Egypt here I come

Benny here. Am off to the Red Sea with Sally and a woman she calls Mother Hand. It is a long old way from Yellowstone! But since Sally forgot to take me on her last trip I am excited to be on the move again. Not sure how I will take to snorkelling - but I take my duties as the best travelled bison seriously so I might do a bit of parascending or something. Here I am at Heathrow enjoying a pre-flight donut. Bon voyage! To me, anyway!

Ka trouble

Poor Henry.

(You know, since I'm calling the car by its name, that the news is not going to be good).

He'd been stranded at home for several days, what with all the snow. This morning, I went out with a few of my neighbours and we spent 2 hours shovelling the packed ice and snow off the road and into the wheelbarrow, until we'd cleared the end of the cul de sac, and then a couple of other people came out and cleared tyre tracks down the road, and an enterprising neighbour who'd raided the grit bin round the corner threw about 2 buckets of it down, so Henry was liberated.

Still, I made Mr Z come to Asdal with me this evening, partly because I wanted to get him food for when I'm on holiday, partly because I was being wussy about driving in icy conditions.

I'm glad he came with me.

And after I'd just wiped the numberplate, too.

We were sat at a temporary traffic light, not two minutes from home, with a carful of groceries, when there was an almighty BANG! from the front passenger side. I thought it was a tyre. It was not (although it is now...) Mr Z tried to drive it, but there was an awful grating, rubbing noise, so we just had to stop. halfway through the temporary traffic light system. Great. Seems that the suspension, which the service garage told me LAST WEEK would be OK until my next service, picked today to collapse.

I am grateful we were stationary when I happened, though.

The RAC came after about 2 hours and towed Henry to the local garage, where the tyre was popped during the lifting-back-onto-the-road process. The garage are going to try and sort it out tomorrow, bless them - just in time for the next dump of snow, rendering the roads undrivable, again.

Off topic, I can't believe Gloucestershire council is using table salt to grit the roads. It's just beyond a joke. Though it is effective - I used up half a tub on the road last night, and judging by the completely bare salt shelf in Asdal, many others are thinking the same. Unless South Gloucs is trying the same trick.

In a positive piece of driving news, I got a solicitor's letter on Thursday with details of my claim for October's accident. It is a sizable sum. All that complaining I did about having to see an independent GP suddenly seems unecessary. Obviously it's not an actual figure yet - but even the lowest estimate she gave me will cover almost all of the cost of flights to the US this summer. It seems a LOT of money, but then when I think about the amount of trouble it caused me, between not sleeping properly for days, to being unable to mark any coursework because of the neck pains, to having to get Mother & Father Z to schlep me around while Henry was getting his MOT, it seems about right.

I'm getting a bit sick of the snow, now. I had Tuesday off because I couldn't get the car out - and school closed at lunchtime anyway. Then school closed on Thursday and Friday too. I got all the History coursework I had here - well over half - marked, and a lot of knitting done. I'm a bit fed up with the snow now, though, and I REALLY don't want to be snowed out early next week too, as I need my laptop, which is locked in my classroom desk drawer. I didn't think to bring it home. I thought it would be one snow day at the most. Then the deputy head warned me it might be Monday and Tuesday too, when she rang on Friday morning.

I suppose the world will keep turning, but I have things I must do before half term.

I took lots of pictures on Thursday, with my new camera that goes underwater and can be dropped and sat on and stuff. I had dithered about the camera for a long while, as it was quite an expense, but finally I decided to just go for it. I've got a bit of the audiobook money left, and no pressing expenses (apart from a new suspnesion strut but I didn't know that then...) Really pleased I went for it. There's a Flickr set of the snowy results there, but here's one to be going on with.

This camelia is bizarre - after a day covered in snow the buds had actually started to open. !!

First FOs of 2009

I have been a productive knitter, so far. My other resolutions, such as exercising and reading more books, have taken some time to get off the ground (though I did purchase and read Z For Zachariah, a book I remember from my teens, last week) but I already have two FOs to share, and another on the way.

FO # 1: Lelah

Pattern: Lelah, by Christina Buhagier at Knitting for Boozehags (no link because it's defunct now, sadly)
Needle: 4mm and 3.5mm Knitpicks
Yarn: Allhemp6 in Midori, three full skeins and about a third of a fourth.
Mods: I knitted in a couple of extra lace panels and phased them out at my waist. I knitted more repeats of the lace pattern. I did four short rows around halfway up the bust to make sure it was high enough at the front.

