Arg.

My PC seems to be on a mission to convince me to buy a Mac. Yes yes, I'm sure there will be lots of enthusiastic support for that idea, but really I wasn't planning on buying a new computer less than three years after this one. Especially not in my present position as a pregnant freelancer. Is annoying. I could probably sort out most of the problems, with a lot of research and effort and purging and reinstalling and such, but man, I don't have time for this crap. The screen is slowly but surely flaking out. Excel is flaking out. (Sharing violations. Anyone know anything about these? Google delivers lots of results, none of which are terribly helpful.) iTunes has totally flaked out. (Thank gods for last.fm, because I can NOT work without Choons.) It's all just very annoying.

Also, it's cold and dark and miserable and my head hurts.

Also, I have to do the big Ally Pally show this week, which is a frankly terrifying prospect.

Mind you, I did get to go to Andrew&Iza's very good housewarming last night, and they had laid on ginger ale *and* Appletiser for me, which I thought was extremely cool. Thanks chaps! The desserts were also particularly fine. Mmmm lemon meringue...

Eyes open. Semi-upright position accomplished. Now how to stand up...

Yesterday was iKnit Day - a lovely fest of knitting type fun, organised by London's coolest yarn shop, and featuring such exciting stallholders as Purlescence (natch) and such attractions as a talk and book signing by the fabled Yarn Harlot.

Good things about the day:
1. Bunches of fun. A chance to meet other yarny shop owners, dyers etc, and many of my customers. A great vibe. Lots happening. Yeah, fun.
2. Yarn Harlot!
3. Making lots of money. Based on last year's show, which was smaller (and I wasn't yet selling any yarn), I knew it would be a good day. It was an outstandingly good day. Woo yay capitalist joy!

Bad things about the day:
1. Being too busy (see 3. above) to actually take part in the day's pleasures. Or to go round and talk to other stallholders. Or to take part in the fashion show (yeah, I was asked! Such glamour!).
2. Missing the Harlot's speech, because, well, that busy thing. Armin was working with me, but you think he was going to man the fort for an hour and a half while I sloped off to enjoy myself? Not a chance. (Seriously, wouldn't have worked. Nope.) But I did get to queue-jump for a signed book, and she claimed to have heard great things about Purlescence (though I suspect she was thinking of the Californian shop of the same name), so, I guess that's something.
3. Being pregnant. Working a show is exhausting at the best of times. This is not the best of times. Not. At. All.

So today is not great. I am so unbelievably knackered. And I have so, so, so much work to do. And I have had a headache since halfway through yesterday. (This is a very bad thing for a pregnant woman to have, as most painkillers are off limits.) And I feel awful all round. And did I mention the huge pile of work?

*sigh*

FYI

The Home Office has a surprisingly tenuous relationship with the truth. Oh, they say "allow 10 working days for us to process your request", but they MEAN "...and then allow an extra 10-30 working days, depending on the tides and planetary alignments, and whether or not we like your face, for us to mock you with our pretence at helping."

Also, someone may tell you "you don't really need this piece of paper, but you can get one if you like", but what they MEAN is "...of course if you don't have it, you better not plan on ever travelling anywhere, ever."

What all this means is, if someone in Liverpool is having a good day, I might get to Cape Town and back this month. If someone in Liverpool has run out of coffee, I might get to Cape Town, and then spend my holiday fighting with the British High Commission to be allowed back into the UK. If someone in Liverpool has run out of coffee, is on a diet and lost a parking spot this morning, I might not be able to leave the country at all for a few more months.

It's a nailbiting ride.

Tired now.

So I ran the British 10k this morning, and I did it in 67min, which is really quite slow but better than I was doing on my training runs, so I'll take it thankewverymuch, and anyway I'm just chuffed (still) that I'm actually able to run 10 WHOLE KILOMETRES. Which is more than the distance from Cape Town train station to my gran's place in Newlands. I'm just saying. 'Sfar.

