Day 37 - It's Raining - Leeches!!

A couple of hours ago thunder and lightning started and then came the rain! Not a lot, but it wet the ground and rainwater seems to revive plants in a way that chlorinated water doesn't. Along with the rain came the leech - since we have had so many possums around, we have been getting the odd leech in the house when it rains (that's the only reason I can think of to explain 35 years or so without a leech and an influx since we've had possum boxes around). Grandpa Flea has just had a tiny one on his wrist, and is bleeding like the proverbially "stuck pig". Ah, the joys of wild life ...

Knitting group today at Cherryhills - it was good to see the group again and to catch up on what has been knitted over January. I came home with three balls of Zara in a pale blue to knit a baby jacket from Pipsqueaks (a Rowan book) - I was going to post a photo from the book - but can't find it! And I wanted to cast on tonight! My chiropracter is having her first baby and I want to have it finished for her before she goes on leave. Guess I'll have to battle Annie Blatt a bit longer. I love Pipsqueaks - I have knitted so many things from it over the last five or six years.

I was roving around the internet tonight and made a terrible discovery - Grumperina and The Knitting Curmudgeon ARE NOT THE SAME PERSON! My apologies to each of you. I have removed the offending reference. I was sure that I had read in Grumperina's blog somewhere that she had posted previously under the other name - I was devastated when The Knitting Curmudgeon seemed to disappear from the internet and had a bit of trouble reconciling the two writing styles when she "reappeared" under another name - okay, so someone now tell me they are the same person and I can feel doubly foolish!!

My apologies again.

Day 36 - Knitting Groups Start Again - Yay!

First day back at the Guild and for the first time for months I was looking forward to it. I haven't been for quite a while as I haven't been enjoying it. The group at Cherryhills starts up again this week too and I'm REALLY looking forward to that - there's always something new to see, feel, try on, read - and it's good fun.

Everywhere I go I look for the local knitting shops - sound familiar to you? And whenever they agree, I take photos or get a photo taken in there, so I'm very generously sharing them (?boring you) with you! This is a photo taken in Victoria, Vancouver Island at The Beehive Store. For some reason the link won't work: "FORBIDDEN" was the stern reply - if you don't already know it, I'm sure you can google it. This was a wondrous store, stacked with yarn. I bought a skein of Fiesta in African Violet there. It wasn't available in Australia then, but now my LYS has it - and I keep drooling over it, and one day - soon (after I knit all my stash up - ha! ha!) - I'm going to get some more.

I haven't done much knitting other than wrestle with Annie Blatt.
Janette assures me that the pattern has suffered in translation, but I'm not too sure about that - I've had these problems with English patterns too - but then, we speak Australian here - maybe that's it!

We had a busy weekend and I got lots of kisses and hugs from Ms 4 during her sleepover and Sunday we had some friends over for lunch at 12.00 noon. They left at 8:00pm so that's why nothing got done in the knit department. Last night we put some of the scraps out for the birds and the possums. (We don't do it on a regular basis so they don't become dependent on us.) And just for Roxie we had a visit from a small glider possum. They have a wide fat flat tail and a flap of skin between their front and rear legs which acts as a parasail? when they glide between the trees. This particular glider is quite large - usually two of them are on the tray together and they still have lots of space. They are cute little things, and it's always a relief to find that they are still around, as a lot of the bushland around here is being cleared for housing.

I'm off to bed - this broadband thing just means instead of sitting around for hours getting frustrated, I sit around for hours making typos and looking at blogs - Grandpa Flea is no fool - he told me I'd be going to bed at 1:00 am - again.

Day 34 - It's Raining - Rain & Broadband!

Can you believe, it rained yesterday! and I got connected to broadband! Of course all good things have a down side - it took me ALL day on the phone with the techs to get my connection working and then it threw me off last night at 1.00am (wh should go to bed earlier) and I've been on the phone all morning - mainly on hold -listening to music designed to drive you to drink - until I got reconnected again. Ahhh - the elctronic age - it saves soooooo much time - not.
.
Here is a photo -at last - of the baby jumpers I have been knitting If you look carefully, you can see one of our possum boxes in the tree behind. We love the wildlife around here, but I have the crankies with the possums at the moment - the bigger brushtails have kicked the ringtails out of all the possum boxes, and the ringtails are more vulnerable than the brushtails. To add insult to injury, one of the brushtails has taken up residence under the house in the space between the floor of the study and the ceiling of the bathroom. AND not only that, I got up one morning recently to discover that my beautiful cyclamen pink cyclamen (Ha! work that one out) which lives on the table on the deck, was sitting there with all the flowers intact, but every single leaf eaten off - just bare stems surrounding the flowers! It looked very funny. Back to the baby jumpers - the knitting group I attend at Cherryhills has been producing dozens of these jumpers to go to Africa. Someone's mother's church group asked for help, so superwomen flew into action.

Annie Blatt's pattern is still giving me lots of problems - I admit to being spatially challenged - refer back to the school uniform disasters - I admit to reading a paragraph of a pattern and knitting 10 rows with a line of bobbles on the 6th - then discovering the next row says: AT THE SAME TIME INCREASE blah blah blah. Even acknowledging these deficiencies on my part, THE PATTERN IS BLOGGING CONFUSING!!

