Yarnivorous

G'day all! Not such a good day today. I'm fine but well, I want to know: How do you get someone to get professional mental help? Even when they admit and recognise a problem, they say it can't be fixed and there's no point? Especially when you are nowhere near them in a geographical sense? They are extremely pig headed about the whole thing. It is a problem that can be fixed if the person wants it to be fixed, if they want to feel well and capable and able to do stuff that they really can do! How do you get them receptive to the idea of being better? You would think people want to be better but when they are like this, often they aren't. sigh. Things are a little pear shaped. It is driving ME bonkers. I have to look after me and not let myself get too overwrought with it all. I have to stay in the moment and not anticipate things. This cancer bizzo has been very good for that. (But it hasn't stopped me buying yarn has it?) Anyway, if you have any ...

Playing with new mobile. Plane delayed 1.5 hours or more. HALP!!!!!

G'day all! Today I thought I would take it easy. Well maybe. I woke up and got up early so that I'd be showered before the plumber arrived. Argh. Hang on a moment - I'm going back to Firefox for my blogger stuff. I've started using Chrome. It is made by Google. It does not support keyboard commands in Blogger! How stupid is that? And I want to italicise stuff properly not use the old commands with greater and lesser than symbols and an i and a forward slash... oh and I'm lazy too. Ah here we are in Firefox. Hooray for keyboard commands! I'm finding Chrome limiting in some ways - I hate the lack of history (on some websites I use the history list a LOT). But I thought since I use gmail and I use blogger and DH said it is good, I should use Chrome. Anyway, back to the topic at hand. The plumber didn't show up. Didn't answer his mobile either. I had to leave at 8:15am to get to my sister's place to snaffle her washing machine (and it is a b...

G'day all! I've been taking part in a shawl exchange on Ravelry. My partner didn't want a light and lacy little shawl - she doesn't use them much. Being in Scotland, she wanted something with a little more heft. Possibly in grey. I went through my fleeces and found a lovely polwarth. Alas, my lovely grey polwarth had suffered from being in storage - it was pretty tacky and quite hard to prep for spinning, even after I washed it again. So at Bendigo, I bought a new lovely grey polwarth. A lamb fleece as it turned out - it was rather tippy but very soft. And it had brown streaks through it - the lamb must be two colours. I snipped the brown/apricot tips off and pulled out the browner locks and left them for another project and got to spinning. I was aiming for a semi-woollen spun yarn. Not sure I got it consistently but I certainly got a warm fuzzy yarn. It knitted up into a warm fuzzy faroese inspired shawl with a little hint of lace - cat's paw lace down th...

G'day all! Still busy, trying to slow down. I'm getting some knitting done, hooray! Tonight I defrosted a bit of chicken to throw into tea. (I'm Victorian, we call dinner tea. Of course we also drink tea. This can make things confusing. We also call hot and cold chips chips, not fries and crisps. Again confuzzlement ensues.) So, back to the topic at hand. I defrosted some chicken. I opened the freezer bag and went to drop it into the pot of boiling water, in which I intended to poach said chicken. Said chicken had other ideas. Splat with double pike and twist on the floor. (Isn't your floor grotty cos half of it is unsanded floor boards and the other half is still waiting to be ripped up? Don't you have the lid off a big bucket for the compost sitting on the floor waiting for the compost bucket to return indoors?) Well I grabbed it and washed it frantically, got rid of the grotty bits and chucked it in the pot. I put the kettle on to boil and wandered of...

G'day all! Just a quick one to say I'm still alive! Though tonight I am feeling fairly average - I think I've been doing Too Much for Too Many Days. Or maybe I've caught the stomach bug that is going around. Anyway, it will be an early night for me! I have so much to tell you and show you and tonight? Not happening! On Saturday I went to an open studio for a small hand-printed fabric place. It was very interesting and I bought some material. Then I dropped in on one sister and we went to visit our other sister. Sunday I went to the farmers' market, then to Spotlight. Oh dear. They had eggplant coloured yarn that was 80 CENTS a ball. Nice yarn too. 100% wool. Plus some of my favourite baby yarn for $1.60 a ball. Note that both these yarns usually retail for between $4-7. Sigh. So much for my yarn diet. Then I hopped off to the Knitting in the Botanic Gardens group (more accurately known as knitting in the observatory cafe group) and caught up with some ...

G'day all! Today I had my first roast chicken episode. OK, I'm not really crispy fried. Not yet anyway! I drove to the hospital. I hadn't been there for a whole TWO WEEKS! I found a car park a fair way away from the hospital (I'm too cheap to pay the parking fee, especially since I have to go every weekday for six weeks) and wandered in. I was called in rather quicker than I expected. The radiologist went through everything with me, mostly chit chat. My brain tends to fall out of my head when I'm experiencing something new. Anyway, after changing into a gown (I wear that same gown for the next six weeks), I was led into the radiotherapy room. The machine looks very like the one on this page (though it isn't that very machine because that one is in England). It was all very Star Trek. I hopped on the bed, slipped the gown down and lay down. The two technicians pushed and pulled and marked and measured - they were very pleased that I still lined up with ...

