mumblings

My FO count is up to three now as I finished off two more pairs of sock started in 2009.

I finished off the Possum socks. They are so beautifully soft.

These socks were made with yarn I bought in Paris when we met Lynne and Nathan. There wasn’t much left to do on them but I hadn’t gotten a chance to work on them.

I’m so happy to have some FOs to show! Of course, this little fellow explains part of the reason why I haven’t knit much.

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pao was right. I can be incredibly decisive when under a deadline and I picked out two local sock yarns and a tiny cat pin cushion in my two minutes. Sadly, I had to touch and run the beautiful cashmere as I had little time to think as the rest of my team were waiting for me back at the conference centre.

My eye fell on a display of these cute little felt pin cushions and I had to take this little kitty because I was missing

my own crazy kitten who I swear grew a lot in the three days I was gone. Whilst I was away, pao fixed my beloved laptop by installing a new hard disk and restoring all my files I thought I’d lost. Thank goodness for pao’s and the Disk Warrior program. He’d spent a while trying to get the bad partition back before we decided to buy Disk Warrior and see what that could do. I was so relieved that I didn’t lose all my cute kitten photos so it was money well spent. Yes, I have learnt my lesson – when Time Machine nags me about backing up my disk, I will really go and back up my disk. It figures that I spend my day telling other people to back up their disks and my own fails. Nothing like ‘I told you so’ to myself, hmm?

I’ve been a bit unlucky this year as I have encountered a rogue yarn shop called Angel Yarns (I’m not linking to them as I don’t want to increase their page rankings but they do appear first on Google) who I ordered two balls of Bergere de France Magic so I could finish off my Trapeze Jacket. Needless to say, I have been charged and haven’t received any yarn or an answer to any of the four emails I sent them so I reported them to Trading Standards, the card handler and I’m about to complain to my card company. I also ordered something in the Woolly Workshop which is closing down with some Christmas money from pao’s grandmother but a month later the yarn hasn’t arrived. I’ve been following the discussion on the two on Ravelry. I’d bought from the Woolly Workshop before and found her service excellent and having read some of the information on Ravelry I’m ok to wait a little longer but Angel Yarns sound like complete shysters. I think I have been lucky in the past that the suppliers I’ve ordered from have been honest and reliable but it does make me very wary. I’ve ordered some more Magic from Fiddlesticks in Devon but I did check Ravelry first (what did we do before Ravelry?) so hopefully they will restore my faith in online yarn shopping.

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I was knitting on the train all the way up to Leeds to the amusement of my project team so when we passed a yarn shop on the way to the conference venue they all pointed and laughed.

We were quite tired on the second day after working quite hard so I sent my team out on a 45 minute break. Luckily one of my team members, Louise, knows the area quite well and I dashed into Headingly on a bus for a few minutes. She, also being a recent convert to knitting, said we should stop at the yarn shop as we weren’t that far away. So we did

The shop was called Baa Ram Ewe and the staff were really friendly. We literally spent two minutes in there before heading back to the conference centre for lots more work.

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This is what I’m working on at the moment. I started these on the way to Leeds last Wednesday. Would you believe me if I said that we worked so hard all day that there really wasn’t time to knit on Thursday evening. It was a pretty intense time but it was nice to spend such a lot of time with my project team. I did mean to blog tonight but ended up working on my project’s blog instead!

I did manage to get knitting mentioned in the Advanced Project Management course I was on today and even got the sock passed round as an example of making my argument persuasive by using visual aids. Luckily I was knitting something quite memorable. The Schoppel Wolle is pretty remarkable.

We took Belly Button back to her owners on Sunday which was a sad day for Sirius. He no longer has his little friend to entertain him but in about 9 days he will have pao for at least a week as pao is going in for more eye surgery a week on Thursday. We would really appreciate your thoughts and prayers as we both have quite a bit of work to complete before then so there will be lots of long days coming up (I managed an eleven and some hour day today) but I suppose it does help take our minds off what is to come. In a way, it is a relief they are going to operate again as pao’s been uncomfortable and unhappy with the way his vision has been recently but still pretty scary.

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Sirius is six months old today. Happy Half a Year, Sirius! Look how small he was.

He looked quite different in his second month.

We got to bring him home when he was exactly three months old.

He grew and grew more and more and his personality developed much more in month 4. He started to enjoy snuggling under the duvet between us.

He has always been a hungry boy and he grew and grew, celebrating the start of his fifth month on Christmas day.

And now he is six months old! My – how he has grown!

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In order to fairly judge the 1000th post caption contest, I copied all the eligible comments to a Word document and got pao to read those out and choose.

It boiled down to three contenders number 5, 8 and 13 so in order to choose one,

we had a draw.

Pao plucked out the winner no 8

Well done, Bilbo, for your prize-winning entry:

How long do you have to leave game before it’s ready to eat?

As consolation for those of you who didn’t win, here is a cute kitten. I wish I could have awarded each and every one of you a prize as the captions were all very funny and just the ticket after I got back from a very tiring work trip in Leeds. Well done, everyone!

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Just in case you didn’t get enough cute. My colleague brought her Schnoodle puppy in and I didn’t want to give him back.

I have a weakness for small animals!

I’m away for a couple of days now and I’m back Friday evening. Don’t forget to enter my 1000th post contest – closing Saturday morning!

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I was looking through the photos I took just after Christmas

and saw these lovely wreaths

I’d photographed

when pao and I were taking a walk around the village.

They are so cheery, I thought I’d share them with you. Stay warm!

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Our car park is a popular place. The very next day, we found a dog called Bingo. He was pretty cute and very friendly.

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The snow has thawed now but I did see some other paw prints in the car park the other day.

They belonged to this lovely chap who was wandering round the car park at work.

We called him Smiley Cat because

a Smiley Cat does whatever

a Smiley Cat does. (Got earworm, yet?)

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