MAY YOUR LENTILS SOFTEN QUICKLY

Isn’t it always the way? I had to choose a day to take our car in for a full service. Thursday seemed a good bet as I has been offered work for Monday and Tuesday, and things were pretty desperate at the school. Everyone was either ill, getting better, or going down with something. I thought that by the end of the week they’d be dropping like flies. So here I am, Thursday; no work and I'm heading into Stroud on MY DAY OFF. What are the chances of that?

Raining.

The garage dropped me home and I decided to use the day clearing up some paperwork. The garden plot will be a quagmire today. I’ve made the right choice.

Sent stuff to the accountant. Put the planning and building regs stuff back, it'll wait another day. There’s something about local authority forms that smack of small town know it alls; badly laid out and worded. The worst thing is, if you want to stay inside the law, you’ve got to complete it.

Eventually, I managed to leaf my way through to the dreaded birthdays. We have 10 birthdays in the next 3 weeks. Adding to the pressure, we plan to be away for one of those weeks. So all the gifts and cards need to be done today, as 3 birthdays fall tomorrow and 2 more over this weekend.

Made some great cards though. Not only that, I found some fab choccy handbags in COCOA, probably the best sweetie shop in the county, not to mention the world. Probably the best handbags in the world. Lovely, girlie gifts.

I decided to catch the bus to Stroud. Missed the bloody thing. I cut it too fine. It left a couple of minutes early, whistling past me as if I counted for nothing. After another hour I was finally on my way. Tricorn house was looking as lovely as ever as I stepped off the bus. Naturally I cut into ALONG CAME POLLY and grabbed the half price magazine with its three free cable needles (hard to say on a cold night). Bargain. Then I pushed a card through a friends door, ready for her birthday tomorrow. Cool.

Car cost about 200 quid. All in all, not too bad; as long as you’ve nothing else to spend it on.

It seemed a good idea to call in on a customer who’s convalescing in a local care home. After a quarter of an hour, I gave up and headed home. I need to see her by the end of the week, but I also need to get to the tax office as there’s no return address on my latest tax demand. Now that is weird.

Spent the evening waiting for a pan of big, yellow lentils to soften , so we could make our evening meal with them. MeWally loaded the software to enable us to edit our ‘video’ footage. So exciting. We hardly used the movie camera, as we don’t want to be overwhelmed the editing workload.

While he did that, I started knitting a hat for myself. It should go with my board jacket, grey and a hint of hot pink. I’m going to put in a headband to house those earphones from the cute pink beanie MeWally gave me for Christmas (see last weeks blog). I ‘ll cruise the slopes with the Ipod blaring French lessons at me. Less than cool, but I need all the help I can get and when I stop for a coffee and Panini, everyone will think I’m oober cool. And that’s the main thing. Luckily I’ve not reached the stage of worrying that every hoody will mug me for my ‘gear’. To return to the knitting for a mo, I’m using the grey baby wool, doubled, that I used on the blanket. It came from EMAUS for less than a quid. I so love that shop.

The hat came out too small. I decreased a bit too soon. 20 years ago I used to make these without a second thought. Now I’m pretty much struggling to reinvent the design. And, yes, I can use a pattern, however, making my own is much more fun.