8 things beginning with S

SPRING! It's here! The sun is shining, in between squally showers of hail and sleet. I've managed to do some clothes-drying outside. It's so light in the evenings that I forget when I should be eating dinner and consequently keep going to bed on a full stomach. The cat is shedding everywhere and looks frankly ridiculous with her massive chest beard, which is usually matted where she's tried to clean it and got it stuck in her mouth. We've been slowly cutting the dreadlocks out of her belly fur but she is, unsurprisingly, resistant to this.


Spring bag. In honour of the new season, and as a nod in the direction of knittabaggamonth which I have completely neglected since the start of the year, I bought some beeyootiful Cascade 220 Heathers in turquoise - much of a muchness on its own, but once felted it has this pink sheen to it, I don't know where it's come from because you can't really see it in the unfelted yarn. I am grateful that Get Knitted have some felted totes and flowers on display, or I would never have known. I am knitting the Cherry Blossom Bag from Noni, which is pictured in a stunning turqouise and caught my attention from first look. I was most pleased to discover they carry the patterns at Get Knitted. The body of the bag is finished, with one decrease round left, and I decided I would hand felt, since I was disappointed when the machine felted pumpkin I did last year came out minus most of its strong orange colour.

I duly cleaned up the bucket, bought a new plunger and a thing to go over the plughole to catch the fuzzies, and I put in hot water and a little shower gel (this was meant to make it smell good...it did not work) and then I got to work, plunging. And plunging. And plunging. After a while Mr Z threw a golf ball in for me to try and help matters along, and I could see that it was working - the bag height had shrunk from 15 inches to 10 - so I kept plunging. And plunging. And plunging.

It did not get any smaller.

In the end, sweaty, soaked from the splashback and generally dishevelled, I gave up, stuck it in a zip up pillowcase, found an old pair of jeans I knew wouldn't bleed dye, and put the whole lot in the washer. It came out looking much feltier - it had shrunk another two inches in height - but with some set-in creases I have been unable to shift. I stuffed it and moulded it and put it next to the radiator. Phase two will begin in a couple of days, when it has dried. It's still a lot bigger than I imagined it would be, but it is a good size for a newspaper, a bottle of gin and the rest of my paraphernalia. And hopefully the cherry blossom motif will cover most of the creases.


Soysilk Corset. My other WIP of note is the Ribbed Corset by Annie Modesitt. I fell in love with this pattern so long ago that I can't even remember buying it. I remember thinking it was way out of my league, though. Now, not so much. I got some Oasis in the sale at Get Knitted, which just seems to go on forever - 100g, 200+ yards, and the ball is so compact! It's a beautiful dark blue, and I picked up a ball of turquoise for the accent, and then I managed to find some little blue shell buttons in Liberty on my recent visit to London which match perfectly.

I had to swatch 3 times before I got gauge. The 4mm needles seemed to be fine until I washed the swatch, and then the thing stretched like a mofo. So I went down to 3.5mm and then 3mm and finally achieved gauge on these tiny little suckers. I was daunted. 200+ stitches, on these tiny needles, for a whole garment? Sheesh. I want to wear it to my friend Sarah's wedding in May, though, so, recognising that these school holidays are my only hope for finsihing on time, I got started.

I had to rip out the first effort. I made two mistakes in the first two rows, and added stitch markers for each pattern repeat to stop it from happening again, and then talked myself into starting over. The ladies at knit club will be so pleased. I don't think Rachel approved of my ignoring the mistake and hoping it wouldn't notice. So, I am roughly 20% done with it now, and it's not as slow as I had anticipated. I started to worry about the size of the armholes, and posted on the Yahoo groups KAL to ask if I could bind off more stitches than required by the pattern without it looking weird. Somebody replied that that's what they would do. I was bit put out, thinking, "Huh! Yes, but will it WORK?" until I realised it was Annie herself who had replied, and that left me a little bit...


Starstruck! I like how the famous people in the knitting community are down with us kids.


