No such thing as normal

Hello hello, it’s Saturday again and the first week of our “new normal” … although I’ve never been normal in my life so I can’t see that I’m going to start now!  🙂

That said, we have all survived the week with not so small daughter discovering that the novelty of cooking for herself has worn off very quickly (oh dear, it’s going to be a long semester!), big daughter and her partner finally getting the keys to their new home that they have been in the process of buying for months, and my husband and I finding that we do actually have things to talk to each other about when the girls aren’t here.  Phew!

I must also say thank you to you at this point – I have very much appreciated your kind words and messages about our new “empty nest” status, and it’s meant a great that you’ve taken the time to remind me that life goes on and that life will get better.  I’m looking forward to it now … I did have a wobble on Tuesday, but I’m OK again now.

I’ve already had one new and exciting experience this week … not so small daughter and I ate dinner “together” and watched an episode of the TV show Benidorm.  We’ve been watching the show for a while and I had forgotten quite how many innuendos are in this show when I suggested we watched it, but luckily, not so small daughter is old enough now to find them funny (unlike the first season of Bridgerton which caught us both by surprise and is perhaps not the thing to watch with your then 14-year-old daughter).  What made this a first for me is that we were using WhatsApp video to chat – and I can honestly say that I have never had to try to time pressing “play” on a remote control before to make sure that the TV programmes started at the same time in two different places as it’s not something that we did even through Covid!

I’ve also signed up for a Tai Chi class – I used to go years ago before we had big daughter and only stopped when my baby bump was so big that I couldn’t balance any more – and I’m very excited to start that.  Big daughter has suggested that we go to a Pilates class together and we are going to do that, although I must say that I am less excited at the thought of that one.  Pilates has always looked a bit like hard work to me!  Anyway, I am looking forward to being more flexible than I have ever been … maybe!

** Spoiler alert – photo of Kate Davies MKAL shawl progress coming up **

I’ve done a lot of knitting this week.  Knitting keeps me calm, it helps me to re-balance and it makes me feel that I’ve come home to myself.  This week, I’ve done a lot of work on my Kate Davies Mystery Knitalong shawl.  The mystery part of the knitalong is over now, with all four clues and the final pattern and project photos published, so I hope that I’m not spoiling anything for anyone if I show my progress.  I’m afraid I’m past the point where I wanted to avoid the spoilers now – I just want it finished!

The yarn is Yarnsmiths Merino Sock from Wool Warehouse, and you can read more about it in this post when I got to try it out.  The shawl is knitted entirely in garter stitch and that is not my favourite stitch to work at all, but I have treated it as a mindful process and also a chance to practice my Continental knitting technique, and it’s been surprisingly enjoyable.  I’ve found it much easier to knit it that way, and it’s been much easier on my shoulders to do that too – I have realised that my usual “throwing” technique is manageable for my socks, but not very comfortable for a bigger project like this.

I’m on Clue 3 now and I’ll be honest, I don’t know that I would have knitted this if I had seen the whole project beforehand (nothing matches, ’nuff said), and there was a point at Clue 2 where I was very close to putting it all away in a bag, never to be seen again.  Eventually, I decided that I have enough WIPs in bags and I had bought the yarn especially for this project so I was never going to use it for anything else, and it’s good for me to learn new techniques and there have certainly been a few of those in this pattern.  I made myself sit down and get on with Clue 2 and that’s been the hardest one (lots of stitches to twist at the start and yes, I did that; long boring plain section in the middle) but now, on Clue 3, I’m enjoying the knitting and because I’m so far behind that the final pattern’s been published, I liked being able to see the finished styled photos in the pattern too.  It’s definitely not a shawl that I would consider to be my style, but whilst everything else is changing, why shouldn’t it be?

There’s still a lot of work to go – even knitting more smoothly in the Continental style, I am still not the fastest knitter in the world and the knitalong officially finishes on 31 October so I would like to get it done by then.  However, I have socks calling to me, plus I am going to run the Winter Haven KAL again in January if you fancy joining me, so I need to get on and design some socks for that!

I also thought I would join in with Blogtober* again this year and although I am writing this thinking, “How the heck am I going to fit all this in?!”, I am in sole charge of how I spend my time now and there’s no reason at all why I can’t alter my working days to suit myself.  Goodness, this freedom malarkey is going to take a bit of getting used to! 🤣

So … more socks to come, but nothing new to show you at the moment.  I am just finishing off the green and yellow not-Norwich-FC-or-Australian socks for my husband and I’ve got to say, I’m very pleased with the join in the colours.  I decided not to carry the yarn up the rounds but instead to cut it and weave it in, and you can see the difference between the stripes at the top and the stripes I still need to finish …

There are plenty of tutorials around on’t’interweb about joining yarns for stripes, but I can add another one to the list if you think it would be useful?  It does involve sewing in ends after you’ve finished, not weaving them in as you go, but if you’d like to see how I’ve done it, then I’m very happy to show you.

Other than that, life has been in a familiar routine this week.  Ridiculous weather (we’ve had storms, wild winds and then unexpected sunshine), I’ve been out with the dog, chatted to the bin men about our broken bin lid, been food shopping, collected not so small daughter from the station as she came home for two nights (it was so good to see her!), and driven not so small daughter back to the station this morning laden down with loaves of bread and a ginormous packet of pasta.

Autumn is on the way as the conkers are falling from the trees …

This second photo is a bit fuzzy as I didn’t have my specs on to check the focus.  A bit like my life when I’ve not got my specs on these days – a bit fuzzy round the edges!

The dog went to a woodland spa and chose the mud pack … 🙄

This photo is also a bit fuzzy and not because I wasn’t wearing my specs, but because the dog knew I was trying to get a photo of him.  He kept giving me dirty looks and moving off just as I got him into focus, but I think I should have been the one giving him dirty looks because imagine what state my car was in when he got out of it at home!

There have been some glorious sunsets and cloud formations amongst the wild winds and storms …

and walking the dog along familiar paths and watching the sun set as it has done every day for millions of years has been a comforting thing.  We make our own reality, don’t we – we choose how we want to be each day and if we don’t like what we see, then it’s up to us to do something about it.  Nobody else can make us feel anything that we don’t want to feel.  The sun will still rise and set whatever we choose to do, and why wouldn’t we want to live our best lives whenever we can?  Different can be better.

Actually, that sounds more wistful than I am feeling – I am OK and I genuinely looking forward to this next “stage and season of my life”, as someone described it recently.  I think what I don’t like is that it makes me feel like I’m getting older, although my “showbiz age” will forever be 28 and I’m sticking to that!

I’ll be back with more to tell you next week, and I hope enjoy the rest of your weekend! xx

* If you’ve never heard of Blogtober before, it’s a blogging event when people post every day in October – some people follow a theme or schedule, I am usually completely off-piste and you’ll get whatever ramblings come out and onto the page at the time 🤣