befogged

It’s a long time since I spent almost the whole day reading, but today I got absorbed:

There are, it has to be said, much worse ways to spend a morning. It’s wonderfully sunny, too, so the birds are out in force and singing springy songs as the last of the snow melts away from our garden.

Latest handspun:

Natural chocolate coloured alpaca, about 476 yards of light fingering weight. I have to confess to feeling fairly pleased with myself! It was such a pleasure to spin, too - practically threw itself onto the bobbin. I think I’m even more of an alpaca fan than when I was just knitting with the stuff!

It took a while at that weight, though, so I spun some aran weight Falkland this week as a quick n chunky project. Here it is:

There’s about 170 yards there, and it’s my first attempt at a 3-ply so I can see room for improvement but am overall pleased.

I guess it needs a sprig of holly ideally (Greenery will really counterbalance the 450g of chocolate, the 285ml of double cream and the five eggs. I think I’ve put on weight just by looking at this thing - I have never made anything quite so frivolously calorific before but my goodness it looks tasty!), but it’s not quite Yule yet and I can get some of that tomorrow:

Yuletide greetings, all

I have spent the day so far cleaning and cooking, which is all terribly domesticated. However, every trace of dust, painting equipment, and random screws (because no matter what you’re having done in the house it always seems to generate more screws than there seems to have been things from which the screws could have emanated) has been evicted from downstairs and the furniture is back where it belongs.

All that’s left are the finishing touches - moving the tv and unit back down there, moving the birds back down there, hanging pictures, and investing in lots more throws for the furniture.

Just in time for us to collapse onto it for the festive season. Wooyay!

A book one, this time. It’s doing the rounds again - I think it first came round after The Big Read - but I thought why not? I don’t know about italicising ones I love, though. ‘Love’ is sort of the wrong word.

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 - bits of it, I spose
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
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare - why yes, I was a Literature student, why did you ask?
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger
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 Dreadful book. Highly amusing memories.
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - well, I might get round to it one day…
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 - Tried. Failed. Tedious as a tedious thing.
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
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 - Not after 100 Years, thank you!
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 Um, I know. It was just as good as I expected.
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie 
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 well, if I’ve read the complete works of Shakespeare…
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

7.48am.

I should think it’ll have melted by the time I get home again, though.

Well, we’re getting there! The kitchen is all but completed, thankfully (just a cupboard door or two to be affixed), and downstairs is well on the way to looking much more like a habitable space. It’s now been painted (after some nipping about trying to find the most sensible paint deal on Alan’s part while I was at home nursing a migraine whose origins may have been either stress or paint fumes from the primer coat, damned if I know which) and has had the old floor taken up and the underlay put down so hopefully we should have new laminate shortly. The stairs and landing (continuous decor from the rest of downstairs, so as we’re doing down there we have to do those too) still need tackling, and then once we’ve got all that sorted we’ll be able to move downstairs again. And then re-do the bathroom, but I think I’ll just not think about that for the time being…

It will be quite confusing to walk into the house and, y’know, be able to *use* the downstairs. Instead of immediately trundling upstairs. Hopefully the furniture has survived its stay in the garage!

I will be quite confused by actual telly, too. We have rubbish reception upstairs so haven’t bothered to plug ours in while we’re living up here - consequently any tv viewing we’ve done has been courtesy of laptops and BBC iPlayer, ITV CatchUp (by far the most irritatingly buggy of the options proffered by the terrestrial channels! But they do have the new Marples…) or occasionally 4OD. Will have to start recording things in which we’re interested so that we can just watch them when we feel like it as we’re doing now!

Gary The Gas Man finally prevailed against the oddness of our previous central heating system, so that we are now basking in the warmth and efficiency of a new boiler and the knowledge that we no longer need to put the water on hours before we might possibly want to have a bath. Yay!

The kitchen is looking much closer to being done - floor and wall tiles are down and up respectively and just need grouting, and then it’s cupboard doors, repairing the bit of wall from which Gary The Gas Man removed the (wonkily fitted) original heating controls, and not really a huge amount else.

By way of celebration, earlier I gathered what ingredients and equipment I could ferret out of the smaller spare room (where the surviving contents of the kitchen cupboards that were water damaged went) and conducted a coconut-related experiment:

Yum. Coconut experiment declared a success to be repeated.

I made more yarn, too:

Extremely soft and squishy merino this time, plied into a result that looks remarkably pudding-like.

