Monday 26th April - Mostly about our cats

 Just thought I'd let you know in advance about the cat 'events' so you can skip this post - although there is some knitting, and some gardening, and the usual trivial day-to-day rambling...   

Leo and McCavity are the wrong side of about 18 years old now, and feeling their age. Some cats get fatter with old age - ours are going thin and bony. I thought McCavity was looking a bit cold the other evening, and when I stroked her, she felt cold as well. So I wrapped her up in the blanket I started knitting for her this time last year;

I think she appreciated the attention;

But she wasn't so happy when the blanket came too when it was time to go to bed (that's her bed in the bottom of the kitchen trolley behind her)

Today we discovered Leo perched on top of this cushion, on the floor. I'm not sure how this happened; the cushion is usually on top of the wicker basket behind her, which is one of my various hidey holes for storing wool.

 She wasn't very happy about the situation and very pleased to have everything returned to normal. 

This isn't 'normal' either - somehow she has climbed inside the two layers of the cushion...

Leo had an unscheduled adventure this afternoon; she was pestering to have the kitchen door opened so she could go upstairs, not something we encourage because her personal hygiene isn't what it used to be, but I was busy making cake and getting fed up with her meowling.

Himself went to see what she was up to; and found himself doing a cat-rescue. Leo can climb up the ladder to get onto the high sleeper bed (which number 1 son still sleeps in when he comes to stay - 'something will have to be done about that' but we've been saying that for nearly a decade now). However, Leo was stranded, as the windowsill, which is her method of getting down, is now completely covered with my pelargoniums (what used to be called geraniums). Himself was greeted with glad cried, and more meowls of encouragement when he cleared the plants to create sufficient space for Leo to get down.

I went up to assess the state of the bedroom; we were in the early stages of clearing, decluttering, taking stuff to dump and recycle and charity shops after years of just closing the door on it all, when lockdown started last March. We had also just finished clearing my god-mother's house - we still have bags and boxes waiting to be rehomed, and as for the resolution of taking two bags of stuff per month to charity shops - forget it. Another couple of years of just shutting the door on it all looks likely. If anyone comes to stay we still have the tent and the airbeds.

I have taken cuttings of the pelagonigeraniums; one website instructs people to take them in the Autumn, and the other says 'April is the best time'. The bathroom windowsill is now full. That shouldn't incommode Leo - her only use for the bathroom is to demand that the cold tap for the bath be set to a gentle trickle in the mornings while I brush my teeth, partly for entertainment, partly to enjoy drinking from it. (I once set the hot tap going by accident; she was most indignant.)

Today's piano teaching was a hit and miss affair (it was last Monday too). The first student has got all kinds of GCSE stuff over-filling her life and had arranged to miss her lesson this week. The second one (a young child) hid on the windowsill of his bedroom and wouldn't come out - we have rescheduled for tomorrow - but the third student was there, seated, all ready with her music on the stand, and, once we had got her sound working, we had a good lesson.

I'm making steady progress on reviving a Schubert Impromptu I learned over 40 years ago, and a Mozart sonata 331 from 30 years ago, and learning a Bartok rondo, new to me but fun to play. All set for the current Grade 8 syllabus. All I have to do is persuade the student that these would be really good choices...

I also sowed some Marigold seeds today, before lunch. I had a look at them this afternoon but they haven't come up yet. I'll keep you posted... 

Wednesday 21st April 2021 - Family, friends, and cream teas

 We did have a cream tea on Monday with the family after all. 

 I made plain scones and cheese'n'onion scones and melting moments biscuits, and daughter brought 'pink cake' and Kinder Eggs (which strictly speaking, don't feature in the usual Sunday Tea but provided plenty of amusement).

The cream? A friend who lives 'round the corner'  read my Saturday blog post and turned up on Sunday morning with two tubs of proper Cornish Clotted Cream, as sold by our wonderful local shop. Oh me oh my, I had forgotten how close to Paradise you can be when having clotted cream and jam scones and tea with family all together on a sunny day.

We finished up the second pot with more scones and jam and cream on Tuesday afternoon with the lovely friends who brought the cream on Sunday. 

To visit Paradise twice in one week is a bit special.

Tuesday afternoon's piano teaching became a bit chaotic as I discovered that my perfectly organised new timetable wasn't. Perfectly organised, that is. Thankfully everyone is very accommodating, and so with three phone calls and a couple of texts I was able to un-double-book the first lesson, and reschedule Thursdays to make everything work again. It is a bit of a win, because although we will miss 'Richard Osmans House of Games' on Thursday' - boo - we will be able to watch it on Tuesdays - hurray.

