This week I am mostly reading...

So with the fibre blahs ( as The Sherriff so aptly calls it) still firmly in place despite the fact that I have merino waiting to be spun into Christmas pressies which normally would have sent me into a whirlwind of pleasant activity...
I have instead plumped for putting up my still baddie leg and reading delightful trash. This is good trash though. A bit like Turkish Delight, you know that there is no content but sugar in there and you know that really it is doing you no good, but oh it is just so very tasty. The lit snob in me was shrieking the entire time I was read this - about six hours, yes it is that lite. But then who wants Dostoyevski all the flippin' time? Not this bunny. (I've never actually read Dostoyevski. I have always wanted to, but I take his books out of the library and then discover that my eyebrows need plucking or I have to paint the bathroom etc etc)

So, here we have exotic, wild and beautiful settings; New Orleans, Paris and the Highlands of Scotland and exotic, wild and beautiful creatures; too many to mention but the cast include vampires, werewolves, Valkyries (no less) and some wraiths. As an honourable mention, a Valkyrie is a creature I could really get behind, not like the rather prissy LOTR elves...Aragorn is another matter entirely but I digress.
Ahem...

Ah yes. There is the obligatory devastatingly handsome hero and the stunningly beautiful heroine so far so ho hum. But he is a werewolf and she is a vampire cross valkyrie (some girls have all the luck) and this little tale is their adventures across half the globe: she escaping all kinds of stuff by the skin of her teeth and he literally fighting the hordes of hell for his lady fair. The way I am feeling right now, this piece of mental bubblegum really hits the spot. I love a hero. I loved the way Cole described desperation of loss and I loved the (occasional quite literal) tooth and nail fight for love.
The pace is very fast, the (rather gory) fight scenes lucid, the sex scenes... umm raunchy might be an appropriate desciption and there is fairly liberal use of the f word too. Altogether a book that a good Christian woman might think twice about reading. And I did think twice about it too and then I went ahead and bought it. And now I am going to go and buy the sequels because sneers aside, this is a damn fine tale and there is nothing wrong with that in my book.

Friday Fiver

1. What do you resent?
Mostly, being awake when everyone else is asleep. Knowing that I will spend the day feeling bloodless and awful and will probably have insomnia the coming night too.

2. What is your most recent occupation?
I am a mum, that is a career. Last paid work was as a sheltered housing warden

3. What are you presently wearing?
muslin nightie and fleece robe

4. What presents have you bought?
lots, but they are a secret.

5. Whose presence would you enjoy tonight?
I miss Tom


Another sleepless night and while looking for things with which to entertain myself, I realised that I had missed the Friday fiver. I will move it to Friday later on.

Bad day for Eden...

Eden plays with rubbish...we have more toys than we can shake a stick at and she likes to play with empty yogurt cartons. This she was doing this morning. She had a lovely time...right up until it broke, split right down the centre. And these things are sharp when they are broken, not the toy of choice for a four year old. Right? I threw it in the bin and she cried and cried and cried.

"Baby, it's broken, no good"
"Whaaaa!"
"No good, sweetheart, it would hurt you."
"Bokken?" Hiccuping sobs
"Yes, sweetie. Broken."
"Fixit?"
"I can't darling, some things just can't be fixed."

Big, big, blue eyes brim over with huge tears and my heart breaks for her over a damned yogurt pot. If only we could fix everything. A hard lesson for a four year old to learn.

On the good news I don't have DVT, which was a concern that caused much sleeplessness last night. I just have a baddie leg is all. I have to warm up properly when I dance (duh!) and take things easy for a few days. I did not laugh in the doctor's face when he told me this, hey, he had just lifted a sentence of warfarin off me, so I just about managed to keep it to a twisted grin.

It still flippin' hurts mind and there is still the niggling thought that I am banking a fair bit on one man's say so that this lump in my calf is not a clot that might not break off, get lodged in a lung and drop me dead in a cold second.
Most of my mind is content with the situation though and is very content that I do not have to go down the hospital for daily jabs of rat poison.

But if he is wrong and I do drop dead then V gets to sue the backside off the National health and becomes a very rich widower indeed.
See? There are silver linings everywhere!

I wonder...

I don't often blog personal stuff. Apart from my ongoing battle with insomnia that I mention so often, I can't remember the last time I did. But hey, death does that to you right?

