Star Wars Day

I'm a bit rubbish at this blogging malarkey at the moment. You know why? Constant interruptions. For example, I wrote the first line of this post seven hours ago. They're not deliberate interruptions by any means, but it does mean I lose my train of thought. Hmm, I'm starting to feel jinxed.

Anyway, happy Star Wars Day! Which by very happy geeky coincidence is My Beloved's birthday - couldn't be more apt really, though actually none of his geeky presents were Star Wars ones. My secret knitting of the last few weeks was this:

A Jayne hat

Oh, so much fun to knit! I've been doing quite a bit of 4-ply knitting this year so the gorgeous squishy aran-weight Drops Nepal and 4mm needles were a real pleasure to work with. And making a pompom is always fun :-D.

I've also knitted a blanket for Miss Mouse's teddy:

That was using Drops Nepal again, bought the same day I got the Jayne colours.  I took Miss Mouse with me on a trip to the Yarn Cake woolshop/cafe last week and let her choose some more from the wall of woolly goodness, for another blanket for Snowy this time, her polar bear teddy: 

She always chooses interesting colour combinations ( you should see her when she's given free rein to dress herself) and I really wasn't sure about these colours together

but she was insistent that 'this is what Snowy likes', and actually now that I'm knitting them up into squares they're looking quite good together.  While were up in the wilds of the west end of Glasgow (necessitating a trip on the underground, the first time for Miss M*) we took a detour through the botanic gardens and had a quick mooch around the Kibble Palace:

Miss M was getting tired and fed-up by this point but I love the swooshy shapes in the greenhouse. Greenhouse is too domestic a word for it really, it's more like how I'd imagine a Victorian spaceship. Lovely place.

* Wide-eyed the night before: 'Will we see icky worms and things?'

things wot we 'ave been doin'

The trouble with having a little unintentional blogging break is that I find I have loads I want to talk about but I'm too overwhelmed by it to be bothered - besides which it is the school Easter break so I'm either rather busy staving off bickerfests or trying to prevent the kids from spending all day playing Minecraft or watching back-to-back episodes of Lazytown. I appreciate musclebound Icelandic men as much as the next woman but there are limits.

The first week of the holiday was great because we tootled up to the Highlands to see my mum and dad for a few days. The weather was lovely and Cairngorms National Park is pretty wonderful at any time of the year:

We were all impressed by this caterpillar.

Since we got back I've done a bit of dyeing, with daffodil heads this time, resulting
in this:

 Ah, yet another yellow! Nice one this time



And I've ripped back the green shawl I'd just started knitting because something had gone not-quite-right and it was bugging me:

So I've started again and now it's going better. She says cautiously.

And I thought I'd show you my little knitted bee.

He brightens up my spotty bag beautifully. I knitted him because Miss Mouse's class recently did a bee topic at school and we-the-parents were all invited in at the end of term to see some of the stuff they'd been doing. I'd offered the bee to Miss M to take in if she wanted but she declined - however she was delighted when I arrived with the bee on my handbag. I think it'll stay there, it makes me smile :-).

Following the crafty theme, I've also become hooked on the Great British Sewing Bee, despite (or perhaps because of?) being completely inept at sewing myself.  I do like watching competent people being competent.

And now, for Mrs Micawber, some of my egg-hunt clues. Apologies for terrible poetry!

'Finding eggs is hard, you'll agree/The next egg is with things that help Mama see' - the egg was hidden on my bedside table behind my contact lens solutions.

'The next egg is hidden from sight/ In a place that might be home to a knight' - in the Boy's old toy castle.

'Magical transport that comes when it's bidden/Is the place to find an egg hat is hidden'  - behind Miss M's Lego Knight Bus. This one had them stumped and I had to give them some fairly unsubtle hints in the end.

'The next egg is the cutest by far/ Find it where the small people are' - in Miss M's doll's house. I'd put gem stickers  and googly eyes on the foil for that egg to make it the 'cutest by far'.

And so on!

Chicks and chocolate and eggs, oh my

I didn't knit these - I could of course, but I'd never get round to it... There's apparently a knitting group at our local library and they knitted a whole load of these little chicks with creme eggs inside, and the library sold them on their behalf, proceeds going to a cancer charity.  The kids were delighted with them!  They are very cute.

I'm going to admit something here - I used to read on parenting fora and the like about uber-mummies doing Easter Egg hunts for their kids, and thought 'Aye right' (useful Scottish expression suggesting extreme disbelief). Today though I sat down and wrote clues (in rhyme) and hid eggs and clues around the house. And the kids had a wonderful time racing each other round the house, bickering about who got to read the clues and so on. And eating the chocolate. And I got an uber-mummyish glow. It was a sublime moment. However it kept them occupied for maybe five minutes tops. I think you can work out how long it took me to find suitable hiding places and compose the clues!

