Weeknote: 12/11

This week, I have been mostly....

Knitting:
As predicted last week, I spent this week knitting cones for yule trees out of Cascade. Buying six skeins of Cascade might have been a bit ambitious, but I am certainly going to get a variety of colours so I can mix and match. My intention is to have enough cones for six trees, which is 18. I would like to have a variety of knitted seasonal items for decoration at home: pumpkins, knitted fairy lights, maybe something Easter themed....but this is a bit of a pipe dream because I don't even have time to make a proper list of things. Maybe one day. The yule trees are a start.

Going to:
On Monday I had a course in Clifton and got to do a bit of shopping up there (after being called a gorgeous young lady by an evidently blind man at the bus stop). I went into Kitchens looking for a brownie tin and was amazed to find it a veritable cavern of baking and cooking supplies. In fact, I was in there for so long I had to put down the items I'd selected, leave the shop and find a loo before I could finish my browsing and make my purchases.

On Tuesday I whimpered my way through the first spinning class I've attended in three weeks. I barely made it. The final songs were painfully loud; afterwards the intructor told us she had been medically diagnosed as a bit deaf, which gave her an excuse to turn the music up loud. I have to wonder whether she caused this problem for herself.

And on Friday, I had dinner at grounded with my lovely Bristol ladyfriends, Aliboo, Parpy Jo and Crabby. I may have drunk too much wine. It was nice.

Eating:
More Bento, more overnight oats, and rather a lot of cake. Nothing out of the ordinary. I had a new recipe for the slow cooker to try but then completely forgot to set it up.

We did have ostrich stir fry for dinner tonight, though. My butcher has taken to keeping a small stock of exotic meats and one little packet of ostrich goes a long way. It's very tasty, too.

Learning:
More about the American West. And more. And more. This is the topic of my revision text book and I am up to my eyes in the problems of the homesteaders. I have decided to bin the plan put forward by the publisher lady and write all the content first, before going back and adding in all the revision activities and the stuff that actually takes all the time to devise. It's going well so far, as you can probably tell by this rather chatty blog entry; my house is looking tidier by the hour.

What I'm finding frustrating about this task is that all my AmWest textbooks say the same thing. All the information has come from the research of whoever wrote the first textbook, I'm sure of it. I don't, therefore, like using these as sources of information; there may be four books, but if the original had a mistake or left out a fact because they didn't think it was important, then the others will too. That feels like bad writing to me. Hence, I am probably overegging it, but I am doing quite a lot of reading from tinternet to supplement what's in the textbooks.

Obsessed by:
The old theme from my final year uni course on travel writing, about how identities and beliefs can be created by the writings of a very small number of people. It's not just this book I'm writing that's brought this into focus for tme this week, either. Is it laziness or ignorance that stops historians from rummaging through primary documents and making their own conclusions? If they're looking at a country where a different language is spoken, I could understand it, but otherwise there doesn't seem to be an excuse.
I've been doing a lot of doomy thinking about the ramifications of this kind of lazy researching.

Entertained by:
I've spent all this week desperately trying to get on top of my marking so the weekend would be free for writing, so I haven't had a great deal of time to be entertained by anything, though I have enjoyed catching up with Dancing With The Stars. That Maks is a total butthead. Every series he loses his temper and his partner stands there simpering as he rants, all like "Oh my partner is such a bad boy, what can I do, eh?" I'll tell you what you can do - turn around and tell him to stop being such a butthead.
But then I saw how he basically slapped Hope Solo and tossed her around like a ragdoll in the preparation for the first team dance and I wondered if I'd be brave enough to tell it like it is. At least on live TV I'd have plenty of witnesses.

Feeling:
Ever-so-slightly out of my depth. It'll pass though, I'm sure.