Monday gratitude

It’s the start of a new week, a blank slate (if you ignore the calendar!) and a whole seven days stretching out in front of us.  Aren’t we lucky to have that?

Out of the window, I can see that the sun is shining and the flower bed is bursting with colour.  I can hear the swallows which perch on the power lines and somewhere outside, a neighbour is hammering something.  Astrid is sitting by the partially-open window and every now and again, I hear the tinkle of the bell on her new collar.  She still wears a collar even though she’s a house cat because firstly, I can hear where she is in the house as the little madam hides when I’m looking for her, and secondly, if she ever did get out then someone could get in touch with us if they found her.  She’s already had one altercation with a car and a neighbour called us after seeing our phone number on her collar, so I wouldn’t want to risk her getting out without any way of someone being able to contact us.

I did think that I didn’t have much to tell you about last week as the weather wasn’t great and I spent most of the week running errands and there’s nothing exciting about that!  But then I remembered that Winwick Mum is all about looking for the extraordinary in the everyday, so I decided to look a little more closely.

💜  Who could resist this furry co-worker?

She’s absolutely no help whatsoever, but Astrid does a good line in cute and I can’t get cross with her – even when she’s covering my keyboard in cat hairs!

💜  Our garden is looking rather overgrown at the moment, but if I stand by the rose arch and breathe in the scent of the roses and honeysuckle (both of which should be neatly trained over the arch but have decided to do their own thing), I can just see foxgloves and greenery and not the grass that needs cutting or the borders that need weeding.

Sometimes, a garden is all the nicer for being a little bit untamed.

💜   If you’d asked me years ago, I would have told that I’m not a rose person.  I think they’re beautiful, but I didn’t feel the need to have any in my garden.  Somewhere along the line, I have become a rose person … slowly, one rose at a time, but here I am.

I’m not sorry.

💜   I spent a happy few hours potting up seedlings.  I sowed these seeds at the end of last year – November, to be precise – thinking that I’d get a head start on the growing season as I was bound to run out of time in the spring.  Sadly, most of the seeds failed to germinate.  I don’t know whether that’s because they were old seeds (I did empty a lot of very old packets) or because the compost dried out a bit over the winter, or just because they didn’t want to grow (seeds can do that sometimes), but I ended up re-sowing them and this time, they came through.

I’ve got Californian poppies (Eschscholzia californica) which I’m very happy about, as I’ve tried growing these before without success, and also a white variety of Viper’s Bugloss (Echium vulagare) which I absolutely don’t remember buying or planting but must have done, because it’s my writing on the plant label 🙂  I’ve also got lots of marigolds (Calendula), honesty (Lunaria), Rudbeckia and scabious (Scabiosa) coming through so I’m very pleased with my seed-sowing now!

💜   One of my errands last week was an appointment to see the osteopath.  I hurt my back quite badly about eighteen months ago by doing death-defying “picking something up off the floor” (don’t we love how our backs react to nothing at all sometimes?!) and I’ve been seeing an amazing osteopath ever since who is helping me make sure that I don’t do it again.  I spend a lot of time sitting down either at the computer or knitting, neither of which are good for posture, backs, shoulders or necks, so I have exercises which I do regularly and a check up every six weeks or so to make sure that everything is still in order.

The clinic isn’t local; I used to drive out to Wales – I know, I could (and used to) see someone closer but changed clinics on a recommendation and am very glad that I did – but now I go to another branch in Chester which I can travel to by train.  It takes about the same length of time as to go by car, but there’s no faff with car parking and I enjoy the smug feeling I get when the train runs parallel with the motorway on the journey home and I’m moving whilst there are cars queuing on the motorway … every time!

You also can’t knit in the car whilst you’re driving but I can get a good few rounds in whilst I’m sitting on the train taking in the scenery.  I also enjoy the conversations in the carriage as most people seem to feel the need to speak more loudly when they’re talking into their phones on a train, and it amuses me to hear one-sided conversations and make up stories about them in my head 🙂

Oh, you don’t recognise the yarn?  This skein was part of my haul from the TexStyle show in March …

It’s the turquoise Yarn Unique yarn in the centre, and this is going to be a new sock design to be released later in the year.  The yarn is beautiful, just the colour I wanted it to be once the skein was wound into a ball (my hands are also the same colour when I’m knitting it, but the excess dye will wash out when I wash the socks – I haven’t used hand-dyed yarn for such a long time that I’d forgotten this particular joy!), and seeing the colours as the sock grows reminds me just what a skilful yarn dyer Caroline is.  The new pattern is working out just as I wanted it to, and I am thoroughly enjoying knitting these socks!

Train journeys are always good for getting some knitting time in – sometimes I wish I could travel by train a bit more just to do that but then, on days like last week when my husband was in London and it took him 4 hours to get home because his train was cancelled and the replacement train was diverted, I am very glad that I do have a car!

The sun is still shining and the swallows are still chattering away to each other so I’m going to go out into the garden again for a short while – I’m hoping that little and often will help me to get to grips with the untamed wilderness that might be very beautiful, but will also be an even bigger job if I don’t try to keep on top of it now!  The hedge trimmers await …