the hazelnut tree and was halfway through cutting down the autumn raspberries when the sky went black again and I ran. I got some lovely veg though...great fat carrots and leeks, parsnips, a neep and some winter cabbage.

After I`d defrosted in the shower I basically had to go straight back out again and hit two supermarkets to do the other part of the hunter-gathering thing. Yeah, I`m a glutton for punishment spreading my shopping over two supermarkets but money is tight at the moment so I have to shop by price, not convenience. I can shave £20 a week off my grocery bill by going to Lidl as well instead of just buying everything at Tesco like I used to do. And some of the Lidl produce is fantastic...real gourmet stuff at bargain prices. So if any of the UK readers here haven`t tried Lidl, go. Yes, the brands are German and often unfamiliar but once you`ve got past the brand loyalty thing (Heinz or nothing??) then it`s really going to be worth your while, I promise.

So back home just in time to make the tea for the kids, quick pick up and a batch of laundry in, Mairi into bed then sat down with Duncan to watch The Santa Clause 2, which was okay in a very corny way. Yup, got some knitting time there. I did about six inches of the second sleeve for Duncan`s sweater.

Yeah, question about Duncan`s sweater. I am knitting it in the round, but the pattern (raglan sleeved) is written for flat. I`m quite confident about the knitting three seperate tubes (body, two sleeves) bit up to the armhole shaping, than putting them all onto one long circular needle and working up to the neck, including all the raglan decreases. But what I`m wondering ablout is the part at the start of the shaping, both for arm and body flat sections, when they tell you to cast off three stitches at the start of the next two rows of each flat piece to start the armholes. Yes, I know I`ll have to dump these stitches when knitting in the round as well. How? Cast them off, then sew up the little slots under the armholes at the end? Leave them on safety pins and graft them at the end? Do a three needle cast-off to join the armhole decreases to the body decreases? Anyone got a good descriptive website for this? Anyone just tell me?

Anyway, today I`m wrecked. This is the pattern for me these days...I do one day of what I would regard as normally busy mother activities, then the next day I can barely move, I`m so wrung out. But of course I can`t stop and have a day off because there`s far to much to do here, especially at the moment, and I just don`t have time. I`m sitting here with boxes of stuff from one end of the hall to the other, the cat tray and dishes need cleaned, the whole house need hooverd because the hoover has been up in the attic for a week now, the attic needs finished off and dust sheeted before the workmen come back (tomorrow??), I have ten loads of laundry to sort and wash and then there are the normal daily things like pick-up and make the beds. And I need a shower and we`re going out to see the Singing Kettles at five. Which means the kids will be back from rugby in an hour and a half, filthy and I`ll have to get them sorted out and bathed myself, as Hubby is going out Christmas shopping. Day off? Hah! One thing I do know, it will be fish and chips for dinner. I`m not cooking today, trust me.

And tomorrow? Back to the Planning Office....

Up at the coal face...

Good thing my ancestors were all miners, because I`ve been getting dirty enough for one. That attic!!! Yuck! I have hoovered up five...yes five...bags of grit and grot and dust from the attic. Doesn`t soiund much? Imagine it in a 5mm layer over every surface of every box or bag in a 45` x 15 ` attic. That`s 675 square feet...and that`s assuming I was cleaning it from a flat surface, which I wasn`t. There`s a lot of stuff up in the attic.

Yuck....I`m still sneezing soot. One good thing though was that the attic has been tidied up a bit and dejunked quite a lot. Who needs three bulky computer monitors when we`ve all switched to flatscreen? A 15 year old laptop? The empty boxes for every electrical appliance we`ve bought in the last five years? Both cars are full of bags of junk now...the big car is full of bags bound for the dump/electrical recycling depot, the little car has bags for the charity shops. It is refreshing. :-)

I also found a few things to put on Ebay (Anyone remember Psions? We`ve got two....) and some odds and sods that I probably bought last year for putting into the kids` Xmas stockings and then promptly forgot about. I also got the chance to revisit my world class collection of vintage Playmobil, fortunately all boxed up and dustproof. Actually, I was quite lucky in that a lot of stuff that was stored up in there was bagged or boxed up. My fleece and yarn stash, for example. Imagine the grot getting into fleeces! And I`ve got all the boxes of Christmas decorations and the tree out, ready for putting up next weekend.

In fact, I`m having quite a good time up in the attic, grot not withstanding. Once the two windows go in we`re going to have a big, usable space up there, not just storage. One end is going to become the main storage area for my fibre and wheels and the other is going to be used for playing. Scalectrix? Model railway? Wargames? Massive Playmobil city? All of this is possible, though not all at the same time. And of course we also have huge amounts of storage under the eaves, out the way.

Want to see some pictures? These ones were taken just after we had it floored but before we started filling it up.





