Friday 1st September - best laid plans

No 1 plan, to send my August Cross Country Collaboration off to Ang hasn't worked out. It's partly because having hummed and hah-ed I have decided that I DO want to fill in the white space between the motifs - and having missed the post today there's no chance of Ang getting it before Monday. Ho hum.

One serendipitous discovery is that having started filling in the white space (Yes, it was the correct decision) is that there was one line that needed a border stitched, but this would have impinged on Ang's 'Bless this Home'  piece. But, hurrah, close inspection and careful counting revealed that her picture is off-centre by a whole row!  

The picture above doesn't show the full space, but to the left of the border there are 5 squares, and to the right of the border there are 6 squares. So I have encroached by one square, making Ang' piece exactly central.

Filling in the white space is going quite quickly, I'm glad to say, just using one colour (well, two thread from different skeins) so I can track up and down the rows doing all crisses and then all crosses. No thinking required. Or not much.

So, Ang, if you are thinking about September already, firstly my apologies for delaying your start, and secondly, at least you know that I am filling the bottom right corner!

Secondly, I was going to post a photograph of Ang's lovely piece of stitching for August here. She must be a real high-speed stitcher because she appears to have all the stitching over the weekend! I'm happy to manage 50-70 stitches per hour if I am reading a chart, and can reach 100 per hour if I'm just doing large blocks of colour.  

I still haven't got me, my phone and the sewing all together, so I am 'borrowing' Ang's photo from her post; (hope you don't mind) and I really recommend you follow the link as she has written in detail all about the inspiration(s) and why she chose shades of purple.

the writing is 'tenui filo magnum texitur opus', the original motto of the company which is now DMC threads and means 'from a single thread comes great work'.

Yes indeed.

Other news - I don't know. Is slugging news? We went out again, and I took a bigger pot, and we collected at least another 20 slugs and snails. 

I'm hankering to get back to the pen and ink stuff I was doing - I've tried an idea or two but not started the next topics in the work book yet.

Books; Oh how I have been reading books this past week!

I finished

'How to run your home without help' by Kay Shrubsall, a Persephone book I have read before. This time I read it with increasing horror; daily dusting, sweeping, brushing and vacuuming carpets, washing and polishing floors, the labour of laundry ('first assemble everything you will need; soap, jelly soap, soda, buckets, brushes, bowls, make sure you have arranged plenty of hot water and set the boiler to heat, fetch in the mangle'). She fills every moment of the day with unrelenting cooking, cleaning, shopping and house work, and the evening with knitting, sewing, ironing and mending. 

and

'Cotillion' by Georgette Heyer - I snapped it up for 99p on kindle as my own copy is a well-thumbed paperback from my teenage days. I had completely forgotten the plot, which is oneof her more complicated ones. But the right people paired off in the end (as if it were ever in doubt...)

I'm still moseying through Isabella Bird's 'A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains'; an account of this intrepid lady's travels in the 1870s. Fantastic adventures and descriptive writing, but not light-weight.

and 'Coot Club' by Arthur Ransome. Rattling good yarns, which I have been reading every few decades all my life.    

Saturday 19th November - Plan of Attack

 There are days when it is necessary to sit down and list and prioritize what need to be done. Today is one of those days. Luckily I have a pad of post-it notes for that purpose;

Make coffee was first on the list - but knitting some of the Advent cowl while I drank it was not on the list at all.

Neither was loading our new 'mini' slow cooker with milk, sugar and rice ready for a rice pudding four hours' time.

 Now, where was I? Ah yes. Catching up with the list. All be done by lunch time with any luck, and rice pudding will be my reward.  

Tuesday 15th November 2022 - knitting thoughts and calculations

 Skip this post if you are not interested in knitting - although the design and maths side might be interesting - or maybe even more off-putting?

Here is the Advent cowl from the mystery knit-a-long I followed last December;

 It was knitted as a long thin strip, 33-35 stitches wide and around - where's my calculator gone - 24 days and about 9 rows per day is about 216 rows. Each day I received an email with the instructions for the 9 or so rows. 

The finished size of this cowl is 74 cm around and 16 cm deep, and weighing about 45 g. I think the yarn was thicker than double knitting, probably aran weight, and acrylic. The gauge is 25 rows and 20 stitches to make a 10 cm square.

