Stuff

Thank you for all the emails and messages I've had checking that I'm OK, whilst the riots were going on this country. I was really touched! It was all a bit bizarre really, as I saw all the riot footage on the news and some of my work colleagues had an unpleasant time getting home on a couple of days, but I didn't see any sign at all of any trouble. I saw a lot of the reaction to it, the upset when friends saw shops they'd used and loved for years burnt down. And the sense of unreality about what was going on.

I followed a link on Ravelry to this blog post about someone's commute to work - she walks across a fairly historic part of London to get to work, with lots of landmarks to photograph. My journey isn't quite as exciting, but these are the highlights(?). It isn't normally as quiet as this, but a lot of people are on holiday as it's August.

Cycle/footpath on the way to the station:

Walking through the town centre:

Empty seats (!) on the train. These usually fill up at the next few stations!

The station, first thing in the morning. Yawn.

Hordes of commuters at London Waterloo, waiting for the train to come in (we are such Super Commuters we know which platform it is, even before the train is announced!). Always entertaining when they change the platform at the last minute and everyone stampedes back the way they came...

 Trains racing out of Waterloo.

Hmm. That's not really very exciting at all.

More exciting was extracting my tent from the garage and putting it up in the garden to check it's OK for the festival I'm going to in a fortnight's time.

 Considering that I got it when I was 15 it's doing pretty well. Which reminds me that, now I'm of advanced years, getting an air mattress to sleep on might be a good idea. Really looking forward to going to Greenbelt. As usual, loads of great speakers I want to hear, and I seem to have volunteered for teaching knitting one evening too. I've taken a couple of days off work either side of the weekend to travel there and to sleep afterwards and do the washing (hmm, in my younger days I used to be able to stay up all night then go into work the next day no problem whatsoever. Don't think I want to try that now). I really am turning into an Old Fart.

And this is the OH's jumper. As you can see, I'm nearly there now, just one sleeve to go so I should have plenty of time to get it finished before I go to Greenbelt, as it's his birthday immediately afterwards! This has been a really enjoyable knit, nice pattern with clear instructions, and he's been able to try it on as we go because it's on circulars. And my interchangeable knitting needles have been excellent - I've been able to switch between sleeves and leave things on the cables using the end things whilst I waited to cast off until he could try it on.

I suppose I could have edited my foot out of the photo, but those are some of my sheep socks. And they're cool.

Garden at the beginning of August

I'm a week late this time, which is what comes of 1st August being a Monday and then going out several nights last week. I didn't go online much last week as I was out three evenings so am now frantically trying to get caught up with emails, blogs etc.

In the big picture I don't think the garden has changed that much. I've pulled up the sweet peas as I didn't keep on top of dead-heading them so they went to seed, plus looked rather manky! But the sunflowers are now in flower.

They're not huge ones, but it's probably the rocky start they had in life with very hot temperatures early on in the year. We've also had some beautiful gladioli come up - these were from a free offer in the paper.

And a bit of a squirrel problem. There is a huge walnut tree in the garden that backs onto ours and the squirrels have been assaulting it much earlier this year than last. If you go outside all you can hear is loud chomping noises from high up in the tree.

 And, as squirrels have no table manners whatsoever, bits of half-eaten walnut come raining down and end up all over the lawn, where they have to be raked up, else they clog up the lawn mower. Of course, the squirrels are also too thick to realise that they've now eaten most of next winter's food supply...

One of my evenings out last week was a trip over to ShinyNewThing who wanted to swop some of her sock yarn. I was keen on it as it's solid or semi-solid which should show up some stitch patterns nicely, so swopped it for a couple of balls of variegated sock yarn in my stash.

This is a skein of I knit or dye superwash merino sock and a skein of Natural Dye Studio Nymph (70% British Blue faced Leicester, 20% silk, 10% cashmere).

I had a great evening looking at her dollshouses (which were really cool, I should have taken some photos!) and she also gave me some windfall apples from her garden.

Combined with some rhubarb and raspberries from our garden, I made some of them into a crumble:

That's all for now. I've only got 2 evenings out next week so might get more time to catch up on blog reading soon...