I like it up there.

Rant.

Just read this and tell me what you think.

We`ve got a lot of spare sets of keys, both Hubby work related and domestic. We have a big keyboard, of which the top three rows, the work ones, are labelled etc. The bottom two rows are domestic keys, spare keys for house, my mum, friends etc. I know what they are because I know the rings, the pairings and where they live on the board. I don`t like putting names and addresses onto other folks keys. What if we get burgled? Open invitation to pick up keys for other people`s houses, no?

Hubby had some new work keys cut. He needed some new rings. Guess what he did? He pulled nineteen keys from the bottom two rows off their hooks, took the keys off their rings to reuse and threw the "unwanted" keys into a bag. He gave me this bag because "Mairi wanted some old keys to play with, didn`t she?"

???????????!!!!!

I don`t know how you feel about keys, but I feel keys are important. I feel if I`ve gone to the trouble of placing them onto the keyboard, they`re very important. I feel that Hubby should have asked me about them before he muddled them up into a bag. But apparently, despite the fact we have had this keyboard for over seven years and I have ALWAYS kept the domestic keys on this board, they shouldn`t have been there. It`s HIS board. Therefore the keys were junk keys, because they were not work keys that he recognised.

He has apologised, but more, I feel, to try to shut me up than for any feeling he might have been wrong to do this. I think he feels I am being unreasonable.

My Hubby has three degrees, one of them a PhD and he teaches postgraduate students at a prestigious university. He is clever, no doubt. So what happened to his "*^%$£ common sense?

I`m mad about this. I`ve got six different things to organise for the house repairs over the next couple of days, the kids and house stuff to look after and (wait for this) I have to make an annoying and time consuming trip into Edinburgh to deliver two sets of his work keys. He knows I`ll do it, though I`m probably going to have to miss my spinning morning just to fit this in. He trusts me, because he knows I think keys are important. I`m also going to have to find time to go round several other houses with these "junk" keys and work out whose are whose. What if someone has an emergency, and needs their spare keys in a hurry? I`ve already fished out the three spare sets of our house keys, the ones he was going to give to our daughter as playthings.

Yeah, I am mad. Very. Can you tell? Can anyone come up with a satisfactory explaination as to why he didn`t just buy new rings at the locksmiths when he was getting the new keys cut?

24th November 2001.

I wasn`t entirely sure if I was going to post about this, but I think I must.

The picture above is of my two sons, Duncan and Robbie, and was taken in the summer of 2001 at Edinburgh Zoo. Duncan is on the left and he`s not quite five in the picture, and the pest with the innocent expression on the right is Robbie, then aged seven. The picture was taken in July and on the 24th November of the same year Robbie died after a two year fight with a rare form of soft tissue cancer.

He was a great boy...the picture really sums him up, cheeky and fun and feisty, loved playing with (and tormenting) his little brother and intent on enjoying himself despite all the unpleasant and often very painful treatments he underwent at the hospital. He always looked forwards to getting out and about on these family treats, which couldn`t happen as often as any of us wished.He was in a temporary remission over his last summer though, so we did as much as possible.

His sister Mairi was born on the 18th October. Sadly, when she was ten days old he had the first of three strokes and that was when we discovered the cancer had moved into his brain. He made an amazing partial recovery from this, though....enough to give us just a little more time together. He was always a boy who wanted to know what was happening with his cancer, despite being so young, and he had seen all too many of his hospital friends die so when he asked me the question I was expecting I told him yes, this was it. He thought about if for a little while and then told me "Okay mum, I may be going to die, but I`m going to have some more fun first." We all did. I remember going to see the first Harry Potter film...twice, going to MacDonalds, going Christmas shopping and being persuaded to buy him yet another Lego set. He enjoyed being with baby sister Mairi too. I`m convinced he held off succumbing to his cancer long enough to see her. Sadly, not for long. He died when she was five weeks old.

That was five years ago today, and we all still miss him terribly. Even Mairi talks about him and asks for the funny stories about the brother that would have been a strapping twelve year old if he`d lived. There are pictures, things that belonged to him still around and we have special days here and there when we all do things he would have enjoyed. It does get easier...I`ve got used to him not being here but I still think of him every day and I`ve never quite got past the feeling that one day he might just walk in the door, back from school, and life will go back to the way it should have been.

Today was just another day in many respects though ...school, hassle with the builders, cleaning etc. Life goes on, especially with two lively children and Christmas coming up! Tomorrow we will go to the event that for the past few years now has come to mean the start of the Christmas season for us. Nothing grand, it`s the local Scout Christmas Fair day. We had planned to take Robbie to it five years ago, to have some more fun. He didn`t make it that far. Hubby and Duncan and Mairi and I went anyway. Robbie would have approved.

Fun is important. Remember that, folks.

