A little time out to mourn the passing of an era

When I was mad an exercise my therapists were fond of and I loathed was "Putting things on a scale of 1-10 where 10 is where everyone you love is dead". My reaon for loathing this exercise was that it seemed obvious to me that if all my loved ones had just died I wouldn't be in whatever situation would cause me to panic because I'd be at home grieving. But depsite this I do recognise that it has its moments.

Let us for a moment consider orange squash. I assure you this is not a deviation. When I was weaned off mother's milk I was put onto orange squash. Robinsons Special R orange squash with no added sugar. It was orange. It came in a bottle with a blue cap. It was good stuff. Over the years Robisons decided to try out the occasional new recipe but somehow my love for it always managed to see the silver lining in this dark grey cloud of marketing and find something to love about each new slight variation that came along. Until now. Now Robinsons has discontinued Special R and replaced it with.....Robinsons no added sugar Orange. Yuk. And believing the picture on waitrose's website and ordering what I thought may well turn out to be some of the last stocks of it surviving on the planet I thereby ended up with 6 litres of the yuk being delivered to my house last night. Thank goodness I decided that any more than 6 might seem a bit unseemly.

So here we come back to the exercise - this is obviously a disaster. Not only do I not have any special r, I now have 6 litres of yuk. Also I squandered what turn out to be my last ever glass of special r thinking I had another 6 litres to go. How could I? So you can see that for me it goes in at roughly an 8 on the scale.

I have emailed Robinsons and asked them to reconsider but just got a standard reply saying my comments would be passed to the brand manager. 'Woe is me' doesn't even come close....

Has it come to this?

I was cruising for a bit of tv action when I came across "The Most Annoying Pop Moments We Hate to Love" at 7pm today on bbc4. Not only that, but this was episode 5. The mind boggles. By the time you get through episodes 1-4 what can still be left to cringe over? And as if it's not bad enough that they've gone through every conceivable "100 greatest/worst (insertnamehere)" in the last 12 months on british tv we now have entire series built out of these ghastly things.

Pooch is out tonight so I was resolved to put my feet up with a decent film and what I sincerely hope will be the last of my secret project. A few sewing in of ends and it should be ready to hand over, even though it is rather late.

Before leaving work this morning I made a row counter bracelet for my secret pal. I really wish I could post a pic of it as I am really really chuffed with it but it is personalised so it would be a bit of a give away. I am almost definitely going to be teaching people to make their own row counter bracelets at SkipNorth next year. They are so cunning and yet deceptively simple to put together.

So no pictures today as it's secret knitting all the way. But soon it will be over! And then it will be knitting as far as the eye can see...

New blog alert

It has finally happened. Pooch has entered the blogosphere. Go over there and leave a comment. You just know he wants you to.

So in other news, you know how I was going on a bit about how I didn't need to buy stuff to make me happy? Well let's just reel that back in a little bit and have a little shoe-love. Now bear in mind when looking at these pics that it was *pouring* with rain in london and they are a bit on the soggy side.

These shoes....are It. Oh yeah. I love them. And I wore them for a whole day and they didn't hurt or rub or anything.

They've got a kind of little nose at the end. And most of all they are exactly the right height to wear with long length trousers.

I think their acquisition may be a direct result of my training course last week as I have been pondering the johari window. The 'unknown' 4th quadrant is said to be where all those intuitions and lucky guesses come from. I like to think it was my 4th quadrant that was picking up signals that these shoes had arrived on Oxford Street and yesterday was the optimum moment to meet up with them.

Speaking of optimum moments, let me bring some sock yarn and needles to your attention. This yummy parcel arrived last weekend after an unfortunately long stay at the post office due to their random strikes.

Now that is a rubbish photo so here is a close up of the two coloured ones.

Oh yeah, it's good. The blue/purple is 75% wool and 25% bambus, which I am choosing to believe is bamboo, and is called Admiral Bambus. The stripey is 75% wool and 25% Poly and is called Admiral R Druck. There was also a skein of undyed which I'm thinking of dyeing for my secret pal, and not 1 or 2 but 3 sets of dpns! Purple pins (which are obviously purple) and metal, hiya hiya which I have been hearing mutterings about and which are steel and some Pointy Sticks bamboo ones. The yarn is satisfyingly soft and squidgy without the slight harshness of mixed-fibre sock-yarns like trekking and opal.

The whole lot came from Knit'n'Caboodle whose tagline is rather satisfyingly "where only the sheep are fleeced" and who I see will be at Ally Pally. I can see the Admiral R Druck having a pleasant stay with me but I fully intend to share the goodies and the blue bamboo mix and some of the dpns will be the competition prize on the next podcast. Don't forget there's still time to enter the last competition...

400th post

since March 13th 2005. Almost 67,000 hits and still going strong. I've been discussing life with pooch and and co recently and feel that I've reached a point of consolidation. I no longer have the same urge to go out and shop my socks off. In "How Proust can change your life" AdeB talks about how in modern society once you're earning a certain amount there is no need to yearn for things any more because you can go out and buy them. I don't want to be big headed and sound off but I reached this point a couple of years ago. If I wanted something I could just go out and buy it. Made life a bit boring really, which probably says more about my life than it does about my earnings. Recently I have slowed down my acquisition of things and am thinking more about what, besides shopping, makes me happy. Geez, how hollow does that sound?

One of the things that does make me happen is sorting stuff out. So today I've been making lists and thinking about things that need sorting out. I've set myself a deadline of ally pally to get the proudtobecrafty.co.uk website sorted out and the spreadshirt shop finished and ready to be publicised. I'm planning to make the PTBC website into more of a portal so not just for Skip Holidays but also for the podcast and also as a distro for crafty bits and pieces I and others want to sell. I've also been talking to Pooch about restarting the zine as I did like doing it - but that depends on making a decision about whether to continue with the MBA which is a whole other can of worms.


But there has definitely not been enough knitting content in this post so a little teaser for you - SkipNorth will definitely be taking place in 2008 and the dates are Friday 7th March - Sunday 9th. I will be letting the SkipHolidays yahoo group know first when Nic and I finalise the price. It will still be well below the £200 mark but costs have risen this year so be prepared for a bit of a hike.