SEX. The kind to do with yarn, I mean...stash enrichment expedition, for those not initiated in the geekspeak of the knitting world. There's been an embarrassing amount of this going on recently - it's easy to find excuses to go to Get Knitted. Recently I have splashed out on plenty of Miski from Mirasol, which is so baby soft I could weep at the hatchet job I'm bound to do knitting it up into something. I really splashed out, and bought enought to knit a garment with - I want something I can wear next to my skin, but not something too warm. I am thinking a vest top of some kind, that I can wear under other things in the winter.

I also bought a massive amount of Fleece Artist Baby Kid. When I say a massive amount...it's only 1 skein, but there are 1000 metres of yarn in that skein. That's right, a kilometre of yarn. It is also very soft, and very skinny and fluffy (Ravelry says it's bulky weight but they must be on crack), and the most beautiful mixture of blues and turquoises and sea greens....I bought it, intending to knit it into this beautiful cardigan I found through Ravelry, to go over my corset top for Sarah's wedding in May. But I think a bag, a top and a cardigan - a lacework cardigan, no less, and my first attempt at lacework - all by May 10th may be stretching it a little. Also, now I look closely, I see that a kilometre of yarn wouldn't be enough for this particular gorgeous wisp of stuff....although I'd probably modify the neckline and make it a V or a scoop, which might save me enough yarn.

Winding this kilometre of yarn was daunting. Mr Z was horrified when he realised that the big ball of fluff was really made of many tiny strands. He set to solving my problem immediately.


SWIFT! I have such a crafty husband. He finally got sick of sitting holding skeins of yarn for me like something out of the Waltons, and we still don't speak about that skein of silk from India which languishes at the bottom of my stash in such a tangle only the most determined unknotter would attempt to smooth it out. Mr Z is no stranger to unknotting, having once spent 6 hours (by accident - he didn't realise it had been that long) untangling a ball of Rowan Cotton Glace which has got itself into a pickle once. But, even he can't face the silk.

I digress. A quick trip to B&Q and £37 later (nobody say I could have bought one from the US via ebay cheaper), and he was in business. Behold! The wood was sawed. We tried to get B&Q to do this for us, but they told us the wood was too skinny to be sawn on the band saw and offered a hand saw instead. And a tape measure, when I asked. And then told us we couldn't saw it until we'd paid for it. Le sigh. So we shimmied it into the car and took it off to Father Z who sorted us out straight away.


Mr Z got straight to it when we got back home and by the end of the afternoon had produced something that looked like this....

(Don't those lilies look gorgeous, by the way? They are Asda Fair Trade. I didn't want to fork out the extra quid to start with but the guilt got the better of me, and I am pleased I did - they have last nearly 2 weeks now and still have some buds just opening; and the whole bottom floor smells of them. Definitely worth it. I even got out that fancy crystal vase we got for a wedding present and haven't used yet.)

(Please ignore the vile wallpaper and border - it's on my list of things to replace).


By the end of today, after sanding down the rough edges, and rasping away the ends of the dowel so that it fits into the holes snugly, and doing more sanding so the arms have smooth edges, and experimenting with stacks of washers and wing nuts, we arrived at this lovely thing on the left - depicted here, bearing my new Fleece Artist, which is doing a great job of reminding me how faded the carpet is (really, all the decor downstairs is tired, but it was the newest when we moved in so it still hasn't been done).

I still need to wax it and make it look pretty, but it's already being so useful. Here it is in action. Aren't I fast?!

The swift was made using instructions from this amazing website here, which I found through one of my favourite knitting blogs.

Mr Z has now moved on to trying to work out how he can craft me a ball winder, but I fear he may be fighting a losing battle on that one.


Seasonal eating. I am excited. Pale pink spring rhubarb is here! Last weekend the woman in my green grocer told me worriedly that I'd picked up £3 worth of stalks and asked if I wanted to put any back. I almost told her off. "This is new spring rhubarb! Look! You can't put a price on that!" I enthused, maybe too enthusiastically.

Mmmmmmm, rhubarb crumble.

And with the pale pink spring rhubarb has come the very start of the asparagus, and lazy holiday breakfasts of lightly roasted asparagus with balsamic vinegar and poached eggs.