Pump for old boiler is inexplicably in our bedroom, in the corner, under my wardrobe. Gary the Gas Man is as bemused about Where Stuff Is in this house as Rog The Decorator (who only managed to find the main water stopcock when he removed the kitchen floor - of all the thoroughly bizarre places to put it!) has been. Apparently the pump is normally somewhere more accessible and rather closer to the actual boiler than in an entirely different room and on a different floor. New boiler, now resplendently new and energy-efficient looking in what was previously an unnecessarily large bathroom cupboard, has pump inside it like a sensible appliance and should therefore not present this problem to future occupants of the house. 

Still, for Gary the Gas Man to connect new boiler up and disconnect old boiler safely the old pump needs to be capped off and therefore the dratted thing needs to be got at. Our predecessors’ removal of the fitted wardrobes from the conveniently fitted wardrobe-sized alcove is actually proving to have been a helpful choice after all. Whoda thunkit.

Contents of wardrobe are now on the bed and in the little spare room and me and the birds have decamped to the big spare room. Birds weren’t impressed at this manoevre (well, if someone started rolling my house somewhere different I’d be a bit startled, too), but have responded to the crisis by eating lots, peering interestedly at everything, and squabbling to be the bird on the perch nearest the window. 

Gary The Gas Man reckons he should be able to get what he needs to do in there done today so can put the wardrobe and its contents back again this evening. Fingers crossed.

Immediately after this unexpected shifting of stuff, pets and self, sale-purchased flooring for downstairs turned up as promised and seems to be all present and correct. Renewed satisfaction in our choice of style and colouring. Second chappie met me at door to offer a quote for trimming our lamentably overgrown front hedge at precise same time as was attempting to count packs of flooring and sign delivery note. We do need hedge trimming, but as I was at that time trying to work, take delivery of 32 packs of laminate flooring, talk to decorator bod and not trip over the temporary pipe leading from old boiler to outside was really not in frame of mind to consider An Extra Thing. Took leaflet and said appropriately half-interested, half-non-commital things.

Scuttled upstairs, established reasonably comfy pillow arrangement on spare room bed, had foresight to remember to bring snack supplies and knitting-for-lunchtime in, and shut the door on all the palaver in attempt to do work. Work quite relaxing, after all that!

Cold Feet. I currently have them. This is because as part of the general works going on in the house at the moment we are taking the opportunity to replace our deeply unattractive, old, and not very efficient back boiler with a hidden-in-a-cupboard combi boiler. The heating is therefore off while Gary-the-Gas-Bod affixes one system in a new place and removes the old system from its current lurking place on the downstairs wall. It should be fine to use it when he’s not actively buggering about with it, it’s just not ideal while he is working and since I am here in a supervisory capacity (ie I opened the door, showed him where stuff was now and was supposed to go, and pointed him towards the kettle and teabags before retreating to the bedroom to work) that means I’m a tad chilly despite my several layers. Feet, though, only have one layer of clothing. Must knit some very thick socks that are large enough to go over other socks…

Things are coming on, though. Once Gary-the-Gas-Bod has removed the old boiler the last remaining bit of wall can be plastered and once that’s dry we can do the painting thing downstairs. I’m hoping after we’ve all developed arm ache doing that it should move relatively quickly - installation of new fire & flooring & skirting being about all that will be left after the painting. The kitchen is usable (shiny oven! shiny hob!) and just needs painting, tiling, doors affixing to cupboards, and the floor putting down.

Incidentally, debate at work the other day - what is the room with the sofas in it in known as in your house? A lounge? A living room? A front room? A sitting room? I always struggle because our living and dining areas are open plan so to me it’s just ‘downstairs’, since the only other downstairs space is the kitchen which is clearly functionally distinct. My parents always had a front room, though.

On another note, I have managed to successfully ply the pumpkin-coloured Corriedale with some more of the same, to make the very small but very squishable skein of yarn at right. No idea what I am going to do with it, but for now I am keeping it as evidence of how far I’ve come in the event of me getting sufficiently far for that to be measurable!

It’s an interesting thing to learn, really - it’s a bit like driving a car, in that when you first start you understand theoretically what you need to do with your hands and feet but it takes a little while before the movements flow properly from one another and become automatic and feel natural.

I am currently tackling some merino, about which I have been told both that it’s supposed to be tricky for beginners because of its slipperyness and that it’s ideal for beginners because of its staple length. It’s a good job, really, that I am not listening to ‘what it’s best to start with’ and just having a play with a variety of fibres on the theory that I’ll likely want to learn how they all behave at some point anyway so I might as well dive in! All animal fibres so far, though - I think I’ll leave slippery silks and bamboos until I have played with a blend and/or generally got the hang of the basics. I feel as though I’m making progress, though, and starting to draft a bit better.