E-bay Sales

For anyone interested I've got a load of books now on e-bay and ID is knitknotknut.

How amazing

is it that because some people sit on their backsides all day just twiddling their fingers that they seem to think everyone else does too!

Is there a point?

I

realise its been quite some time since my last post and that I have become quite a stranger in these parts but I have not been at home much. My calendar has been like this

28 Feb / 1 March - Newcastle for the weekend looking at locations for the Knitting & Crochet Guild's 2010 AGM weekend.

5 Mar / 8 March - Glasgow for the ICHF show on the UKHandKnitting Association's Learn to Knit Stand

12 Mar / 15 March - Birmingham for the ICHF show on the Learn to Knit Stand

18 Mar / 22 March - London Olympia for the Twisted Thread show on the UKHandKnitting Association's Learn to Knit Stand.

So I have been at home long enough to wash behind my neck and change toothbrushes. Things have been a bit hiccuped between the shows as well. On the Tuesday after Birmingham I got up in the morning to a somewhat cold (for me) cottage. I felt the radiator and it was stone cold. I went and checked the boiler and the pilot had gone out and wouldn't relight. I walked along to the bus stop at the end of my road whilst on hold to British Gas. I rang them and explained the problem and they said that they would get an emergency engineer out to check it, open all doors and windows, don't use electrics etc and he would be there within the hour despite my saying I could smell no gas. When he eventually turns up he checks everything and says that the pilot is electronic and I would need to get a normal engineer out as he only deals with emergency leaks. I then ring British Gas again and they say that they will get someone out that day before 1pm. 12.30pm arrives along with a telephone call. The engineer is running late and it will be 2pm. 2.15pm arrives along with the late engineer with no apologies. He spends about 5 minutes looking at our boiler and then 20 minutes on the 'phone to one of his colleagues about a different job. When he finished the telephone call he finally finishes the job in hand and has the boiler working again. He also recommended that we have the system flushed which would cost the delightful sum of £530 but would guarantee it for life (on an 11 year old boiler which nobody else has recommended for the past six years that gets serviced twice a year).

Then when I was in London I developed chronic toothache. I managed to control it with a combination of Ibuprofen and Paratamol and am most surprised I didn't jangle with the amount of pills. On the Monday morning on the way in to work I telephoned my dentist to arrange an emergency appointment. I asked for "the last available appointment" to be replied with "we don't have any afternoon appointments". So I ask "what is the last available appointment you have then". I was told 9.40am. At this I walk from the side of the train station I am already on to the other to catch a train home.

I get home and pottering around I heard dripping from behind the washing machine. I drag the washing machine out and find that the pipe is leaking. Now give me a computer or a knitting needle and I am in my element. Give me a piece of DIY and I have got as much chance as a chocolate teapot! Well I turned the inlet pipe off (I know that much) and go up to the dentist.

My dentist had a prod around and took some x-rays. Whilst I was waiting I popped outside and range the shop of the chap who unblocked the machine after the MonsterMog episode. She said it could be either the washer or the pipe itself.

I then went back into the dentist and was told (after the x-rays had developed) that the root was dying (do you believe I typed dyeing first!) and it would have to be removed. He then asked "you're not allergic to penicillin are you?" to which I put him ephatically right that I am and that he could prescribe me pencillin but not sure that I would need an extraction appointment if he did. He then gave me an alternative prescription and I toddled back down the hill home.

When I got home I checked the washing machine which I had turned off at the inlet pipe andfound it still dry. I popped into the shop of the plumbeer whilst I was waiting for antibiotics to be made up and had a discussion with them. The sister reckoned that it was the pipe from the machine to the main plumbing that I needed to change. One 'phone call to MM to discover whether he had the "technical" expertise needed to which he said yes I bought a new pipe. I got home that night and gave him the pipe to change it and after pulling the washing machine out he promptly tightened up the screw fitting from the pipe to the plumbing and said it was just on the loose and hasn't dripped since!

Today I popped up to Newcastle to the Pins & Needles show at the Radio Metro Arena. I have to say that it was quite an odd sensation going to a show as a visitor rather than being on a stand especially when I knew so many of the retailers there. I have to admire the people that are there for the entirety of a show as it is held in an ice rink so the cold/damp seeps up through the floor despite inch thick wooden flooring and carpeting :( I didn't come away empty-handed though as I did buy some buttons for the cardigan I am knitting and will post a picture as soon as I locate them in my knitting bag along with my camera.

The rest of this weekend is now going to be spent tidying up as Ethyl and youngest brother descend on us on Monday for a fortnight for the easter break. Am hoping that they have decided where they want to go over than "Last Of The Summer Wine" country and the "National Film and Television Institute Museum" as tourist attraction wise I've gone a blank!

Foreign climbs

requiring my passport and funny money here I come.

I'm missing in action and back on Monday!

Big Read

This meme is originally from the Big Read. Apparently they reckon most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:

Look at the list and bold those you have read.

Underline those you intend to read.

Italicise the books you LOVE.

Post your list so we can try and track down these people who've only read 6 and force books upon them.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6. The Bible

7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare

15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18. Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger

19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20. Middlemarch - George Eliot

21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34. Emma - Jane Austen

35. Persuasion - Jane Austen

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41. Animal Farm - George Orwell

42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50. Atonement - Ian McEwan

51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52. Dune - Frank Herbert

53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding

69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72. Dracula - Bram Stoker

73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75. Ulysses - James Joyce

76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78. Germinal - Emile Zola

79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80. Possession - AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87. Charlotte's Web - EB White

88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94. Watership Down - Richard Adams

95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Ooops.....I spoke too soon

I was making great headway yesterday with my SP's outfit until I got out the tape measure. Turns out I'd overshot myself by 4"so am having to unpick row by row :( Above is a picture of the yarn knitted up and although its not my colour palette I am enjoying the outcome.