So I'm still tetchy.

Just for you, Roxie:


This is a large birdsnest fern that grew (self sown) under the airconditioner outlet at home - it obviously thrives with the constant drip of moisture.

By contrast, here's a photo of a tree fern that has been severely burnt off in the all the hot weather we've been having:



Also a photo of one of my my bromeliads that has survived the hot weather in relatively good condition because it's in a pot out of the sun: .Don't ask me why my photos are all over the place in relation to the text - I"VE ALREADY TOLD YOU THAT I"M SPATIALLY CHALLENGED and TETCHY!

Ms 4 year old Flea is arriving at 2.30pm (it's now 12.10) for a sleepover and we are having people for lunch tomorrow. Not a bed is made, including the little Flea's which is still stripped from the last Flea invasion, not a dish is washed, not a cake is made, not a chicken thigh has been marinated, not a dip has been made,and not a thing has been hung on the line (probably will need rewashing because i t's so steamy and washing smells very quickly if not dried straight away- so much for the water conservation drive) and there's nothing decided for tea tonight. Sounds like someone has tied me to a chair in front of a computer screen and said "FIDDLE YOUR LIFE AWAY, FOOL". On the upside though, Ms 4 loves her mama - and Grandma Flea doesn't score it for a kiss or a cuddle when mama's there. BUT when we have sleepovers, I'm very popular and get lots of juicy little wet kisses on the cheek and heaps of cuddles. I feel better already.

Conscious as I am of throwing many punctuation and grammar stones at those other people who DON'T CARE about our language, I am also conscious that I live in a glass house and do VERY occasionally slip up myself. Of course it's NOT MY FAULT- oh no - (I learnt this one off Grandpa Flea - Mr Infallible!) - any mistake is the result of a typo!! So my apologies to my fellow grammar police out there.

Peace to the world - in my dreams of course.

Day 30 - I Forgot Our Wedding Anniversary!

I have NEVER forgotten our wedding anniversary - but today I did. As Grandpa Flea rarely remembers it, it was not such a disaster, but I can't believe that I forgot. 42 years married might explain it and I have had a lot of other things on my mind.

Good news - today I signed up for broadband - it will take about two weeks for the modem etc to arrive, and I'm really looking forward to it.

I finished another little jumper for Africa when we were travelling - they look really cute in the bright colours. Annie Blatt is no easier than before - I discovered last night that, despite careful measuringand counting, one front is longer than the other - you know what happens next - creative blocking! I've unpulled it too many times to do it again. I'll start the two sleeves tonight and with a bit of luck will finish the cardi by the end of the week. Then I'll have to go back to Eloise or it will finish up as a permanent UFO. I have just tried to upload some photos but it is taking forever so it will have to wait until our broadband starts.

We have a meeting with the builder later in the week to finalise our contract for the townhouse. The year will go quickly, but I wish it were already built (hope the tense is correct - people in glass houses and all that ...). We have taken our house off the market over the hottest part of summer but the pressure will be on to get it sold before our new place is finished - otherwise I'll be putting out a call for food parcels!

Our garden is looking soooo bad - I think we will lose at least two tree ferns this summer - they are all self sown, and have all prospered until last summer when we lost a couple in the heat. Every time we go away we lose something in the garden - this last four day absence meant we missed the watering day and it coincided with very hot weather. There is not much we can do about it.

I'm glad you didn't mind the rant, Roxie - I'm not as tetchy today, but still not happy about the state of the world.

Day 29 - Question 1

My last post had been in draft mode for days - how can one person in a 2 person household have so little time? Answer: dial-up internet. When we got a new computer (12 months ago) we were planning to move to a place with cabling in place so persisted with dial-up. Twelve months later we are still planning to move, but I've decided to lash out and get a new modem so I can get broadband - I don't enjoy spending hours in front of the screen waiting for things to download and it leaves so little time for other things I'd rather do. So in a week or two ...

We have just had four days visiting Grandpa Flea's brother and his wife in Temora - a NSW country town. The drought is very bad all over NSW and I was shocked to see how little livestock was around - the few cattle I saw were skin and bone and being hand fed. We did pass a a couple of flocks of sheep that looked to be in good condition. None of the farm dams we passed had any water in them and the crops that did survive gave very low/poor quality yields. The paddocks were eaten down to the bare earth and we saw quite a number of willy-willies taking the red topsoil away. We've had bad droughts before - I can remember them from my childhood - but combined with climate change, this one is very scary, for the cities as well as the country. Australia is one of the driest continents on earth and we are fast running out of water - one of the cousins-in-law was telling us that she took her family to a caravan park in another small country town in the school holidays and they were told to bring their own water with them, as the town is trucking water in.

My question is this (as the politicians are fond of saying): the average person in the street has been concerned about climate change for years -so why have the governments been in denial for all that time? Meanwhile the pollies are all running around telling us we won't have to drink recycled water. I can't believe that they can be so short sighted - ignoring the long term needs of the country for their own short term power trips. Country people have always drunk recycled water - treated sewage goes into the rivers and the towns downstream use those same rivers for their drinking water. Current membrane technology delivers water that is far cleaner than the water we drank when I was a child in a country town.