I came down to start typing up the notes that I needed to send out after yesterday's lessons, to find the cat asleep on my chair hidden under the table.

So, rather than cause any disturbance, I pulled over the 'sacrificial stool' and balanced my books and lap top at the end of the table

Of course the cat had relocated herself somewhere else. That is just how things go. 'Sacrificial Stool'? I hear you ask? It is a very cheap IKEA stool; the one item of furniture that the cats were allowed to sharpen their claws upon. It now has an extremely textured finish to the legs 

  

but still has a function as it is a good height for smaller pupils when they were having lessons here (with a cushion to hide the scratches). The crossbars meant that they had somewhere to put their feet, which helped them to sit up in a balanced posture at the piano.

Right - I'm clock-watching - eight minutes until I start teaching - time to go. 

Saturday 17th April - Is it Springtime now?

 Nearly - we have sun, and we have bright days, but we have a rather bracing and brisk wind. Not fierce, but enough to make itself notices

Sitting outside for morning coffee and afternoon tea ha happened a few times;

and at other times I have carried my mug halfway down the garden and then turned round to make a rapid return to the warmth of indoors. 

Can you spot the garden chair at the top of the picture? It gets the morning sun just there, and I can sit and contemplate by vegetable patch; all those lettuces and radishes a-growing, and everything else all sulking. I shall sow more seeds on top and see what happens. 

We are hoping to have a family afternoon tea together in the garden tomorrow. Scones and jam (we haven't got any cream, sadly). Fingers crossed for the weather. The tables and chairs have been arranged in readiness; I didn't get out my dressmaking yardstick - yes, YARD stick, although it does have metres on the other side - to mathematically check the distances between the chairs. That's because Himself is six foot tall (unless he's shrunk) and is therefore a walking 2-yard stick when he holds his arms out.

Meanwhile - I have nearly finished my third Osaka teacosy - it is at the 'darning all the ends in' stage (about three dozen left to go) and the the 'Cutting of the Steek' will occur. I shall pour myself a celebratory glass of port when it is finished.

I am also swatching over and over again as I inch towards the final design for the Fair Isle top I have in mind. 

 I have it in mind to knit the jumper on the cover of this book, without the sleeves, but as I HATE doing ribbing so much (the usual way of doing the edging at the bottom of a jumper) I'm investigating other options. The bit of knitting above starts at the top with an i-cord cast-on in beige, followed by a few rows of stranded colour work in stocking stitch, then some rows of garter stitch to see how that functions as a hem, and a normal cast off using a contrasting colour. I've discovered that garter stitch will 'flare out' compared to stocking stitch; Elizabeth Zimmerman (a knitting guru held in similar esteem to the Dalai Lama when searching for knitting wisdom) suggests increasing the stitches by 10% when going from garter stitch to stocking stitch.

I've just noted all this down in the blog o that I can find the information later. It is quite hard to stick a piece of knitting into a book and make notes, if you then want to be able to close the book afterwards.

Knitting fascinates me - the way a single thread is looped and looped and looped into something two or three dimensional, and the way one shapes the fabric as you create it.

At the moment I'm using up scraps and ends of Shetland wool left over from all these tea cosies. Soon, I will have to take the plunge and order the yarn for the Fair Isle top; about 25 balls if I am making it with sleeves, so - guess, estimate, calculate - how many will I need for just the front and back? And what patterns will I use? The one in this book, or one from Elizabeth Zimmerman, or find some on the internet or in other books...?

The school term started for me today - I have one family who have piano lessons on Saturdays, three children, one after another. So this morning was a substantial change of brain activity after two weeks of settling into a kind of sloth. 'Up and at'em' - and from Monday it will be the normal teaching timetable. What would I be like if I stopped teaching?  

..........

I see I have missed nearly all of the broadcast of the Duke of Edinburgh's funeral; I switched the television on in time for the bugles - Last Post etc and the blessings and the National Anthem. Ah well - I will be able to listen to the Radio broadcast later. I am so glad they had good weather. My heart goes out the to Queen, poor love, and the family.

 

Easter Holidays

so, nearly a fortnight since my last post - had you given up on me?

We're still here;

or, without the music;

The Disney Winnie the Pooh cartoons came out when the children were young - they were on the tv non-stop. Can't say I liked them much

So, what kind of nothing have we been doing?

The 'lawn' is covered in tiny violets - also dandelions which Himself declared war upon; years ago we bought a special dandelion-dealer-wither-sort-of-thing and it still works. The front 'lawn' has bare patches of not-dandelions-any-more interspersed among the moss. (A whole new crop appeared a day or so later - this seems to support the warnings against using anti-bacterial products which kill most of the bacteria leaving room for even more bacteria to colonise the cleared space). 