I don't want to knit a strip again, because I would like to have a fair-isle/scandinavian pattern this time, and the best way to do colour knitting is to avoid purl like the plague. I shall use a circular needle and knit it in the round.

I have ordered three balls of Drops Alaska from woolwarehouse, which is ridiculously cheap on their website. The specifications are;

Yarn Weight	Aran
Ball Weight	50g
Length	70 metres
Needle Size	5mm
Blend	100% Wool
Tension	17 stitches and 22 rows for a 10x10cm tension square using 5mm needles

I've got two in a darkish blue for the background and one in off-white for the pattern

So far, so good. Now the maths begins;

Number of stitches to end up  with a 74cm neck (assuming I get something close to the gauge) is 

hmmm. 1.7 stitches  would be 1 cm, so 1.7 times 74 is 125.8 stitches. Let's call that 128, which divides nicely by 4, 2, 8, 16 (This has implications for the pattern repeat)

Number of rows to end up with a depth from chin to neck of 16 cm is 2.2 times 16 which is 35.2 rows. I'll call that 36 rows. (This has implications for how many rounds have to be completed between 1st and 24th December)

I need to do some rib at the top and the bottom; say three rows each, leaving me 30 rows for the main part of the cowl

So, day 1 could be cast on and a row of ribbing

day 2 two rows of ribbing

days 3 - 22 the patterns, and plain rows in between different patterns (20 days, 30 rows)

day 23 two rows of ribbing

day 24 a row of ribbing and the casting off.  

I loathe doing ribbing - I think I'll cast on and knit a row, then do a 'mock' rib of one row single rib (right side) next row knit, and do these two rows again before starting the pattern. I'll do the same again at the neck. Anyway, I've got some leftover aran somewhere so I can start swatching while I wait for the yarn to arrive.

I'll post my progress...  

  

Monday 14th November - Random Comments

 It's King Charles' birthday today. He's 74. Me, I'd rather be retired, living my own life (as I am) doing what I want to do (as I mostly do) whenever I please. I hope he's allowed some peace and quiet on his birthday.

https://creativecommons.org/resource/birthday-cake/5045502202_41476791a4_o/

my birthday celebrations started earlier than usual when we met up with son and daughter on Saturday. We have nearly finished the Guy Lian chocolates - rationing ourselves to only two at a time, a couple of times a day, and Himself is fettling the Advent candle so it will stand up straight in the holder - it is the holder that is wonky, not the candle. These little creatures are watching my every move while I teach piano from their cozy egg-box home

I might make them their own special Christmas tree in due course.

The cat is beginning to look a little less moth-eaten; I my perhaps have trimmed off a little too much fur when trying to removed one of the clumpy lumpy bits;

but if I carefully smooth her fur down (rather in the way that our chemistry teacher at school arranged his hair) I can hide the bald spot quite well.

I've been hunting round the internet for a knit-a-long project for Advent as I so enjoyed the one I stumbled across last year. It was at www.buttercupminiatures.co.uk; every day through December I received an email with about ten rows of pattern across 30 stitches - just enough to go with a cup a coffee in the morning. This year their knit-a-long is for create a miniature jumper for a 1/12 size doll - not what I am interested in doing at all. I shall have to see what else is out there, or maybe create my own from the various pattern books I have.  

Maybe a different Christmas motif using up my double knitting stash... hmm. There are loads and loads of free charts (cue 'lost in space music') out there on the web.

I did make a very successful (and incredibly warm) scarf using two balls of yarn, of plain, and one multicoloured. I knitted it in the round, on a circular needle, using charts I found on the internet. Maybe I'll do something like this again. 

This was two different colours of King Cole Riot. I think I used two balls of mixed greys and one of random bright colours - another time I would use a uniform plain colour for the background as a couple of times the two colours merged and the pattern was indistinct.  

Now I've been looking... I'm liking the idea of 2 balls of Sylecraft Life (£3.50 for 100g) and King Cole Magic or Beech (£4.59 for 100g). My fingers are twitching over the 'add to your basket' button,  but luckily for common sense I need to start a piano lesson in 7 minutes.    

It was 96 stitches round, as I remember, so that would be about 4 rounds per day - a project to last until Easter, I think, Christmassy motifs at one end, Candles etc through February, early spring bulbs, and then Easter?

