November roundup

How is it December 5th already? The end of November flew by with all the grace and speed of a freight train ploughing through 10 feet of snow, passing deadline after deadline as I screamed in vain for it to slow down and just give me a chance. It is my own fault of course. I took on an extra job on October, from a place that I haven't worked with before and therefore didn't want to say no to. This on its own would have been OK, but then my trusty 11 year old computer died. I have a work laptop, but I am too set in my ways to find it easy to use - I am too used to having two screens now. Then the exam board dumped a huge piece of work on me without notice. School has also turned up the pressure so I ended up having just one free this past week, on Friday.

Woe, woe, woe is me. Woe, I say. 

Books read: I read To Miss With Love by Katharine Birbalsingh. She is a controversial figure in the education world but has just been made social mobility tsar, so beloved of the Tories is she, so I thought I had better read it and see what she was about. I guess I surmised that she wants similar things for children to what I want, but she has some very different ideas about the best way to achieve them. Rather than encouraging children to 'talk proper' to improve their life chances, for example, I'd sooner work towards a world in which this no longer matters. But, meh. 

I've started December reading a hefty history tome and a cook book, so I am not holding out much hope for a successful end to the year. But we'll see. 

Metres knitted: Not too many. I've finished the front and collar and I am plugging away at the first Tegna sleeve. This project is dragging, I'm bored and I desperately want to knit something new. 

Pounds lost: 1. I am overjoyed by this, because the weight I dropped during covid has stayed off. It has wobbled around a bit, especially because the calorie tracking lasted all of a week...My Fitness Pal has been sending me increasingly desperate-sounding notifications all month. But, I think the careful planning and prepping of lunches, a habit I have managed to keep up with almost all school year so far, has really helped. As has just not having time to eat anything outside of meal times. 

Sleep: Predictably awful. I've been repeating my unhealthy mantra, 'Sleep is for wimps' this past week. It's definitely not. Sleep is for people who are able to say no to offers of work in months that are always, always too busy. 

This post is all very meh, isn't it? I should be full of the joys of Christmas. I want to be. It's coming very soon. I just have a lot of work to clear before then. I should also say that I decided I was going to make a concerted effort to catch up with more friends this month, I goal I achieved with finesse, having dinners with Tom, Jo, Caroline, Vikki, Kate and a whole weekend in Wales with Rachael plus another Saturday at a conference and long lunch. Plus an in-person knit at Flock. So it hasn't all been gloom. 

October round up

October has been a weird month. It started with a cancelled ski course, so a surprise free weekend; then I went to London and ran a Tough Mudder ('ran') - my first ever 10k - and then BANG! I got covid. It started with a slight loss of taste on the Sunday evening, but the LFT was negative. Then my sleep was disturbed by fever dreams and I (very unusually) woke up in the night with a raging thirst, went to the bathroom and was unable to smell Mr Z's horrible soap. I woke him up. 'I can't smell the soap,' I said. Mr Z grunted and immediately absconded to the sofa. In the morning I booked a PCR, naively telling the school absence answerphone that I'd probably be in by lunch. Famous last words.

Luckily for me, I couldn't have planned it better, because my last day of isolation was also the last day of term, so I ended up having three weeks of October off, although I did have to spend several of them feeling very unwell and several more not going out. It was a veritable treat when I was sent an antibody test kit and got to walk to the post box to send back the sample. 

That said, all that time certainly helped with the goals...

Books read: Two. I read Ian Rankin's Resurrection Men and then polished off Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud, which a lovely friend sent me when she heard I had covid. Not too bad, considering I also managed to binge watch two seasons of ER. 

Metres knitted: I got through most of the rest of the linen cone on my Tegna; the back is done, just the front, the collar and the sleeves to go. So, maybe another 500m, plus a couple of hexagons I did on my trip to Edinburgh at the weekend. 

Sleep: So much sleep. Covid knocked me for six. The week after I was still getting about nine hours a night without a wake and squeezing in a nap when possible as well. Going back to school has totally ruined all of that, of course, but it was nice while it lasted. 

And probably assisted with the...

Pounds lost: 10. TEN! Thank you, covid. For the first four days I couldn't access the kitchen due to isolating in the spare room, and then I didn't really want to eat without a sense of taste because it seemed like a waste of food. So I am now x-1 stone, 8lbs. Ten is a lot to lose that quickly and I am afraid it will have corrected by December but I have gone back to calorie tracking for this month to try to keep the momentum. 