I am currently really liking the Eat the Seasons website. In spite of shopping locally for fresh fruit and veg, I still find they ship a lot of it in from abroad, and it's nice to know what I can expect to find that hasn't travelled further than me. It makes me sad that I'm eating things from the southern hemisphere when I've still never managed to go myself.

Speaking of travelling food - did you know that they grow bananas in Iceland? Over the geothermal vents, you know. They also grow cucumbers, tomatoes and roses. I might not mind eating produce from Iceland - I know it's travelled a long way, but I like to think I'm in some small way, supporting the economy of what may come to be the first carbon neutral country in the world. Their emissions per capita are 62% lower than thaose of the USA, and they use more primary energy. Impressive.


Samba. Or polka. Or disco dance. Just do something. The Wii dance mat has arrived in Bunnyland. I've been hopping about all over it, as has Mr Z (though generally at a more sedate pace).

No Sally - it isn't twister.

Light at the end of the tunnel

It's been a long old year.

It's been almost a whole one since I got my promotion, and one in which I don't think I've done as well as I could. I've felt more and more wretched at my lack of innovation in G&T since I got the job, and as time has gone on it's just got worse and worse. Trying to juggle that with the Aim Higher stuff, and teaching, and the ski trip, has been an impossible task. I was so happy to be giving up the Aim Higher and delaying the ski trip by a couple of months.

But this weekend, as I scribbled down idea after idea for G&T next year, I realised that I had been too hard on myself. I never allowed for the fact that it might take me a while to get going. I couldn't pick it up and be amazing from day 1. I really feel now that I've got a good understanding of the expectations and rigours of the job, and I can actually start getting on with it.

Yeyyyy!

Serious part over. Fun part beginning. The weekend is a good example of that fun. We went on the annual Murder Mystery weekend with 36 key stage three pupils, and they were lovely. Lovely, lovely children. Didn't stop making an effort for the whole weekend, and coped very well with the changes to the program we had to make, thanks to the weather.

If only the same could be said for all the staff (return to the not so fun bit). They were, in the vast majority, as enthusiastic and hard-working as the kids. Unfortunately, one in particular seemed to be unhappy with pretty much everything we did. On one point her complaints were valid, though she went about complaining about them in a very over-the-top way - really throwing her weight about and not giving me a great deal of opportunity to explain that she was basing a lot of her complaints upon something that wasn't true. I stayed calm and didn't argue back. No point. I was even more pleased I'd taken this course when, after that was over, that evening she had another row about not understanding what was going on or who she was supposed to be. Since she wrote the bloody story, with me and another, this came as something of a shock, and I don't think it was strictly the case. She also complained that our costumes were rubbish - when she'd been delegated to collect the costumes from our resident wardrobe mistress, and had said the day before that she'd kept forgetting. Le sigh.

I'm trying to remind myself that she had a very stresseful week, and hasn't been very well, and then I found out she was at a very low ebb on Friday afternoon, and it didn't help that I was poorly organised with the paperwork. Still, I think there are ways and ways of dealing with stress, and taking it out on your colleagues, who are giving up a weekend of their time to do an enrichment activity, is a bit low.

It makes me sad. Normally, the end of the Murder Mystery is a really happy, positive time - and I can look at it like that, if I think about the kids and how well they got on and enjoyed it. But it's left a bad taste in my mouth, and I hope I don't have to invite her next year. I can really do without that sort of negativity.

Onto more pleasant things, like my newest knitting project. I found a pattern for a knitted digestive system some time ago and Phillipa (head of science) commissioned me to knit on, so I got that started on Saturday afternoon at the Murder Mystery. It was a fiendishly difficult beginning - a provisional cast on and join in the round. I'd never done provisional cast on before, and with only 10 stitches it was difficult to keep my needles in the stitches and get it into a circle. In the end I did it on a circular and pulled the thread very tightly as I knitted it onto DPNs. Since the end of the knitting is turned inwards to make a nice puckered anus (there are three words bound to get my blog googled as a porn site...) it didn't really matter that I didn't do a great job of it. It's looking good so far, but knitting 15 feet of small intestine might get old quickly.