Progress on all fronts.

Well, there has been progess, on all fronts. I`ve now been given a time line to work with, which is a relief with Christmas looming close. We`re still chasing the Planning Consent and Building Control paperwork for the replacement windows and Veluxes for the attic, you see (bloomin` Council chambers won`t let you get away without every t dotted and every i crossed.....;-) ) So basically everyone has given up on Plan A, which was to finish totally by Christmas, and have decided to finish everything but the windows before Christmas, leave the scaffolding up over the two week holiday period then swoop in straight after the New Year to do the replacement windows etc. We should have the consents by then.

(For the non-UK readers who have asked... our local councils don`t just let us do any old alterations we want to our houses. Even things they totally approve of, like reinstating original style windows in place of the vile 70`s plastic monstrosities we currently have. It requires a period of time where we officially request permission to do this, notify our neighbours to see if they object, allow 28 days or whatever to allow them to object and even then the County Council might decide not to allow it if we had wanted to do something inappropriate to the building. Same with the Veluxes, which are a sort of sloping window we want to put into the pitch of the attic for ventilation. Just to complicate things further, we also need a Building Control warrent for the Veluxes, which means we need to prove to the Council we`re not going to do anything to damage the safety of the structural integrity of the house. For the two Veluxes we need to cut and brace one roof joist per Velux. Nothing difficult, it`s very common and perfectly safe if done properly but we still need to complete the paper trail. If we don`t do all of this, when we come to sell the house twenty years from now we won`t be able to, as no lender will give a buyer a mortgage on a house with unauthorised alterations. Plus we can get hit with massive fines from the Council for not following the legal process. If they feel scunnerish about it, they can fine you AND tell you to reinstate the original structure. Really, it`s not worth not doing the paperwork! Plus, we`re getting some grant aid towards the main outside works which is really nice in these days of cash strapped Council budgets and they`ll require all the paperwork done properly.)

Anyway, to get back to the timeline, this means we`ll have our lounge and kitchen still functional over Christmas, with (hopefully) working utilities and heating. In return we get to keep our scaffolding for another three weeks or so. It means I can put the Christmas tree and all the decorations up...originally I was thinking if they took the lounge windows out the week before Christmas I would be frantically cleaning the mess up on Christmas Eve and putting the tree up at 5am on Christmas morning, yo ho ho. So I`m happy. It also gives me another five weeks to box up ornaments, books, toys etc. The window replacement is going to be very, very messy.

Gawd, you must be all sick of reading about my house! Well, it`s my blog and I`ll moan if I want to. ;-) But belive it or not, I have been doing a reasonable amount of crafting amidst all this, even if it is only (a) more socks and (b) a plain sweater for Duncan. I`m still going to the Haddington Spinners every Tuesday...it`s a haven of tranquility and sanity, belive me! I also go to the Edinburgh Guild on the third Saturday of every month, though having said that I didn`t last Saturday because it was Mairi`s big ballet show and she was performing.

I am currently spinning a lovely blend of shocking pink merino carded with white angora from Marshmallow the rabbit, who is owned by my spinning friend Debbie. (I swapped her a tent for a box of angora fibre, lol. ) This is for a hat/scarf/mitts for the Pink Princess, of course, though she might not get them this winter! I also bought four 50g balls of dyed mulberry silk roving from Doreen at
Scottish Fibres, who was at the felting workshop last Thursday and who always brings along a sack or two of her new stuff "just to show us". Temptress! I bought some siver grey to blend with the grey angora I bought at Woolfest (name of rabbit unknown) and some very intense peach, pistachio and lilac colours. Sounds revolting? No....gorgeous.

Unfortunately I can`t show you any of this at the moment, because we`re down to less than seven hours of daylight here now and the green safety netting round the scaffolding means the house feels permenantly subterranean when it comes to lighting. The garden is a no-go area because of the building works. I must see what I can rig up indoors, but I don`t really like taking pictures of fibre and yarn under artificial lighting. The colours don`t show well.

Oh well, on with another cleaning and packing day. And Christmas shopping, argh!!!!

And for today`s encore....

...the workmen managed to inflict an almost mortal blow to the satellite telly dish.
Fortunately or otherwise they seemed to regard this as far more serious than the computers being down and produced a repair person in under an hour. I was almost disappointed. Nothing but pap on the TV most of the time anyway.

So to date they`ve flattened the garden, up in the attic they have recreated Pompei after Vesuvius blew, cut my telephone wires and broken my satellite dish. We still have electricity, gas, central heating, drains, windows and the cats. Any bets on what the workies will do next???

Answers on a postcard in ten words or less, please. The best suggestion submitted will win a chunk of genuine Scottish battleship grey render chipped directly from my walls. Judge`s decision is final, and you get to pay the postage.