In another supreme parenting moment, yesterday I made chocolate nests with the kids, though mostly the Boy actually.

 And oooooh, they're good. Mmmmm..

That's one sitting on my keyboard this evening, half devoured. It didn't last much longer.  Miss Mouse won't touch them because they contain corn flakes, which she likes as cereal but apparently is disgusted by in combination with chocolate. Does that sentence make sense? Ah, you get the gist. Nor does she like mini-eggs, weird child. So all the more for the rest of us, eh :-D.

Enough chocolate (never!) - here's a small cat watching us play a game:

I've just realised I've already used this picture on my 365 blog. Hmm, never mind. That was the scene yesterday, and actually this was the scene today, as we set up for a second go:

Yesterday was Table Top Day, a day invented by the Geek & Sundry Youtube channel people (so Wil Wheaton and chums) to get people playing games together and tweeting about it.

Now I'm not a gamer. Computer games very rarely grab me and I hate most board games (Monopoly - spit spit..). My Beloved is, naturally, a gamer's gamer  - he has been a games programmer, he plays computer games, he has a past involving role-playing games, war-gaming and once even LARPing.  He gets all the gaming jokes in Big Bang Theory. I fear I am a constant disappointment to him. All that I have going for me, in a gaming sense, is that in the early days of our relationship we played Day of the Tentacle and the various Monkey Island games together, collaboratively - he was the mouse-clicker, I said 'No, try clicking the  flag/pirate ship/whatever' and we both tried to figure out how you win a pirate spitting-contest. So I have no real history of gaming but in the interests of family something-or-other I bought Forbidden Island which has (phew) no board so is not technically a board game. Instead it has cards which form the game board. And there are no dice of any size or shape. And best of all it's collaborative - the players are not competing against each other, they're working as a team to achieve their goal which is to, er, nick the treasure before the island sinks. The treasures that were hidden on the booby-trapped sinking island to prevent their catastrophic misuse by thieving imperialists. Yeah, shouldn't have read the back-story, should I? Yesterday we won, but today we failed, which made me feel a whole lot better!

So that was fun. No, really! We haven't yet managed to persuade the Boy to join in which is a shame because I suspect he'd figure it out a lot quicker than me, but Miss Mouse is quite happy to join in. Three out of four (plus interested cats) ain't bad.

The widening gyre

A bit of Yeats for you there, because I'm still spinning and because Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart, died this week, which made me think of the poem.

So, yes, still spinning. The doctor says it's labyrinthitis which is what I suspected.  It comes and goes. And is particularly bad in supermarket checkout queues! I think that's because that's the only time I'm actually standing still. The rest of the time I'm either moving or sitting down, and it's manageable then. In fact it's not really bad, I'm functioning, getting the kids to and from school, doing most of the usual things, though Powerhooping is out for the moment - the sight of all those hoops is just too much!  I've been using the computer less and for shorter periods of time which is why I haven't been blogging - I'm a s-l-o-w blogger,  it takes me a while to find the right pictures and write a post!

So what have I been up to? Well I did do another loaf of bread, following an actual recipe this time and it turned out ok:

 Then My Beloved made some of his wonderful oaty rolls using his usual method of haphazard measuring and, as far as I can tell, minimal kneading, and they were amazing!  Hmph.

 I've made choc-choc-chip cookies with Miss Mouse:

And apple and blackcurrant crumble just for me, 'cos nobody else likes it (but no picture of that because the ones I took looked too visceral).  Comfort food? Oh yes! It's been grimly cold with a really biting wind. I've just been watching the snow falling again. It's been snowing a bit every day for days - mostly tiny pebbles of snow, not hail because it's too light and soft for that, but not flakes either, more like very small polystyrene beads. Today it was back to real flakes though briefly. I'm not looking forward to going out to get the kids. This time last year it was like this, which was nice but weird.

Today I mordanted a skein of wool - that's the first mordant this year, we're getting to dyeing season, yay! I might even invest in a bigger pot so I can do more than one skein at a time.

And that's all for now. It's taken me two hours to write this post because it all got too spinny and I had to go and lie down in the middle, so if it's incoherent don't blame me, blame my inner ear!