September round up

Books read: I managed one and a half. I finished A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder by Shamini Flint and am halfway through a Rankin's Rebus I haven't read. I introduced Mother Hand to Rankin's Rebus when I found them in the library in Las Vegas and so every time she has another, she passes it on. I have a big stack. She will be pleased that I'm making a start. 

Metres knitted: I think around 500m. I am 14 inches into a linen Tegna. I'm bored with it, but must finish. The lace around the bottom took ages and it would be a crying shame if it was never blocked and made to look nice. 

Sleep: I've been trying, honestly. I've been going to bed as early as I can on as many nights as I can. It's a bit better than term time usually is at this end of the year. 

Pounds lost: None. Well...it went up by 4 and then down by 4. Weird. 

I thought I would blog some more in September, but tbf, it was September. Always a busy month. I have not had the usual re-marks to do but there have been appeals against the summer grades: a new process to learn and, although there weren't that many, they were time consuming. 

I might be counting down to half term, yes, what of it?

August round up

Books read: Two and a half, go me! I started with The Amber Fury by Natalie Haynes, a novel about a woman teaching Greek tragedy in a PRU, which I devoured in two days flat. I chased it with another Natalie Haynes, A Thousand Ships, which is a retelling of the story of Troy from the perspective of the women. I remembered just enough of the story (and had been reminded of more in my previous read) to make this refreshing and enjoyable. Cassandra's sections in particular were pretty brutal but I thought her ending was written beautifully. 

These stories are so heavily connected to my youth that they stir some quite interesting memories. I gather there is quite the fashion for this sort of retelling at the moment and I've got my eye on The Children of Jocasta by the same author and Circe by Madeleine Miller, but I have held off for now - I will borrow them from the library and space them out a bit, so I don't get Greek mythology fatigue. 

Once I'd finished with that I thought I'd better do some reading for the new A-level so, naturally, most reading progress ground to a halt. I re-started 'An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo' as recommended by Father Hand and it has been quite enlightening about Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly the rise of the tabloid press and the aspects of today's society they managed to create; but it's not exactly bedtime reading. I think it's probably going even slower because it's on Kindle. So I've picked another novel off the shelf to start today. 

Metres knitted: I finished the Gemini tee - let's call that 160m. I knitted a skein of hexagons - another 187m. That's 31 hexagons for this year alone, go me! Not a great monthly total but I have spent a lot of it away on holiday. That brings my total for the year so far to 5300ish - some way off my goal but still a fair amount knitted up. I have just started a new linen top which is a mistake, I should be going into the autumn with a nice woolly 4-ply on the needles, but I will persevere. 

Sleep: very good, of course. My friend Zoe is an early to bed, late to rise person so I ended up naturally sleeping a lot more whilst we were on holiday, even though I went to bed after her and got up earlier. One week this summer, my weekly sleep average was actually over 8 hours. Impressive. 

That said, I struggled to sleep last night. I am hoping that was the bad night's sleep before the new term, as I went into school today. 

Pounds lost: amazingly, three. I have eaten well, all summer long, saying no to neither starters nor desserts, quaffing wine at every opportunity, fuelled on long drives by wine gums. But I have also done a lot of walking and been generally a lot more active. Just as well, as I have stupidly entered a Tough Mudder in October. 

Blogging: I'm in the mood for writing so there might be more of this in September. 

Wardrobe clearout: playsuits

I'm participating in a challenge at the moment, where I wear the same dress for 100 days. If I do this and take a picture each day, I get $100 towards a new dress. This is a challenge with many benefits, though the cynical part of me says this is mainly really good advertising for the company that makes the dresses, especially judging by the number of people in the Facebook group that own half a dozen. Benefits for the participant, however, include learning to wear dresses (I don't own a wearable pair of trousers that aren't exercise related); washing clothes less (I don't wash clothes until they smell bad); learning to live with fewer clothes. That's the one for me.

My wardrobe is heaving. I have a lot of clothes I wear, a lot of clothes that almost fit and a lot of clothes I would never wear again but want to keep. The problem is that the volume obscures what is in there: it is difficult to riffle through the rail, for example, because it's quite tightly packed. I've observed that this is a trait I've inherited from Mother Hand, who gets round this problem by buying new wardrobes so that she can retain items of clothing Sib and I wore as children...I cannot become this. 

