Yarnivorous

The New Year is almost upon us! How this last year has flown. Wishing you all the very best for the coming year, be well and of good cheer, may your creations work as you want them to and may we all learn to tread lightly upon this, our only Earth. For me? Get Nathan's thesis finished (it is a joint effort cos if I don't keep him on track he wanders anywhere), find some work that meets my needs, spiritual/moral/ethical and monetary wise, and maybe make some more socks to mate up with the socks that well. you'll see when I fix up the pics.... Get my yarn page updated! Sell some yarn so I can afford the rockin sock club this year. I shall talk to you all in the New Year! anon :-)

G'day all! No Christmas pics yet - I haven't even taken pics of my prezzies! How remiss of me! We've been busy in the yard after getting 32mm of rain (that's about 1.25 inches and the most we've had in months). Mrspao did this, so I am too. It is the first part of each blog posting on the first of each month of 2006. Enjoy, and I will have knitting content soon - lotsa knitting happening! January Welcome to 2006. Hope you enjoy the ride! This year we'll have plenty of spinning, knitting and house/garden stuff for you to enjoy and perhaps some tales of travel to a far and distant land, a land of milk and honey, green fields and congested cities. February Guess what I got in the mail today? Two parcels! It was ever so sweet of the postie to jam one of them into the letterbox - it didn't really fit in very easily. The other one was sitting on the door mat - a much better place! I am not sure the spider that got squashed in the letterbox would appreciate th...

Just like the ones I've never known Merry Christmas all! Yesterday I thanked all those who made an extra (or any) effort to send rain our way. Well it was one helluva Christmas present! We had nearly an inch of rain overnight (20mm, not 25mm but close) and we are still working on more. The woo-tank (open topped aquaponic tank with 99 bubby eating fish in it is full (I hope there are 99 bubby eating fish in it still - it overflowed last night into the stormwater) and the main tank is at least a third full, which is about as much as we've ever had in it since we installed it in May. However, I would like to know who sent THIS our way? Did someone get a little wee tad overexcited? Is your god particularly potent? at 5am I had to get up. It had been hailing on and off for an hour, the cats were hissing and spitting and fighting (presumably because Cheshire was hungry and she beats up Nut when she gets hungry) and well it just plain looked too exciting outside cos from our bedr...

G'day all! Thank you all for your concern about the fires and the ongoing dry weather here. I would like to thank at least one of my readers' gods, maybe more, cos this is what happened on Friday: and this was heading for us this evening: Hooray! It is cold. Only 10 degrees C here. That is cold for December. Very cold. It is on average 13 degrees minimum overnight and 25 during the day (and recently we've had a couple of overnight temps that are 20 or so). (For those in the fahrenheit era, that is about 78 during the day and hmm say 55-60 overnight). We usually get about 50-60mm of rain every month, a little more in winter, a little less in summer but rainfall used to be reliable here. Ha! Here's the weather forecast: Melbourne Forecast Issued at 4:05 pm EDT on Sunday 24 December 2006 Warning Summary Nil. Forecast for Sunday evening Cloudy with showers. Fresh colder southwest wind. Precis: Showers. Windy. Forecast for Monday Mostly clou...

G'day all! The longest day and shortest night for us. Normally this is the happiest time of year for me - I love the long days. This year... Ah what an unsettled time it has been. I've been working hard on getting ready for last week's housewarming and then this week's last minute Christmas knitting. The bushfires have continued burning north and east of us - they are a long way away and if they burnt through all the houses they would need to to get to us, it would be a disaster on the scale of Hurricane Katrina - and it has been smokey again. Drives me insane cos I can only walk (cycling will induce an asthma attack cos me and smoke are not good together), and cos too much forest is burning in one hit and destroying too much in the way of life, and let's face it, smoke is something that sets off a very deep response, an instinct of worry worry worry, gosh I would like to panic now... (I dyed and overdyed this yarn for my middling niece. Yummy aran/worsted wei...

G'day all! This date, one year ago, we moved into our (the bank's) house. Yep. Settlement was on the 16th and we were IN! This is our first anniversary of living here. Gosh the year has gone fast, and no, I don't want it back again cos this has been a mongrel of a year. Our house a year ago. Our house now. I've been quiet this week cos we had a hmm-hmm load of work to do around the house before our housewarming yesterday (I figured that it was in the first year of us moving in, so it is All Good as the banana-benders say), plus I am knitting Christmas presents. We got most of the house looking somewhere between OK to good. People love our in-wall bookshelves (alas, alack, I can't get good photos cos the hall is only a metre wide and that is not enough for the camera to show more than two shelves and a bit of "fancy" plasterwork). Thank you to everyone who came - I hope you had a good time cos I enjoyed it :-) Do I have pictures of knitting for you t...

