Yarnivorous

G'day all! Well what an interesting thing happened this afternoon. I got the right sort of phone call, one that makes you dance with glee in the office, not caring if anyone sees you. But first the Important Stuff. Yes, Sock visits Gembrook, pt II. I admit straight up this was not much of a hike. It was nearly sunset and the walk down a steep hill pretty much knackered Nathan, so we just wandered around the edges of Gembrook Reserve. Still, I thought you should see what some (not very good quality) Australian cool temperate schlerophyll forest looks like. Here's sock, admiring what I suspect are Eucalyptus regnans (the tallest flowering plant in the world) (or at least their bases): Just in case you reckon these trees are tiddlers (and these ones are in comparison to the giants), here is Nathan standing next to one. He is 6'5" and over 240lb. That thing dangling in his hand is Sock. Sock felt very small indeed: And we found a tree fern for Sock to wonder at. T...

G'day all! It is the crack of midnight here and I have a pounding heart that is now slowing down. Soon I can go back to bed. Doncha hate WRONG NUMBERS? I flew out of bed cos the phone was ringing. Ohmigawd, what's happened? Why is someone ringing us at midnight? I hope noone's died or been in an accident. Nope, some middle eastern dude kept saying ello at me and then hung up. I thought they'd gotten over ringing us but it seems not - our number used to be someone else's... Argh. This time in a week I will be a free woman! (But I am actually fairly expensive, at least as far as yarn and fleece goes) Hooray! Gosh it is scary and challenging cos this job has been a fair whack of my life for four years, and the previous role was another four years.... Very odd! I took many pics today of my walk from Richmond to the city this morning. It is about 3.5km from Richmond to my workplace and despite the many pictures and stops and sidepaths I took, only took 45 minute...

(Peeve, you might need to avoid this post....) G'day all! Sunday was our 6th going out anniversary - yep, Nathan and I started on 25 June 2000. He was such a shy thing with me - not shy in general but with a girl???? Of course I only realised this some time in the evening when I saw the date.... So we had celebrated by Nathan going up into the roof to do mysterious Nathan things, and me getting cranky with Nathan's sock without knowing it. Then we went for a nice little drive to Gembrook . Gembrook is a quaint little place somewhat enlivened by being the terminus for " Puffing Billy ." It was also market day, and one of my favourite market people was there (remember Galadriel from earlier in the month? Well now she has a bunny partner.... no pics yet, too gloomy!). But even better than the market was Puffing Billy engine 6A! Sock wanted to be in a picture of the train. We hung around the engine and Nathan went to ask some questions - his Dad is a big train nuff...

aka "Give your unmother a heart attack" I hope noone is epxecting tales of knitting at this very moment - I do have some socky adventures to show off but I decided that some pussy exploits were more important :-) We already knew that Nutmeg is a good climber. She used to climb up the pantry shelves at our old place and get into the roof (you really don't want to know the reason why we had to cut the ceiling out of the pantry....). Well Nathan spent some time in the roof on the weekend, doing mysterious Nathan things that involved a fair whack (boom boom) of banging around and general cussing. He had the ladder set up for the access hatch. So I hear some scrabbling and what do I find? Nutmeg up the ladder. She jumped down. I go and get the camera and encourage her back up it again. Up (note the very excited tail)(note hot water heater with asbestos riddled chimney and asbestos riddled walls in background) Up (note the excited intent face) Up to the top level But the t...

G'day all! This is a nonsense blog entry to keep you vaguely entertained whilst I do some house stuff. So, here's an odd quiz result. Some parts are very accurate but others? I'll leave you to work it out. You Are Likely A Forth Born At your darkest moments, you feel angry. At work and school, you do best when your analyzing. When you love someone, you tend to be very giving. In friendship, you don't take the initiative in reaching out. Your ideal jobs are: factory jobs, comedy, and dentistry. You will leave your mark on the world with your own personal philosophy. The Birth Order Predictor Some stuff I want to make: A pinwheel jacket (not a sweter - it has a ruddy great gaping hole down the front - that is not a jumper, a guernsey or a sweater or a jersey. Anything that doesn't have one solid front piece is a cardigan, a jacket, a coat or a nonspecific top - I am sure there are plenty of other names too). A shruggy thing but in much nicer colours. Really purt...