I have been wearing my CPH all over the place. It is warm and lovely and I get lots of nice comments. It isn't strictly finished yet (ssshhh!) because I wanted to wear it, and I know it will take me ages an ages to make myself pick up the stitches for a button band, or get a zip for it. It desn't look too shabby without either, but I am going to make myself do it in the summer, when it's too hot to wear it. I did the hood with a three-needle bind off and carried the cable up the back, and because I messed with the stitch pattern I have two little points on the hood, but I am not particularly fussed - I think they make a nice feature.

I have several knitting irons in the fire now, since the CPH is off the needles for present. I am all ready to cast on for Annie Modesitt's Corset Top - I have some royal blue soy silk that's just the thing. I swatched it two weeks ago and then, in spite of advice given to me at knitting club, washed it and let it dry - thank goodness I did! The swatch stretched to almost double its original width, and if I'd made the top it would have come out too big even for me. I don't know what to do now though - I want to drop from 4mm needles to 3.5mms without swatching again and hope it'll be alright, because I'm too lazy to swatch again and too impatient to let it dry - I want to make a good start with it over Easter weekend because I'd like to wear it to a wedding in May.

I don't know why I'm saying this - I know I'll swatch it again. I'm not a rebel, really.

In addition to this, I have yarn for a Noni Cherry Blossom Bag, and for Dahlia from Knitty, and a couple of skeins of chunky to knit some headwear with. I don't know what headwear yet, but I am aware that March is drawing rapidly to a close and I have yet to knit a hat. Shock horror! That's no good for knittahattamonth. I will have to cast on the bag instead, so at least I've done something for knittabaggamonth.

Then, next month, I'm going to knit a tricorner hat for felting - because next year's Murder Mystery theme is pirates, and I'd like to get ahead *grin*

Knittahattamonth

Life is busy. I leave to ski tomorrow. I have been frantically juggling the paperwork for that with the pressure to do something amazing for G&T, trying to teach without a whiteboard (thank you VERY much, Acer, for refusing to replace my HD for a SECOND time in spite of the fact it was the SAME error and it's under warranty, you cheap bastards - as if I can't do a system restore myself), catching up on the marking (formidable), organising several Aim Higher events, mentoring the GTP student, reining in my contempt for my tutor group (some, not all), teaching at the dry slope (and then driving one girl to Salisbury hospital with a bad sprain and living on tenterhooks for 2 weeks in case she was too damaged to come on the real trip), applying for courses, taking up tap dancing, knitting sharks, playing Scrabulous, reading novels instead of magazines and visiting Mother Hand. When the Head told me last week that if I were to organise the annual sixth form federation G&T conference in Malaysia in October, he would grace me with his presence, I actually managed to say, "I'll think about it" instead of just a straight yes. I'm getting there. Saying no straight out has got to come soon.

Tap dancing is fun. It took all my courage to go for the first time, and then I was told I couldn't just watch and I wasn't able to take part thanks to dire underpreparedness (no socks, shoes or money), so I had to do it all over again a week later, and it was not the regular instructor and the sub had no idea I was new, so asked me some quite difficult questions about steps which I couldn't answer. "What have you done before?" he enquired. "Er...well I stopped classes about 15 years ago, when I was 10," I stuttered back (note: managed to shave nearly 5 years off my age, but I think it was written all over my face). This alienated most of the other class members (apart from the very irritating tattooed hard-looking bloke who turned out to have a Fred Astaire complex and tap around freestyling in every pause we gals took for breath) who were amazed I had been recommended that class "because we're so advanced!" Ha, yes, well, I managed to keep up with that shim sham we did, better than some others, so evidently my muscles have some memory. It wasn't so good this week, I have a problem doing pick ups, which might be solved if I buy a pair of tap shoes and, yknow, PRACTISE. I think I'll stick at it. Friend Parpy Jo wants to do ballet. That'll be a hoot. I can barely manage 45 minutes of studiously ignoring myself dancing in the mirrors in sweats, let alone a pair of pink tights and a leotard.

