flaking out

For what feels like the hundredth time in three months, a gang of tradesmen have descended and boxes full of god-knows-what have been shifted from one room to another. While there's no longer a toilet in the old kitchen (progress!) there is now a bed in the living room (hard to ignore). The process of replacing a rotten old kitchen seems to have taken over every corner, every object and every day of our lives - not to mention every penny. But because we're doing this out of sheer necessity rather than any Elle Deco sense of aesthetic supremacy (the old kitchen is run into the ground and starting to digest itself from the inside out) the process is somehow easier to tolerate. It simply has. to. get. done.

Except that the noise and the fine film of dust is torturous. So much so that I'm willing to leave the keys with whichever bunch of grunts I hired two hours earlier and just escape. And so earlier this week (on the pretext of discussing flooring) I went to our local department store... and ended up in the wool department.

This makes me a total flake. I have two unfinished baby jumpers on the go and a box full of yarn remnants, but an offer on wool cotton in the softest unisex shades was more than my ditzy temperament could resist. I immediately cast on 250 stitches and started striping, and suddenly there's a massive project on my hands - a garter stitch baby blanket of one-row stripes and unimaginable tedium. It will (if it ever gets finished) be seriously beautiful. But any 'design' (if I can be bumptious enough to call stripes that) I've come up with myself has always ended up unfinished in the bottom of a bag. So I'm not holding my breath.

And here's the thing, we're not even getting new flooring.

Another thing I'm being a drip about it books. These is my words; the diary of Sarah Agnes Prine by Nancy Turner is our bookgroup choice for this month, and I'm finding it hard going. I can tell that it's an important historical book and, being a real young woman's diary, it's very easy to read. But it's a pretty grim diary of American pioneer travelling life in the 1880s, with all the death, disease and violence that entails. It's hard to keep going, and it's a looooong book. So when the meeting this friday night got postponed due to the hostess' unwelcome kidney stone, I have to admit, there was just a tiny grain of relief at the back of my conscious brain; phew, I don't have to struggle on with that book by the weekend.

I KNOW, my buddy has a kidney stone, it's unforgivable! I promise to rectify my karma and offer to go round and do her ironing or something.