Never a dull moment

Friday afternoon at home.  My Hero and I are sitting at our computers, getting on with our respective business.

“Listen, do you hear water dripping?” says he. “Mmmm….sounds unusual.  I wonder where it’s coming from?” (gazes up at ceiling)

“Not in here” I reply, peering into the laundry, “and not in here” as I look into the cloakroom. “I’d better look upstairs”.

“Nothing up here either”

Strange.

The drip gets louder and the first one hits the floor at our feet.  Within ten seconds it’s pouring from the ceiling so I run and grab a washing up bowl and a towel, whilst he runs to turn the water off at the stopcock.

I am on the phone to the builder, who assures me that someone will be here within minutes.

My Hero removes the panel from the ceiling, and once the deluge is over, notes that the water is not coming from a pipe but from the room above.  I run upstairs to look and discover a corner of the kitchen under an inch of water.

It’s the fridge. Again.

As we turn off the water supply to the fridge and mop up the water, a call from downstairs comes from the builder who’d raced to our aid, bless him.  We can reassure him that we’ve identified the problem, have turned off water and have more or less got the situation under control.  Having ensured that there’s nothing further he can do for us he returns to wherever he’d come from and leaves us to look at one another and call the repair people.

Eleven and a half months since they last came.

Thank goodness I blogged!

What’s new?

It’s been quiet around here in the last few days.  Not that there’s been a lack of things going on, just that most of it hasn’t been bloggable.

I’m enjoying an online class, mostly for fun but also with a fair bit of professional interest.  Jessica Sprague and Heidi Swapp’s “Mouse Paper Scissors” is an interesting combination as the title suggests and the quality of both class materials and teaching is first class.  So far, I’m soldiering on without the box of goodies which accompanies the course – hopefully the postman will deliver that sooner rather than later.

Anyway, my Photoshop knowledge and skill level is increasing daily and I like what I’m doing.  Hooray!

The potential photo of the day above, (which didn’t make it in the end) represents a whole new saga we’ve been writing here.  The story of the Indian Visas is turning into something of a lengthy tale and the gleeful reaction of the owner of the small photo shop in Cirencester rather revealing.  Since we were last in India, the regulations have changed and now, the visa application needs to be accompanied by two photographs of passport quality but each measuring 2” square.  Home produced digital printouts are generally not accepted because of the paper quality, we were advised, so we spent £16 to get the real thing.  What good business for photo suppliers big and small!

In the meantime, my hero has completed around half a dozen of the long and very detailed application forms, each requiring information of our parents’ birth, our travel history during the last few years and more or less everything else about us apart from our glove size.

Whilst he’s been form filling, I’ve been doing a little bit of therapeutic crochet.  Following the French pattern has introduced some challenges but I’m pretty much ok now with the “mailles” and “brides”.  However, I’ve not concentrated enough to establish the pattern in my brain yet and could simplify the process somewhat by translating a brief summary of the pattern on a small card. In English.

Then finally, finally,  I thought it about time I recycled nearly ten years of minutes, agendas and other paper associated with various work I’ve done, thinking that if no-one else keeps a record of this, then hard luck.  I’ve not referred to any of this in ages but “sure as eggs are eggs” (as my Mum would have said)  I’ll bet that someone will ask me if I have one of those papers in the next few weeks.  In that case, I shall say “tough!”

Needless to say, it took less time to refill that space with other stuff.

Fortunately, in between all of that, the sun has shone and there was time to enjoy  lunch with an old friend and colleague, attend a terrific concert with friends last night and go for some good walks in the village.  This morning, the Bergenias in one of the gardens down our lane were stunning – ours are still in bud and not quite in this league yet!

So that’s that.  Life. 

Isn’t it fun?!

and home by bedtime

I didn’t quite expect to travel so far today.  We’ve got exciting travel plans on the horizon but today was to be spent at home mostly.  It was only as I settled down in the late afternoon with a crochet hook in hand that I realised how far I’d been.

I began here.  Somewhere in Yorkshire. Aaah.

A couple of hours passed but that lovely crochet scarf/shawl wouldn’t go out of my mind.  I returned to my desk and pinned it to my Pinterest board in the category “I could do this – could I do this?” – because as some will know, I am not the most confident of crocheters.

I returned to Yorkshire and followed the link to France.  An interesting tour followed en francais before l hopped over a few countries to Japan, to find the book. 

Finally, I found myself in the USA, because my linguistic skills do not match my aspirations when it comes to crochet.

The result?

That strategically placed ball of yarn hides all kinds of sins.  But hey, who’s going to be examining it closely?

(you never know ;-) )

48 more flowers to crochet.

Of course, I had to come home via Bristol, to buy yarn, too. 

Update on Sunday, February 13, 2011 at 7:52PM by Gill Thomas

I was taught well.

Look.

A full life

I was reading a blog the other day which discussed answers to the question “what do you do?”.  I recall experiencing this very dilemma myself when we first moved to Gloucestershire,  27 years ago this New Years Eve.  Still looking for a job in the area, I soon tired of people asking me what did I do?  If I answered (truthfully) “I’m a teacher”, then the question would immediately come “Oh, where?”  If I said (also truthfully) that I was unemployed, I would receive either a pitying look or be challenged about why I wasn’t spending every waking minute in the queue at the Job Centre.

Because, of course, I didn’t want to say that actually, fingers crossed, I was pregnant.

Some time later, a friend and I cooked up the perfect answer between us.  If anyone asked us what we did, we’d simply answer “Nothing”.  That usually wrong footed the enquirer who often responded  “But surely…”, offering a fine chance to clarify with details of being a full time mother, volunteer, creator of this and that and all round busy person.

But I must say, I rather like the answer “I lead a full life”.

I am also a creature of habit, so here we are, the first Sunday in December and my Hero is going off to his Sunday rehearsal prior to the choir’s concerts at the end of the week.  Tradition demands two dozen mince pies and finding that I’ve taken more or less the same shot of the mince pies for at least two years running, my photo of the day today shoes the casualties, the “cook’s perks”.  Very good they were, too. 

Did you spot the glitter?  The house is glitter-central this week, with twinkles in all kinds of surprising places.  That on the mince pies is the edible variety, which my friend Kelsie, of The Sugar Box assures me has been very on trend since Kirsty Allsopp sprinkled it on her mince pies last year.  Well, we can’t allow ourselves to allow these fancies to pass us by here in the sticks – and in today’s bright sunshine, it’s very effective, too.

Oh, and there are three Christmas cakes in the oven too.

Duh

Not only have I misplaced my knitting mojo, I appear to have also lost my common sense.  My apologies to my friends who've left comments recently, which I seem to have inadvertently deleted irreversibly.

Now who's feeling pleased with herself?  Not me.