End of November.

I finished my NaKniSweMo sweater....




Yes, deeply rubbish picture, but what do you expect at 11.30 pm? Art? (I'll get a better photo tomorrow.)

Pattern is 3timesChic, in Rowan Plaid, recycled from a UFO that has been taunting me for over a year now. It's a chunky sweater and the alpaca/wool blend is going to make it waaarrrmmm, but it's a great fit (I made a medium), the very slightly ribbed effect gives it shape and it's a total doddle to knit. I will make it again, I think. But possibly an inch or two longer...I already added an inch to the pattern, but it could do with more.

Oh, and with this post I have also completed NatBloPOMo. Hopefully it hasn't been too boring a read for you all? I've quite enjoyed the discipline/encouragement provided by having signed up for this, and hopefully not too many of my posts have been filler ones. I've written about cats, knitting, spinning, my family, cooking, my endless struggle with the house improvements AND had a competition, so I think there's been something for everyone!

I'll do the November progress roundup next week. But for December I'm not going to have challenges, targets or any other sorts of pressure. Christmas is bad enough, urgh....

Oh, and Lad is home. He had a grand time, as predicted, and did a lot of things. But the principle topics of his conversation this evening was how they gave them three (Yes, three!!!, sez he) courses every dinner, cooked breakfasts every day and an all-you-want-to-make packed lunch system, lol. And he found a new girlfriend....though, by the sound of it, she found him. Well, the school did say that the week wasn't just about outward bound activity, but also about personal growth and development!

Knitting?

Hey, I finished something!



This is the Lace Edged Woman's Hat from the Head Huggers site, which actually specialises in chemo cap patterns. I just found the hat and thought it would be nice for Princess. It's knitted in a wonderful yarn called Sirdar Balmoral, a lovely blend of 72% wool, 25% alpaca and 3% silk. I have fallen for this yarn big style, which is a mistake as it's discontinued.

This hat is a good fast knit...I made it in an afternoon, and I'm not a quick knitter, and it took just under 100yards of yarn. I made the small size as recommended as I'm a loose knitter, and while it's a good fit for my bigheaded six year old it's also stretchy enough to fit me, nearly, and I have a big skull. Excellent pattern, ideal for a st minute present I would think.

I bought the yarn on Tuesday, in one of the charity shops in Haddington. They had a huge basket of vintage yarns, mostly acrylic but I did find a 1oz ball of Patons "Nylox" sock yarn (80% wool 20% nylon) in a rust colour that will coordinate perfectly with the left overs from my Anastasia Socks. Four 1oz balls of dark ruby 4ply Patons "School Knitting" in the same wool/nylon blend, also for socks. Two 1oz balls of Lee Target "Motoravia" 100% pure wool 4ply in dark pink, for socks or a scarf for Princess Top prize find though was the one and a bit balls of the Balmoral. Gorgeous yarn! Total cost for 8 balls of very useful and good quality yarn? £1.60, or $3.20 USA. I LOVE charity shops!

I've also been plugging on with the Dead Parrot and I've finished all the sections for my 3timesChic sweater. I doubt I'll be finished it for the end of November though, given the current swamp of chores i have waiting. Oh well...not to stress out about a sweater. I want to finish it though so I can get onto knitting something else. My very favourite old zip-up hooded cardigan has finally worn out under the arms after three years of almost constant wear. It's not mendable, so I need to replace it with something. I quite like this, the Zip Cardigan by Lorna miser, but there are lots of contenders out there.

Oh, and I finished painting Lad's room and am just waiting for the paint to dry before I shove all the furniture back. It looks a little more blue than I hoped (it's two coats of cream over a very strong sy blue) but there's no time now to put on a third coat of paint. Anyway, I'm going to have floor to ceiling shelves round three and a half sides of this room before I'm finished. No-one is even going to notice the paint colour has changed.

Old and creaky.

Well, I got the first coat of paint on Lad's bedroom walls today. Only two and a bit walls because I have to paint them first then move the ceiling high shelves (and contents ) across to free up the other walls for painting. And it only took me about one and a half hours. But...

...I'm getting old, alas. My back and the back of my legs hurt, big style. I have stiffened into a question mark shape. My fault, of course, because instead of going for an immediate hot shower after I finished I sat down for an hour and just sort of set.Yeah, I'm a wimp. How can that little bit of painting be so tiring? Well, if I tell you that the ceilings here are neary fifteen feet high, would that explain things? Our walls are BIG, and there is a lot of uppity-downy and stretching involved with painting them. Hey, and after I finish this room, I have three more bedrooms, two publics, kitchen, bathroom, 35' long hallway and a stairwell with a thirty foot drop to paint. (Actually this last is DEFINATELY getting subcontracted.) Good thing I quite like painting, no? It's just the stress on the body I hate.

Oh, as to colour? Well, after trying about 100 matchpots of every known blend of white, cream, magnolia and pale beigeish , I decided on an inoffensive creamy yellow-white called Jasmine White. The reason it had to be inoffensive is because I'm going to paint the entire house with it, end to end, with the single exception of Princess`s room which will be Rose white. I am going for the Neutral Look. Bugger Style Statements. I'm not intending to do this again in a hurry.

Theo in Waiting.

Theo is officially Lad's cat, though in practice Theo seems to think he belongs to whoever is holding his food bowl.

