School holiday brain mush

I realised last night as I was out walking with my husband and the dog and stopped to take this photo that I hadn’t posted my usual weekend blog post.  I’m blaming school (or rather, college) holiday brain mush.  Not so small daughter is in her second week of the Easter holidays but it feels like she’s been off for about three months and I have completely lost the plot with pretty much everything I’m supposed to be doing!

You know, back in January I said to myself that my only intention for this year was to spend it catching up with all of the things that I felt that I’d fallen behind on (in particular with the blog – like updating the pattern pages with links and that sort of thing) and here we are in April, four months later, and I haven’t even started.  I’m not quite sure what’s going on!  Flipping heck, how are we a quarter of the way through the year already?!  Are you finding the same thing or is it just me?  I’m a bit worried it’s going to be the end of December tomorrow and I’m going to wonder where the year’s gone!

To be fair, I have had things come up that I didn’t plan on in January … I’ve had the bright idea of recording Super Socks as an audiobook (please do tell me what you think about that!) so I’ve been spending some time researching how that’s going to work.  I got caught up in learning about Feng Shui around the time of the Chinese New Year (it’s always fascinated me) and not so small daughter has a busy social life that’s required a chauffeur (she may have passed her driving test but is without wheels so it’s down to Winwick Mum Taxis to provide the transport).  She’s also got mock exams coming up and we’re on countdown to her actual A Level exams which start in about six weeks’ time so it’s not like I’ve been sitting on my backside doing absolutely nothing.

What also hasn’t helped is that Google has done yet another update, Facebook and Instagram have changed something or other again and my inbox has been filling up with emails about how I should be using AI, promoting to my ideal audience, making sure that I stand out from the crowd, setting up social media schedules and researching key trends and keywords at every possible opportunity.  I’ve found it quite exhausting – I never started the blog to do any of that, I just wanted to write about the stuff that interested me and help people to knit socks, and sometimes it feels like that isn’t how it is any more.  This has definitely been the time when I want my email inbox to zero!

Anyway, enough of me whinging on about progress, let me show you something lovely instead …

I went to meet some friends for a brew at a farm shop called The Lambing Shed in Knutsford last week.  It was super-busy because it’s the Easter holidays and there were lots of small people driving toy tractors around the play area and waiting to meet the new-born lambs in the big barn.  I’ve spent a fair amount of time meeting lambs on farms with my girls and watching them on the toy tractors during the school holidays myself, and it was quite a shock to realise that I hadn’t even thought about the place being busy because not so small daughter had taken herself off to Liverpool on the train to do some revision at the library there and meet her boyfriend.  Sometimes, we move on without even realising it.

There weren’t too many lambs out in the field (maybe the rest of them were living the celebrity lamb lifestyle doing the meet and greet), but it was also quite cold and wet so hopefully the really tiny lambs have somewhere warm and dry to be until they get a bit bigger.  It always makes me happy to see them, though, and now that the clocks have gone forward and it does feel slightly warmer (I’ve turned our heating off, nobody has noticed yet!), it definitely feels like spring.  Not so much for my cousin in Canada, though, who sent me this photo of her weekend weather …

She’s had strict instructions to keep me supplied with photos of snow over the winter, but she really didn’t expect to be sending this to me in April!  She had intended to be out in the garden this weekend, but it didn’t happen … if you had an unexpected return to winter this weekend, I hope you were able to keep warm and dry!

I got out into our garden for a bit (I even managed to cut some of our overgrown hedge – no, no nesting birds, I did check) which felt like a result!  There are tiny new leaves of the Alchemilla mollis showing …

A single flower on my Daphne … this tiny plant will hopefully grow over the years to be considerably bigger but I am delighted to see a flower in its first year in the new border!

Papaver somniferum (opium poppy) seedlings … I’m very happy to see these as I loved them in the border when this was my veg patch, but I do need to try to move them from here as these plants will grow up to about 4ft tall and they should not be right at the front of the border!

Here’s something else that shouldn’t be in the border at all – do you know what they are?

Potatoes!  I thought I had found every last potato when I created this border but apparently not!  There are potato shoots popping up all over the place and every time I pull them out, there are more!  I never thought I’d ever come to think of potatoes as weeds, but I really don’t want them growing in amongst the flowers this year.

Something else green …

This is the sock that I’ve been designing to help with the fundraising for not so small daughter’s trip to Nepal in July.  I do need to get on with it or she’ll have gone and come back before I’ve even got the pattern out, but this is the second sock and I’m up to the toes so there has been progress.  The pattern is pretty much written, I just need to go back and make sure that the charts match the written instructions and then ask my lovely tech editor to check that it actually makes sense, and then I think I’m good to go!

Changing the subject … the dog is off to the vet’s for a sedated scan this week.  He’s been out of sorts for a few weeks now, off his food and being really sick at first but we’ve got that under control now and he’s eating again, thank goodness.  He’s got old-boy teeth issues but not enough to cause this; he’s had blood tests to determine what isn’t the problem, but the vet wants him scanned to see if there’s anything going on in his tummy that she hasn’t been able to discover up until now.  I don’t think it matters whether your family member is human or furry, going for a scan is always a worry.  You don’t want to find anything awful, but at the same time if you don’t find a reason for the problem then how can you fix it?  The dog is fine in himself, someone who didn’t know him wouldn’t necessarily pick up that there was anything wrong but when you know someone very well, you just know when they’re not right, don’t you?  I’m trying not to head down the disaster-scenario rabbit hole as there’s absolutely no point in worrying about something until you know what you have to worry about, and I do know that the vets who are looking after the dog are going to do their best to get to the bottom of whatever’s going on, so I am just going to try to take it one step at a time, and the next step is the scan.

Oh dear, I didn’t mean to end this post on a downer and as far as we know, there’s nothing seriously wrong with the dog; I just mentioned it as it’s on my mind and you get to read what’s on my mind in my posts!

I’d love to know what you’ve been up to this week that’s happy! xx