Some of those women do that tap class in JEANS. Miss Barnes would never have allowed that.

Anyway...on with some knitting. I joined the Knittabaggamonth on Ravelry but then I messed up my January string bag project and so I think I have to leave the group now. I have knitted a hat every month so far, though. Here is January's...



Pattern: Hannah from Magknits
Yarn: Rowan Scottish Tweed in Bulky Herring...I love this colour. It's grey woven with what seem to bebits that someones swept up off the Rowan factory floor. I want to knit a whole big thing in it soon.
Mods: I knit it to pattern the first time without swatching and it was MAHOOSIVE. So I ripped it out and started again, with less stitches, and did one less decrease per round. I can't remember how many I decreased by, I think it was 10. I did some maths that made sense at the time and worked. It's still a bit too big but I am happy enough with it. I love the buttons. I hauled out the huge box of buttons I inherited from my last London rental and found, amongst the vintage buttons, a cool row counter and a lot of retro stitch holders, which is handy, since I didn't have any. (The picture is the original biggy).
Fun. It only took a couple of hours. I am speedy now, dontchaknow.

And for February....



Pattern: Shark Hat by KnittingNinja
Yarn: Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride Bulky in Heritage Blue, with some 220 held double for the mouth, and LP worsted for the teeth.
Mods: Another one I didn't swatch for properly (LEARN dammit!) but I was getting more stitches per inch than the pattern and was concerned it looked too big, so I did decreases after COn the fin, and ended up with a pot bellied shark. I found the pattern really confusing, especially over the body increases and the teeth, but I did a good job I think.
I was so happy the project came out just in time for the ski trip. I had been checking compulsively for weeks. I'm going to look great sharking it down the slopes in it, and it only took me 3 days, and that was working around work commitments and the CPH.


Ah yes, the hoody. It's looking SO NEARLY FINISHED. It's driving me a bit mental. I have seamed the sides and put on both the sleeves, and I am halfway finished with the hood. It's a good length, but wider than I expected so it's not a figure-hugger like I hoped it would be. However, I think it might look a bit odd as a figure-hugger, being the length it is. I also might put a zip on it instead of picking up the 6 million stitches for the button band, depending on how neat the edges look - then the front cables will meet and sort of match the back...it would be a perfect match if I hadn't read the pattern backwards.

It's exciting, though. An actual garment. Something that took more than two skeins. And I've only been knitting it for two months! I'm like, a proper knitter now. My seams suck and I am too slap-dash to do proper Kitchener so it will never look like it was shop bought, but it is snuggly warm and a lovely colour - the variations in the yarn have become a real feature.

Better go and pack.

Apres moi, le deluge

Flooding's becoming an increasingly common occurrence in the West of England. This time, I've been around to see the Avon break its banks around Bath, and in Bradford-on-Avon. I don't remember this happening last winter, but it may well have happened in the summer - I was conversing with an old man on the bridge in BoA and he said, "It was worse last year" - and it wasn't until later that I remembered the summer floods that happened while we were in the USA. I am a bit concerned about it, because when I moved out to Father Hand's for the year, there was some quite severe flooding (that was in 2000) - perhaps it's my fault.

Anyway, the Avon in BoA had been up to within a foot of the walkway on Tuesday and I persuaded Mr Z to let me borrow his baby on Wednesday so I could take some pictures around Bathford, but then on the way to work I found the water levels in BoA had risen roughly 4 feet and the bridge was nearly flooded, so I got even better pictures than I expected. Ian had picked Wednesday to take year 13 to see the Tithe Barn and the Saxon church, and then arrived back fairly wet after opting to wade through standing water rather than walk up the hill and around the flooding.

The picket fence marks the usual boundary.

You can see how high the level is by the benches - just the top few inches of them showing, plus that bin is almost underwater.








Almost all the arches of the bridge were filled up. On the other side, the water was swirling and sucking through where it was building up a little against the bridge and trying to run through the arches (the water is flowing from right to left in this picture). When the water is at its usual level, the bank runs from the lamp-post on the right to the tree on the left. The level marker on the other side said 29 feet. Scary! Very, very fast-flowing, too.

