Friday blues

It's a very grey day outside - in fact, it's been drizzly all week, after an unusually sunny Bank Holiday Monday. I haven't marked any coursework, mainly due to the fact that I'm into day 4 of the first cold of the school year, which has now settled into a grinding cough - but at least I haven't slept most of today, as I have during the rest of the week. Henry the Ka is refusing to start, probably due to some blockage in the fuel line or maybe the fuel pump or something. And worst of all, I just found out that my favourite Playscheme kid died this morning after several weeks of illness. I am gutted.

My favourite story about him is this....his mum dropped him off one morning looking very tired and when we asked if she was OK, she started laughing. It seems she'd got J into her room - on the third floor of her home - and they'd been playing, when the phone rang, and she went to answer it. While she was down there, J...made very good use of his nappy, shall we say....and then managed to get it off, and had a good roll around on her white-linened bed, and then decided to investigate where Mummy had gone, so dragged himself down three flights of white-carpeted stairs - on his bum.

She said she was cleaning until nearly 2am and crying the whole time, but all the while she was telling us this story she was giggling away and ended with a "Serves me right for having white carpets!"

I suppose this is part of the territory when you work with special needs children, but it's still a very sad business.

Hey ho.

I am starting to be a bit concerned that I won't FO anything this month, which would break my good habits of 2009. So far I have six FOs for this year, and I have another seven projects OTNs - although three are in very deep hibernation, and one I began as a ski hat and don't like how it has turned out so I will probably just not finish it....and not frog it either, because it was 50p yarn from Shaw's.

I have been working hard on the Baby Poonan for Jen's baby (which she had a couple of weeks ago - a girl, Abigail, over 9lbs, difficult birth but mother and daughter both blooming now) but I am not so keen on how it is turning out and I made a mistake with one of the cables and couldn't fix it so I am not very motivated to finish. I've also been working hard on Liesl, a stashbusting lace cardigan I started in February with the yarn left over from the Central Park Hoody - but, even though it grows quick, the feather and fan pattern is kind of dull and it's hard to keep up the hard work on that, too.

Still, I have knitting group tomorrow and a burning desire to finish SOMEthing for the month of April, so watch this space.

Embarrassingly, I totally misread the pattern for Liesl, and decided I would email the designer on ravelry to correct her mistake, on the basis that I would like to know if it was me. I double and triple checked and was certain it was an error in the pattern. I sent the message - and then almost instantly saw that I was wrong and had to send a second message saying sorry. I never heard back. I have the urge now to buy all her patterns as a way of apologising for my mistake.