G'day all! Well the deed is done. I rang my boss and resigned today. I followed it with an email. My last day is July 6. This is excellent cos it means I get my leave paid out after the end of the financial year, which means I'll not pay so much tax this year - I think I should be getting about 9 weeks of pay. That will be most fab, as long as they tax it as being 9 consecutive weeks and not a lump sum. Plus I just so happen to have two weekly zone 1 and 2 tickets so I don't have to waste a monthly ticket. So work for the next two weeks then a couple of weeks off being a slacker around the house, maybe have a little holiday away someplace, and then back into job hunting. Hooray! Once I had done the deed, I felt very odd indeed - wobbly, excited, terrified, pleased, content. Job hunting is going to be a big challenge for me - I haven't done it seriously for over 8 years. Now I just can't wait to get out of the place. And I chirped up a lot - started teasing pe...

G'day all! Today I had a long chat with my brother and my next up sister. They both agree don't do the SSRIs and do quit the job. They both recommended temping as a good thing to do cos it exposes you to many different workplaces whilst you work out what you really want to aim for and what skills you really do have. Why don't I want to take the drugs? Cos I am by no means suicidal. I am flat, but I've been stressed out of my nut for about a month now, and my self-confidence has been undermined to the point where I can't make a simple decision about what to do next. I still find joy in things, just not anything to do with work (except my walks along the Yarra). I believe that I can bootstrap myself out of this state - I've done it from worse positions before when I had less support than I have now. I may be a wusster and a *nice* girl who isn't pushy (unless you really start treading on me) but somewhere in the fluff is a band of steel. I just have to...

(not so) G'day All! So there is my question. Should I quit my well-paid job and hope that I can find something else within a couple of months (before the money runs out), or should I bow to the corporate giant of my job and the pharmaceutical companies and chuck down some pills? (The latter with no guarantee they will work and that I will have a job in a month's time anyway?) Ah, decisions, decisions. This is me at the moment: (I doubt I am the only person in the world who has had to empty the vegie crisper straight into the compost bin.... and then has left the half washed out crisper on a table outside....) And I am getting a bit more black and blue and frosty as time goes on: (unlike my poor baby car who got attacked by Ninya last night and was all covered in ice!)(BTW, Patricia Wrightson was a top notch Australian author, and I thoroughly recommend her books if you can find them - I have to steal them back from my sister who stole my copies for her kids) I distracted mys...

G'day all! I had feared that my spinning mojo had deserted me - afer all I hadn't spun for pretty much a month (though I have to say that the tennis elbow was not happy with this spinning thing). Then after seeing most beautiful handspun yarns at the handknitter's guild yarn expo, my spinning mojo found me again! Ages ago, Wendy sent me some kettle dyed South American tops. I've played around with some of it and made some interesting yarn, but this was a fast and furious spin-up over the last night or two. I had need to grab fluff and spin madly. This fit the bill perfectly. Ahhhhhh. Thanks, Wendy! (Look we had blue sky for a while today! Yesterday was rather grey) A little while ago I dyed up some (washed) fleece I had sitting around. I just stuck it in the dyepot and squirted yellow, fuschia and clematis (purple) on it. I wish I had taken a pic of the fleece as it dried and then when it was in prep (I just flicked the ends out and fluffed it up some whilst ...

31. I have an extra special superpower. I can find dog poo to stand on where there was no obvious dog poo before - I apparently can conjure it anytime, anywhere (the best time was when I stood on some just before hopping in the car for three hours....) Y'know some people get great superpowers but that one just stinks! (boom boom!)