Yesterday was the funeral of an old friend. She had been ill for years with a mild kind of leukemia - debilitating rather than deadly. Then all of a sudden, it mutates into the malignant kind and she is dead six weeks later. Bang. She was the same age as my husband, seven years older than me. It makes you think.
I have been fighting hard lately, fighting for stuff I should not want, making impossible demands on people. How can I be devastated when they do not give me what I want? It seems that all my adult life I have wanted more. More stuff, more challenges, more people to love me, more things to do, more things to learn. What will it take? What will it take?
I have been thinking for a long time to go and train as a nurse. The twins are going to school full time next September and this is my chance, maybe my last chance. And of course as my little ones leave for a new chapter in their lives, I am getting broody again - which is right out as far as V is concerned. And I see the rightness of it. Doesn't make it easier though, especially with the girls in church sprogging left right and centre.
So here is the question. Is this desire to get out and get nurse training a bluff for hiding broodiness? Or is it a real desire? Or is the broodiness a hiding place? If I stay at home with another baby (or two?) for another four years, I will not have to attempt the three years training that it takes to be a nurse. Also, V thinks I do not have the necessary characteristics to become a nurse. Do I ignore the opinion of a person who knows me so very well? He has lived with me for more than half my life after all.
What to do? I wonder...

There is something wrong...

I have not spun today...
Neither have I knitted,
crocheted,
felted,
or looked at yarn on the web...

and what is most worrying of all, I have not wanted to either. And it is not as if I have decided to write a book or take up roller blading or origami. I just have reached a dead end and I am finding it bizarrre.

Am I going in for something?

Sunday Scribblings - Misspent Youth

I don't know if a youth is ever misspent. Surely every experience goes into making what we are.

(Just about the shortest SS I have ever done!)

It is Love

Ebony circular 26" circular needles, size 4.5mm

Christmas is coming...hint, hint.
(Sometimes V reads my blog. It is worth try.)

Pod's Hat - phase four ...or... Return of the Hat

V says this looks like Darth is off to a hippy gig (Hippy Vader). I say that it has taken me roughly fifteen hours of work and is ab fab! (Though secretly, I agree with him). Oh well, this is what happens when you tell me amber and black -you get flames. But while the sun and comets are my fault, the basic Darth design is Pod's responsibility. So perhaps it is Pod Vader and hey, at least in no one will raise an eyebrow in church...too full of nutters there to notice even such a dashing hat as this.

I am quite chuffed really with this, it has certainly been fun to do. Thanks Pods, I'll hand it over to Dizzy this evening.
x

Blessings

I found this today.

Blessed are those who can laugh at themselves;
they will have no end of fun.

I liked that.

Happy Thanksgiving to our American friends!

Pod's hat - phase three

Well, it is done!

Apparently Pod has been watching with baited/bated (?) breath for the next installment of the hat saga. The felt has been sitting on my piano looking forlorn. I made it up and then got cold feet thinking that I would foul up the cutting somehow, but I managed and now it is recognisably a hat.

It looks a bit weird though. Kind of what Darth Vader would wear if he was a Mountain Ash Rugby Football Club supporter. But there you go. I followed my brief and it is all done bar the shouting. Hopefully they will be yells of glee rather than "What the hell do you call that?!" followed by hoots of laughter. I can hear Uncle Daisy* now...

Pics tomorrow when I can find a model that is awake



*Uncle Daisy - the name bestowed by my youngest on Dizzy's husband - as sturdy an example of Welshman that you could find in the Valleys, built like a brick privvy as they say around here and my three fairys call him Uncle Daisy. He wears it graciously.

OK Now I Know

Yes folks it is insomnia again! And you know what that means...blogthings quizzes! Yay!

You Are a Fruitcake

People pretend you're sweet and precious, but they know how weird you really are!

What Holiday Food Are You?

Friday Five

1. What's the last thing you threw away?
Coffee grounds - what a weird question

2. Have you ever been to Paris?
Yup - it is chock full of rude French people...apart from that, it is stunning.

3. What do you stare at?
Stars, candle flames

4. What do you hurry for?
Not much, but the school run is a hassle sometimes :)

5. Friday fill-in: I could have been...

a physiotherapist if it were not for a career's advisor in school who told me I needed a degree in Physics... bad advice...utterly incorrect in fact, but I believed him. Oh well...

4 things

Yes it is me again, my blood sugar is rock bottom and all I can do right now is sit in front of the 'puter and not move.
So, reading Pilgrim's blog (among others) this morning and he has a four things meme. Now I am not about to do the whole thing...but V just wandered in with second breakfast and asked me for the four best intro's to songs I know.
And here they are

• Golden Brown by The Stranglers
• Walking on Sunshine - KC and the Sunshine Band
• Take on Me - A ha
• Feelin'Good - Ella Fiztgerald

What are yours?

