Champagne and Socks

Puppy says hi. He’s currently stuffed under my right elbow between me and the armrest of the couch and has hiccups. I can’t tell if he is Sleepy!Pups or ScaredyoftheStorm!Pups. Either way, he’s a cutie.

I was driving home this afternoon and glimpsed one of the vets I used to take Benji to. Took me right back to the day he died and a lot of my regrets about that day. Heartsick. I got teary eyed but then I thought, for the very first time, that now we have Sasha. And I guess that’s what they mean by “this too shall pass” – that if you wait long enough for life to happen, things get so complicated that it’s hard to see them as black and white.

Or something.

Anyway, it’s Monday. And a new week. This week most of my office is out on a field trip up north. And the other officemate I’m in with this week had to head off just before lunchtime. So it was just me for most of the day. And I quite liked the peace and quiet. I still had a bunch of phonecalls and a few people dropped in throughout the day. But mostly, I liked the quiet. I don’t think I’d like it permanently but it’s a good chance for me to get my teeth into a few tasks.

End of the weekend means I should check in with my list. I didn’t get everything done. That’s a given. But I think I did better than some weekends.

• Read Mockingjay
• Work on Twelve Planets – no but received progress on shorts from writer
• Update ASif!
• Work on paperwork - no. oops
• Fix some of the tweaks and additions  to the new Twelfth Planet Press website - did some
• Finish unpacking in the lounge - finally unpacked all the large movers boxers. Can now see couch
• Reorganise the kitchen – no but washed all the dishes from the final unpacked boxes
• Finish sorting The Craft

• Start a new pair of socks - see photo!
• Listen to Brenda Dayne’s Knitter’s Manifesto – some
  
• Finish Season 1 of Life on Mars (UK) – i think i might be bored?
• Bake something

I‘m not sure whether it was the recovery that I need from The Hunger Games, which OMG! I sobbed through the last hour of reading Mockingjay. That book was physically painful to read in parts and was just! Oh! I read it as fast as I could to minimise the pain. And actually I’m not sure I could ever go back into that world. But wow. Just wow. But anyway, after that, I kind of didn’t read anymore fiction over the weekend. I did get some nonfiction stuff read.

And I started some knitting – the socks above, the yarn I’ve been saving for myself for about 5 years (who knows why I don’t just do these things) and a shawl that will also be for me. This yarn is Lisa Souza’s Mars Volta and the shawl pattern I found on Ravelry (find me over there as girliejones) but I’m not loving it yet. I’m going to wait and see how the lace looks when I get there.

I started managing my projects on Ravelry. I’ve been fighting assimilating into that website but I must admit it’s damn fantastic. I’m trying to sort all my craft at home into individual WIPs so that I can systematically work through them – so many things I abandon so close to the finishing line because something got tricky or fiddly and it’s not that hard to pick it up and figure out how to get past that. My plan is to stocktake and get a plan going incorporating starting new projects (cause that’s always the most fun) and getting WIPs finished too. And I noticed that you can log “Other” in Ravelry under Projects (tracks your ongoing projects) and I might then use it to also track my quilting and have everything in the one place. And um, yeah, I have more than 4 socks currently on the needles. *cough*

I also baked something! Yes I did! I baked my first cheesecake. I’m not sure I’ve ever made one before. And C thought I was pretty brave to fiddle with the recipe before trying it out, but you know how it is! Besides, take fat, add fat and sugar, what’s gonna taste bad about that?! So my first baked cheesecake – I had no springform tin so I winged that bit too. The top layer is the smaller version which I think got a little overcooked cause it was thinner. Underneath is a much more scrumptious version. I think in future (I noticed a nice variation with raspberries to try) I might halve the recipe.

And um, puppy says – time to nap!