Bear is off and away. He left yesterday and I think that he'll be fine. DH checked his room and he said that it was nice with plenty of storage and it's nice and quiet. I'm confident that bear will do well.
I forgot to give him the shot glass to take with him.
It measures shots but also tablespoons, teaspoons, millilitres and fluid ounces. I picked it up mainly because I thought it would be useful for measurements if he cooks. I don't know if bear will do many shots while he's away. I suspect he may but not many, as it's not really his style (though who knows). However his track record is being the responsible one in the friend group and I guess it would be helpful to know what a shot of liquor is supposed to look like. The standard measure is a lot less than it looks like on TV.
Today is the first day of a new chapter in my life. I spent a lot of it rummaging around some writing stuff and getting some washing done. I think Monday is when I'll sit down and try and plan out how to make things work. It's felt a little odd.
At least the plumber is coming tomorrow. I'm desperate for the leak to be fixed. It's staining the front of the house! I'll be so glad when it's sorted out and I hope that the plumber (who is lovely) can work something out.
When I signed up to Facebook under my pen name, they asked for a date of birth and I put 22nd September 1968. That is not my birthday. It's not that far off. I'll be hitting 60 years of age soon, but I'm an Aquarius (if you believe in that sort of stuff, which I shouldn't, but it creeps up on me). I just checked and those who are born on 22nd September are Virgos. As I said, I'm an Aquarius, the fruit loops of the zodiac. However... my mother was a Virgo. My father was a Virgo. My best friend at school was a Virgo. My first boyfriend was a Virgo. My bridesmaid was a Virgo. My husband is a Virgo. There are a lot of Virgos in my life getting extremely irritated by my lack of sense. One of the other sensible star signs (allegedly) is Capricorn. Those in my life with that star sign are bear (who has a lot to put up with), my late mother-in-law, my father's long term girlfriend, my husband's neice, his brother-in-law and his lovely auntie. Any other birthdays are well spaced out. It's just the expensive ones that group together.
I searched for 'Virgo' on Unsplash and this came up. Nothing more relevant showed and I thought that this was pretty so I decided to share.
Anyway if you're on Facebook, you may see a prompt to wish me happy birthday and ninety people already have. I feel incredibly guilty about that. I'll say thank you to them all, and I feel incredibly grateful that someone took the time to send good wishes, but I'll feel guilty every time I press 'thanks + post' even as I feel hugged. Besides, I'm still going through my Facebook friends. I wrote an explanation here, but it's my author page and I love accepting friend requests, but it got indiscriminate and I've been using birthdays as a way of slowly picking through my friend list. There have been so many inactive accounts and the birthday reminder is so useful for this. However I do wonder about how many birthdays are the real birthdays.
I called in to Marks and Spencer today. My walking is getting worse, but I managed a short walk while hanging onto a trolley and I noticed that the Christmas stuff had started to come out.
I kept meaning to take better pics but things got a way from me. It's been a lovely day here, really sunny and a welcome change after all the rain. I've been spending most of it with bear as we sorted out what he's taking with him to university. It's currently stashed in four bags for life, the packaging for a duvet, the packaging for pillows and a backpack. That doesn't include his clothes, but it includes all the kitchenware and a few bits of groceries to start him off.
There have been some fairly intense discussions about what he does and doesn't need. Bear is sticking with a minimalist plan, which I'm sure will be fine. It's driving me nuts, though I'm trying to hide it from him, and I'm sure that I'll keep worrying.
Of course I'll worry a little about bear, but I think that he'll be okay. Wherethejourneytakesme said that perhaps bear had inherited the numbers ability from my great aunt. From where I sit, he's inherited the ability to get on with absolutely anyone from father, but he's also inherited my maternal grandfather's ruthless intolerance to fools. As far as he's concerned, peer pressure happens to other people and he'll quitely and undramatically do as he damn well pleases. While it would be nice to be able to persuade him, for example, to at least take a dressing gown with him, it's reassuring to know that he's not easily influenced, or at all, really.
The next few weeks are likely to be odd for DH and I. I'm sure that there are many reading this who understand what I mean. Since I became pregnant, back in April 2006, DH and I have centred our lives around bear. I mean, we haven't tried to take over his life or force our way in, but our lives have been very much about what is the best for bear. Now we need to recentre a little. To be honest, I think it's going to be fun.
I saw this and I thought that it was important to share.
It's a scam that if I had seen it, I would absolutely have fallen for it. It's a reminder to be cautious about clicking on links from unsolicited emails. I love Atomic Shrimp for all sorts of reasons and I'm really grateful for their scam warnings.
