I've finished the back of the Beastly Black

This morning I finished knitting the back of the 'Beastly Black Corriedale" jacket, the fibre of which I started spinning last October.  I have only got the sleeves to knit and they will be easy and relatively fast as they are mostly stocking stitch, unlike the reams and reams of ribbing which I had to do for the front and back.


I am also about to start spinning braid 12 of the 'Rosewood' colourway for a plain, V-necked, raglan sleeved sweater.  Having, in my dewy youth knitted a mixed colour sweater (two strands, one light and one dark) I know that mixed colour ribbing can look awful so I have purchased one braid of Metro Brown from GreenwoodFiberworks.etsy.com  and will knit the ribbing mainly in the Metro Brown with a stripe of Rosewood to pull it all together.  I am putting off spinning the Metro Brown so that I will finish spinning the Rosewood before I start knitting.


Having handed over my car to Herself yesterday I no longer feel as though I have cut my right hand off.  Yesterday morning was hard for me; it is such a lifestyle change to be carless after all these years but I know that I have the option of buying another car if I need the security. However, since I can't drive a night any more and I have the bus and train so close I can use taxis if I need to go anywhere off the beaten track.


I phoned the taxi company this morning and changed my pickup place as for some reason they had me living about a kilometre away.  I also confirmed that I can use a taxi to take the babies to the vet as long as I ask for an 'animal friendly' cab.  That means that I don't have to stop using the Cottesloe Animal Hospital, one of the main reasons I wanted to keep the car.  I have been using the Cottesloe vets for 50 years and they are one of the best  clinics in the State so I was reluctant to change to the Claremont Clinic.

Here is a photo I took for the guys on Ravelry.com ; click on the picture to enlarge it.

Biting the bullet #2

I have finally bitten the bullet and sold my car.  She is going to a friend, Herself, for the price of an ongoing donation to Medics Sans Frontiers and I will be dropping her off on Sunday when I go to the Self's for lunch.  When we were filling out the transfer forms I had to put in the odometer reading and was horrified to find that, in the six years I had her, I only managed a bit over 6,000 kilometres.  Since I can't drive at night any more due to the effect of lights on my astigmatism she mostly sits and collects dust.  I have left open my option to buy another car if I feel that I really need one but if I do I will get one similar to the one which D3 has, with front and back cameras and GPS.


I am feeling sad about letting her go, apprehensive about how I will manage without a car and will have to stop going to the Cottesloe Animal Hospital where I have been taking my animals for fifty years and instead take the babies to the Claremont Vet who is just down the road and I can walk there with the Kitty-carriage.


Meanwhile, someone in a HUGE SUV has taken over my second car space.  I left a polite post-it note and then a large note fixed to the windscreen with sticky tape.  Next time it might be duct tape and then superglue but if it continues I will report it to the Council of Owners.  I have no idea who it is  -  they have certainly never asked if they could park their monster there on my property.  Had they done so I might have agreed since my spaces are destined to be empty but they have seriously annoyed me now.  The best solution would be to clamp the vehicle but that is beyond my powers.


Yesterday was a serious computer day.  I arrived home from COTA to find that my Windows Live Mailbox was empty.  The storage folders were OK and all the mail was still on my webmail  -  so I phoned iinet and they had to close my account and open it again, after which 227 emails (most of which I had previously deleted) fed back into my mailbox and I had to delete most of them all over again.


Then, because I had problems at COTA with accessing my own web pages (I was teaching a client about keywords and how they are set) so I tried on my own computer last night and found that I couldn't open the website. I phoned iinet again only to be told that it was an ongoing problem probably due to their upgraded security measures and that their technicians were working on it.  I subsequently found that the problem was first reported on February 8th so it is taking them quite a while to sort it out.  However, this morning the site was up and running with working links again so maybe it was just a temporary glitch.


Meanwhile I intend to go back to my mailbox and move all my genealogy and family emails into folders to quarantine them from further vanishing acts.  I have a large number about Great Great Uncle Charles and his doings which I don't want to lose since most of it is not documented elsewhere and with no source material I won't put it onto my family tree.

Climb Every Mountain.