Last time I did this particular race (it was also the first time I'd run a 10k), I had to walk most of the last 2km. This time was much easier. It helps that rather than running in sweltering 30-degree heat, it was a cool 20 degrees or so (with occasional rain). Rain is better than sun. Fact. It also helps that I had Choons. Yes! I took great care in assembling a playlist for the event. Now, playlist assemblage, for running, purposes of, is a fine art. You can't just stick a bunch of bouncy songs together, nonono. You need to predict your levels of energy at each point and choose the Choons accordingly. For me, the perfect playlist has 3 clear phases:

1. Aggro beginning. Gotta get off on the right foot, as it were, pounding the pavement like you really mean it. Lots of drums are recommended. The right sort of beat is vv NB: need to establish a pace. It should be quite fast, because after all you *can* go fast at this stage, but not so fast that you wear yourself out right away. My choices?
Stomp, Ripper Sole (the fab bit from Tank Girl where the rippers are all boogieing down)
Bjork, Army of Me (hey, it follows Ripper Sole in the soundtrack and that works for me)
Fleetwood Mac, Tusk (possibly the best running song ever)
Blondie, Call Me
Because we Can Can from Moulin Rouge

2. Middle maintenance. By now you've established a rhythm, so it's really more about entertainment. Pick Choons that will divert and distract you, and that have approximately the right pace. Defiant lyrics are good here. Some of my favourites:
Ini Kamoze, Here Comes the Hotstepper
Aretha Franklin, Son of a Preacher Man
Ice-T, Big Gun (yes, more Tank Girl, you gotta problem with that?)
Blondie, Rapture
Grand National, Playing in the Distance ("We're not caving in... we're not caving in...")
A fabulous mash-up of Nirvana and The Supermen Lovers, as recommended by top bloggers everywhere

3. Final stages. You might be flagging, so you need relentlessly perky songs to cheer you up and keep you going. If that should happen to be disco, well, there's no shame in that. NO THERE ISN'T SO THERE.
Scissor Sisters, Laura
Gloria Gaynor, I Will Survive,
Blondie, One Way or Another
Goldfrapp, Train

4. Finish line treat. Well, I guess this one's optional, but personally I really like having something totally delightful and maybe a little bit loony come on just as I'm patting myself on the back because OH MY GOD I JUST RAN ALL THAT WAY! Something like, say, the Langley Schools Project version of You're so Good to Me. Yes. Something just like that.

Of course, if you've gone to all the trouble of setting up the playlist, then you really want to listen to it all the way through. So do try to make sure your player doesn't mysteriously conk out just before the 7km mark, all right? Because, trust me. That would be really... really... really disappointing.

A good night.

Freshlyground. Dudes. Have you seen them? The albums are great, but live, they're phenomenal.



Course you've missed them now, if you're in London, at least till the next tour. They'll be all over Europe, though. And then of course back in Cape Town. Hey, maybe you're in Cape Town. Maybe you could catch them locally.

*sigh*

I miss Cape Town.

(Hey, you know the best part? Well maybe not the best part. But a really good part. The sound. It was excellent. I don't watch a lot of live music, and partly that's because almost without exception, the sound quality sucks, you can't really hear the actual songs, just noise. (I have particularly lousy hearing; I realise this might not be the case for everyone.) But whether thanks to the venue - Cargo in Shoreditch, very nice - or Freshlyground's own awesome sound engineering, this time, they sounded perfect. Yay for actually hearing the music you're there to hear!)

*blink*

What kind of idiot stays up until after half past four to work on something that nobody has asked for, that will earn only a tiny amount of money (if any), and be rewarded primarily in highly dubious "glory"?

I'm not bloody finished, either.

Oh dear lord and it's actually getting light outside. This is nuts.

Heptacrap

Which means "crappy week". (Well, it does now.) Nasty lingering cold. Rude customers. Too much work. Internet dramas. Parcelforce. Bitchfight over our tenancy deposit (we're not getting most of it). Eh.

In between all of which I kept thinking fascinating thoughts that I was positively desperate to commit to blog, all of which now escape me. Eh.

Hm. Seriously. There must be something...?

