my cats ok

the vet cant see anything wrong with her. I'm going to worm her and hopefully i dont see any more blood.

sad things

Sorry I haven't been posting. This week I found out something sad and I haven't been in the mood to post about it. One of my very best friends is sick. But I won't write about it because I am not sure she wants the whole world to know, not that the whole world reads this. But anyway. It has made me a bit sad this week.

I have been working on both my love blanket and my scarf this week. They are both coming along nicely. The blanket is big enough for one and a bit and I have almost finished the whole ball of my yarn for the scarf and the length looks good. I got lots of mail from etsy this week. Included in that mail was my two drop spindles and roving. I really want to try some spinning but I told Connell to put it up somewhere high so that I cant get to it. I want to finish these projects first. I have other yarn to knit too. I think I want to knit something for my mum before I start to spin too. So I am at least going to leave it until I have my week off in a months time. Lets see if I can do it.

I am still exercising a bit and drinking lots of water which is good. But the food I have eaten this week hasn't been so good. I haven't weighed myself on wii fit for a couple of days because the last times I did my weight was going up not down.

My cat might be sick. there was blood in her pooh last night. I called the vet down the road this morning but they were all booked up. I just got a call though, they had a cancellation. So I will take Mushroom up to get checked out now.

Thank you

Thank you very much for all your support. I think that talking about what I am doing to as many people as possible will hopefully help me to keep on track. I went to hydrotherapy last night which was half an our long of movement and exercise, then I spent another half hour in the pool doing laps. I can swim, but I'm not fit. So when I would get tired from doing one type of stroke i would change to another. So I was constantly moving for the next half an hour too.

This morning I got a delivery. I love getting deliveries. It was my drop spindles and roving. I got a top and a bottom whorl. I bought them before I had read any of my books on the subject and these don't have notches in them. They come with instructions though so i hope i can figure out how to use it. I bought just some white roving to start with and some pretty coloured roving as well. I really shouldn't start until i have finished either my scarf (which I haven't touched for about a week) or my love blanket (which is growing everyday).

I'll have to get some photos for you guys tonight.

My new exercise plan

So I'm really depressed about my weight at the moment. I feel so stupid and disappointed that I let myself get so overweight. Today I made a positive step towards trying to fix this. I gave myself a plan and incentives to exercise. I have set up an easy spreadsheet that has the type of exercise I am likely to do(walking, Wii Fit, hydrotherapy and gym) and time increments i would do them in (15min, 30min, 45min, 1hr and 1hr+). Then i mark the date that i did this exercise on.

I have decided that i need incentive to keep me going. I LOVE buying things from Etsy.com. It is one of my favorite websites and i love just going to the forums and checking out peoples shops from there. I try to buy hand made gifts now so I try to plan and get things from there too. So for incentive, every hour I spend exercising I get an Etsy Dollar. A dollar to spend on Etsy.com. I think its a great idea. not only will it give me incentive to keep exercising. it will save me money because i wont just go and spend money in the shops anymore. I think that maybe i should get a bonus for weight loss too but i haven't decided how much weight loss and how many dollars i should get for it. I know i want to loose 15-20kgs. so maybe every 5kg i can get a bonus of $10 or something like that.

Sorry for being AWOL

I haven't blogged for a while. The weekend wasn't necessarily busy but i was busy watching Project Runway season 1 on YouTube and knitting. I have done a fair bit more on my scarf and then I have picked up my love blanket to do more of that.

Also this weekend I went shopping! i bought a Fridge and TiVo. so i spent a Lot of money. And on Sunday Connell and I went to his parents house for a belated birthday lunch and I was spoiled. I got presents from his parents, his brothers and sister and their partners and his Nana gave me a present too.

Then we went to my parents house (after buying the fridge and TiVo) and watched the news... There is a disaster going on down in Australia at the moment. I would hope that everyone in the western world has heard how horrific this is. Please if you can donate to the Red Cross. Australians have really dug deep and I know that we have donated at lease $12million. That is fantastic. there are so many dead. and so many more homeless and injured. We have lost 181 people so far, but they believe that the number will raise higher than 200 people. The pictures and videos and storied are just heartbreaking.

Etsy Forums

I am loving the Etsy forums at the moment. I am mostly a lurker but I do say a few things now and then. They never seem to end up part of a conversations but its still fun. And I have found two sellers that I love and have bought stuff from so that is great.

I put in an application for leave from my job today. I haven't had a proper holiday in like a year and a half. I even worked over Christmas with just the public holidays off. So I am taking the third week in March off. It's the last week of the Adelaide Fringe. I plan on being a Fringe Whore again this year. Its a term I coined for myself last year seeing as I would go to 2 or 3 things a week over the month it was on and spent a lot of time in the Garden of Unearthly Delights. One thing I really want to do is the Op Shop tour. Its a bus tour that goes around to a whole heap of great op shops around Adelaide. I don't have any one to go with. So I will have to go by myself unless I can get a friend to come along with me.

So during my leave I want to go to lots of Fringe events and do lots of Craft things. I want to do a lot of knitting and crocheting. I will have my drop spindles by then so I can try to make some yarn too. That will be exciting.