Belonging - Haiku

I have not done One Deep Breath for a very long time. Thanks to Patois, whose lonliness prompt was poignant, heart breaking and rather too difficult to face, I visited there again and found - belonging. Rather easier to sum up in seventeen syllables.

Safe in his warm arms,
I am his and he is mine.
Two souls, one heart beat.

This is, I know, almost unbearably sentimental, but belonging just spoke of the Song of Songs to me. I am my beloved's and he is mine. That is belonging. For other haiku check out ODB here

A Day for the Queen

That is what we used to call a day spent doing what we liked in my house when I was growing up. These days they are known as crafting days. I had Carol's company all day yesterday. She is working on a mega quilt - patchwork and it is beautiful so far and surely will be stunning when it is finished. Quilting is something that has always passed me by, like cardmaking or applique. They are all crafts that one would think I would take to - pretty little fiddly things, but there is too much design involved in it, composition and that - it is bad enough putting earrings together. Quilting would fry my poor brain to a crisp.

I spent the day working on Pod's hat as you can see from the previous post which is I confess post dated or a retrospective or what ever you call it when you fiddle with the posting options on blogger - cheating?

Anyway. It is Thursday and that means a love is all around. There have been plenty of kidling pics up here of late so I think I will post up...

Carol (sans quilt) in her Cordell costume. Taken in Blaenafon Ironworks which is where The Coal House was filmed.
Carol will not kill me for posting this up because she is a lovely person, but she will want to kill me very much indeed.

Pod's Hat - phase two

Pod has a team and that team's colours are black and amber. Amber is not a colour one gets in the Winghams catalogue. So it is out with the carders for a bit of creative blending.

This is fun, but it takes a looooooong time. Get the colour mix right, then blend, pile the batts up, split, card up, pile up, split the pile and card again. It is best to take rings off the fingers for this or else you'll get blisters! Trust me, I know.

Colours to make amber. Mostly yellow, orange and brown
but touches of others needed for depth

the blend on the carder

semi-mixed batt

finished pile of blended batts

sample of amber felt

Pod's Hat - phase one

Laying out the fibres

Add bubble wrap, hot water and soap... and a bit of elbow grease

Two pieces of fine black merino felt

The Double Portion

Today is Eden and Lily's fourth birthday.
All kinds of stories surround these pair. Here are some :

• The vision of cherries I recieved in prayer when I knew I was pregnant but had no idea of twins.
• The fact that I thought I had killed my mum when I told her over the phone that I was carrying two. That was a laugh - she went utterly silent and I thought she had had a heart attack and died.
  
• The struggle of carrying them when the docs mentioned twin transference (big problem) and then genetic growth disorders (bigger problem) to the point where the obstetrician finally mentioned "abnormalities incompatible with life" and then offered to terminate the smallest (Lily).
  

It was not the easiest or happiest of pregnancies. Thank God for the vision of perfect cherries I had when only six weeks pregnant. I hung all my faith on that, stood on it when things got very shaky indeed. And then there they were, six weeks early, tiny, and made up equal parts swansdown and whipcord - tough and kicking, so small and so vital, so vulnerable but so very strong too. They were whisked away to intensive care (Lily weighed only a little more than a bag of sugar and fitted into my double cupped hands, Eden weighed about the same as two bags of sugar and looked huge by comparison but she too was pitifully small). They stayed in the special care unit for a month in incubators and I was allowed to take them out for a cuddle and a feed and then I had to put them back quickly before they got cold. They felt like dolls I was sometimes allowed to play with. This continued until they had reached the magic weight of five pounds when they were allowed home, just in time for Christmas. Tiny but perfect and wonderfully strong and healthy. This they still are and will remain so all their lives.
I still look at them and catch myself thinking in astonishment "Twins!" and Rose too, as beautiful a big sister that you could find.

My cup runneth over. Happy Birthday babies.

And this!

Merino chunky on niddy noddy

Ah! I remember

Blue Faced Leicester "Humbug"

This is what I have been doing the last few days...this is beautiful stuff. A blend of cream, grey and brown fleeces and it is so warm made up. I shall find it hard to part with this!

Monday Again?!

Excuse me, did you see a weekend go past just now?
Bleedin'nora as they say round here. Is it Monday? And heck, it is almost tea time! I can't remember what I did with it. Hope it was good. I knew there was a reason why I kept a blog. It tells me what I have done.
I think I have slept...I am sure I have. What day is it again?

Remembering

They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
we shall remember them

There is that stillness that happens on this day and we try to absorb for those two small minutes the enormities of two world wars and the other conflicts since.
The First World War has always had a soul impact on me. The optimism with which it started and the unimaginable horror that it trailed behind it.
I went to Borders today and leafed through a book titled Faces of the First World War. a book of photographs and they left nothing out. I was transfixed...but I did not buy it, some things should not be brought home to look at you from the bookshelf, but I am glad I read it.

