One sleep to go

G'day all!

This is going to be a loooooong post.

At last the much feared day is almost upon me. Hooray! I am sick of waiting for this day and Nathan's insomnia is not helping much. We have both been pondering the $1600 mattress that we lay upon last Sunday and wondering if it would be better to sleep on than a $200 futon that Nathan has squashed flat.... Like hello! I can see we will be going back to get that mattress, or a new unlaid upon version of it. It was sooo comfy.

Oops, diverted by thoughts of deep sleep upon a comfortable bed. A bed with double pocketed springs individually wrapped and a bed that when Nathan moves, I don't feel seasick from the ripples. Ahhhhhhh.

Anyway, I've been accumulating a few bits and bobs over the last while. I am having a bit of a bead gathering time, as you can tell from the pics that follow.




Now not all of those beads are to my taste but the necklaces cos $5 each and have some nice beads in them, more than $5 worth, and the bead box was half price cos it had lost some beads after someone broke it.

Then I found this book:


Totally fascinating. How to make all sorts of glass beads. Could this be yet another hobby for me?

But never fear, I am still knitting and I even did some spinning the other day - spinning when the weather is hot is not very pleasant as the fleece tends to stick to my sweaty palms and arm. The upwards Jaywalkers continue at a not particularly fast pace - I'm only getting about 6 rounds done on each train trip on the two socks on two circs - the weight of the socks is starting to pull the needles in odd ways. It is amazing how much you can get done though in an afternoon of watching B5 dvds whilst melting in front of the wheezy old airconditioning unit on a 43 degree day.

Here is the evolution of the socks, including a pic of the label for Karen. The socks were not very long on Saturday during the day:


Or by early evening...


But after several concentrated hours of knitting, by Monday evening they looked like:


Here's a tale of a very sad trip to a supermarket near work in the city. I needed some extra bits of food/drink for lunch, so I wandered down to the local supermarket. There I bought a bottle of "Fierce Grape" Gatorade and some "crunchy trio" sprouts for a grand total of $4.40.

What a waste of money!

I have been reading that sprouted legumes are very good for me. So I bought a mix of the things to add to lunch.

ICK! Yuck! These things are HORRID! They are bitter, and the ones that are not bitter taste like grass. Yuck! I can't stand bitter - it makes me gag. If I put something bitter in my mouth, it is all I can do to not spit it out on the spot (very embarrassing in company or at restaurants). The only way I can swallow it is to dilute the flavour with something nice, or at least something that masks the bitterness. So all those fancy lettuces are not my favourite foods cos many of them are bitter. I can only eat them by combining them with say tinned beetroot and even then I avoid the ones with the heavily indented leaves. Anyway, you should've seen my face as I ate the snow pea sprouts - they at least only taste like Green Things, but I still was underimpressed.

I managed to eat most of the sprouts by combining them with the rest of my lunch (leftovers from the previous night's roast chicken). Why do peple enjoy these things? How do they enjoy them? Or do they eat them just cos they are supposed to be healthy?

Then the gatorade. Oh the gatorade. Who on earth designed this "grape" flavour? I am almost tempted to ring their toll free line and tell them it is totally DISGUSTING. It smells like some weird cross between fake cherry flavour (another of my least favourite flavours in the world) and toilet duck or some other cleaning/disinfecting agent. It tastes pretty feral too - some chemically flavour that I don't recognise at all. It certainly doesn't taste anything like purple grapes to me. Don't ask me if it tastes like toilet duck too cos I don't know. Ah, I've just remembered what it smells like. I got some purple Kool aid a couple of years ago. It smells like that did. I wasn't game to actually drink it, I only used it to dye some yarn and nearly passed out from the smell.

Do Americans really think that smell is like purple grapes?

As I told a friend about this horrible experience, she suggested that toilet duck may be squeezed from little ducklings. This then reminded me of a story I read on the BBC website about a Vietnamese man's brush with bird flu.

This chap had come home to his village to catch up with everyone. His family made him his favourite delicacy - congealed duck's blood. I have to say that it is not one that I am in any hurry to try, especially since the man's brother fell ill and died not long after eating the meal, then the man fell ill too. OK, neither of them died of the horror of eating congealed duck's blood - it was bird flu that did one in and nearly got the other. Still for this person raised on a conservative western diet, anything involving eating blood or the innards or the extremities of animals sounds totally revolting. You can keep your pigs' trotters, or your sweetbreads, or chook feet, or haggis, or boiled heads, or BLACK PUDDINGS (ecky-thump!). No thanks! Not for me! I don't even eat many sausages these days. But I do enjoy the odd lamb shank or osso bucco or even some ox-tail soup. At least I know where those bits of meat have been and just as importantly *what* they are.

LOL

So here is what became of the gatorade:


Waste not, want not!

The fleece came out a pretty pale blue/turquoise/aqua with a few purple spots - I guess that was the first area to get to the dye. I used silky merino fleece and it is sooo pretty. I forgot to take a pic of it for you. But you'll see it soon! Lucky you won't be able to smell it though.

Finally, a weird sunrise. There are lots of bushfires around my state at the moment and we are developing a bit of a smoke haze (that could be why I feel asthmatic at present... ah!). Sunrise yesterday lasted an hour or so (and was a bit freakily like the Sunbane for those who have read the Thomas Covenant books, only without the nasty Sunbane effects....)


Okey kokey, that will do you. Have to go console the Nathan cos one of our witnesses can't show up tomorrow cos he took today off instead....

anon!