I basically took the pattern at its word and measured and did some maths and it came out a perfect fit. It's such a perfect fit it doesn't even need elastic to keep it up! I have knitted a couple of icord straps though, which will be attached with poppers or hooks and eyes.

There was a bit of a wobble where I realised my gauge was different to my swatch (must be the round-knitting as opposed to the flat-knitting) and I had to rip back a day's worth of knitting and do rather a lot of decreases, but it was made a lot better because, for the first time ever, I used a lifeline. I don't know what made me do it. Prescience!

It's hard to do the pulled back shoulders, one leg forward pose
when Mr Z tells me to flick my hair from side to side.

Then, of course, it snowed - a lot. Hence the pictures. I like the irony. Really it's for my trip to the Red Sea next week. I may have bought 7 different kinds of green ribbon online because I couldn't pick the one I liked best...

FO # 2: Fingerless gloves for swap



Pattern: Mayahana Flying Gloves
Needle: 4mm DPNs
Yarn: RYC Baby Cashsoft in pale pink (that colour that looks sort of grey). It is so soft and lovely.
Mods: I didn't knit a thumb I just made a hole. I ribbed at the top, too, though that may be part of the original pattern. I only really used it to get the number of stitches ot cast on, and for the link to the lattice stitch. They are very pretty, and luckily too small for me or they might not make it into the swap parcel.

Tonight I have knitted one Eowyn mitt, too, for a friend from knitting group who is trying to rustle up something warming for friends of her son, who lives in a unit for people with head injuries in Devon (I think that's what it is - it's one of those stories I missed the beginning of). Apparently the unit is very cold at present.

I haven't knitted any Eowyns for over a year and it feels funny to go back to a pattern I am so familiar with, when I am a considerably more accomplished knitter. For a start, I can't understand wtf I EVER knitted them flat and seamed (I remember thinking of a good reason at the time, heaven knoiws what it was). For another thing, the first mitt only took me an hour, and I certainly wasn't that quick last time.

I bought a new camera. I have many, many snowy pictures to share. But talking about Eowyn makes me want to go and CO for the second one, so they will have to wait.

25 things about me

This one's doing the rounds on Facebook but I don't want all these good me-facts going to waste over there!

Here are 25 things you might not know about me.

1. I have a shockingly bad short term memory and often forget what I'm saying halfway through a sentence, or ask the same question several times at 30 second intervals. I have an awesome long-term memory, though.

2. The right side of my hair is always curlier than the left because I twist it round my fingers absent-mindedly.

3. I eat out of date food. A lot. Yesterday I ate a yogurt that went out of date on November 11th. I view the date stamps as guidelines, really.

4. Top of my list of things to do before I die is see the southern hemisphere.

5. "Feel the fear and do it anyway" is one of my favourite sayings.

6. At last count I had 9 wrap dresses, which may be too many.

7. It really irritates me when non-knitters look at me knitting and say, "You're so clever! I could never do that." Do they think I was born doing it? It's a skill like anything else and anyone can do it if they learn!
(Knitting readers might recognise this fact. My favourite story to do with it is the woman who heard this while she was visiting someone in hospital - from a brain surgeon.)

8. I'm a terrible hoarder. At present, I am mostly hoarding yarn, perfume and bath products. I am also a big book hoarder - that's ongoing.

9. I enjoy making Mr Z jump - and it's really easy. Sometimes he will jump when I have come in late, banged around downstairs, been to the loo and then walked into the office and said hello, because he is oblivious. I feel guilty about it quite often, but it gives me the giggles.

10. I find it really difficult to read non-fiction; it takes me a really long time. I think it's because I don't care how it ends.

11. I like to be busy, although I'm never very productive. I am a bit half-arsed, truth be told. But I like to have lots on the go.

12. I'm really excited about holidays this year because I'll be going abroad 4 times on 4 very different trips. 2 are with school. I like doing school residentials, they're really rewarding. I don't get why other people don't.

13. I love being 30. I was excited to turn 30. My 20s felt like they went on forever and I'm really excited by this whole new decade stretching out ahead of me. Especially since I'm now a lot better off, more stable and happier than I was when I turned 20. And, I was relieved when I discovered that the school years are not the best years. I wouldn't be a teenager again for anything, unless I could take all I know now back with me.

14. I thought that stuff about your wedding day being one of the best days of your life was a load of old bollocks, until mine was. I still regret wearing those shoes, though. I should have gone for the uncomfortable but utterly gorgeous pair instead, especially since I took them off at the reception anyway.

15. I love baking, and it makes me sad that Mr Z does not really eat cake. It is just as well, though, because I would have baked us into matching gastric bands by now if he did.

