Mothlady

Furry creatures

First of all, thank you for your kind words on my previous post. I really appreciate them. Bettina was diagnosed with chronic renal failure about ten years ago and we knew it was a steadily progressive disease, but it still came as a shock how quickly her condition deteriorated in the end. We're just sorry she got to spend only a little over three weeks in our new home. She loved the backyard garden and went for walks on leash, even on the last day. No-one would believe she was 18 years old. If you look at the picture in my previous post, she was sixteen at the time. She got a few grey hairs and got skinnier over the years, but that was all.

Finally, here's one of my favourite pictures of her when she had been with us just a little over a month.

Notice the chewed up plant on the left, with two young cats and one kitten there wasn't a live plant in our household for years. (More cute pictures in this old entry.)

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Last week I noticed some holes in our tiny front yard and said - half-jokingly - to my SO that two animals dug such holes, rabbits and rats. He didn't pay any attention to it at the time, but on Monday morning when he was ready to leave for work, he opened the door and saw "something big and dark" (his words) scurry into the hole. He was quite shaken by the encounter and was soon contemplating between selling the house and buying a shotgun. With his *cough, cough* comprehensive knowledge of biology, I knew it could have been anything between a field mouse and a beaver, but I must admit that the idea of a RAT made me a tad nervous. A friend of ours said that it could be a water vole, which sounded much better. It's also called a water rat, but it is a vole nonetheless. I wanted to see the culprit, so for the last few days every time I've gone out, I've followed this routine: I slam open the door and eye the ground suspiciously, then I cautiously step out and stomp my feet a few times. I've had no luck yet on seeing the RAT rodent, but the neighbours are starting to eye me suspiciously. I'm sure it's just some harmless creature (who really needs to get a snorkel ASAP with the rains we've had lately, the holes are full of water), but the idea of RATS furry creatures skulking on our doorstep gives me the creeps.

Musings on work

We've moved the furniture around in the bedroom/study (we bought a new bed, too, but I will tell you more about it later) and this is what I see when I look out the window while working.

I'm very happy with my current work situation. I've got enough work to make a living, but not so much that I'm buried under it. Though I guess my idea of a workday might be quite different compared with other people. Ideally I work 4-6 hours a day, five days a week. Translation work can be at times mechanical and boring but it still requires quite a bit of creative thinking, so the longer hours I try to do, the less I get done. Less is definitely more in this business, I've done enough 16 hour days to know that.

I should probably contact other employers and clients for more work, but I'm afraid I'll end up with too much, so I'm not in a hurry to do that. Besides I like this new system of free weekends. I just did the figures for the past 12 months: I had been doing a six day week for the whole time. For someone who's in a 9-to-5 job a free weekend doesn't sound like anything special, but when you don't have regular working hours you often end up working nearly all the time. You know, an hour here and an hour there, seven days a week. I'm still not up with the larks (never have, never will) and it's more probable that I'll get my work done at 4 AM rather than 4 PM, but at least now I'm enjoying my free weekends.

Well, I wasn't actually enjoying myself last night. SO is spending the weekend with his parents (they have a tiny island) and he left yesterday afternoon. It was getting late and I hadn't heard from him, so I decided to send him a text message. When I got no answer, I tried to call him but he didn't answer. Half a dozen phone calls and messages later I still hadn't been able to reach him, so I began to worry that something had happened. Although knowing his absentmindedness I suspected it would be just a case of male idiocy. Finally, this morning the phone rang and he explained that he had put the cell phone in his knapsack and then forgotten to check new calls and messages. In his knapsack? Hello! This is the same person who has the cell phone glued to his ear at home, and if you wish to speak to him in person the phone probably has to be surgically removed from him. Men! Grrr...

Oh, I almost forgot. We had a thunderstorm yesterday.

But it's still too hot to knit (34 C/93F), so that will have to wait until later tonight.

Weather report, Pt. 2

Twig left this comment on the last post:

Wow does it often get that warm in the summer? Of course, to me, 85 F is a perfect temperature.

Yes, it was actually 85 F or 29 C degrees today, thank you very much. I know it doesn't sound too bad if you're used to hot weather, but I certainly am not. Not only is this the hottest summer in 50 years, it's also the dryest in 100 years. Oh, and I forgot to mention that our so-called air-conditioning consists of a couple of open windows and one 15 year old table fan.

I have a friend who lived in Texas for a couple of years and he said that he couldn't get used to the hot weather no matter what. They then decided to move here, so I guess the wife (who is a Texan) now has to get used to our cold and snowy winters :)

Twig also wrote:

But I do have a question. How can it be too hot to knit, but cool enough to crochet a BLANKET? Inquiring minds want to know.

