Friday 10th December - That was the week that was

 An odd kind of week, bitty, hassled, but as the days passed things began to settle.

This is a long post, even by my standards, so maybe wait until you have time for a cup of coffee, perhaps spread it over a couple of days?

The details of the various bits and pieces and loose ends and emails and etc etc that all needed clearing, following up, sorting, completing as a matter of moderate urgency are not important. It's just that, all added together, it became overwhelming. 

However, by the end of Tuesday most of the spinning plates had managed to land without out any serious smashes, and we are back to the day-to-day of what passes for normal in my life.

I have half-decorated the Christmas Tree - seriously - because I can only reach one side of it. The other  side is too close to the window. Then I hit upon the solution - I decorated the side I could reach, and we rotated the tree through 180 degrees. It looks find from outside... here is a photograph that I took when it was only partway rotated.

 I'm sure I will get round to finishing it soon, maybe this weekend.

In the process of rotating the tree, a glass of water upset itself all over the floor (I was NOWHERE near it, honestly). Fortunately he glass didn't break, and fortunately the water went over where we hoovered, so our wooden floor is looking a lot cleaner and brighter after using this as an opportunity to give that part of the floor a good wash.

McCavity the cat has provided us with another opportunity to wash a little more of the sitting room floor (it is well overdue!). She has lived for all of her 18 years and 8 months without getting her ear slit in a fight, but we tracked a trail of small drops of blood to where she was sitting in a rather dishevelled heap on her cushion. The injury to her ear is very slight and I can't find any other narks or bites. I think her thick fluffy coat saved her from worse. I expect the other cat is now suffering from furballs.

I don't think we will wash the rest of the floor any time soon.

Knitting news; 

The baby hat is off the needles and ready to be posted along with the tea cosy.

so I allowed myself to make a start on the 'experimental' jumper. I'm following Elizabeth Zimmermann knitting instructions - you can't call it a pattern exactly - 'I wouldn't dream of telling you which wool, what size needles, what tension you require or how many stitches to cast on' she says chattily in the book - so you do a swatch or sample, see what you get, and then start on the arithmetic. Judging by my experience so far, this wool is very easy to rip back, pick up stitches and re-knit if things go wrong... that's it, sort of greeny-blue colour. It is knitted 'in the round', so you join your stitches into a circle and just knit round and round and round... until you discover that you DID have a twist in the stitches when you joined them in spite of checking everything about three times. There is no solution to this problem - once you have finished your temper tantrum you have to calmly rip it back, pick up the stitches and then just knit round and round and round and round...  

The red-blue knitting is the Advent cowl knit-a-long. Just eight rows each day, so I am managing to keep up at the moment.

 The slow cooker is in use now. I have made a great Vat of Red Cabbage which has been divided into portions and put in the freezer, all except one portion which became an emergency lunchtime vegetable when the beans destined for our lunch threw themselves into the catfood plates rather than land on our plates to be eaten. Oh alright, we dropped them when we lifted the bowl out of the microwave. No cats or people were hurt in the accident. (And we didn't stop to wash the kitchen floor!)

not cooked yet

I used the word food processor to slice the cabbage and the onions and the apple. It was such good fun that I sliced up the rest of the onions, three carrots and the white cabbage as well.

I used quite a lot of the onions and carrot when I used the crockpot again for a sort of minced beef base - which has also been portions and frozen. Where did all this energy come from? It won't last, but as long as we don't have tears before bedtime everything will be fine. Although we have run out of freezer space at the moment.

Dress Day 98

Now that the end is so close, I find that I am dropping bits of biscuit or discovering crumbs of Advent chocolate melted onto it the whole time. This dress is in for the shock of its life after the weekend.