A long chatty post

Didn’t go to Leicester this weekend. Mainly because everyone else who was going had already made plans to go to clubbing, and that’s not really my kind of way of spending a weekend. So instead Oliver and I went to eat at Pizza Express on Saturday and then just hung out, watching movies in his room. Speaking of pizza, on Friday, after Oliver tried to help one of his mom’s friends set up a router for her laptop (turns out she only had a router, not a router/modem thingy), we went to get pizza from Pizza Hut. While we were waiting for our order, a man with a collection tin and some roses comes out from the restaurant section. He’s collecting donations for children with leukemia (I assume it was to help them and help fund research) and for £2 you get a rose. Oliver was about to say no, but then he changed his mind and gave £2. Picked out a deep red rose and gave it to me. That’s the first time ever that he’s bought me a flower. It’s in a vase on his desk right now. :D

I’ve finished reading Suzannah Dunn’s The Sixth Wife. Now I can’t decide should I read Alison Weir’s Innocent Traitor or Lauren Weisberger’s Everyone Worth Knowing (she’s the one who wrote The Devil Wears Prada so I expect this one to be similaryly good). More historical fiction or funny fashion-y type world? Whatcha think?

I know I moan about not being able to shower. And I know that one of Oliver’s mom’s friends has said that I can just go over to her house and shower there if I want to. But the thing is, I feel really odd doing that. I don’t really know her in the sense that I can feel okay about using her shower. Even when I was a kid, I didn’t want to shower over at my friends houses during sleepovers because it just didn’t sit well with me. I pretty much always waited until I got home to shower. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I felt that I could shower at my best friends’ places. Now, well, this showering thing has gotten a bit better. I feel fine showering over at places where I know I’ll be for awhile. But just going over to a neighbor’s place to shower? Not quite there yet. Maybe one day I will. Maybe I won’t. But hopefully, I’ll never have a non-working shower again without a spare being available.

Clue 3 of the SSShawl is done. Just finished it about an hour ago. Good thing I only have to wait until tomorrow to get Clue 4. There is a small mistake in the Bird’s Eye part where I had dropped two stitches and they’d unraveled to the next row before I caught them. I didn’t know then, and probably still don’t, how to fix it so that it’d look like the rest of the pattern, but I did make sure that they wouldn’t continue to unravel. I just wish that when people see that I’m concentrating on my knitting, especially when I’ve pointed out before that it’s a complicated lace pattern that I haven’t done before so I didn’t quite have the hang of it yet, that they wouldn’t try to draw my attention away from my counting or whatever it happens to be that I’m doing. That’s how I dropped the stitches, I was being talked to and I don’t want to be rude so I try to listen and then I mess up. And since I was getting kinda eh about working on just one project, I decided to use the Mirasol Hacho (in Peacock Ripple) yarn that I got from Anji for Christmas. At first I thought about socks, but then decided that since it is DK weight, I’d rather make something else out of it, like fingerless mitts. I didn’t find anything from the only knitting book I had available for perusal in Sheffield (Stitch’N’Bitch Nation by Debbie Stoller), so I tried to design my own using the Clover lace pattern that was used in a wrap sweater in the book. Didn’t look too good, so I went on the Net. Knitty didn’t really have any designs that I liked either. Then I remembered Magknits! Front cover of the latest issue? Yep, I’m making Evangelines. They’re so pretty! I’ve already done the left hand one and I’m halfway through the second one. I also modified the pattern just a little bit. I’m doing the long version, and while I was knitting the first one, I forgot how many repeats of the cable I was supposed to do before the thumb hole. Then when I checked the pattern, I had done one too many. Not that I mind, of course. So now I’ve got a total ten repeats instead of nine on my gloves. The second modification is the number of stitches. I added eight stitches to the underside of the glove since my yarn is thinner than the yarn the designer used. So they’re a bit snug, but that’s okay. I can’t wait to wear them when I won’t need a big poofy coat anymore. :)

I did some more writing today. Past the halfway mark now. As long as it’s quiet, maybe with a little music playing softly in the background, it comes to me really easily. Especially when I get to sit at a table or desk (but that’s only now, sometimes it’s easier if I’m sitting on the bed on leaning against the radiator in my room; it just varies). But when everyone’s home and the TV’s blaring and people are talking over the already loud TV and there’s cigarette smoke wafting about…

The power went out yesterday. First, my laptop stopped receiving power from the socket it was plugged into. I thought that maybe it had come loose so I checked all of the joins in the power lead. Then the lights in Oliver’s room went out. But the lights in the rest of the house were okay as was his computer which was plugged into a different socket. At first we thought it was because his dad is currently in the middle of redoing the bathroom and he’d done something to it. Everything else was fine upstairs though. Turns out that a fuse had blown because the washing machine, stove, oven, kettle and TV were all on and using the same fuse. Oliver’s dad fixed it so that the washing machine would use a different fuse from now on.

Going to the movies tomorrow with Oliver and Shaun to see Alien vs. Predator: Requiem. Not really my kind of movie, but they want to see it and Oliver’s willing to pay for my ticket, so I’m not gonna whine about it. A movie’s a movie. Even if it is kinda scary and it’s got weird creatures slowing killing off each other and the humans that get in the way…