My dad's about to arrive with a couple of trees to stick in the ground for us. Well, that was the idea, but as it's now pissing down I rather think it'll be a couple of trees to leave for us to stick in the ground. Which is fine and all, although I don't have a shovel. (I will shortly have a small garden hand tool set, though. My packaging supplier, always liberal with the free gifts, has suddenly taken to making those free gifts worth having. Last time it was a toolkit. A really rather nice toolkit. It makes me quite suspiciously happy.)

Anyway. We've almost settled into the new house. The Ikea drama had a surprise twist in the tale: the arrival of the online order included those bloody cupboards that we had hysterics over not finding in the store (and then found, and brought home at great personal stress, not to mention certain Streetcar penalties, but never mind that). Beloved thinks it's all my fault, because they're my cupboards. I think it's both our fault, because we did the shopping together and we discussed the online order together, but secretly I think it's a little bit more his fault, because he placed the bloody online order.) So it's Still Not Over. On the other hand, my Art is now hanging decoratively on the walls.

...

Parental visit now passed, the garden is... well. It has some things in the ground. It also has some things not yet in the ground, and an awful lot of ground lying around where it shouldn't be (including on the lounge floor), and general mess galore. Hm.

Better go clean up now.

Cold, smelly and unhappy

Reasons not to move into a brand-new development-slash-construction site (#1 of a possibly lengthy series):

Mid-shower, with a head full of shampoo, is not the *best* time to run out of water.

When the internet's away...

...this is some of what Scroobious has been doing (in no particular order):

1. Unpacking
2. Going to Ikea
3. Unpacking
4. Going to Ikea
5. Going to Warren Evans
6. Unpacking
7. Going to John Lewis
8. Unpacking
9. Taking deliveries
10. Taking more deliveries
11. Playing with her robot*
12. Still unpacking, DEAR LORD WILL IT NEVER END.
13. Trying to figure out the heating.
14. Battling The Devil.**
15. Feeling astonishingly grown up at having bought a bed and a sofa, both for pretty much the first time in my life.***
16. Loving my new space.
17. Wishing the furnishings for the new space were coming together just a leeeetle bit faster.
18. Tripping over boxes, both full and empty.
19. Assembling furniture. I built my own desk! And some other stuff. Yay furniture assembly! It is FUN.
20. Really, really, really missing the internet.
21. Constantly thinking "Oh, I must blog that when our broadband is up."
22. Completely forgetting what it was I meant to blog.
23. Buying ART! How grown-up is that!
24. Being chided for leaving "that hedge stuff" up on the blog for so long without new content, asifihadanychoice. Didn't anybody like the hedges? I liked the hedges. Oh well. No accounting for tastes.
25. Rediscovering Helene Hanff, who floated to the top of the to-be-unpacked boxes and trapped me on the couch for a few delicious hours.
26. Um... some other stuff. Probably. I forget.

__________
* Yes it's safe for work. *rolls eyes* ...Oh god I just looked at that site a bit more than I usually do. My robot is cousin to military robots. Suddenly I don't like it as much. But, okay. It doesn't deliver bombs, it disarms them. All right. That's better. Um. Hm.
** As regular readers will know, that would be Parcelforce.
*** I am not counting the random acquisition of furniture being offloaded by other people and adopted by me on an "all right then, have a few pennies for it" basis. This is real purchasing, of the proper choosing from a range of options variety.

Things that are Wrong with this week

1) Beloved is on night shift. That's just always Wrong. (And messes with my own sleep patterns.)

2) I had to get up at 6.30am yesterday to pack orders. Again, Wrong. I'm not complaining about the orders themselves, obv - they are coming in thick and fast and if they weren't I'd be in trouble - but still... that is a Wrong time of day.

3) On Monday, I undertook my first ever business trip. Now, I've always wanted to have a job that required me to travel. I know that it frequently sucks, involving Wrong times of day and so on, but it also takes you to see cool places for free, right? Well. My first business trip. And it was (a) to Birmingham, (b) paid for by me, and (c) did I mention to *Birmingham*? Actually, not even that. It was to the NEC. Which is basically An Airport (even though I got there by train) and could have been anywhere in the whole world as long as that somewhere is depressing.