 

Friday 11th February - Persephone Books

I suspect Persephone Books has a bit of a cult following. And I am one of their followers. Here's how they describe themselves;

Persephone Books reprints neglected fiction and non-fiction, mostly by women writers and mostly mid-twentieth century. All of our 141 books are intelligent, thought-provoking and beautifully written and are chosen to appeal to busy people wanting titles that are neither too literary nor too commercial.

They used to have a lovely shop in Lambs Conduit Street, Bloomsbury, London, an old-fashioned shop in an old-fashioned street and handy for the Foundlings Museum and cafe nearby. But they have moved to Bath, which is not as convenient for me. Bath has just risen several places higher on my list of places to visit once I am able to go out and about again. (Covid. snarl snarl).

At first sight, the books look very dull in their uniform silver-grey covers. However that means that 'Persephone People' can instantly recognise each other by a single glance at the bookshelf;

https://heavenali.wordpress.com/persephone/

This person has got a very severe case of Persephone addiction! I have about half a dozen, I'm not exactly sure how many, and have decided to allow myself the purchase of one per month, as a minimum, oh, those last three words added themselves to my sentence all by themselves!

Here are my January and February Persephone Books; 'The Country Life Cookery Book' by Ambrose Heath, and 'Greenery Street' by Denis MacNeil. Lying across the top is one of the bookmarks which come with every book; I would have to go a-hunting to find which one this bookmark belong to. 

The secret inside the cover of each book is the vibrant pattern, taken from textiles of the period; the cookery book is all leaves and flowers and birds, with bookmark to match

Greenery Street features furnishing fabric of the kind that 'Felicity' may well have chosen for her new home. Sadly, I don't have the matching bookmark, as I bought this online from a charity supporting the East Anglia Hospices. It is a little bit battered on the spine, but I can live with this in the knowledge that I save £5 on the purchase price and have donated a little bit of money to the hospice. 

 Also, I see that one can buy replacement bookmarks! I shall order some, and at the same time a catalogue. Which unfortunately dispenses with the saving I made from buying a book second hand. No problem, if I buy another second hand book, I will have made up the savings... it's a new economic policy I am adopting.

Saturday 24th July - Water

Woke up to thunder and rain. What a relief after the last few days. We had taken a gamble on not watering the garden last night, and this time it paid off.

Luckily it didn't last for too long - now, at the end of the day, it has become hot and sunny again.

 Sometimes I imagine what I would pack if we suddenly had to deal with imminently being flooded out; what would we salvage? For a start, we'd take the computer upstairs, and any important books and papers. 

Then collect passports (I think mine is out of date), empty my drawer of medicines into a bag, along with portable oxygen concentrator. Toothbrushes, soap, towels, shampoo (I can deal with anything as long as my hair isn't getting me down!). Cats into the cat box, and all the cat food. Scoop up the loo rolls and a tube of germolene which represents my sum total of First Aid equipment. Then food - would we have time for the little storm kettle? It might be useful. Blankets. Pillows.

 

Ah yes, and all the myriad computer and phone chargers... never forget the chargers!

still sort of on the subject of water,

Here are some splodgy watercolours; I have got hold of a thin book by Hazel Sloan called 'Learn to Paint  Watercolours Quickly' and am copying her pictures. 'You can read this book in 30 minutes,' she says, but you will be painting before you reach the end.' True.

I'm looking at her flower sketches at the moment, sloshing the colours on, letting them run together and saying ' well, that'll do,' after a minute or so. I want to use up anA4 sketchbook I started as an experiment, much larger than I have used before, and I don't think I really like it. Or do I? It might be growing on me.

I divided this page into six at the beginning of July, intending to do one square per day, but the picture I painted in the top right square was so awfully awful that I cut it out and threw it in the compost bin, which is why there's a bit of a sunflower showing in that square from the next page.

I did the poppies at the beginning of the month; paint first, following a you-tube tutorial that I half remembered. Then I went over it with a pen which turned out to have sparkly brown ink in it - yes, I'll do that again!

'Try twisting your brush to make the leaf shapes more interesting' she says.

I've got to be a bit careful if I go in for splattering when painting indoors, as the white curtains are a bit close to where I work.

They aren't meant to be 'real' flowers, just 'flowerish' flowers.

Yesterday I set up outside; this end of the garden is in the shade until around lunchtime.

 I wasn't sure how useful a ceramic hot drinks container, given to me as a 'thank-you-teacher' present was going to be, but it is brilliant - there's no risk of rinsing my paintbrush in my coffee any more!  

