I'm finding it hard to stay awake here.  Tea is being clutched.  Chocolate has been consumed.  It may be something to do with the fact that I had a sunny lunchtime picnic with the Welshman again.  He is pleased to report that I am much bouncier and more like my normal self.  In fact, I currently have a slight excess of high spirits (tiredness not withstanding) and am inclined to be a Bit Noisy.

The grass (with sock)

And the coriander (sock free).

Last night, I cast on for Alloy, in brown bamboo tape.  Did usual trick of starting with sleeve, and apparently got gauge.  Then I found a Debbie Bliss black bolero, needing half a front and an edging, and feel that I ought to finish that before knitting any more of Alloy.

Alloy is such a stupid name for a sweater.

xxx

I made a list of all the kind people who commented on my blogversary entry, and whom I do not know IRL.  There were six.  So I rolled a die, and it came up with #3, who is RedSangria.  Please could you use the private contact thingy to let me know where to send?  And also how big your head is (inches or cm work fine.  I'm from the metric generation but my parents work in Imperial)?  I know exactly the yarn....

Otherwise, I present Sophie

and

The coriander

and

The grass.

xxx

I tend to feel the value of these memes lies in completing it for yourself, and then feeling smug (or not, as the case may be).  In my case, I'm going to feel smug, since I ceased studying English Literature when I was 16.  The list is apparently from the Big Read (it doesn't match), although why it feels the need to include Narnia and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe as two separate 'books', I'm not sure (perhaps because it's been bastardised in the process of being meme'd?).  Ditto Hamlet/Shakespeare's Complete Works.  I have no intention of reading The Bible in its entirety, and will not claim to have read it, or Hamlet, despite having read parts thereof.  Sam did read the WHOLE BIBLE and I just sat impressed: he wanted to know what it was all about before embracing Wicca fully.  Apparently, the average adult has only read six of the books below.  Oh, and for the record?  I only finished Ulysses because The Banjo Player wandered in, and informed me at the psychologically crucial moment (i.e. when I was about to give up) that Ulysses was 'That book that everyone started, but no-one finished.'  I completed Orlando (not on the list) for much the same reason, except it was Terry Wogan on the radio, informing everyone, that he didn't know anyone who had finished reading it.  I am somewhat competitive in my reading achievements.  I have tried Dune, Catch 22, and On The Road and Tess of the D'Urbervilles but it wasn't the right time.

01.   Look at the list and bold those you have read.

02. Italicise those you intend to read

03. Underline the books you LOVE.

04. Reprint this list in your own LJ 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 (most of the plays)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD 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
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 

Meanwhile, I'll listen to Alan Bennett reading Winnie The Pooh.  A positively seminal work.  And I may trim the grass.  It's getting unruly

xxx

The summer of socks (I write a second time, since the first post was eaten), has begun with something of a whimper: this is partly because I haven't cast on anything new, and partly because all I really want to do at the moment is read.  I'm part way through 'Cranford' now, having polished off 'The Player of Games', 'Flashman and the Mountain of Light' and ' A Handful of Dust' this week.  It has been good reading.  Next up is probably 'Prozac Nation' and, oh, 'Trainspotting'.  The recent tidy of my bedroom revealed a VERY big pile of books to read, including 'Love in the time of Cholera' and something by Graham Greene, a Jilly Cooper light Romance and all the secondhand books I bought weeks ago.

Anyhow, these are my Primavera Socks.  Lorna's Laces, from Loopy Yarns in Chicago, I feel that I should call them Vinca socks, still, from the Collette novel, Le Blé en Herbe.  All very pleasing.

Sophie Rabbit is not yet in a state to be photographeed, as she has no ears yet.

Here.  Have a picture of Freda, Mum's duck. She makes some ridiculous noises while being fed, and is a greedy little whatnot.  Mum hasn't seen her for a few days.  Poor Mum is Dealing with Cousin Kristine. Cousin Kristine used to be affectionately batty.  She's now sadly full of Altzeimers (I worry: that's two on Dad's side of the family, and Dad is heading, quickly, towards 'delightfully vague' himself).  Cousin Kristine veers between the delight that her husband left her more money than she's thought, and worries that she's maxed out her credit card in Cornwall because she 'paid for everything'.  She wants something to do all the time.  I'll be going up to visit at some point, and have suggested that Mum find a local Senior Section to look after her for some Service.  I'll be more pro-active, and try to find out who the Div. Comm is for the area and actually sort it out.  Mum has given her some knitting for the time being.  It remains to be seen if she can follow the pattern (so, we might put her on squares).

I apologise if I'm not making much sense.  I'm in a bit of a haze of mefenamic acid and co-dydramol.  On the plus side, I can't feel the cramps at all.  On the minus side, I feel terribly vague.

xxx

I'm a bit too excited for a list.  I'm seeing The Anthropologist tomorrow.  No, I am not over him, and I haven't seen him for months and months.  We spoke on the phone yesterday, and I beamed for much of the afternoon.  And, as a romance, the entire thing is doomed.  But I do adore him so.