Four Books today

So this morning before work I got two packages, a small one from booktopia books and a big one from amazon. They both had knitting books in them. Tonight i have read a bit from all of them and think they are all great and I cant wait to read more and try things from them. The first is The Yarn Harlot's At Knits End: Meditations for Women who Knit too much. This book is filled with anecdotes and tips for knitting. I haven't read a lot of it yet but I like that I can just open it to a random page and get an important tip.

The other three books are all about spinning! Boy was I excited to get home and start to read them. I have read the first couple of chapters of each so far and find that all of them have good information and varied information from each authors perspectives which is great for me because I know NOTHING about spinning yet. I have ordered both a top whorl and a bottom whorl spindle with some roving from an Etsy shop so I hope that I learn something from these books.

The first book is Spinning in the Old Way by Priscilla A. Gibson-Roberts. Its a small book with black and white illustrations. It is well written and easy to follow with seemingly good advice on how to spin with a top whorl hand spindle. So far it has given lots of goon information about how to start spinning. She has made it clear that it is her way of doing things that she is explaining and that there are many other ways to spin yarn and this is just one thing to try.

The next book was Start Spinning by Maggie Casey. I heard about this book on the Lime and violet podcast (I am still very behind only having just listened to the episode from May of 2008) and when I went to amazon to find it the other two were bundled with it and I had heard them talking about each of them too. This book has nice clear, instructional photos throughout and is very easy to read.

The final book I received today was Spin to Knit by Shannon Okey. Again there is some nice and clear step by step photos in this book but not as many as in the Start Spinning one. But this book has a lot more ground to cover. This book seems to cover everything from getting a rubbish bag full of fleece left on your doorstep to the patterns for making objects from your hand spun yarn. The information is great. I am not so thrilled about some of the patterns in the end of the book however. There are a lot of things on there that I just would not make. But the info in it is great.

So today was a good mail day. Not only did I get the books but the case of wine I ordered on the weekend was delivered here too. And thank god someone was here to receive it because I wouldn't want to leave a case of Chardonnay out on the from veranda. It could have gotten stolen of over heated. Both would have ruined it.

Working out the kinks

I have been playing around with the background to my blog the last couple of days. the picture on there now was done by Connell. He asked me what I wanted and I said that I didn't know. I just wanted it green and pretty. Then I suggested cherry blossoms on a branch and this is what he came up with. I like it for now. It needs some tweaking i think but it will do. Now I will wait for him to get home and get him to just make it wider so that the background stretches along the whole page.

EDIT: The background is all fixed now. I am going to try to get Connell to sketch me something everyday so that i can change my background every once in a while and feature his art on it.

In the mean time I have a couple of photos. The first one is the Birthday card I got form my workmates. our Secretary is great. And she does scrapbooking (something I want to get into but maybe in the digital form to save paper). So she whipped this card up for me and I love it. Everyone in our unit signed it and I got a very pink cake. I wish I had taken a photo of it. It didn't just look pink, it tasted pink too.

The second photo is where I am up to with my waving chevron scarf. Its coming along nicely and you can actually see the wave in it which is great. I think I'll just make it as long again as it is and that will be it. I will have plenty of the yarn for that too.

Talking of yarn I purchased 2 more skeins today from etsy. I know, I am bad. But as one lady at work said to me, its OK because I don't spend my money on cigarettes and drugs (I would say alcohol too, but the wine tour I went on yesterday would make me a liar), I don't buy any designer clothes, I have lots of clothes but they are all cheapies. so at least i am spending my money on something pretty and creative. I got 2 skeins from Kitty Grrlz Hand Spun Yarns. I got the Dragons Song for my mother, she loves all things dragons and I thought I would make her a scarf or shawl and I got me the Amethyst vine cause that's my favorite stone and I'll make something nice for myself with that.

Today I went to the physio. Next week I'll be starting hydrotherapy at my work pool which is great. It's an hour and a half after my work finishes but I might be able to try to get into work an hour late those days and then just stay back an extra half hour. Otherwise I live right near by so its no drama to get back to the pool once I have been home.

Tonight I played some WiiFit. Its fun. We have had the game for ages and I was using it every day when we first bought it, but soon enough, like most things I lost interest. Connell has been using it most days to chart his weight as he has been running a lot and loosing a lot of weight. But I am a lazy creature and have not been doing enough exercise and I am paying the price.

I used to be part of a "gym" called EFM. It was more of a club with a personal trainer though. They are franchised and all over the city. There is one close by that is run but the wife of a guy I used to work with. The problem is that its $100 a month if you go twice a week at that particular one. I used to pay that for unlimited access when I used to go. But its worth it. They set out programs for everyone every day. So it's different and fun each time. I really have to get off my butt and do something about it. My excuse at the moment is the heat wave. Hopefully next week it will be cool enough to go.

Here is a gorgeous video I was told about:

Wine tour

Today we went on a wine tour of the Barrossa Vally. It was fun (besides a few hiccups along the way from clashing personalities, and one sales person who seemed to think I was invisible). I bought a few bottles of wine had a nice lunch and did a fair bit of knitting along the way. i have just finished the third section of the waving chevron scarf. Still enjoying it but I want to do something with my new yarn.

I have forgiven my cat of it's transgression the other day. She has been unusually friendly since then. So that is good.

Connell is an artist. I am getting him to make a background for me. But he doesnt know how. We will muddle through together.