I've spent some of the summer musing over my clothes-hording instinct. I've figured out a few things -

• Plus sized shopping has been, in the past, very tough. I had a habit of buying things because they fitted rather than because I liked them. This is not a problem any longer, as the next generation swarm the castles of fashion and demand inclusivity, so now is the time to start being discerning about what I buy and really think about what my style is, rather than my style just being 'what fits'. 
• I keep hold of items of clothing because they have good memories attached to them. I don't need the item of clothing to keep that memory: a photograph of the memory, or of the garment itself in a pinch, is all that is needed.
• I buy clothes via mail order and then don't send them back, even if they don't fit quite right or aren't what I want. Then I don't want to get rid of them because it is wasteful to pay for clothes I've never worn. I still believe that to be true, no matter which way you slice it, but it is less wasteful to pass the clothes on to someone who will wear them, rather than keep them squirrelled away until they're well out of fashion and nobody will wear them at all. And the best way to avoid this is to not order them in the first place - or, at the very least, to send them back. 
• Using the cost-per-wear argument or 'the most sustainable garment is the one you already own' argument to justify keeping hold of clothes I don't wear is not the one. While clothes I don't wear take up storage space, clothes I do wear are in neatly folded piles on the floor, getting dusty. 
• If I like something and it is a flattering item, I will quite often buy it again in another colour, or sometimes even the same colour, so I have a spare. But. I buy good quality clothes (and justify the spend on the basis that they will last) and so they last and last, because I'm wearing each item half as often. I can't expect the clothes I own now to be the ones I will wear for the rest of my life. Wardrobe turnover is normal. Buying two of everything is not necessary. I do not allow Mr Z to order spare food items for the kitchen on the basis that we don't have the space to store them: I should also be applying this logic to my clothes.
• My clothes are not my car: I do not need to use them until the fall to pieces to make them worth the spend. 

So, as I work through the challenge, my plan is to work through my wardrobe and make some donations. I would like to donate 100 items to charity by the end of the challenge. Ideally these should be wearable items, not things going for ragging. 

To begin with, I went through the box of clothes I weeded out of my wardrobe two years ago, that were in the spare room. These are clothes I don't want to part with but that I don't wear. Having worked through the box, I turned out a pair of shorts and a dress that I put in there for reasons I cannot work out, and reintroduced them to my wardrobe...a fail. But I got rid of half the garments in the box. I then worked through my holidays clothes - tricky, because I haven't been on a foreign holiday for two years so I don't really know what I need, but I went on colour and shape for now - and added to the pile. 

Today, I have tackled playsuits. A big fan of the old TV programme Life Laundry, I pegged them all out on the line to have a look. 

I started wearing playsuits in 2018 when I turned 40. I was overjoyed to find something so comfortable and easy to wear. In 2019 I shopped for them heavily. Since then, I have added to the collection annually, without throwing any out. I am, in truth, searching for a replacement for my very favourite playsuit: a blue floral, button up number from Gap that is rapidly fading. 

The favourite one, pictured here with the assistant head's dog that I unsuccessfully tried to kidnap. 

Hence, I have ended up with this situation - 13 playsuits. Enough to wear one a day for nearly a fortnight. In truth, I wear three of these on rotation. Time to be brutal. 

I started by removing all the playsuits without pockets. 

I'm already sad. One of those, I'd never worn (but it was too big on the chest, a hazard of ordering such a garment as a pear shaped woman). 

One, I wore to my 40th birthday party and my 12th wedding anniversary dinner and to a fancy beach club in the south of France. We had adventures. But no pockets and it was very short and the fabric was quite thick, so it's going. 

Fancy Montpellier beach club (waitress's thumb just seen). I don't think I have worn it since this holiday, to be honest. 

One had a print I just loved, so I swapped it out for another which I had washed with a garment I'd dyed red, inadvertantly turning the white in the print into a sort of grey pink. I reflected and was sad again: I wore this one to work on an inset day and the head said I looked lovely. But she said I looked lovely in the version I hadn't accidentally dyed. Granted, the cherry print is too blousy on the bust, but I can fix that. I swapped it out. 

My final swap was for the other red print. I received this at school, tried it on and wore it immediately to go to teach a taster lesson. It is just about smart enough and long enough to wear to school...but it has a back zip, making it hard to wear, and the v neck has a little rip. I couldn't decide what to put in its place: a plain black jersey with a split back that is good for wearing out, or the patchwork that prompted me to start the playsuit experiment in the first place after I saw it on a plus sized instagrammer. 

I tried them both on and decided to keep the black one. I am sad about the patchwork: the print in it reminds me of a playsuit I had when I was a teenager (and wore the very first time I went clubbing, with DMs, shedloads of black eyeliner on my eyes and in my brows, and a long medallion necklace...ahh, the 90s) and it is light and airy, easy to wear on holiday. But, it spontaneously unbuttons and is a little short in the body. So it is in the charity pile. 

