Pretty Poor Blogging

Oh, dear me, I really have been absent without leave, haven’t I?

The virus was pretty horrid, not as bad as it might have been but definitely swept me off my feet for a fortnight. My head was mush and I felt like doing very little so that was what I did – very little indeed. I managed to do a few Blips and I also posted a couple of times to the Sanday Spinners blog. I still have to update Brunhilde’s blog with the details of the Sutherland trip.

There is a deal of change imminent in my life and I feel altogether unsettled, though not at all ruffled.

Let’s catch up:

  • There are still two windows remaining to be replaced but the winter storms are now with us. Not sure when we shall get those jobs done.
  • The fridge freezer has started misbehaving again, turning itself on and off continuously. We think that this time we shall give in and buy a replacement. Delivery of a new one is proving problematical challenging prohibitively expensive
  • There is a dead rodent somewhere in the walls or ceiling of my room. It’s very whiffy.
  • It’s Puzzle Time again – with the SUMS Puzzle Hunt starting on Monday 27th October. We seem to be a team of two this year – room for three more if you wish to join in.
  • We went to town as mentioned in my last post (6th October) and Suzie saw the vet and was prescribed two new additional drugs. We’re not sure that she is showing any benefit for them.
  • I finally picked up some knitting that day and worked a few rows on the ferry there and back. Having made that progress I kept knitting on the project, Herbivore, as I began to feel better. It is now finished and blocked and I am working on the Hugo poncho once more and indeed took it to town yesterday.
  • After a couple of weeks of being bug-ridden, I returned to Spinning Group on Monday but couldn’t find the energy to take my wheel with me, and once again I knitted. I made cake!
  • My workroom/studio/whatever it is called has been further disrupted, in preparation for refitting the window, though that has yet to happen. It’s difficult to get anything done in here just now but I am pottering on and did, as mentioned, achieve some blocking this week.
  • Mr L wishes to return this room to its former status of joint office space. This kind of depresses me. The notion of fitting everything into one of our smaller rooms does not fill me with inspiration nor with confidence that everything will fit. Something will have to go. I feel that I need to keep space to make photographs, whatever else I do.
  • Friend J had made me feel v guilty about the fact that I bought a violin and have not yet learned to play it. A violin tutor book and DVD was ordered and arrived today. Once I find my fiddle I shall try to tune it up and have a go. Then when I have caught up with J, who can already play Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, we shall continue to learn together.
  • It’s not really all down to J, it’s also a matter of Mr L have revitalised his musical interests and our desire to be able to play together when he retires. I really would like to have some level of musical competence, in any instrument, in time to do that.

That’s about it. If there was anything else, it cannot have been worth recording. Really the time has flown by even though all I have been doing is slumping in front of the iPlayer or Netflix.

Yesterday I went to town with Gill – the idea being to have a free day with no long lists of things that had to be done. Mooching around the charity shops and eating lunch was about all that I wanted to do. My prize purchase of the day was a 12 foot square cotton dust-sheet, which I plan to use for photographic backdrops. I shall most likely cut it into quarters, at least one of which I shall do a dye job on. One quarter might make it into the sewing pile and be used to back a cushion that I want to make for my spinning chair. Not bad value for a tenner.

I also purchased some Freesias to offset the dead rodent pong. It’s smelling better in here already.

A hand-thrown pot mug from Westray Pottery jumped into my shopping bag too (just £3 in the charity shop!)  but not alas the matching jug, which I realised in the middle of the night would have made a fabulous photograph together with my freesias and the new backdrop.

The Tesco pan offer seduced me and I came home with a new 20cm cast iron enamelled casserole – my Le Creuset one has needed replacing for some time now and I find myself happy with that small extravagance. I also bought one of the small baking dishes, for two-person lasagne meals though am concerned that I will find myself unable to cook in such small quantity. I make get another and cook lasagne in pairs, one for the table and the other for the freezer – at only £4.99 with the collector stamps, they are a bit of a deal. The pan was a good buy too, just £29.99. The main reason we had not yet replaced the Le Creuset was because we no longer have access to the outlet shops where we used to pick up Le Creuset at silly prices… about the same as paid for this pan. As long as you are not bound by a desire to have all matching colours, this stamp collector deal is a really good one and worth looking into.

One thing that I did have at the head of yesterday’s shopping list was a double picture frame. I had bought a couple of artists’s cards in Balnakeil when we were away and wanted to frame them for the bathroom. That mission was achieved, the cards went into the frame this morning and once I have found a hammer I shall be hanging my souvenir in its new home.

I’m finding having two Saturdays (as that is how it feels to me|) in every week to be strangely unsettling. Mr L is in the kitchen, restringing his guitar and I have not had to rush about making lunch for 1pm. It all feels very odd.

Tomorrow, on Saturday #2 of this week, we are going Stock Judging. Stock Judging is an annual island event to which I always plan to go but have yet failed to achieve my plans. A competitive event, open to pros and amateurs alike, it should be a lot of fun. I intend to take my camera with me so I had probably set about charging my battery very soon now.

This afternoon’s hit list:

  1. Charge camera battery
  2. Find a Blip
  3. Maybe add some pics to this post
  4. Find a fiddle
  5. Start writing up the Sutherland Trip
  6. Knit on Hugo
  7. Lesson 1 of Fiddle tutor

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