Friday 25th November - Day of Domesticity

 The cat is happy...

She spent most of the day in her new heated place.

Slow Cooker 

I have started a new page to record Slow Cooker Adventures. Today we ate the beef goulash I made yesterday.  I  forgot about the sour cream that should have been added before serving and although it was pretty good without, I reckon it will be better with. I'll know when we eat the other two portions now in the freezer.

From one pot full we got four portions of goulash and half a portion of soup, which I combined with leftover veg soup for a supper. (We eat our main meal at midday ish, and have something like soup and toast as an early supper)

I've made a sausage supper today. I took a block of sausagemeat and divided it into 20 meatballs, which I browned and added to the vegetables. We'll eat 10 meatballs between us, with veg and potatoes tomorrow,  and the rest will go into the freezer. 

I'll be adding these to the Adventure Page!

Christmas Cake

I started making this yesterday, halving the quantities as I went along... this stage involved simmering dried fruit with water, orange juice and spirits (rum this time) and leaving it to cool.

Today was making the cake, BUT I forgot to halve the quantities! No wonder it took twice as long to cook! I'll know what I have ended up with tomorrow when I cut into it.

Sweaty Sweater Surgery.

The thing that fascinates me with knitting is the engineering... how the single thread of yarn is folded and looped and manipulated to reach the end product.

The ribbing did separate from the main knitting ok. I was worried about the connecting loop but it sorted itself out as I went along

I managed to knit up the live stitches on the needle and complete the new ribbing. Something weird happened to the zig zag pattern. I kind of understand why; it's to do with losing a half stitch when you change the direction you are knitting from upwards to downwards. Engineering again.

I'll sew in all the ends and then be able to wear it. Hooray!

Thursday 24th November - averting catastophes; the slow cooker, the cat and the knitting

 Here's my Plan of Attack - I always include things that I can tick off straight away - doesn't everyone?

Although maybe I shouldn't have ticked off  'BLOG' yet as I am in the process of doing it.

This is an attempt to go paperless - I have used something - an 'app' maybe, called Bamboo, on my tablet as I  tablet to write up the plan. Although there isn't much point in going paperless for this as I have most of a pad of 'plan of attack' post-its left.

The beef goulash was supposed to be for today's lunch, but the pot is fuller than the 2/3rds recommendation so I want to cook it on low for 6-8 hours instead of high for 3-4 hours in the hope that it will not bubble up and over and everywhere. We shall see if this tactic is successful, and in the meantime eat tommorow's lunch (fish) today.

The Catastrophe - you may remember that McCavity (our nearly 20-year-old cat)went through a phase of falling off things a few months ago. She's not to steady on her legs these days. One of the first places she fell from was the back of the settee. This was a favourite perch all through last winter, as there is a radiator behind the settee. So it was a little alarming to discover this when I walked into the sitting room;

(that strange brown thing by her head is a small teddy bear with a magnet in its back.)

We fetched down this ancient rug - I know it is over 50 years old because I took it to boarding school when I started there back in 1971 - boarders all had to bring a travel rug from home to put on their beds. And an eiderdown. I was very glad of both, indeed I used to wear my PE sweater, socks and dressing gown in bed as well. No central heating back in them thar days.

The rug needed going over with the vacuum cleaner to remove a few layers of dust, during which process I discovered that the other side of the rug is mostly holes! However, one folded, it has made a fairly solid pad to fill the gap between the settee and the radiator.

I am engaged in some rather sweaty sweater surgery at the moment; It is  possible to remove the cast on edge of a knittted hem - say a cuff, but entails picking up stitches all around the knitting, and then - oh horrors - CUTTING through stitches between your picked up stitches and the ribbing. I have embarked upon this Awfully Big Adventure in order to reknit the ribbing in such a fashion that it won't curl up the whole time. Fear not, if you were planning to join the Advent Cowl Knit-Along - I am doing all of this so that you won't have to! 

The white blocks are pencil rubbers which I have stuck the ends of the needles into to prevent stitches disappearing while I am wrangling the rest it. I am unravelling the cut piece of yarn and should end up with all the main stitches happily on the needle, ready to be knitted into the new ribbing.

Monday 21st November - Positive Procrastination

 

I'm hoping writing today's blog post can be considered as 'positive procrastination'. I have just invented this term (but maybe someone has got there first without telling me) to cover those situations when you have made your list, and then you go and make a cup of tea and rattle in a quick blog post before bringing yourself to the point of actually starting it. 

The first section on the 'plan of attack' is labelled 'Most Critical', and writing a blog post isn't written there. Everything else MUST be done today, especially as it wasn't done yesterday, or the day before, or the day before....

The second section is 'would be nice'. I have written 'Emma Bridgewater Christmas Decoration'. This refers to the wee little jug on my tea tray - it holds exactly enough milk for one mug/cup of tea plus a top-up, or the amount of water Himself likes to put in his single malt Scotch when he has one.

The matching mug is upstairs in the bathroom with Himself's electric toothbrush head inside. We have a Phillips electric toothbrush and they have stopped putting a colour coded ring on them, so we can't tell which is which any more. I'm using my favourite tiny coffee mug at the moment, but I would rather have it for coffee. So I'm considering getting another one 'Emma Bridgewater Christmas Decoration Tiny Mug' - now which pattern to choose, and personalised or not? 

I'm please to have found a use for the tiny mug - it was too small to hold an espresso coffee. or to be an egg cup.    

(His is on the left, because he is right handed, mine is on the right, because I am left handed. This may not make sense, until you realize that we pick u the toothbrush handle part with our dominant hand, so when the mugs were the other way round we kept choosing the wrong one.)

So far today positive procrastination has included 

Knitting some more Advent cowl and weighing how much yarn is left, so that I can check if I need one or two 50g balls of main (one will be exactly enough, and I have thought of a work around in case some unforseen happening happens) 

Making another rice pudding to check quantities and timings (500ml milk, 32.5 g rice comes to just over the 1oz measure and 25g sugar to just over the 1/2 oz measure on my dinky mini-measure. I have used white sugar this time, and added 2 cardomum pods (I've had three goes at spelling cardoman and none of them look right) and one fresh bay leaf)
 
Ordering 2 balls of Adriafil Knitcol double knitting wool (it is glorious stuff!) to experiment with a Lent cowl project. Which is why I probably won't order the tiny mug as well.  

It is 11 am and shall race myself to complete the following by Lunchtime (about 12 noon) 

Piano email to S

Piano email to R

Text J

Work on the December 'Print and Post' Newsletter 

On my marks, get set, go!