Said garment on our wedding anniversary trip to southern Italy in 2018. I do always allow myself one buy-back from the charity shop bag and it is possible this will be it. 

The remaining seven playsuits fit in their box. Two of them are almost worn to death: a faded navy and a bird print that has holes in the shoulder, somehow; I will aim to retire them next summer. The cherry print will need some adjustments and, if I haven't made them by next summer, I will charity shop that one as well. 

Added to the other pile, that is 27 garments off to the charity shop. A strong start. 

July round up

A little late this month because I've been away in Cornwall. It was lovely but, my goodness, there were a LOT of people there. A lot. I did not find it restful or even particularly enjoyable, but luckily Cornwall is gorgeous. 

Books read: I managed to finish The Return by Victoria Hislop although, strictly speaking, I finished it on August 1st. I'm going to count it anyway though because it's my goals and I can. I really wanted to love the book but I just didn't really. It was a bit too long and started to read more like her retelling of somebody's memories of the Spanish Civil War, and so I was quite surprised to get to the end and find it wasn't. I certainly know a great deal more about the Spanish Civil War, to be fair, but that wasn't really the goal.

Still - that's one more off the bookshelf. I have now fallen into a new vein of fiction, the feminist retelling of ancient Greek stories, which seem to be all the rage at the moment, so hope to have more to report for August even if this doesn't help me clear books off the shelf at home. 

Metres knitted: I've been working on a linen Gemini tee this month and it is going really quickly, in part due to my binge-watching of ER from season 1. I am amazed that I seem likely to get the whole thing out of one cone of C4 linen, and one cone that has already provided a little yarn for another project. My stash notes tell me there was 660m-ish left on the cone but the project calls for more; it's definitely not the DK it's masquerading as. All this means that it's kind of impossible for me to know how much I've knitted in metres without doing something complicated with weighing scales and a WPI measure. I don't want to know that much (my goals, my rules) so I am going to go for a middling 500m. I am disappointed I didn't finish the top in time for the start of my holidays away from home but it should be finished before the next one, in a week. Then I need to give it a good wash to see how much the linen swells, and work out how to wear a pretty sheer linen top. 

Sleep: I've gorged myself on the stuff, mate. There have been some notable fails - the last night of term saw me in bed at 3.30am and up before 8am for a first aid course, a situation I may need to accept I am not young enough to enjoy anymore - but generally I have been in bed reasonably early and slept moderately late, for me anyway. Hurrah for the holidays. 

Pounds lost: this was never going to be a good month for that. It is six on. I'm grateful it's not more. 

Blogging: I have projects to post about but I'm too busy having fun for that. Holidays to the Gower and Cornwall. A wedding anniversary celebration. It's been a great month. 

June round up

Books read: I finished Children of Blood and Bone which was really engaging, so much so that I immediately bought the sequel for my Kindle...and then lost interest. So I powered through The Broker by John Grisham (I don't remember the casual sexism from the books I read in my youth, I used to love John Grisham, but perhaps I am just older and angrier now) and I am about halfway through The Return by Victoria Hislop, set in the Spanish Civil War. Mother Hand is thrilled that I am finally reading all the books she has given me over the past decade.

Metres knitted: Some, but not 1000. I finished Madison, which used 280g of 4-ply in the end....so much Cat and Sparrow left, I could make a whole new project with it. So let's call that 300m. I dutifully picked up a new L&L colour and did five more hexagons, so that was another 190m. And I binged on yet another garter stitch baby jumper in some Smoothie, another 320m (I have a lot of FO posts to be writing). 810m. Not bad. It's been a busy month.

Sleep: see above. That busyness I feel sure has contributed to my inability to sleep this month, along with the heat. I have been lying awake for longer than usual and then having some really vivid and quite sinister dreams just before waking up. Yesterday my brain did this wildly interesting thing where it created pictures to go with the news stories I was hearing on the radio alarm. I wasn't dreaming about news story-adjacent things - I was understanding the radio and my brain was creating a picture reel to go with it. So there was a story about wild boar mating with escaped pigs in Fukushima and my brain conjured a boar, then when the radio said the boars had pig-like features, it morphed it into a slightly chubbier shape and gave it brown piggy spots. 

No cheese before bed, no. I suspect perimenopause. 

Pounds lost: In another tale from the 'my body is weird' archive, I gained and lost 8lbs this month. So I am still x stone 1lb. I've got into an excellent habit of batch cooking lunches, just in time for school to end. Eating when not in a school routine is my next mountain to conquer.

Blogging: No. I don't want to count the hours I've given to the exam board this month because it will just frustrate me. It has swallowed all the joy out of computer time.