I hate washing my hair.  It needs doing, it needs doing tonight, and I hate washing my hair.  I do like clean hair, though, so I shall sort it out.

Joy: two fronts and a partial sleeve.  Colour is appalling, it looks much less garish in real life.  Flash washes everything out.  And makes the beads look rather more contrasty than they should be.  I'm attemping short row shaping on the shoulders, preparatory to a three needle bind off.  I forgot about the collar, and I am prepared for squalls .

Tory Baby Booties: and aren't those octopus buttons cute?  Pattern is Chunky Bootees from Zoe Mellor's 50 Baby Bootees to knit (see link at bottom of page).  TPPC approves.

Mum's scarf, Wilo: I am not enjoying this.  I am at the very beginning of row 4 (Two treble treble crochets into the back loops of each of the preceding double treble crochets).  And I have used less than one ball so far.  There is no gauge given for the darn crochet.  I apparent have two balls to go.  There are only 4 rows in the pattern (plus the bit which is red in the pattern in the book, which will be dark blue).  I am only making this 'cos I love my Mummy.  And I quite like the yarn (Kid Classic).

OK.  No excuses left now.  Except for more crochet.  And I can't deal with any more of that!  Will go wash hair.

xxx

Do not read this entry if you wish to maintain your illusions that I'm sweet and innocent.  Stop here, and go and think of fluffy bunnies.

So, Surfer Dude, who is, like, so Californian it's un-be-lieeve-able and I'm going to have the hugest difficulties ridding myself of those insidious inflections, anyhow.  Surfer Dude and I have a nice night out, and, eventually, after an awful lot of umming-and-ahing on my part (and, in all probability driven by hormones and loneliness) end up at my flat.  To canoodle.

Part way through the canoodling, while demonstrating his hairy chest (and it's a very nice buff chest, I must say.  He's also got rather nice brown eyes), he announces that he's all trimmed down there.

At which point, after a moment of being nonplussed, I start roaring with laughter.  This is not something I've heard of: but apparently, a lot of guys in the US go for that sort of thing.  Which I guess evens up the whole bikini waxing thing (I've never had any truck with the idea of waxing anything.  I tried waxing my legs once.  Never again).  However, my roaring with laughter, like totally destroys the mood, so we go to sleep, and I am left with the question: is this really the sort of thing that Americans go in for?

Honestly.   Trimmed pubes.  And I'm off laughing again...

xxx

Conclusion 7th March 2006

Well, the ex-fiasco phoned this morning, so I asked him if he'd ever trimmed, and explained why.  His reaction was fairly similar to mine - he also roared with laughter.  Bless him.

So, I can only conclude

• trimming is more prevalent than one would think


• I've not met anyone who announces that they trim before - but I may have met someone who trims, and not known that they trim, since without seeing before and after, it can be a little difficult to tell


• My reaction was perfectly valid since most guys don't announce...


• Being reminded of that line in Austin Powers for the past two days hasn't had a deleterious effect on my work.


• and the californian in question (a.k.a. Surfer Dude) has blamed me for a major service outage yesterday.  Students.  Honestly.

So, yes.  Picture of the fronts of Joy, now hideously out of date, since I've got past the sleeve shaping in the one that's on the needles.

 I've taken the brave decision to make the sleeves 3/4 length, since I've got just under 4 balls of yarn left at this point and very little chance of getting more in the same dye lot.

I can see that I'll be ripping out the swatches before I'm done.

This is all hideously stressful, along with work being incredibly busily stressful (and there's no point in my working extra hours.  I'm invariably too knackered to achieve anything).

And then I have the date tonight.  I'm still not out of my pyjamas at this point, and I've only had one cup of coffee, so I think I'm having a coffee headache-cum-migraine.

xxx