• Write report Henry Smith Charity
• Pack Holiday Accounts  I'm allowing one more week for the last requests to come in, then I shall be closing them off.
• Laundry
• Change sheets (sheets are off, and laundered, I need to put the new set on).
• Try to throw headache before tonight's party  Went, didn't drink terribly much, owing to co-codamol, which was mostly dealing with the headache.
• Tidy sitting room  won't be tidy until the clean sheets are no longer hanging around it.
• Tidy bedroom
• Find new box to replace broken Brownie/Guides badge box, which fell off the shelf and broke last night.  Audit badges.  I eBay.  Two large fishing tackle boxes have been ordered. We can therefore separate out the Brownies' badges from the Guides' badges. 
• Transfer all necessary information off my laptop and onto old work laptop: this one no longer has a functional CD/DVD drive, and the motherboard is on the way out.  As is the keyboard.  work in progress: need to sort out the .php and the mysql stuff on here before I do the final move.  Because I want my backups of wice even if I don't actually do any more work on it ever again.
• Work out how to get Dell to collect old laptop.
• Sort out cheque to R.
• Brownies Accounts  Fed up with the subs tin exploding over my rucksack, I've got one with a catch to keep it shut.  Extra bonus: it's pink.
• Go to Boots, for bun nets, hairspray, return empty inhaler
• Take stuff to charity shop  have merely found another bag to fill.  It's a small bag.  I must go through and prune my book collection and my shoe collection at some point.
• Sort out sponsorhip cheque for Race for Life.  Send it.
• Midsummer party at Nick's
• Send contract to new flatmate.  Prepped, he doesn't want it until I've got the deposit.
• Sort out filing mountain I had not done any filing since SEPTEMBER 2007.  The shame.
• Get cheaper gas/electricity
• Knit bunny arms.
• Address envelope Jo.
• Do something secret.

Remember, there's still time to say wow, it's been four years of this drivel: give me some yarn for putting up with you (see previous entry).

xxx

It's a Blogversary!  And for once, I remembered (OK.  I put a little reminder in my calendar.  However, bearing in mind currently levels of forgetfulness - today, I left the laptop at home - I do not feel that's cheating in any way, shape, or form).

I believe, sometimes, particularly in knitting blog land, it is traditional to have a little bit of a competition.  So.  Leave a comment, and I'll pick one randomly, and the winner will receive some London related souvenir from the little market stall round the corner (two corners, to be accurate) from my flat.  If you are a yarny type, there may well be yarn too.  If you are a non yarny type, and live in the appropriate climate, I might just knit you a hat (but I need your head circumference).  If you do not live in the appropriate climate, I'll think of something.  You have until midday BST Sunday 22nd June.

In the meantime.  Grass.  Post-trim: I should have taken a picture last night, when everything was more or less the same lenght.  However, I was too busy trying to remove the grass from my notebook before rushing off out to a campfire.  Everything came home smelling authentically smokey.  Jo sniffed my Guider's top to check.  It was a jolly good campfire.  Much fire.  Sausages.  Marshmallows.  Songs: including some I hadn't sung since I was a Guide.  An Austrian went a yodelling!  Somehow, got roped into leading my favourite, "Marilyn Monroe", which I evidently looked unsure about, as several people immediately volunteered moral support...My hair still smells of smoke, and this, although unusual for the office, is a good thing.  My boss is not in, however, and will not be benefitting.  He somehow pulled a ligament in his ankle in his sleep.  The mind, frankly, boggles.

Oh, and my CO (Carbon Monoxide) detector has apparently reached the end of its life, and has been beeping every minute to tell us about it.  We eventually stuffed the speaker with blu-tack, and stuck it in a wellie in the hall cupboard to smother the din.  I must get another.  This is terribly important.

xxx

The grass will get one tonight.  I, meanwhile, need to co-ordinate myself with my hairdresser, and possibly a day off.  And maybe take Sepha too.  This will take time to organise.

I'm at that point where organisation is not happening.  Dropping things is happening.  Forgetfulness is happening.  Bruises are still happening.  I had an excellent collection from Pack Holiday, some more, a fortnight later, from Taking Things Back To Brownies, and I've added two more from the ball: on the knee and on my foot.  I apparently stepped on my own foot.  The Pack Holiday ones, plus friends, have more-or-less faded now.  All hail arnica.  Enough of the clumsiness.  I merely give you this illustration of forgetfulness.