The water pouring up through the drains gave me a clue to why the whole place smelled so bad.

So, that was Bradford on Avon. Thankfully the place seems to be set up for flooding, and only the funeral directors and a couple of riverside pubs seemed affected. I wonder if they coped as well as the Lock and Weir in Hanham - apparently their carpark was underwater (uphill from the pub itself) and they were rowing people to and from the pub; the regulars were all in, sitting around drinking in wellies, in a foot and a half of water.

Further along my route home from work I travel through Bathford, and turn onto the A46, crossing the Avon again. This valley between the BoA road and the A36 was also heavily flooded...

I was very lucky with the light...

The sheep seemed unconcerned.

Meanwhile, the ducks (you can see their swim trails to the right) were positively loving it.

You can see, from the tree line, how flooded it really was. The usual span of the river is the other side of the trees - so the flooded portion is the wider strip. It was amazing how much water there was there. Thankfully there are no houses down there so no flooded buildings; and the flooding OUTSIDE Bath meant that INSIDE Bath was alright, I think, so nothing too serious. By the next day, the floods had abated, leaving behind them some very green fields in the valley, and a bit of a mess to sort out at the Bradford on Avon funeral director's.

Thus endeth today's picture-heavy post. Further pictures can be seen in my Flickr stream.

Satisfying my inner bitch

It's a wet Saturday afternoon and I've plenty to say and a new DAB radio to accompany me, so I am intending to do a couple of entries.

So, I am back at the gym with a vengeance, after a very slack December due to acute busy-ness. Of course, since it's January, everybody else is back at the gym, too: there've been a couple of ugly scenes at Spinning over the past couple of weeks due to overbooking, and at circuits on Wednesday, around 100 people turned up, which meant our usual 50-minute circuit turned into an hour and 10 marathon, towards the end of which even the instructor was tiring and running out of cardio exercises for us.

The January circuits sessions are always the best for people watching. For a start, you always see people you haven't seen for ages (I suppose I fall into this category this year). Then, there are the people who are obviously really serious about that "get fit" new year's resolution but don't really understand the need for a good sports bra: there were several of these, who almost had me clutching my chest in sympathy, and proved to be almost hypnotic for some of the gentlemen, thanks to slightly-too-small white t-shirts.

Then, there are the people who really aren't serious. These people are usually kitted out all wrong, and don't usually break a sweat. There were two such there on Wednesday; I didn't clock them until we were almost halfway around, but after that I couldn't stop my horrified glances and eventually it became so obvious that they started staring back. I couldn't help it, even then.

For a start, people like this are always glaringly easy to spot, because they wear the right type of trousers - football-type numbers - but they insist on rolling the waistband down to make them into hipsters. Admittedly, this is flattering if you have the figure for it, but anybody serious about the exercises will quickly realise (within the first 5-10 minutes) how impractical this is, when they are constantly pulling them up. In addition to this, they are often wearing heavy jewellery (gold chains, big earrings) and/or hoodies.

Wednesday's two displayed all of the above, between them. Girl#2, in the hoody and gold, seemed more serious than her friend Girl#1, with the DIY hipsters, but when I spotted them neither looked particularly committed, because they had TAKEN OFF THEIR TRAINERS. They were doing star jumps, on the rock-solid, tiled floor of the leisure centre, in their socks. They progressed like this for some minutes: in fact, for the next 20 minutes or so until eventually the instructor broke with the tradition she has of never interacting with anybody on an individual basis, no matter how badly they are doing the exercise, and went over to tell them they had to wear their shoes. They put them back on, at which point it became obvious why they had taken them off - at least in Girl#1's case, they were much too big. She then seemed to spend most of the rest of the session concentrating on stopping them from flying off - but not tying the laces.

This seemed to take up most of her concentration, in fact, because she did not at any point, for the rest of the class, do a single exercise correctly. This is the dangerous part. I never do jumping lunges because I am not convinced I would keep form and I fear for my knees. Her jumping lunges were an accident waiting to happening. Her squats were straight out of the "How NOT to..." book. When she deigned to lift a weight, her whole body helped her to swing it back and forth.