Yes It Is Insomnia Again!

You Are Animal

A complete lunatic, you're operating on 100% animal instincts. You thrive on uncontrolled energy, and you're downright scary. But you sure can beat a good drum. "Kill! Kill!"

The Muppet Personality Test

New Game

Wandering around Blogspace this morning, as you do and I happened across a new game. What you do is tap in your name into amazon search and see what it throws up. I had several, including an urban gothic, whatever that might be. Sounds like something they would offer you in Starbucks as part of a Halloween special, probably in a tall black mug.

I digress...

Sian Hill threw up this...written by Eric Hill and translated by Sian Lewis, see?

Spot's Toy Box (in Welsh)

I know...I have far too much time on my hands. I don't actually, but I am ignoring my chores. Hoping that the fairies will appear and wash up the steaming, fetid heap of dishes that are lurking, waiting to pounce on me as soon as I haul my sorry carcase into the kitchen.

*wailing* I don't wanna do housework!

Baby, it's cold outside!

Recipe for Mulled Wine
I have perfected this recipe over many years and I think it is as close to perfect as I'm ever going to get anything

Bottle of inexpensive red wine. ( I use the French table wine from Tescos but the Bulgarian cabernet sauvignon is good too

1 orange, sliced into half inch slices, dont use the top or bottom slice as there is too much pith in proportion to flesh and pith makes it taste bitter. (I will resist the urge to make any further comment here)

Brandy or port or sherry in order of preference. If you want to make falling down water then use all three. Fill a large mug half full with chosen plonk - Tesco's own tawny port is lovely for this - and top up to full with water. Add another mug of water or else you'll be asleep by eight.

Soft brown sugar to taste. I use about 1 or 2 tablespoons. Don't use too much or else it will start to taste medicinal, weird I know but there it is.

5 cloves
1 large cinnamon stick. Tap the stick very gently with a wooden spoon. It releases the scent of the spice into the wine.
1 decent sized piece of whole dried ginger root. This can be difficult to get hold of. I got mine in a health food shop in Aberystwyth, Do not be tempted to use powdered ginger, it clouds the wine and it hangs around on the tongue too. If you cant get it whole dried, use fresh (peeled) but then make it a large piece.

Put all the ingredients in a large sauce pan and heat very gently until steam starts to curl slowly from the pan. Strain and serve in heat proof glasses.

DON'T DRINK THIS AND DRIVE AS IT IS STRONG STUFF!

Roasted chestnuts are the desired accompaniment with this but gingerbread is good too.

Tired

Too tired to write much tonight. Been dancing in church, got a lovely pressie from Dizzy for the shrugs which were their own reward to work but still it was a beautiful thought - Thanks Dizzy :) and I recieved design info for the commision from POD - a hat, yay! That means a fibre order to Winghams tomorrow and spinning with a purpose again - love it.

Went to see Stardust last night - oh what a fantastic film. I think I will go and see it again before too long and it is a definate must for the DVD collection when it is out. A proper fairy story: true love, evil, beauty, a handsome hero, murder, escapes, pirates, oh so pretty costumes, sword fights, adventure and rescue. You just can not beat a recipe such as that ...and the ending is a classic. Go and see it with someone you love.

When Spinning is a Chore

Get the beads out...

mess, but good mess

Finish with dragonflies

And weird tutti frutti earrings

The Chore

Shetland Lace weight

Man! This stuff is fine! And that takes some spinning. I have about 85 grams of this fibre and I reckon I have about 45 g left to spin up. Perhaps another week of spinning evenings.

Sorry

I just could not resist. Apparently it is an art installation in London being... um...installed?
Thanks to Hedgewizard for the pic that made me laugh til I had to mynd i'r ty bach

Sara in her Shrug

The light was abysmal for pics and my camera was playing up. That is why Dizzy is looking so pale, not because she has been through hospital hell with her precious baby for the last month.

Friday Five

1. What is sweet?
honey and the back of my kids necks always smell delicious

2. What hours do you work?
Hey, I'm a mum... I'm on call 24/7

3. When do you relax?
does not compute...error, please re boot and try again

4. How did you learn about the birds and the bees?
This reminds me of the Les Dawson quote of the young man who had ambitions to become a sex maniac but failed the practical.

5. Friday fill-in:
The good vibes flow ____.

I would have thought that good vibes vibrate actually... pedantic? Little me?

Thursday - Love is All Around

Show this girl a camera and she poses. I wonder sometimes...