I had an email a couple of days ago from The Phantom Golfer who features in several pages of my web pages section on my trip to Iran   -  see My Trip to Iran.  The Selfs were there as was The Phantom golfer who had a habit of handing out multitudes of golf balls to the Iranian children and running up all the steepest hills and climbing the highest towers.


Here is an extract from the email which demonstrates that we are never too old:


At present we spend a few hours each weekend climbing up and down hills in the Dandenongs preparing for another crack at the Kokoda track late next month. When we went three years ago I was told that I was the second oldest to do it so that was a bit of a challenge and I went back the next year and did it both ways--with about six weeks in between. Now we thought It would be a good idea to make it a bit harder for the next person to beat the age barrier and we will be leaving shortly after my 85th.


It puts my yoga practise to shame and he is a decade older than I am.  I am really impressed and wish him good weather and an enjoyable trek.


My COTA client who has had a multitude of lessons and still can't find her way around a computer keyboard has, I gather, booked for classes into infinity as well as attending Adult Education group classes.  I despair of ever teaching her as she doesn't touch her computer between lessons and, of course, has forgotten what I showed her the week before.  Today we opened a Gmail account for her because she wasn't sure of her user name and couldn't remember her password. 


However, we will labour on and maybe she will eventually wrest her computer away from her husband and start to use it.  She wants t get a job but needs computer skills.  I am not sure whether she is incapable of learning, doesn't want to go out to work (I can't say that I blame her for that) or she is being bloody-minded because her husband, who has a chronic illness, has told her that she needs to get a job.  I've been there and done that but fortunately I have a profession and rather fell on my feet with the job I landed.


I am spinning the ninth braid of the Rosewood fibre and am pushing ahead because I have a lot of other fibre which I am anxious to get onto.  The Beastly black is progressing faster since I finished the fronts/collar strip of ribbing and although I am still ribbing up the back (I have to do 12" before I change to stocking stitch) when that is done I thing that the hard stuff will be done and the rest will be faster and easier.  Now that the weather has finally turned cold I am anxious to finish the jacket  so that I can wear it.

I didn't need this on a Fast Day

I have had a very dis-spiriting day at COTA this morning.  I had two clients who either can't or won't absorb anything and just to make things difficult, neither computer was working properly.


The first client has difficulty absorbing the concept of computers, never touches his computer between lessons, relies on his wife to set things up for him and can't see the point anyway.  I don't really know why he comes  -  to please his wife, perhaps?


The second one needs a job but has no computer experience, takes multiple classes both with COTA and other organisations, never touches her computer between lessons, can't remember from one week to the next what she has been shown and I am totally wasting my time; she doesn't want a job and I can't say that I blame her for that.  The trouble is that I am at a loss to know what to teach her any more and was more or less marking time.  If the email is made to work that would be a useful skill for her  -  if she could remember how.  She couldn't remember her user name or password on her own computer.


The trouble was that the email on the COTA computer I use was non-existent; the link to Windows Mail didn't work and MS Outlook wasn't installed.  I moved over to the computer which Himself uses as he is over East at the moment and that computer had MS Outlook installed but it wasn't set up or authorised.  And she has booked in for another four or (horror) eight lessons as well as classes with Adult Education.  Maybe it is time to set her assignments.


I will set myself to spinning to try to make myself feel less useless.  At the moment I feel as though I should get out while the going is good.

... and on the subject of colour

With about 3cm left of the beastly black's ribbed collar/front I draped it around me and realised that it almost reached my knees.  Extrapolating from that I found that the raglan sleeves would start at about waist level which is not at all what I want so I have stopped knitting the 72 inches of ribbing just a bit short but as the instructions suggest putting the stitches onto a stitch holder so that I can make adjustments later if needed I have left my options open.


Looking as the skeins of beastly black which I have left to finish the jacket it seems to me that I may not have enough yarn.  Black is black and easy enough to get a close match even if it means knitting the sleeves from a different dyelot so I went to the Trans-Tasman site to see how much or little I would have to buy.  They no longer quote amounts so I will have to get in touch with their Australian representative or go over to Bilby Yarns and order it there.