Yes, that is tricky, especially now that the blanket is getting bigger. I sit on the sofa and try to push the blanket (I guess it's more of an afghan nowadays. What is the difference, by the way?) to one side. I will probably get scoliosis with this super ergonomic crocheting style.

September is perhaps my favourite month, and now there's another reason to enjoy it: the St Brigid Knitalong starts on Sept. 1 (thanks Twig, I hadn't heard of this). St Brigid has been on my to-do list for a long time and I will definitely join the group if I find the right yarn. That sweater is such a classic that I wouldn't want to muck it up with the wrong yarn. So a visit to my LYS will be the next step. Is anyone else thinking of joining the KAL?

Like a fish on dry land

I was planning to have an unusually long summer vacation, five or six weeks altogether, but it didn't turn out quite as expected. I spent the whole June doing the last bits of work for the idiot employer, then we were away for two weeks, and as soon as we got back I got the flu. It still wasn't too bad because I had four and a half weeks off, which is my longest vacation ever. But...

We've had the hottest summer in 50 years. Every freaking day it's been between 27 and 32 C degrees (81-90 F). Every. freaking. day. Except when it's even hotter. Which means I'm hot, I'm cranky and I'm constantly running out of clean T-shirts. The last time we had rain was in June (only once and it lasted maybe five minutes). The leaves of the trees are freakishly brown and everyone's really tanned (all except me, I was a redhead as a child). I'm constantly dehydrated, and vacuuming the apartment is a real PITA. Of course it's nice to have hot weather, but this is just too much. A walk in the park? Too hot. Knitting? Too hot. A visit to the gallery/museum/friend/restaurant I planned way back in May? TOO HOT.

To make matters worse, there's been some forest fires and the smoke gets here even though the fires are 300 kilometres from here. It's especially bad in the mornings when I feel like I'm in Pollution City. Even though I don't have asthma or anything, the tiny particles in the air are affecting my lungs in a bad way.

So I guess it's no wonder that lately I've been glued to the sofa watching the European Athletics Championships and crocheting the blanket.

It's very monotonous soothing for my zombie brain. The body part of the cotton sweater is finished, and I bought the dpns for the sleeves.

You can find the original pattern here. It's in Swedish, but they have a good dictionary and some of the patterns are in English. And no, I'm not doing the flowers!

Bettina's reluctant to leave her cotton bed, and I can't blame her.

What is up with Bloglines?

Is it just me or has Bloglines acted strangely lately? They said that there shouldn't be any phantom posts or duplicates because it's actually people doing some alterations on their posts, but nearly every time somebody posts something, Bloglines tells me there's three new posts. Or five. Or ten. Even if there isn't any new post to begin with. Very confusing.

Anyway, I'm down to 478 unread posts now (from 560). I'm stupid enough such a stubborn person determined to read them all. It's actually quite fun to read 60 a lot of entries by one and the same blogger.

While I'm on the subject of blogs, let me just say this: I want to be Norma when I grow up. I, too, want to have a house and a garden. Quite often she tells us that she's got so much work that she won't be able to blog for some time. Of course she then blogs the very next day. Or she writes the posts in advance. If I didn't like her blog so much, I would have to hate her, you know? I mean, if I'm buried under work, blogging is the last thing on my mind. And she does yoga as well. I tried Pilates for the first time yesterday and chose Pilates for Dummies because it was supposed to be an "easy-to-follow workout". Now I feel like somebody beat my back with long sticks. Rolling like a ball and open leg rocker are easier said than done.

Norma also posts great pictures of her garden. I saw an oystercatcher for the first time in my life on Tuesday, in our backyard. It's a funny-looking bird with an orange beak, so I knew at once what it was. I rushed to get my camera, pressed the zoom button and heard the familiar whirring sound. Except it wasn't the sound of the zoom coming out, it was the camera shutting itself off. The battery was dead, the bird got scared of the noise and hopped slowly away. But it really was there, the oystercatcher. Right in our backyard. Just a few meters from our balcony. *sigh*

Just to show you that I haven't gone all cuckoo (pun intended), here's a little something I started on Wednesday with a cotton/polyamid yarn.

I intend to finish this sweater as soon as possible. It will come handy on those long, cool August nights when I'll be waiting for that bird to return. Just me and my camera. And possibly some knitting, if I venture to loosen my grip on the camera.

Green explosion

After a very long and cold spring we've had a week of sunshine and hot weather. The trees have exploded into lovely shades of green.

Not a cloud in the sky.

We'll bring down the summer chairs from the attic and then I can knit on the balcony, yay!