New laptop!

I haven't disappeared. I've been trying to buy a new laptop and finally succeeded on the third attempt, after spending a week with a fraud alert on my bank account (as the Man at the Bank said on the phone, "you don't normally spend several hundred pounds with Dell computers, so it looked like suspicious activity"!!) Presumably if I bought a new laptop every month it would have been fine...

Then there were a few problems with my bank address (home) not matching my delivery address (work) but finally Claudius (the new laptop) arrived on Friday! I am half swopped over from Caligula (the old laptop), as I haven't had time yet to sit down and sort out which files are going where, or install the software for my printer, phone and scanner, but soon I will be embarking on a wonderful new world of being able to access my email and Flickr at home, able to post pics onto Ravelry without everything crashing and other similar exciting activities.

I'm waiting for a swop parcel to make its way across the Atlantic to its recipient before I post pics of the finished item(s) so I'll leave you with pics of the two wash mitts I made as Christmas presents:

Slow stashing

I just read the article on "Slow stashing" on Knitters' Review. Excellent plan! I don't want to stop buying yarn completely, and I don't want to *just* knit from my stash, even though I'm aiming to do a lot of that this year.

Has anyone else read "Lark Rise to Candleford"? I've almost finished it and have really enjoyed it (it's January's book at my reading group). I didn't see the first series of it due to the people I was lodging with and their monopoly on the TV.

This Christmas I learnt...

... that garlic crushers and Play-Doh make fantastic "hair". And purple and yellow Play-Doh mushed together make a muddy colour.

How much I've missed having a cat around. Sweep arrived from the rescue place to keep my Mum company a week before Christmas and is settling in well (apart from being terrified by my nephews). All attempts to convince him that he'd love to live in a small flat in Slough rather than a large house with garden in Lincoln have so far failed...


There were baby monkeys present at the birth of Christ. (I'm not convinced about this one, but Monkey said it was true).

And the frost on the top of my car looks very pretty. And I might not have been late for work if I'd got on with scraping it off the windscreen rather than taking photos of it.

I haven't read any blogs for over a fortnight - I had very limited internet access over the Christmas holiday and my laptop is really on its last legs now! However, a new one should be en route to me as I type!

Where did November go?

Eeek, it's the end of November and I'm not sure where the time went!

We've been frantically busy at work this month. In fact, I've hardly done any of the Thing that is supposed to be the Main Part of my job. I've really enjoyed (almost) every day, there is so much happening and so much that's new to try out but it's only just dawned on me that the reason I'm no longer capable of staying awake after 10pm may have something to do with all this! Anyway, things should calm down fairly soon. One of my colleagues was off sick for 10 days so I've been covering for her. I also got to courier Something Large to an exhibition at the Bodleian. Which was also fun. I'd never couriered for an exhibition before and it was really cool watching them get all set up and watching my Large Object being installed. And I got to travel in the courier van (I was a bit sad it wasn't a lorry as I was hoping to up my street cred with the nephew sprogs by showing them pics of me in a lorry) . The exhibition is called "Hallelujah, the British Choral Tradition" if anyone has an urge to go and see it.

And I finished my portfolio! That's what's been taking up time in the evening and at weekends. It's currently being proofread by one of my colleagues so sometime this week I'll get it back, make some changes, print out three copies, get them bound, parcel them up with a cheque for a ridiculous amount of money and post the whole lot off to CILIP to be assessed! Does CILIP not realise that there is yarn out there to be bought with money, rather than sending it off for some stupid assessment?!

I'm very behind with blog reading (again), mainly caused by people doing NaBloPoMo, which appears to have been designed to make me feel guilty about keeping up with blogs (but then I have enjoyed reading the NaBloPoMo posts I've read, I've just got a lot to catch up with), but also by my laptop, which has taken to crashing at every possible opportunity, and not just when using Yahoo and Flickr as it did before... The laptop replacement fund is in action though, and I am busily working out the cheapest time to buy a new one. Fortunately, when I had my car serviced this month, it didn't need any new tyres, which I had been anticipating having to buy, which means the laptop can now be bought sooner!!

Unfortunately the two projects I'm working on at the moment are for swops, so I can't really post pics of them. I also haven't taken any pics of them anyway as the light is so bad. So there aren't any pics to see. I did just try to upload a picture of the basil growing on my windowsill (on the grounds that a pictureless post is boring) but the laptop crashed Again, so I'm giving up on pics for the time being.