Thursday 2nd January - And so the Year begins

Today - the first working day of the year...

And so we did a bit of work, once I had managed to wake up, and have a bath and get dressed and all that palaver of transferring from slumbering person to wide-awake person.

The transformation didn't quite complete, so quite soon, say a couple of hours after the first coffee of the day, I found myself wilting back towards slumber. Lunch, and another coffee has helped.

I've managed to send out a third of the piano lesson invoices for next half of term, and once I have finished procrastinating (oh, did you think I was blogging?) I'll brace myself and send out the rest. If it were just a case of zapping out the invoices that would be that, but I try and sweeten the pill with a bit of a progress report for the pupils and so forth, and it's that, along with double-treble checking that the names on the invoices and the pronouns in the accompanying emails all match, (and they never do first time around) that takes the time.

We, that is Himself and Myself, also went into town and accomplished a few errands this morning. Which means I have been able to cross half-a-dozen items off my list, and also got my head around what needs to be done next.



Tomorrow we shall attempt some more items on the lists - his list, my list and our list.

Meanwhile, I shall make a cup of tea (which I don't really want) as my final procrastinate before I get on with these invoices. I keep telling myself that I will feel so much better once they are all sent off.



It's so tempting to invest in all these planners and notebooks in the hope that they will magically cause organisation to happen...

New Year - 1st September 2018

New Year? Yes, the new School Year.

I'm still a teacher - which means that I 'manage' three different kinds of year; Calendar Years, from January to December, Tax Years, from April to April, and School Years, from September to July (where did August go?)

I suppose that means I can make three different sets of resolutions... no, bad plan.

I've just these two days left - Saturday and Sunday - before I have to start wearing my watch again, and plunge into Teacherworld, wherein I will be submerged util December, with a short break to come up for air in October.

Most of my timetable tangles are resolved now; just three schools and three piano pupils to go. Just an overwhelming list of emails to send out, pupil packs to assemble, TeacherBags to clear out and the last few sheets of old paperwork to shred.

We don't have a shredder; I rip the paper into tiny fragments and stir it into the compost bin for the slugs and worms to feast upon. Yum yum.

Sunday 15th January - A Letter From Home

Dear Everyone,

So, the first full week of teaching has happened, and I can draw breath. There were a couple of potential dragons lurking at the beginning of term, to do with tricky parents and stroppy students, but luckily the dragons that looked as though they were going to be the most awkward turned out to be very small fry, and the bigger ones will eventually just take themselves off without me having to do anything about them. More I cannot say - one of my unpublished resolutions is to try not to be so snarky about people that irritate me for one reason or other.

We visited Petworth to return twenty djembes that our church had hired last term. Calling in the second-hand bookshop I parted with £1.50 of my hard-earned dosh for this:

   

It's a sort of anthology of snips and snaps, all with John Burninghams' illustrations which I have always enjoyed. There was a paragraph in it which caught my eye at the time and made it worth the money. I forget which it was now - but this morning I read this which made me laugh;

The idea of the two old folks sitting by the fire having gin and tonic and boiled eggs for supper amused me. (I've just downloaded "A Very Private Eye" by Barbara Pym onto my kindle for a future read.) We are totally electric now - apart from the central heating which relies on an electric pump. But we could always use the old storm kettle to boil some water.

It is very effective. Getting the eggs in and out of the contraption could be a challenge. And it won't make toast. Somewhere in among the garden stuff is our ancient barbeque, and the chimenea. Perhaps we would have cup-soup and BBQ steak in a power crisis? It would be a bad idea to bring any of these exciting miniature furnaces inside; I suppose would could line them up just outside the french windows and hope the flowering jasmine didn't catch fire.

Flowers have been a good source of cheerfulness this week. The snowdrops under the apple tree are late this year - they are normally up and nodding about at Christmas. However, after the last couple of properly could days they are now in flower. I'm not going out into the horrible dank seeping rain to take a picture. This is last year's.

We bought a couple of pots of hyacinths to take when we were going to visit my godmother a few weekends ago. In the event we postponed the trip, as it was the tremendously foggy weekend and it would have been foolish to venture out unless completely necessary. A few days ago they, too sprang into life. Just a few buds in the morning, and all in flower when I got home in the afternoon - a lovely surprise.