I did make a point of travelling into town proper, though, because I'm sad enough to want to see the snakeskin spaceship, as absolutely nobody calls it. (Selfridges, I mean.)

Anyway. Spending £60 of my own money and hours of my own time - with a cold - to go to Birmingham. Wrong.

4. It's past midnight and I'm not in bed yet. Because I haven't quite got around to going to bed. Because then I'll just go to sleep and wake up and have to do far too much work again, just like every other day. Wrong. Of me. Very, very, very stupid. Well.

5. Having completed the entire back and side front of a jacket I'm knitting, I decided I'd got the size completely wrong and must start again. Because I just have sooo much time to knit, it's fun to waste it doing everything Wrong.

6. On telling Beloved the above, he said: "That's why you never get anywhere. You keep on doing everything wrong and starting again." He was on the other end of a phone line so I couldn't hit him. WRONG.

On the other hand. Have a little comic relief.

We can haz house!

It is Not Right that lolcats has infiltrated my speech patterns. Just Not Right.

Be that as it may, we appear to have successfully bamboozled one of London's All-Powerful Networks of Evil* into giving us a house. (Well, not so much giving, more extorting spare kidneys for, but whatev.) If you believe the marketing guff, it is in fact a "luxury villa" in "fine surroundings", but then if you believe the marketing guff...

Natheless. Four bedrooms, people. I shall be selling SO MUCH WOOL. (I'll have to, to pay for the damn thing.) Also, that leaves room for guests. This Means You! (Probably.) Also, and more importantly, there will be a housewarming. Yay!

Carry on having a fine weekend, then. I know I will.

_____
* Lettings agencies

Things I am grumpy about

1. The heating's broken again. This is very inconvenient, and also boring. Having to sleep in three layers of clothing, plus two of socks and one of handwarmers, reminds me entirely too much of my boarding school days. Seriously, universe, cut it out. Make Boiler Go. (Make Plumber Work.)

2. I don't seem to be getting much done. This is a problem, and also depressing, as I have absolutely no excuse other than being useless. And, maybe, too cold to work properly. (You think temperature shouldn't affect productivity? Fine, you just carry on thinking that.)

3. We are completely and utterly failing to find a nice big house to live in. Househunting is tiresome, and yet another thing interfering with my productivity. It seems that, for our budget, we should be able to get what we want in the area we want. There just isn't much on the market. (Note to landladies: please don't tell your tenants the place is "beautiful" while you show it to them. Allow them to decide that for themselves. Otherwise you will end up feeling insulted when they are forced to explain that they'd rather pluck out their own eyeballs than live with your choice of furnishings and decor, and nobody wants that.)

First hurdle. To fall or not to fall?

So of all my manymany Resolutions, the one I'm most excited about is this: Take Sundays Off.

No, really. That's a proper challenge, that is. Of course it goes hand in hand with other, more boring plans involving Proper Time Management and Discipline and all, so that I can take one day off once a week, without The Business going completely and utterly to pot. I also believe that if I know I'm going to have a whole day to myself once a week, it might be easier to knuckle down the rest of the time. And also, I do want to use that time - some of it, anyway - to do things that are Useful but not directly Work. Some of them might, arguably, become a sort of work. But never mind that right now. A whole day for knitting! Every week!

So tomorrow is the first Sunday of the new year. And while I did promise myself that I would not make this "day off" thing conditional on being up to date on my task list - because, well, who am I kidding - I none the less find myself in a bit of a bind.

This Friday, I launch The Yarn.*
On Monday, Beloved finishes photographing The Yarn.
By the time he has finished photographing The Yarn, he needs me to have done the boring technical task we call "Creating The Products". I was supposed to do this today. I'm only about 60% done.

So.