G'day all! Blame this on Kerrie from Hipknits . Cos she is turning 30, I am blogging 30 things about me. I started knitting when I was 9 or 10. My first jumper was in a thick and thin yarn called Country made by Cleckheaton. It was white yarn with a blue stripe. The jumper had cables and I wore it to death. Gosh I loved that jumper. Mum tried to teach me crochet too, but it never took. I finally realised why when I looked in a book (a year ago) and discovered that I crochet with the wrong hand and was winding the yarn around the hook in the wrong direction. I started spinning less than two years ago, when I bought a spindle to ply up some yarn.... Now I have two wheels, four spindles (rarely used these days), and two large plastic boxes (like goodly sized chests) of tops and yummy things to spin, plus several fleeces and some alpaca to spin up. Ooops. One of this month's goals is to set up my yarn for sale page :-) Whether anyone wants it is another matter.... I have al...

G'day all! Do you ever find yourself so overwhelmed with all the things that have to be done that you end up wheel-spinning and doing the unimportant stuff simply cos it is unimportant? Well that is where I am now. I haven't sent off a single job app yet because I have to rewrite my resume. I find it hard enough to sell myself normally, and now that my boss has been systematically tearing down my self-esteem (I got another thing today pointing out what I am doing wrong), I am starting to wonder what I have to offer! Every time I pick myself up and carry on, I get another thing pointing out how crap I am compared to what she expects. I am expected to impress every person every time. Tain't ever going to happen cos my very existence on this planet seems to offend some people straight off! I think I am getting the same results-focussed management as she expects to get. She is ambitious and much more driven than I am. I am too laid back, maybe even laissez faire, and aw...

G'day all! Yesterday was a very nice, if rather cold day. It was so nice, I put my quick drying polyester work trousers (not that horrid seersucker polyester, nice modern pants) out on the line. Within half an hour, it started raining, and showers kept falling for the rest of the afternoon and overnight and even now! Plus without the sun, it got very cold indeed. As they say, Murphy was an optimist ;-) It was good to hear the water trickling into the tank next to our bedroom, though I could've done without that sound at 4am - it was very inspiring, shall we say.... So I promised pics of Nathan's gloves. Here they are in all their burnt orange glory (colour isn't quite right): Note the seam on the bottom one - I didn't put in enough short row shaping for the wrist and they were a little on the large side. Note the one on the top has lots of short row shaping coming into the wrist. It fits a lot better. I modified the original pattern a lot - it basically only...

G'day all! "We are grey - we stand between the candle and the star. We are grey - we stand between the darkness and the light." (Who said that and in what tv show?) Well it was certainly grey yesterday. It was the greyest and dullest day we've had for ages, and cold - only 10 degrees C. Fog rolled in overnight and just didn't go away until a cool change blew through after sunset. It was bizarre - we rarely have fog that lasts after about 10am. Nathan said when he was in Seattle, it was like that for a whole week. Ick. I need my sun! But today it is just as cold but sunny. Sunny is good. Sunny means I can get pictures! Sunny means that I can see stuff easily. Late yesterday afternoon I was trying to work in the garden, doing some weeding and I couldn't actually see the weeds - it was like it was some time after sunset, not 45 minutes before.... LOL I've finally been able to get some pictures. Y'see when I leave for work, it looks like this a...

G'day all! Well the fun and games never stop here. To which I can say a big fat HA! But there is always something to do and keep the hands busy and sometimes even the old mind.... though at present the old brain cells are rotting away cos DH decided to put some extremely smelly glue on something and the whole house REEKS of it. It is one of those smells that doesn't get familiarised to your nose/brain either - I've been home for well over an hour now and I can still smell it - so I guess it is a bad smell (nb this is why peoplw who wear perfume often throw more on - they can't smell it anymore, but everyone near them nearly passes out from the stench). So I am not sure that I am exactly focused on this blogging task 8-) It is a long weekend here in (most of) Oz (not Western Australia). Ahhhhh, I so need a long weekend. All this work stress is driving me nuts. I reckon it is about time I showed off some recent dyeing. I can't even remember when I dyed this yar...