G'day all! Had a lovely trip to Sydney. We went off to the Blue Mountains for our anniversary. We walked and we walked and we walked, apart from sitting on trains and buses. One little thing about Google Maps is it doesn't show you the terrain. It can (Google earth is better) but y'know you just look at the map. lalalala. It's all good! Then when you get there, you realise that that kilometre walk from the station to your accommodation, a quite short walk, involves going down and up some significant hills. That is before you've even gotten to the bushwalking parts! Anyway, we did quite a bit of walking, lots of hills and stairs. I have 1.8 gig of pictures from the place, not that I am going to share all of them with you! Here's the most famous part of the Blue Mountains: The Three Sisters feature on almost as many pics of Sydney as the harbour bridge and opera house. And just to show we were there, no crappy photoshopping required, :-) Still very busy at ...

G'day all! I'm off for a long weekend with DH. I'm taking the bus and train to Siddeny tomorrow - 12 hour trip! Plus a bit extra on the bus cos the tracks are stuffed between Melbourne and Albury. (I'm taking the plane back though.) To keep you entertained in my absence, please enjoy: I know I did! (There is one notable gent lacking from this video montage - how on earth did they leave him out?) anon!

G'day all! I am very pleased with myself. Goldie and Boldie reappeared in the back yard. Boldie was locked in the coop last night but I could not get Goldie in there by hook or by crook. But today? I outsmarted a chook! Yes indeedy, I have a PhD and am not usually considered a mental slouch but I am as pleased as punch with myself for outsmarting Goldie. A chook. A creature with very little brain. LOL Tonight there are two chickens in the coop. I won't go into details cos they are dull and tedious but we'll just say it involved carefully placed grain and me standing in a very carefully selected spot (out of chook eye view). My day started a little earlier than usual - I had to be at my sister's place by 8am in case the removalists showed up on time. They did show up at 8:35 or so - not too bad since it was booked for between 8 and 9. The cat was distraught - bad noises were happening outside the bathroom (the only room I could reliably lock her in. She is allowed...

G'day all! Today was a day of toil I tell you toil - doing the farmers' market, more tidying, taking six boxes of Stuff to the Salvos, shredding material that I am going to dye, folding material and putting it away, knitting madly on the shawl that I have to send off by next week (egads, I will need more yarn so I have to prep more fleece and spin it up), looking at the fruit trees that need to be planted (and actually digging a hole, and yes it started to fill with water!, and planting one apple tree), etc, etc. Fed the chooks their grain, which they gobbled madly. They love their grain, though there's nearly always some left over for vigorous scratchings in the pen - keeps them entertained in the morning, though Boldie screeches a LOT - she thinks she is a rooster sometimes. Wakes me up even! How to win friends amongst the neighbours, having a chook that screeches. Not very suburb friendly... At last the end of the day was nigh, so I went out to lock the chooks in th...

That the weather scares the hell out of me. Yikes! The wind is incredible. A low pressure system has developed to the west of us and is galloping south eastward. Winds are hitting close to 100kmh. The whole house is flexing and bending - that is a good thing cos not flexing would be verra bad indeed. But I can't sleep from the noise and the feeling of the wind hitting the house. Also since the place is nowhere near weathertight, there's a lot of drafts and noises from the temporary "ceiling." I've never experienced a cyclone or typhoon or hurricane. I hope this is as close as I get! Here comes another blast - you can hear it coming. Yargh. Time to plug the old clock radio in and play the radio, see if that helps block some of the sound... Hope DH didn't really want the beer bottles he left out the front cos they just blew over. anon! PS we are still here, 8 hours after I posted the above. The house is still here, the wonky fence is still "uprigh...

G'day all! I am having A Week. My internet is very slow. My chat session keeps dying = very hard to talk to DH online. DH is busy and not very contactable. Uploading photos takes a number of tries. I am very surprised that I can blog at all. Helmet (the car) decided the old battery was not good enough any longer and killed it Wednesday. Getting that fixed just ate all my budget for the month. Nathan doesn't answer his phone very often. Things are not very organised. I am doing 10 minutes of tidying/cleaning per room per day. I am in a house full of crap (ok, there is some really nice stuff too IMO). The garden needs a lot of work. The house needs a lot of work. There's no plaster on the walls or ceiling in the laundry. Before the walls can be plastered, we need to get a plumber in to plumb the new toilet in its new location. Then we can remove the old toilet. Then we can put new windows in. But before we put new windows in, we need to get the new windows. Nathan ...