Go to library.  Take out Flash for Freedom! Trainspotting and Prozac Nation, thus making 12 items on loan in total, of an eclectic nature (I also have The Player of Games - Iain M Banks, Weldon's Needlework Vol 4, Murphy - Beckett, Unless - Carol Shields, Just a Minute on CD, the previous Flashman novel, Making Money - Pratchett, Brighton Rock - Graham Greene, Humboldt's Gift - Saul Bellow). Get lunch.  Contemplate Blog Entry on eclectic reading tastes.  Go to weigh self at chemist (20.4 BMI).  Abandon books on chair in chemist.  Get back to work, realise something is missing, wonder if I abandoned books at Pret while juggling lunch and change.  Decide probably not.  Eat lunch, then go on a book hunt.  Fortunately, no-one was interested in my little selection of three...and who could blame them?  You have to wonder at someone with those tastes in reading.  Or, as our rugby coach put it "I didn't think that anyone under the age of 40 read the Flashman novels.  Much less women."  Personally, I rather like Flashman.  In a funny way, he reminds me of The Anthropologist.   All that running round Northern India and the Punjab, and having a fine appreciation of the female form.  Less so with the cowardlyness.  The Anthropologist is not a cowardly custard.  I digress.

Of course, all this forgetting things could probably have been avoided had I remembered to pack my cloth bag into my handbag this morning.  Or even remembered to bring in Flashman on the Mountain of Light to return to the library, in another bag....but I forgot.  There was a point to all this rambling, but I fear that I have forgotten that too.

xxx

I'm hayfevery (with incredibly itchy eyes: I suspect that, despite the eyedrops, there will be a prescription filing for the stronger antihistamines in the next day or so).  I'm sleepy (partly due to a wondrous ball: partly due to the fact that my flatmate seems to be incapable of letting herself into the flat without making the most godawful racket at silly o'clock in the morning).  I'm inclined to soul search slightly (made mistake on Friday, upset someone whom I esteem highly, but I think we'll both get over it).  I am skipping Softball for the sake of sanity.

Here.  Have some grass.

I think it needs a bit of a trim.  It's getting very straggly round the edges.

Rather like me (I could do with a bit of a trim as well).  However, I am happier taking the scissors to it, than I am taking the scissors to my hair.

Dom and I at the Ball of Wondrousness.  There was only one non-wondrous moment, when the boy stood not two feet from me, and organised a date with the girl who was standing in between us (I think he was drunk and failing to think.  My Mother thinks he was trying to Make A Point.  Whatever.  I sulked for all of five minutes and then Got Over Myself).

It's a jolly good dress, isn't it?  I look exactly like my mother in this photograph, which is a Good Thing.

Stephanie was also glammed up.  If someone could tell me how to gain weight on my collarbones, but not elsewhere, I would be gratified.  I suspect it's not possible, but I live in hope.

I look as though I've got mischief in mind in this picture.  Really, I don't.  I'm terrifically well behaved at this type of event.  I value my manicure!

And Dom modelled the glove for me.  Prior to the application of the button (sewn on, at high speed, yesterday morning).   He has delicate hands compared with my Daddy: the gloves fit Daddy perfectly.  But, if the circulation to your index finger, on your right hand, was a bit rubbish owing to crass stupidity 20 years ago, these would make a v. welcome addition to your wardrobe.  Dad was tickled pink.

You can see that the unanchored finger flops about somewhat.  It's now held in place by a nifty red heffalump button.  As with other huge heavy mammals, heffalumps rock.

xxx

I think it could do with a trim....  It looks much greener under the flash than it does under Office Light.  Must give it a quick drink before the weekend.

I cannot be bothered to think.  Here.  It's all Gooooogle's fault.  Although, having just come out from being fathoms deep in Rose Tremain's "The Colour" and now being equally deep in Peter Ackroyd's "Lambs of London", I'm inclined to disagree.

I'm also getting rather bored with hayfever, as are my sinuses.  I've found that an antihistamine plus some over-the-counter Sudafed when required (the sort of stuff that you have to sign away your life for if bought in the USA, owing to the Pseudoephedrine component) works a treat.  I've also got eye drops to try.  However, I am out of Sudafed at work, and feeling blocked up.

Wednesday evening:

Today (was out at a sales pitch-cum-seminar this morning, so only one):

I braved Oxford Street today.  I wanted a copy of the O'Reilly Active Directory book, which was non est.  Also non est were any shoes that I could dance in and which matched my dress for Saturday's ball.  So I'll go and cast on the Sophie rabbit instead.  Or maybe go to bed early.  Am watching 'The Long Walk to Finchley Road', but it's not got as much Sam West in it as I would like, and he's doing that barely repressed emotion thing terribly well.

xxx

This morning:

I wonder what they put in it?

I'm suffering from a spot of desolation.  So I bought this (in 'Bloom') to make this for an anticipated baby, who's Mum's just gone onto maternity leave.  I also bought some of this, but in milk chocolate, with cranberries.  I am no longer going to burst into tears in the office, or on Oxford Street, or in John Lewis, or on the Tube (had a very near moment with a busker playing Pachabels' Canon).  No-one has died, or is ill, or anything like that. I'm just disappointed.

xxx