Do I:

a) spend tomorrow morning Creating The Products in a frenzy of productivity, before switching off my pc and knitting the afternoon away?**

b) take tomorrow off as per Resolution (win!), but then spend Monday morning failing to Create The Products with any kind of speed on account of constant interruptions by posties, yarn styling duties etc, so that Beloved is unable to Upload The Pictures according to schedule, thus placing the entire Yarn Launch in peril, and also preventing me from achieving the other very important tasks on Monday's list?

c) Ooh! Oddly, this one only just occurred to me - work into the wee hours tonight so that neither of the above has to happen. Thus breaking another fine Resolution ("get to bed before midnight unless I'm out having proper fun somewhere, or at least getting paid for my time"), but what the hell.

I think we have a winner.

Edit: 2am. Done. I hope. Oh, nope, gotta do that price list... 5-minute job. Then bed. Tomorrow, knittin'. Yay!

_____
* Over at The Shop, obviously. Not my own yarn. Other people's yarn, wot I am selling. Purty.
** For which, read: "spend tomorrow morning faffing around fretfully until I finally settle down to work just before lunchtime, stopping after half an hour for an extended lunch break, then returning to my desk to Create The Products, interrupting myself every 20 minutes or so to check blogs and Ravelry, and eventually finishing Creating The Products shortly before I have to go out to a knitting group in the evening, probably forgetting the price list for the samples I promised to bring?" Not that this is necessarily a representative description of a normal working day. Necessarily.

Organisation, lack thereof

This is my desk at the start of a standard week. It don't look like much, but you can at least see the surface.
This is my desk at the end of the week.


The theory goes that by spending more time working at home, and less going to an office, I'll be able to keep things closer to picture A, with all the implicit productivity that entails. (Since every piece of crud on the table in picture B represents Something Not Yet Done.)

What are the chances?

The Giant Swede of Doom

Not celeriac this time, but an actual swede. An actual mutant giant swede of doom.


I posed it with a lemon, for scale, and a rather oddly shaped pear, for humour. But the pear's weird potato shape doesn't come across at all, and it sort of detracts from the giantness of the swede. So just mentally erase that pear, okay? It is a GIANT SWEDE. It is as big as my head. Well, my head's quite big, but probably as big as Beloved's head. It is, in any case, HUGE.

And yet still counts as only one vegetable. We're getting good value from our organic box. Oh yes.

Hello world! I love everybody!

Happy Christmas! Happy Boxing Day! Happy almost New Year! Ummm... happy! Happy happy! Woo yay!

Apparently spending two days at home, with the computer switched off and just one's Beloved for company, with a large quantity of fattening food and assorted alcohol* and a large pile of DVDs (Lord of the Rings for preference), can do wonders for the stress levels.

Yay Christmas! Can I have another one just like it?

_____
* Meet the Brother William: equal parts pear liqueur, Frangelico and Southern Comfort, served in a martini glass with a cherry and topped up with Peartiser. Don't say I never give you anything.

Feelin' festive

So it would appear to be Christmas, complete with magical, mythical mist and frost. I've been to see Matthew Bourne's Nutcracker!, I've been ice skating at Kew, and I've kicked off the Christmas dinners (three in two days) with a very enjoyable affair indeed at Pippa's tonight.* I've been given perfume and a polar bear, I've wrapped the few presents I'm giving,** I have posted almost the last of the knitterly rush orders (with two more tomorrow).


We don't have a tree (sacrilege!), but we do have spangly red tulips, which is surely at least as good?


We have stocked up on festive food... possibly more than we are capable of eating this year. I'll get back to you on that. We have also decided on our plan of action for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day (it involves Lord of the Rings, all of it,*** and pyjamas, and resolutely unplugged computers).

Everything is looking pretty good.

It's just a shame that the heating's broken again.

_____
* Parties with fun people are even more fun with more fun people. It's so great having Vivaldifan in London.
** Or possibly, I have inveigled Beloved into wrapping them for me.
*** Apart from the extras. That's just crazy.

True or false?

Which of the following statements about my past week is/are untrue? Now with added answers!!