G'day all! Many moons ago I participated in a lace swap. My lovely swap partner, Dorothy (sorry, must provide a link but I have 10 minutes to blog in and am tired tired tired), had some woes with her local post office. They were not very helpful at all. Well the other day, lookie what showed up! Mmmm..... Lotsa goodies! DH has been enjoying the snackie doodles - chippies and various chocolates (the latter not in picture) whilst I have laceweight misti alpaca, some red nail polish, a lotus blossom pattern (Yay! I like that one!), wild rice and Clover needles - mm, bamboo circs :-) Thank you so much, Dorothy! I will enjoy it greatly. Once Christmas is over and done with I can start playing. I am flat chat at present. It is killing me. My boss wants me to start cold calling places to see if they need gas. I am not a salesperson. I detest call centres that cold call. He wants me to do it cos he doesn't want to do it. He's the salesman. I have a house to clean from ...

It's so hot the chocolate is melting. Inside. In the house we are trying to keep cool. I'll have to put it in the fridge... 39 outside, mid 30s inside and likely to get hotter unless the sea breeze kicks in. Hurry up sea breeze, or cool change, due some time this afternoon! Time to lie in front of the fan with a wet flannel. anon!

G'day all! Or maybe not. Horrid weather we have at the moment - hot, stinking hot, and smoky. Hate smoke. Makes it hard to breathe. Many large bushfires are burning to the northeast of Melbourne - none threaten the city but they are threatening small towns. No lives lost at this stage that I know of but that could change in the blink of an eye. Plenty of small lives will have been lost - poor critters of all sizes. I am fussed. Usually, these sorts of fires do not hit the southern part of Australia until late January/start Feb, mainly cos the hot weather has dried the bush out to a crisp by then. This year? It is already crispy dry and ready to burn. So what do I do when I am fussed? (and have a housewarming in a week?) I start tidying the fibre room. I organise my fleeces and record details of them. I move a bookcase from the study to the fibre room and use it to store fleece. I realise I have an AWFUL lot of fleece. (That is not all of it cos there are another three ...

G'day all! Lerv is finding out that your new camera can do panoramic shots.... Excuse me whilst I indulge myself in this post. (The "caterpillar hills" between Bass and Kilcunda on the way to Phillip Island and Wonthaggi. These usually look dead dry and bare from January onwards, but this year they've just been dead dry and bare.) This has been an interesting week. My last remaining aunt died on Monday night. Just like her brother, my father, her time had well and truly come. Yesterday we formally sent her to her god. Hope she finds him/her/it as nice as she expected.... Anyway, this meant I had to drive down to Wonthaggi yesterday. It also meant that I only worked three days. Gosh working three days is GOOD! I took the camera with me cos I fully intended on doing a little side trip and getting some beauty shots. That is when I found out about the panorama mode :-) (My family has lived in the Wonthaggi region for over 100 years. My ?great? grandfather was ...

Cos I have to get them off my computer and somewhere where I can find them again (isn't your bookmark list about 5000 long, even though you have a gazillion folders and have "tidied" them and can't find the ones you want when you want?) Likely Christmas present for my separated sister - a drop stitch wrap , with a pair of Fetching for her daughter. Note the rest of the family will be lucky to get anything but I figure it would be nice if the ones who *need* to be thought of get stuff. Hmm, I had better find some yarn and knit her son up a hat - he can wear it in Canberra in winter cos they get snow there. I have to finish dyeing the yarn for the wrap, dry and spin the dyed tops for the fetching and find some boyish yarn for the hat. OK, so it is summer and hot - winter will come again in due course. I have two weeks to get it all done in - it has to get there by post most likely. Gluten-free recipes . Yum! A new version of the periodic table . Health benefits o...

G'day all! What a lovely night! The moon has risen through the mauve twilit sky (maybe it is even a bit of gloaming!), the cicadas are shrilling madly (who needs the gentle drone and shrill skirl of the bagpipes when you can have cicadas doing the same thing only even louder!) and we have some sorbet to eat :-) Mmm, sorbet. Yesterday we went to a friend's birthday outing at a cafe in Camberwell. I suggested that we take our bikes on the train to Murrumbeena and ride the rest of the way. Public transport only costs $2.50 for a daily pass in Melbourne on Sundays and it is very very popular. The trains fill up to the brim for all the world like a stopping all stations train in peak hour or a tin or sardines, only without the fishy smell, mostly (doesn't help that they run every 20 minutes and are half trains - three carriages not six). I forgot that you have to climb up out of a valley. Oops. It was a really nice ride, just a bit up and down. Mostly up. LOL One hill ...

G'day all! I have a new baby! It is very small and sleek. I could've gone smaller but at a price, so this small is small enough. Here is its box: And there it is in its box: (I think the box has to be that big to take the CD and the manuals. It doesn't need to be anywhere near that big for the camera...) And here is the new toy! New toy is great! It is not a top end camera by any means but it takes much better pics than the old camera, and not just because it is lacking this: (that is the lens of the old camera - no wonder I couldn't get pics without blurs in them) I got it from Hardly Normal (they call themselves Harvey Norman) and they matched Kmart's price. Kmart was sold out after putting them on special - they only get three in, boo hiss. I got the camera and 512mb card for less than $200! Some people will say it is only 4 megapixels but I am using it for web pictures and a 1 megapixel camera will do for that... Here is the last pic of the garden on the ...