16. I'm a qualified ski instructor - only on nursery slopes, though. My best instructor move is backwards snowplough whilst bent over holding the fronts of somebody else's skis. I rock that move.

17. I love pens and pretty stationery. I own more notebooks than I will ever use, I fear. They make me do more work for school, though, so that I can fill them up.

18. I am absolutely obsessed with polka dot stuff. I love polka dots. Every day, I wear something spotty. My staffroom mug is polka dot. My wedding ring is kind of polka dot. My wedding dress had polka dots on it, though you can't really make them out.

19. I still have my first car - an E reg mini - in the garage. I dream about getting a Haynes manual and fixing it up myself. Then I'd have it resprayed with a polka dot roof and reupholstered....in polka dot fabric.

20. I have an A-level in Latin. It was my best A-level grade - a B. It is more useful than I thought it would be.

21. I have only ever dated men who are computer geeks. I hold their collective knowledge responsible for my ability to teach ICT without any qualifications or formal training, and my extensive use of keyboard shortcuts.

22. I lived in Las Vegas for a year after I finished university. I didn't work or anything, I just sat around Father Hand's apartment reading and chatting to people online, and sometimes I'd cycle to the library or the cinema. I did an amazing bus trip though, and covered 9000 miles in 5 weeks. Good times.

23. When I was a student, I used to go and sit next to Alexandra Palace when I was feeling a bit blue. It was 2 buses away from my house but even the journey was cathartic. Being able to see London spread out made me feel insignificant and, in turn, my problems.

24. I kept extensive diaries all through my teenage years. I only stopped when I started going out with Mr Z. I can't imagine not telling him everything - though quite often I suspect he'd rather not know.
It's fun to read back over the diaries, but there are still bits - the bad bits - that I can't read because they're too evocative.

25. When I have a bad day at school I think of working on Playscheme and getting beaten up on the minibus by Joe and spat at by Shimu and happy slapped by Michelle, and it puts it all in perspective! I still miss Playscheme every summer, though.

2008 - A Knitting Review

Hmmm. I like blue, don't I?

In 2008...

• I finished my first sweater - the Central Park Hoody.
• I knitted 24 hats, and gave 23 of them away.
• I caught the bug for viral knitting, and completed a Clapotis, a pair of Saartje's booties and the Drops Swing Jacket.
• I thrummed for the first time and made mittens.
• I cabled a pair of wrist warmers.
• I knitted a pair of earrings with wire and beads, on the day the pattern was published (3rd project on Ravelry, and one was the designer's!)
• I finished two scarves - one skinny, which took months; one chunky, which was started and finished on Christmas day.
• I knitted a corset top out of soy silk - favourite FO ever.
• I knitted a shawl, from one skein of LE Lion & Lamb.
• I STARTED a bag, my first attempt at lace with a mohair cardi, a digestive system for the science department and a scarf for Mr Z - which all lie languishing in the UFO pile.

I am quite disappointed I didn't even manage to knit one bag, in spite of joining the Knittabaggamonth group, but I'm pleased I managed three full sized garments. I've put a moratorium on knitting garments for the moment, since I am doing quite well with the old weight loss thing and I don't want to end up wasting yarn on something I won't be able to wear for longer than a few months.

That said, I cast on for a fishtail lace boob tube yesterday (no pattern link - it appears I was just in time because the link is dead!) I am knitting it from allhemp6, with a halter instead of a straight edge, and I hope to have it finished by my holiday in a month...we'll see. The hemp's quite hard on the hands and it's looking a bit crazy right now, but hopefully after 3 repeats of the lace pattern it will start to take shape; and a good blocking should get it looking shipshape. I am knitting to a different gauge and at 2 inches negative ease, so I am really crossing my fingers!

"What else do you do during the week?"

...panted the very sweaty man sat next to me on the mat this evening, as we caught our breath in time for the crunches in the circuits class.

He happened to be the fittest man in the room (and I use that term in its original context - definitely, only in its original context). He is the sort of athletic type who wears a sweat-wicking top and two pairs of shorts to every class. He shaves his legs. He was sweating even more than me, and I was half dead.

It was literally on the tip of my tongue to reply, "Weeeelllll, yknow, I mostly sit in my chair in front of the telly with some chocolate and a bit of knitting," but I decided I didn't know him well enough to be cracking jokes and so I made up a fitness routine on the spot. Apparently I go to the gym a couple of times a week and I desperately want to start going to circuits on Wednesday. I failed to mention that I count playing Tetris on the WiiFit board as exercise.