January's resolutions are sort of happening, especially the one to do with eating chocolate several times a week. The last box of "teacher chocolates" has just been opened (and eaten). We are pretty selective - eat the ones we like and lob the rest. Apple and chocolate? I don't think so. I've just got the musical tin of biscuits left now. There are the "unpublished" resolutions, but I'm only going to mention them if they actually happen. The "less of the Snarkiness" one needs a bit more practice, but some of the others might manage it, at least through January.

Well the afternoon draws on, and we are going out soon, in order to start the planning for a complex trip, involving seven different households and potentially three different embarkation points, not to mention all the events for when we arrive at our destination. There is one single fixed point about which everything gyrates - we should think ourselves fortunate to have even that amount of certainty to base our itinerary upon. Luckily we have a month or so to get it all together. All will become less unclear in time.

Love to you all,

x

     

Saturday 21st November - Perfect Planning

There's a lot to get done in a short amount of time with a limited number of helpers if this tea-party is going to happen.

I've followed the advice of my brother and created a sheet of post-it notes with jobs on them.

The idea is that everyone who wants to help can take a post-it and do the job described on it. I went one stage further and wrote the job out again on the paper underneath the post-it note.

• Set out the tables and cover with banqueting roll (you will need scissors and tape)
• Set out 80 chairs around the tables
• Arrange tea plates, napkins, table confetti etc
• Put sandwiches between serving plates, decorate with cherry tomatoes and watercress, and put on tables
• Put small cakes on serving plates and put on tables
• Slice large cakes, arrange on plates
• Prepare tea and coffee (milk, sugar, cups and saucers) and set ready for serving
• Prepare cold drinks (drinks, glasses, jugs) and set ready for serving
• Prepare Prosecco (drinks, bottles) and set ready for serving
• Create 10 small table flower decorations (teacups and saucers, oasis, flowers, greenery) and put on tables

What can go wrong?

http://techmash.co.uk/2014/03/20/man-catches-salmon-bear-likes-salmon-what-can-go-wrong/

Saturday 30th May - Gardening part 2

... so on the way home from Lowder Mill we called in at a garden centre close to home to investigate the feasibility of our ideas.

The new patio has left an unsightly triangle-ish patch of bareness where we changed the shape.

 

So the options are

Grass it over

Turn it into a flowerbed 

Make it into a pond

Create some kind of "feature"

Grass - not as straight forward as you might think. Getting it level and sort-of-matching the existing weed-infested "lawn" looks to me to be a tricky business. So I wasn't that keen.

Flowerbed - you mean the sort that fills up with weeds, like the ones we've already got? That patch is already infested with horsetail, which can't be weeded out, so dealing with it in a flowerbed would be a nightmare. Hey, that's nearly a sort of pun!

Horsetail is an invasive, deep-rooted weed with fast-growing rhizomes (underground stems) that quickly send up dense stands of foliage. https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?PID=257

Horsetail wouldn't be such a pest in grass, as it gets discouraged by frequent mowing. Oh, wait, how frequent is frequent? Ah.

We could fill the flowerbed with densely planted low-growing shrubs, which would hide the weeds. I have been eyeing up the roundabouts and verges to see what the council have been choosing.

A pond? No. That means frogs, slime, toads, clearing the pond, blah blah bleah.No. Oh, I said that already.

A "feature". Ah, yes, but what kind of feature? Something smart, attractive, unpretentious, useful, low-maintenance. Does that just about rule out everything? Well, maybe not.

At Lowder Mill today they had a vegetable garden made entirely of raised beds;

http://www.lowdermill.com/gallery.html

   Today it didn't look like this as it is far too early in the season. However what they did have looked most attractive, and easy to manage - alternating rows of red and green lettuces, herbs and marigold flowers. Very pretty.

So I think our plan is going to be to cover the bare patch with a weed-suppressing membrane, topped with a layer of pebbles. We've got our eye on something like these "Premium Scottish Tweed Pebbles" which look like this (that's him standing on them to give a sense of scale).

Then, on top, we could put some of these half barrels to be "instant" raised beds and what ever other containers look suitable (that's him measuring across the top with his arm to give an idea of the size)

I reckon that would work. Then, maybe, as if by magic, they would become something along these lines

https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?pid=527

Watch this space...  but be patient. This could take some time. 