But  -  the Trans-Tasman lot no longer have black corriedale!  Looking at their colour range I had a choice of Liquorice or Jellybean, both of which looked black. But which one?  I eventually found a list with American translations and, in Yankese, liquorice is called black so I will be able to match up extra fibre if needed.  But I may have to get a whole kilo again.  It took me five months to spin the first kilo and my heart quails at the thought of having to spin more.


And that, of course, brings me to my aubergine bump, also a kilo.  Will I have enough to knit the Charlotte Onedin sweater which I am planning  or should I order more of it now so that I can blend the dyelots in before I spin.  A little bit of integral variation in the colour could be attractive so maybe I should just bite the bullet and order another bump of each of them.  I can always use it;  I look on the corriedale as the sort of bread and butter of spinning  -  what I use if I need a large amount.  I wish that they sold BFL though!

Greens Blues

I am two and a half weeks into my Fast Diet and finding it very easy: nothing to eat all day and pile it on (in moderation) at night.  According to what I have read and from the information in the 5:2 Diet Book, kale is the latest "in" vegetable.  Don't go there.  Perhaps it had something to do with the way I cooked it  -  steamed with wine and garlic  -  but it was like chewing on a tarpaulin.  Perhaps I should have beaten it into submission before I cooked it but the rest is going to be processed through my soup maker with some lentils which are one of my favourite things as well as being recommended as a good source of protein and fibre.

Another thing which I have discovered is that tuna is suitably white, as the diet bible recommends, but is supposed to be eaten almost raw, which I can't bring myself to do, or it is a very ho-hum fish.  Perhaps there is some tuna and lentil soup in the near future as well.

Himself (and I hope that he is not reading this) who has been on the 5:2 diet for a few weeks and has reduced his waistline significantly was singing in a public concert, standing in the front row of the choir when his braces failed him and he had to hold his trousers up with one hand and his music with the other.

I was able to buy a second blankie for Parsifal, identical to the first one, so now I can wash them regularly and he loves them.  In fact he is becoming very cuddly and hasn't eaten anything indigestible for ages; all he needed was to be able to smurgle on demand and curl up and go to sleep on the blankie afterwards.  But he still bullies Poppy ...

I have spun half of the seventh plait of Rosewood  -  almost halfway through my 14 plaits, have only about 4" of the endless black ribbing to knit before embarking on more ribbing up the jacket's back and I have started making rolags from the corriedale aubergine bump which I will be spinning woollen on E.Emma which might allow me to spin thicker to make a chunky sweater.  There is lots more in the pipeline and I am trying to resist the temptation to buy more fibre until I have reduced my stash somewhat but I can't knit fast enough to keep up.  I guess that I can pass some of it over to GB2 who is spinning  -  and who likes the same colours as I do but I want to spin it all myself.  I'll just have to knit faster.  My mother was a superlative knitter and could knit Aran and Fair Isle while reading a book.  I can't even do plain black ribbing at night even when I am looking at it.

This is a photo of the scarf which I knitted from the BFL pigtails from GreenwoodFiberworks.etsy.com  -  click on the photo to enlarge it.

Something Fishy

D1 has acquired a cat  -  Oriental and very vocal.  One of Iris' favourite things is Bonito Flakes which can be bought at Japanese delicatessens.   D1 has been telling me for weeks that I should get some as a treat for Poppy and Parsifal but the nearest Japanese deli is in Subiaco and I figure that my cats are spoilt enough without expecting me to travel for treats for them.


However, D1 gave a container of the flakes to D2 but Chloe turned up her nose at them and so they eventually gravitated to me.  Poppy, like Chloe, turned up her nose at them but Parsifal decided that they were exactly what he needed to make his life complete.  I found him with the container, which he had knocked off the kitchen bench, trying to get the lid off it and he has made serious attempts to open the cupboard where I have stored the flakes.


I am not prepared to make them a part of his diet because he will expect me to keep on providing them for him, so I have two choices;  I could wrap them securely and put them out with the rubbish  -  or I could pass them on to D3 for her cat.  It is getting to be a bit like 'pass the parcel' and D3 will probably have the same problem with Sebastian as I have with Parsifal  -  and am I prepared to do that to a much-loved daughter?