The camellia appears to be loving its new place n the garden and was covered in flowers until;

the weather forecast became ominous, and I even wrapped up my strawberries and vegetables in bubble wrap as a protection against sub-zero temperatures 

This weird little bird is supposed to predict the weather, and all those fern-like crystalline growths in the solution indicate snow...

We have had snow, and hail, and more snow this week. Everything in the garden seems to have survived. I watched it from inside, much warmer, with a proper cup of tea out of a proper teapot with a proper tea cosy on a proper tray with a proper traycloth. 

In one of the sunny but freezing cold spells we managed a 'hello there' when some of the family swung by after visiting my father for a picnic lunch, all well wrapped up in blankets and no need to chill the prosecco. 

And in another sunny but freezing cold spell we managed a birthday presents and Easter Eggs exchange with the offspring down at the seaside. It was cold enough that turning round and going straight back home again seemed like a good idea, but, fortified by a slice of chocolate cake, we managed a short walk towards the sea and along the front in the sunshine, and then what seemed like a never-ending trek back the way we came after the sun had gone behind clouds and the wind fiercely in our faces.

This morning I had the pleasure of sitting out in the garden with a friend having tea (on a proper tray with a proper cloth, but using mugs as we were in the garden). In the sun, and out of the wind, it was perfect; I didn't even need to wrap up (mainly because I was already wearing a thermal vest, winter shirt and thick guernsey jumper!). She has carried away another two bags of music teaching resources - I am sorry to see some of them go... 

'You sound like you are missing the class teaching,' she said - well, yes, and no. I'm not sure I am up to singing 'John Kanakanaka over and over, three lessons a day, with the children facing their partners in two concentric circles and doing dosy-dos moving to their right twice in each verse; vastly entertaining for the teachers to watch the chaos, and I'm sure there was an educational element to the activity...   

I'm sorting out the piano lessons for when term starts - I have never had so many relatively advanced students at the same time and now have to actually Learn a stack of music ready for Monday. Starting with the slow movement of Beethoven's Pathetique sonata, Bach Prelude and Fugues, a Mozart sonata or two... my days of 'blagging' my way through the pieces are over. 

 

Thursday 1st April - No more fooling this year

 It is 12.30 pm so no more April fooling - 

 - where did all those days disappear to since the last time I posted on this blog?

Some of them disappeared in a kind of sleep-walk - there were a couple of 'zero-energy' days when neither of us could summon up the 'oomph' to get more than the absolute minimum done. The weather was cold and bleah, the days were samey and grey... all I felt like doing was eating chocolate and buying stuff on the internet. The cat felt the same way.

There was nearly a catastrophe when we hadn't realized that Leo had managed to climb inside her duvet and we were going to sort it out and get rid of the strange lump that had appeared in it.

 Luckily I had just enough strength of mind left to keep both chocolate eating and internet buying within bounds. Although I now have a great list of stuff due to be delivered over the next few days.

The veg plot is well underway now. I would like there to have been more signs of life, but so far I have two sticks of rhubarb and a fine display of tiny salad leaf seedlings. A few peas have emerged, and I am hoping the sun will encourage some more to appear. No sign of spinach, radish, brussel sprouts, spring onions or carrots yet.

Yesterday it was warm enough to sit in the garden and paint;

The cat is drawn using a method I call 'emergent drawing'. I just keep drawing and drawing until a cat emerges from the lines. I stole the description from a method of teaching writing which was popular back in the 1990s, or maybe earlier, called 'emergent writing'; I was a bit sceptical but it seems to work. The child (pre-school, or reception, or early years) starts by just 'pretending' to write - doing wiggly lines to make shopping lists or stories - and over time and with appropriate teaching and encouragement these first 'writings' become letters and words and sentences. Well, that describes my drawing method exactly.

The sunflower seeds are all ding well. But very floppy. I plan to stake them all using the bamboo skewers I discovered when I reorganised the cutlery drawers using these rather clever thingies.

We just have to chant 'little on the left' as we open the drawer to know which size is where. There is a tiny symbol printed on the edge by the handles to show whether there will be a knife, fork or spoon on the other end. (you don't need to tell me that 'large on the left' would work as well; I have put the little knives on the left and That is That!)

There is a grey cutlery organiser buried on the left hand side of the kitchen drawer, holding the small implements like pastry brushes (we have two?) small blue sharp knives (we have three?) apple corer, lemon zester and so forth. The big green thingy is a splendid contrivance for coring and slicing an apple all in one go.  

 

It is a great pleasure to be able to open the kitchen drawer without a struggle, find an implement without impaling oneself and then close the drawer again, all without a single expletive.