Wednesday 12th November - Landing on a Comet

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30026398

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30026398
One of the cameras on Philae sent this image of the comet during the descent

I'm not that interested in astronomy.

What fascinated me was watching the young (in my eyes!) scientists as they watched the landing...

The launch was ten years ago, so presumably the planning and the development stages were even longer than that ago, when these scientists were undergraduates, or maybe even still at school.

I guess many of the original team will have moved on, moved away, retired, without seeing the end of their project. A bit like planting trees for a future landscape, planning for eternity; thinking for the long-term. A bit different to how so many people think about life.

 

Wednesday 14th May - An Acceptable Gift

I saw this box of assorted sticky notes in a bookshop today and knew someone could probably use them at the moment...

His time-manager was briefly retired when he retired at the end of March, but is now back in service as we deal with various family events, and he also project manages the planned (and necessary!) refurbishments for our house...

It did make him laugh. Just as well!

Christmas Day 2012 - Not quite according to the Master Plan

"Plans are nothing; planning is everything."  Dwight D Eisenhower

I always create a Master Plan for Christmas Day.

It is roughly based on the plan at the end of Delia Smith's "Christmas" cookery book - timings for turkey in, foil off, turkey out to rest for 45 mins, potatoes in, potatoes out, make the gravy, set the table, open the presents, blah blah blah...

The trick is to have several sheets of paper, a pencil, sharpener, rubber, and finally a biro all to hand.

You put in the fixed points;

9:30 leave for church
10:00 - 11:00 Church service (that was a guess as we have a new vicar - in previous years I would have added half an hour. In fact we gained 15 minutes at this point as the service was only 45 minutes long)
11:00 - 11:15 chatting with friends before we leave
11:30 back home

next fixed point:
2:30 sit and eat

from there you can work backwards and forwards working out what happens when, scribbling revised timings here, tearing out some hair, trying again, having another slurp of sherry - did I not mention sherry as one of the things needed for doing the planning? - going and making a coffee, and then, suddenly, the whole thing falls into place. Ink over the scribbles with a biro, write it out in neat, get someone to check it through. Done. The Perfect Plan.

This year's plan had to include visiting the hospital with smoked salmon before the meal,
8:30 slice and butter bread, top with salmon, add lemon wedges, pack pepper mill
9:00 choose and pack presents for opening at the hospital
11:45 hospital visiting hours start
12:45 home in time to take foil off the turkey - we were l bit later than planned for that, but it was fine.

We were going to eat the first course at our house, visit the hospital again at about 4:30, then back to my father's flat for pudding and more present opening afterwards.

9:00 am choose suitable presents for opening at the flat (get things done ahead if possible!)
3:45 make turkey sandwiches, prepare plate with sandwiches, mince pie, Waitrose stollen bites
4:00 pack mince pies, apple pies, jam tarts (the last two being a family tradition), Christmas Pudding, cream, brandy butter, rum butter, stollen
4:15 leave for hospital

The Master Plan ran like clockwork; perfect, every detail dovetailed. We even had a 15 minute breathing space early on, thanks to the church service being shorter than expected.

Perfect - until the electric cooker stopped working, fusing all the electrics in the house just I was taking the turkey out to rest. Now what? I stood and surveyed the par-boiled potatoes, par-boiled parsnips, frozen sprouts (actually, they were rather nasty and I won't buy them again), turkey stock to be made into gravy, raw carrots, ingredients for bread sauce all sitting in a pan...

Quick phone call to my father - "we're coming over in 10 minutes - could you put your oven on at 200C!"

While the turkey was being carved and put into a serving dish, I packed everything into containers and pans and bags, and we decamped with the whole lot to my father's flat.

And there we had a Good Enough Christmas Dinner. We had good food, and family, and fun, and we have the pictures to prove it. 

Sunday 24th June - Fantasy Project number 1

This isn't really fantasy project number one - really more like number 1001. But it is travelling more briskly through the highways and byways of creating plans, researching, comparing prices,
feasibility planning.

Here's a clue;

I'm not sure that it will ever come to anything. Most of my projects just fizzle (seen any additions to the knitting project recently? no? QED).

Travelling hopefully is often very much better than arriving at reality.

But next year I will have very much less work than I have now, and I could do with finding something fun, energising and preferably remunerative to fill the empty hours.

Or I could just stay at home get on with gardening, housework, DIY. That's a really horrible thought.