A. Met my long lost cousin, given up for adoption at birth, who is now working on the next Bond movie. Answer: true. He made contact with the family a few years ago, but this was the first time I'd met him. He's cool. And looks like his mom.
B. Acquired knitting yarn made entirely from milk. Answer: true. It's rather nice. Soft. I'll be selling it soon.
C. Went to view a house for rent which turned out to be at least twice as big as we were expecting.
Answer: astonishingly, true. Right number of rooms, but they're enormous rooms. And an enormous garden.
D. Graced review of The Golden Compass with the sparklingly apposite headline "Narnia's polar opposite". Answer: false. Because the reviewer completely failed to see the striking differences between CS Lewis and Philip Pullman. To be fair, I believe the film has rather played down the atheist angle...
E. Rediscovered the ability of alcohol, when taken in excess, to mimic the effects of caffeine, prompting random wee-hours blogging. Answer: true, obviously.

Yes, it's a bit of a cheat making the one false answer the thing that you'd think was too boring to lie about.

Vegthulhu

Being a trendy London meedja couple* and all, we do of course get a box full of organic goodness delivered on a weekly basis. And try really hard not to end up throwing it all out a week later, but never mind. Now, I've test driven a few of these schemes, and I'm rather pleased with the one we're using now. For one thing, the produce is really good stuff, and a good mix of it, and they have a very tempting catalogue full of extras like organic free range booze. Yeah! For another, the website is well designed and easy to use. They offer nifty services like being able to blacklist certain foods - either temporarily or forever - as in: I Will Not Ever Never Eat a Tomato. Or maybe just not till next month. And for another, each box comes with a friendly newsletter that (a) identifies what's in your box choice that week, (b) provides little info-nuggets on some of the more exotic items, and (c) provides suitable seasonal recipes.

However, on occasion, these great little services sort of cancel each other out. As, for instance, this week. It's all very well being told that this week's small mixed box includes gala potatoes and white onions, but when we've said ix-nay to the spuds and onions for a while, and they substitute those with some rather more... esoteric... veg, then we don't have much clue as to what they are.

My finely honed deductive processes lead me to believe that these are probably Jerusalem artichokes. (Neither from Israel, nor anything like an artichoke; the guinea pig of the vegetable world, if you will.)



But then, what on earth is... this?


It's... it's like... an Elder Swede.

I'm sort of afraid to put it in a stoo.

_____
* rotfl etc

On to the next chapter, then, and not before time.

Having processed my initial feelings of rejection, considered my options, and inexplicably omitted to drown my sorrows in gin, it has become clear to me that that last bit might be because (a) there weren't that many sorrows, and (b) I was far too busy with business-related stuff to take time out for drinking. Conclusion: having more time to do the business stuff, and maybe even have a little fun now and then, would make me happy.

So I am turning my back on offers of replacement jobs and striding forth, once more, into Glorious Freelancedom. And entrepreneurship. Exciting! I won't be buying many new shoes any time soon, but that's okay. I'll knit myself some warm socks (from my copious yarn stash) instead.

However, I would like you all to know that I am deeply disappointed in The Blog's supportive wossname. Here's how it went in my head:

Me: Woe! I have misplaced my job!
Blog: Oh you poor thing, how awful for you. We feel just terrible.
Me: Actually you know, it's not all bad. In fact it's quite good. In fact I'm really looking forward to this much-needed change.
Blog: Goodness, you are well adjusted. We admire you so much. None the less, it must have been quite a shock. Have a cookie.
Me: Well yes, it was rather. Thanks. Don't mind if I do.

Here's how it went in reality:

Me: Woe! I have misplaced my job!
...
Blog: I'm sorry, were you talking to me?

So. It's a good thing I have real friends. This internet community thing isn't all it's cracked up to be.


[Note to self: Possibly look into more regular posting before complaining of uncaring readers. Just a thought.]

Edit: Asparagus has been cast, by well-meaning and supportive types, on my employer. No need. Despite oddities of timing and such, which possibly added a bit to the shock factor, I really haven't been ill treated, and am happy to give them the thumbs up as Good 'Uns who do genuinely try to care for their staff in a way fully in keeping with their much vaunted pro-social values. Also, the restructuring is a thing of perfect sense and a Good Move all round; also, my boss was rather more distressed than I was at the news. Awww bless.