As you can see, I'm feeling a mite tetchy - don't get me started on the incarceration of David Hicks for five years without charges being laid against him; the use of "extraordinary rendition" by the US government with the full knowledge and complicity of our government; the failure of our Attorney-General to admit that sleep deprivation is a form of torture; or, for that matter, the invasion of Iraq - to mention only a few gripes. It puts my difficulty with Annie Blatt patterns into perspective.

Tomorrow is another day. Perhaps I'll post on knitting.

Day 25 - Where Has January Gone?

At last I have managed to reset my email address so that Blogger recognises me and lets me in - I'm exhausted - it's been a hard battle! But that's not the reason I haven't posted for days (and days). We've had two grandchildren staying - one for two days and the other for seven. We picked them up the Subday before last but Ms 10 had to go home early to meet her obligations with Nippers (junior surf life saving) so we put her on the bus on Wednesday afternoon. She has been travelling alone for the last year now - it's a two and a half hour journey. It's a local bus company and if no one is there to collect a child travelling alone, they take them on with them while the office tries to contact the family.

Before Ms 10 went home, Grandpa Flea took her and Master 7 to see "Walking with Dinosaurs" - they loved it - Kate from Blue Mountain Knits has given a very good description and photos of it on her blog. Then I took them to see the movie "Arthur and the Invicibles" - they looked pretty bored during it, but came out wanting it on DVD so they must have enjoyed it. I was not that impressed with it, but then who am I to know the workings of little minds? The rest of the week was spent playing "Bub & Bob" with Master 7, taking him to swim at a friend's house, raking huge piles of dry leaves with him - which he really enjoyed - watering the garden with a watering can on the days when we can't use the hose (which he also enjoyed) and taking him to see "Badjelly the Witch" - a Spike Milligan play which he seemed to enjoy. I say "seemed" because anything other than computers is second rate entertainment in his eyes. Master 7 does love to knit - albeit in a rather gung-ho manner, so this holiday I had a French Knitting thingy for him. He spent hours making i-cord on it - 6 and a half metres! which he wanted me to sew into a draw-string bag for him to keep his money in - and, like the good Granny I am, I obliged.

Another major undertaking was a BLITZ on table manners with both, and GRAMMAR with Master 7. Using your knife and fork(!) and PROPERLY, eating with your mouth closed and wiping your fingers on a serviette were the main manners we attacked. With some success.

Grammar was a different story. I only attacked "them" as in: "what are them things?". Not much luck until I introduced an incentive - $1 when he used the right word spontaneously, and 50c when he used the wrong word then self-corrected. You have to be quick though - he started introducing "those" into the conversation at every opportunity! So we had some success, but I'll be interested to see if he maintains the change when he's been home for a while.

During this time the weather was atrocious - 40C degree days - the tree ferns have browned right off, and some of the bird's nest ferns are severely sunburnt, as is the mondo grass. I'ts impossible to give them enough water by hand. Still, if it's a choice between the plants and having water to drink, I'll go for the drinking water, thank you.

Not much knitting has been done - probably an amount equal to the amount of FROGGING. I've been doing an Annie Blatt baby cardi for Sue at Cherryhills, and I've found the pattern very confusing - even more so when I am working from the graph and reversing the shaping for the other side! In the end I had to write it out, and I'm still not sure it's right.

Day 14 - That Janette's not just a pretty face ...

Thank you Janette for your advice on how to load a photo - it's nothing to do with having a Mac - being dumb is a better explanation!

So here is a photo of shawl I knitted for Flea No. 1 - modelled by her, taken on the deck at our house. It's here to prove to myself that the upload bit works. It was knitted after a Lyn Johnson workshop. As all the interesting photos are in the old computer and I can't copy them to the new computer, I'll just have to start scanning things to post - but that might not be anytime soon!

I still can't get into my blog, nor can I make comments on other blogs, unless I go through the Blogger homepage. Why? I do not know. When I try to log in anywhere it tells me that there is no user account by that name - even when I do the "recover user name" bit. I've emailed Blogger about it so we'll wait and see if they return the favour.

Today we picked up the two little fleas - Ms S. and Mr N. - Ms S. is only staying for a couple of days as she has other pressing commitments back home - ah! the world of 10 year old girls (whoops! I've just been corrected by said 10 year old - nearly 11 YEAR OLD girls). While Mr N. who absolutely adores his Grandpa Flea is staying for the week. They are going to see "Walking with Dinosaurs" with Grandpa Flea.

Just to prove to myself that it DOES work, I've posted a photo of Grandpa Flea in "Sommerfulgen" a great yarn shop in Copenhagen. It is one of many yarn shop photos I have taken all over the world ( I call them 'knitting around').


At first this photo appeared above the first photo and all the text went strange, but I seem to have that one sorted - for the time being. Ms S. is looking over my shoulder giving me the benefit of her vast experience in computing, so I'm off - it's way past her bedtime.

Happy knitting.