Equilibrium

 I woke up on Friday morning to discover that my sense of balance had stepped out for a bit. I assume it's some kind of inner ear thing - I didn't feel light-headed, faint, sick or anything like that, I just wasn't clear on what was up, down or sideways. I found myself clinging to the floor, thinking 'the enemy's gate is down' which isn't much help when you're trying to get to the bathroom. I'd be rubbish in space.

It eased, and sleep helps, but I'm still a bit off-balance and spinny. It's all very odd, and has meant I haven't done some of the things I've meant to do over the last few days.

However I have made bread (above) - on Saturday, from a packet mix admittedly, but it was quite nice and I feel inspired to make some more, this time not-from-a-packet-mix.

Today I did some spinning.

I've had a spindle or two since my re-enactment days. The light one got sat on by somebody and snapped but this one, my 'good' spindle survives. I don't know if it's 'good' in a spinning sense but as an object it is lovely. However I've never really got to get grips with spindling. Somebody kindly showed me the basics at a re-enactment event years ago - at Scarborough Castle actually, after a largely sleepless night in a tent pitched in the castle grounds. Scarborough Castle is on a headland sticking into the North Sea, and the wind was quite 'fresh' that night. So I didn't take it all in that day. But I've had a go a few times since and yesterday I actually got round to looking up a helpful Youtube video, which has helped. As you can see the 'yarn' is quite lumpy but believe me it's way better than it was. It suddenly started getting almost even instead of insanely thick immediately followed by insanely thin. I was quite proud of myself and went downstairs and said to My Beloved 'I've been spinning' and he looked confused and said, 'What, your head?'  Actually my head was surprisingly unspinny while I was spindling. The same cannot be said for the Powerhoop class I was at this morning - all those hoops spinning round and round and round did not help my balance issues :-D. Apparently I looked like a rabbit in the headlights. Hmm.

This evening, while watching last night's Top Gear, I've been going on with the yellow stripey thing, which I should have finished by now as we're onto Green (March/April) in the Project Rainbow spectrum, but there you go, these things happen. I should never have tried to knit it while watching engrossing subtitled Danish crime drama last week!  Talking of which, slightly tangentially, the next thing to get excited about is Shetland (showing next Sunday and Monday), which I am so looking forward to, even if Douglas Henshall is nothing like my idea of Jimmy Perez. I shall be squeeing at familiar places though, and looking out for one of my friends who was an extra for a day. And no, on a clear day you cannot see Norway..

Green things happenin' in the garden

 Look! I'm growing light-bulbs!

Oh, okay, they're snowdrops. I find white flowers very difficult to photograph, especially in sunlight. These have mostly popped up in the last week. I like snowdrops but they're so small and white that they don't make much impact in the garden.  So I'm hoping that these..

and these..

 .. are something yellow. I can't remember what bulbs I planted where so it'll all be a pleasant surprise if and when they flower.

 These are the first tiny leaves of apple-mint:

Stuff is happening in my garden. At some point over the winter I always think that Nothing Will Ever Grow Again, but it mostly does.

The more of this the better!

The downside of clear blue skies of course is cold frosty nights and scraping the car in the morning, but I can live with that to get some sunshine in February. And as it's nearly the end of February (where does the time go etc) I'm starting to think about what I want to do with the garden this year. I want sunflowers again - we grew some a couple of years ago but none last year, and I do like the vertical interest they provide, as the gardening books say. In other words my garden is a small rectangle so I need tall things in it. And I like cheerful flowers! And the kids enjoyed growing ridiculously tall flowers.

I want cosmos this year as well. I grew some by accident last year (they were in a flower seed mix I think) and they were beautiful. And poppies, I like poppies. Dad gave me a whole lot of poppy seeds so that's a good start. And I want loads of nasturtiums. I might even grow some veg again this year.  Right, I'm off to look at seed company websites and request catalogues!

Another nice thing

Another nice thing about this time of year is that cut daffodils are so cheap. Usually I feel guilty about buying flowers when they don't last long, even though I know the psychological boost makes the occasional bunch (or in the depths of winter, a regular bunch) worth every penny. At heart I am indeed a stingy Scot, so when it's 99p for a generous bunch of daffs, giving me sunshine in the house, it makes me very happy indeed!  And they're all the better of course when actual sunshine is bouncing off them!

Do you like my jar vases? Most of my vases (oops, Mr.Collins-ing again) are quite tall and/or narrow-necked which doesn't suit short sturdy bunches of daffs, but jars work quite well and suit the casual nature of daffodils I think. I particularly like the one the daffs on the left are in. It contained stir-fry sauce of some type I think and looked very dull with its label on, but now that that's been removed I think it's an interesting shape.