All is normal for here. The chillis are still crawling and overrun with bugs. The leak continues and bear is on pins ready to go to university. Term starts at the end of next week and so we have blocked out Monday to make all the checks, confirm that he has everything, and pick up anything he needs. I'm still recovering from the wonky wheel - the car was bearing left. I spent from 9am to 6pm waiting at the garage while they tried to work out what was needed. I ended up going back twice and left with two new tyres (which were an advisory in June anyway), a new wheel and a car that still has a habit of drifting left as it's sort of ground in now. Still I had a chance to catch up on some knitting. This was good as while I was clearing stuff out to get to the leak I found a blanket that I had started knitting around, I guess, ten years ago.
You can see the division between knitting before and knitting now. I think the technical terms my mother used were 'relaxed' or 'dropped' but I think of it as more like 'sprawled' and have resigned myself to a fishtailed blanket. As it's far from perfect, I can't donate or sell it, so I get to keep it and it's lovely and warm as it's being knitted up, so that is a definite win. I've a few half knitted projects, but after this I've decided to unravel and start again rather than worry about the tension.
Speaking of yarn, I was in Aldi.
The pile is slightly smaller as I walked away with 1000g of aran weight that will be perfect for a pattern I have.
That's £12.90 for enough yarn to make a sweater for a larger lady like myself, which I consider a bargain! I picked up some crochet hooks as well as when the stitch holder on the cardigan I'm knitting, that was holding 110 stitches, failed, a crochet hook would have been a significant help recovering the dropped stitches. It's ended up as something of a dog's dinner on the shoulder and I'll take a pic later.
And further about knitting. Those who knit may have picked up on a row about a YouTube video from the SciShow of all people.
It's upset a lot of knitters, perhaps because it was quite condescending and wasn't 100% accurate about its images. It talked about knitters in history having to work things out by trial and error and with intuition. The reaction videos that I've seen have been pretty funny as well as almost unanimously scathing, but it reminded me about one of my great aunts.
She was terrifying. She presented as a sweet, innocent, helpless, unmarried and innocent old lady who couldn't possibly be trouble. This was a lie. She had a way of looking you up and down and utterly anihilating you with one, pithy, elegant sentance, leaving you emotionally devastated for weeks. She spent most of her life working for a family firm of furniture makers/importers, starting at age 16, retiring in her seventies and terrorising generations. She was a wizard with numbers. The story that was told was when the fast young men came around to demonstrate the new adding machines, she could beat the specially trained speedsters with pencil and paper. Mind you, knowing her, there was probably psychological warfare involved as well.
She was born in 1902 and while our family encouraged the women, she was never going to be able to go on to any sort of further education. I think that if she had been born in 2002, it would have been a very different story. She really understood numbers and it showed in her knitting. Because she was a demon knitter. She loved to make the intricate Aran sweaters and cardigans. I've only been able to find two pics that aren't copyright.
Neither reflect my great aunt's work. They were intricate works of art, with eye-watering patterns in panels with all types of cables, ribbing, moss stitch, bramble stitch - all that you could think of. Chris Evans' sweater in Knives Out is a good example of the sort of pattern she enjoyed - all panels and complexity and bumpy bits. While the very nice presenter of the Sci Show talked about physicists suddenly discovering the engineering in knitting, my great aunt had nailed the maths by the 1970s, if not before.
It wasn't just that she routinely finished garments that I would never even attempt to consider, it's how she approached them. For those who don't know, a panel of a particular knitting stitch pattern will commonly be described as needing a multiple of x number of stitches plus y number of stitches. The YouTube channel, iknitwithcatful, has a playlist of different stitches and will describe, for example, double moss stitch as a pattern with a four row repeat needing a multiple of 4 stitches plus 2. I'm adding the link to the channel here as I find her incredibly relaxing.
So my great aunt would decide that she liked this particular cable panel from pattern A with this particular raised stitch from pattern B and a panel of these criss crosses from pattern C and she would assemble them together from her selection, adjusting them so that the stitch counts would fit together. Then she would pick a pattern that she knew would come in at the size she preferred - and different sizes would need different stitch counts, and all the different parts of the aran pattern and all the sizing had to be adjusted and tweaked until she was happy with the result and would start knitting the fiendish combination which would end up immaculate and perfectly fitted. She did knitting for fun, with no sign of stress at all the number crunching, as a sort of side hobby away from her main passion of traumatising her family.
I miss her. She was, like many in my family, a strong character with her own view of the world and a happy disregard of whether anyone agreed with her or not. She grew frail at the end, as she outlived many sparring/feuding partners and ended up surviving on sweets, cigarettes and sherry. If she had been born in a different time, I'm confident that she would have had an impact, if only in the mental health of which ever institution of higher learning she attended.
Writing stuff - just a quick note that an old friend Finn Cullen released a roleplaying game which reminded me of how I met my husband and I wrote about it on my writing blog here. Finn is a genius writer and I wish I was half as good as him, but he's not as fussed about it.
I'll be back regularly once bear is off to university and I've settled down. Thank you for the amazing hugs in the comments.