Of course, it's January and time for gym-going again. I was feeling a bit sorry for January yesterday. January never gets appreciated for being January. January is all about detox, dieting, devilishly difficult exercise routines, and deprivation - or it's about scoffing at all the people doing those things and declaring that you're much too cool for all that bollocks and will just continue on as before. Most of all, January is for getting through as quickly as possible so that spring will arrive. Sometimes February brings those magic sunny blue-skied days when spring feels just an unfurling leaf away, and the mornings are lighter by then and the evenings too.

January is all about the dark and the desperate and the dirt. Everywhere looks dirty. Grass starts to look yellow. Cars are so filthy from all the grit on the roads that people (like me) who refuse to use automatic car washes are driven to wiping their numberplates with a damp cloth, just to stay road legal; and the sides of the roads take on a foul, black hue from all the spray. And everyone's desperate, because December payday was early and now it seems like forever until payday again and all those copper jars are being raided for money for bread and milk and gin. Maybe not gin actually, because it's detox month.

Nobody loves January. Nobody appreciates nights like yesterday when the fence almost blew away and I was SO HAPPY to be curled up in bed with a knitting mag. Nobody marvels at the days of freezing fog, like last Friday, when the frost gets even thicker as the day progresses so that everything is coated in thick white icing sugar and looking beautiful, but it's not foolhardy to walk around because the ground frost isn't, by some miracle, slippery.

I'm going to make an effort to love January for January's sake and not wish it away into February - even though I am going to the Red Sea in February and I am quite beside myself with excitement already (I'll finally get to use that disposable underwater camera I bought in 1999).

Big up January! Woop woop!

Things I love about January so far -

1. I have managed to stay on top of all my planning to such an extent that I had the WHOLE WEEKEND OFF and yesterday I didn't even get dressed (although the internet was down for most of it, but I'm not blaming January for that).
2. I have lost almost all of the Christmas weight already.
3. I have been dry skiing and three of the boys I took, who came last year, were amazingly good, and I discovered they've been touring England's snow domes, so great is their love for skiing thanks to the school ski trip, and I DID THAT! Me. That trip wouldn't run if it wasn't for me.
4. I have been very fastidious about laying out clothes, jewellery and make up every evening and have consequently been very nicely turned out at work.
5. Sixth form mocks. Study leave, baby! Five lessons down this week!
6. I've had a clear out. I stashed up all my knitting yarn (all 15 miles of it...) in pretty hat boxes and recylced a ginormous bag of clothes.
7. I'm knitting an aran sweater with a faintly rude name for Jen's baby and it's going superquick.
8. We have a brand spanking new telly which is 40 inches and an LCD so I can see it properly now, even whilst knitting and only looking at it intermittently.
9. I bought a new black dress and it should arrive soon, and I got 15% off.
10. Celebrity Big Brother. Hirarious! Especially tonight where they made Coolio wear a kilt, and Vern a Beefeater outfit, and Latoya had to dress up as a Welsh maiden. Loves it.
11. I have finished writing the last set of audiobooks which had been commissioned, and a new mattress is in the near future. I was very pleased to finally get it over with, though I fear I amy sign up for another one soon, even though it will be a struggle for me to do it. Just say no, Sal, just say no.

I may be a bit overexcitable this evening. I'm blaming circuits.

I wanted to do a big post as a round up to 2008 but I thought, if I waited to have time to do it, I'd never post again. So I leave you instead with a group shot of my year 11 lovelies in their hats, on the last day of term. They were thrilled with them and wore them to assembly, which got me loads of kudos with the other staff, not to mention other pupils.


Mmmm....check out my end of term lushness. I was looking hawt that day. Mmhmm.

Are you well read?

(Shamelessly stolen from another blog I read).

This one is originally from the Big Read. Apparently they reckon most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Underline those you intend to read. -
3) Italicise the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - only a kiddy picture book version, though
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger - started it, couldn't get into it.
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - started it, couldn't get into it.
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - tried to read this when I was 13, should maybe try again.
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

31 - not bad!

OK, firstly - isn't the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe part of the Chronicles of Narnia, and Hamlet part of the complete works of Shakespeare?

Secondly, how did anything by Dan Brown get on this list?

Thirdly, I didn't italicise anything. I am much too fond of everything I read, or I don't finish it, as evidenced by the "couldn't get into it" comments. But, of all that are bolded, I've read the Colour Purple several times and I would read Nabokov again if there weren't so many other books that need reading.

Finally, I don't think I'll ever read a full-length novel by Dickens. I try, but I find it such hard going. I do want to read a Tale of Two Cities, though, simply for the French Revolution link.