But there's no denying he's missing his boy. He has barely moved his furry butt off Lad's backpack since Lad left.




(Except to visit his food bowl, of course. He's not that upset!)

DIY week.

Well, given that Lad has pushed off for the week, I've decide to paint his bedroom. This is Stage 1 of a long and complicated plan which is designed to not only swap the study into his room and vice versa, but also to swap our bedroom with that of Princess. A couple of weekends work? Ahem. I think not. Six months, more like it.

It's the stuff, you see. We have a big house with large rooms, high walls, lots of shelving and four pack rats living here. We do floor to ceiling accumulation of stuff. We have stuff here that moved in with us nine years ago that we haven't seen since the day we unpacked it. We have tottering piles of toys. Shelf upon shelf of boks. Camera gear. Computer gear. My massive Playmobil collection. My stash. My other stash. My wheels. (Back up to five again.) Etc. Just moving the stuff away from a couple of walls takes hours. Fitting it all back again is generally impossible.

Yup, I know. Chuck it out. I am I've been in Lad's bedroom for two hours already, have moved the furniture clear of the work zone and have three binbags of rubbish to go out. I'm sitting down for a cuppa here though. I'm not getting any younger and moving furniture around isn't half as easy as it used to be. I am pacing myself. I have cleared the two and a half walls I am going to paint and now need to brush them down and do a bit of plastering on one wall, where last year's repairs knocked the skirting out. Then I will get the painting things ready and walk away till tomorrow.

This is what Hubby doesn't understand when I say painting one room will take a week. Yeah, sure, slapping two coats of paint on just over half a room will probably take me about three hours total with the roller actually in hand. It's all the rest that takes time. And if I knacker myself in the first day by doing too much then I'll not be able to do anything tomorrow. I have all the rest of the domestic stuff to do...laundry, shopping, cooking, school run etc. Plus I don't want to miss my classes, and I'm doing a spinning demo at a craft show two days this weekend. (Note to self here: Do not knacker hands. Rough hands can't spin!)

I'm sure I heard someone at the back ask why Hubby doesn't help? Well, he's going out to work at 6am at present and getting back at 7pm. Nuff said? If I had waited two weeks till the teaching for the semester had ended I might have been able to get a couple of hours furniture moving out of him. But Lad would have been here and that would have made things considerably more difficult. Nope, this week was my only chance.

Dustsheets. Plaster. Laundry. Rubbish bins. Boxes into storage in attic. Make beds. Before lunchtime, if possible...and it's 11.30am already, eek. Better get away from here!

But I will leave you with one last image. It has to be a mental one though as a black cat on a black background is a bit...well, black. Lad has left his school backpack on a shelf in the hall and Theo is asleep on it. He's been there for most of the last 24 hours, actually. He's never slept there before. Is it possible he knows in some strange feline way that Lad is away? Is he there because he's in some way missing Lad, or waiting for his return?

Oh well, onwards and upwards....!

Lad.

On a brighter note than yesterday, this is my second son Duncan, aka Lad.




He's eleven now and a big lad, almost as tall as me.




He likes his food...




His sister loves him...




He loves his kittens...




He even loves her. (Most of the time. She is a pest.)




He's helpful....




And funny....




And tomorrow he heads off on his week long school trip to an outward bound centre in the Scottish Highlands. Hiking, canoeing, white water rafting, absailing etc. He's never been away from home for such a long time before, not without one of us around somewhere. Yes, he goes to sleepovers etc and sometimes I barely see him from one days end to the next, he's so busy during the summer. But this is for four nights and five days.

Naturally though he's really looking forwards to it. He likes good dirty sporty outdoors stuff, has a good bunch of friends going too and likes and trusts his teachers. He's not pernickity about food, as long as there's lots plus ketchup, and he's used to camping and living out a holdall for weeks on end. (They are not camping, they are sleeping in bunkhouses.) He's not some fragile shy flower totally dependant on someone else cossetting him along. He will have a ball.

It's just ME that's suddenly gone into full mother hen mode, overloading him with socks, reminding him not to go out in wet shoes and to remember to wash. (This last is a bit of a vain hope, I admit.) My little curley-haired baby is growing up. He was always the little, cute, cuddly one that put his hand in yours when he was worried about something, unlike his big confident brother and totally unfazable little sister. Now, he's nearly a young man.

Have a great time, son.

November 24th.

Today is that day again.

I'm not saying life really gets better about this sort of thing, but you do get used to it. I was watching a terribly trite program on bereavement a few months ago when someone came out with a very true statement "You never get over these things, but you do work out ways of getting through them". Yup, that's true. The thing is it all takes such an amazingly long time to get to this stage but conversely on days like today it seems like it all happened only a few days ago.

This morning though I looked at my tall, fair, lively and beautiful daughter as she scampered around the house in her PJs looking for breakfast. She's six years and five weeks old today. Next year she will be seven, and the same age as her big brother when he died. Also, the same number of years will have passed since he died as he lived with us. It all seems impossible in a way, even yet. I wonder if seven years will be the magic number for me when I finally come to terms with all this? Because it's certainly not happened yet. What does "come to terms with" mean anyway?

However as they also say, life goes on. Today we are off to the Haddington Scouts Christmas Fair, which is the official start of the Christmas season for us. It's a fun, lively, very home-made and well run event and the kids enjoy it hugely. A good time to turn another corner and into another year, I think.