It concerns me, greatly. I very much doubt she'll be back, but I can't understand why the instructor didn't say anything - or her "co-instructor", a teenaged boy who has never, to my knowledge, spoken to a single person in the hall and is about as helpful as a wet rag. Every time I go, I watch people doing the exercises wrong and think about how much damage they could be doing, and it pisses me off a bit more. Every time she makes us do endless sets of jumping lunges, or bridges with leg lifts, and I watch the arching and the sagging and the knees in the wrong place, I silently fume. Maybe I should actually make a complaint, one of these days. I do feel a bit full of it, though, because there are no mirrors and I'm not even sure I'm doing the exercises right.

Anyway. I needed a little rant there. I'm going to start a new entry now because I think this one's semi-poisonous and I don't want to infect the rest of what I have to say *grin*

Well done, Endemol

I have, for the first time, been watching the January Big Brother....the celebrity one never appealed to me and so I never watched it. I was intrigued, though, by the idea of putting 12 alpha teens into one house, and I have to say, I think it's a resounding success.

At first I felt quite sorry for them. They're all at the top of their game in their own way, but have this arrogance about it that reflects their age, and I could see them being publicly ripped to shreds about it, and I felt quite sorry for them. But that hasn't happened, at all. Instead, they've all bonded really well, without the usual clique wars we see on the summer BB; the celebrity hijackers are doing funny things with them that are meaningful, instead of getting them to eat fish guts in return for food; and generally, the show is a lot more entertaining than I expected it to be. It's a shame it only has such a short run, though I can see how it would get old quite quickly.

It really made me laugh when the purple ninja went in and started throwing around rose petals. Jade was really annoying, though, and I find that brother and sister combo vaguely creepy.

So, hats off to Endemol! After last year's racism debacle, they were always going to have to be super-careful about what they did with the format this year, and somebody has their head screwed on over there. It really works. That said, the kids at work don't seem to be discussing it as much, so perhaps it hasn't been as much of a success among the yoof and therefore will not reappear.

This post was brought to you by the Sally Institute of Trivial Ramblings.

Happy New Year! - And Further CPH Whinging

Nearly time to start work for 2008. I turn the big 3-0 this year, it's exciting, but I could still do with it being LAST weekend so I had another week off before work. I feel thoroughly rested and I've done the bare minimum amount of work necessary to ensure I don't get to the end of Monday and have to cry all way home due to the stress, but I could do more. I suppose I could always do more. If I'm making one new year's resolution, it's to Know My Limits (Woman).

I have finished the left front of my Central Park Hoody, and I knitted the short row shoulders and did the three-needle bind-off with the back piece, without event. I phased in a second ball every 2 rows and so the colour difference isn't too bad (I hope). However, after reading a lot about the project I realised I knitted the doucle central cable on the back piece....well, backwards. I cabled front and then back, instead of the other way around. This was because I read the chart from left to right, like any dumb western scholar. I am really irritated by this, because I wanted this sweater to be perfect - but, in all honesty, I like it better that way. It's just that it's wrong. Anyway, I'm glad I learned the trick of chart reading on a project where the mistake doesn't mess up the whole thing. I have a far more ambitious cable project in mind (once I get my hands on this bookful of cable patterns) and it's good to get the practice in.

I am joining in with this bag-a-month project on Ravelry. I am charmed by the idea - who doesn't need more bags? I have an excellent project in mind for the cables, from Drops, and there is a cable and moss stitch bag I was planning to make with my leftover Maya, but since I'm not planning on forking over for the pattern that will be of my own design. I also have a great idea for a beaded bag, which will also be my own design. The felting may be a little tougher, I don't mich like felting; since the washing machine consumed a piece of my last felted project, I know I'm going to have to hand-felt and I am much too lazy for that. I still need a laptop bag, though.

January's project will have to be quick and simple. I'm thinking a string bag. I have a bunch of Lily Sugar'n'Cream that is begging to be used.