Manic Kitty

Busy busy busy. In no particular order:

Sunday I drove up to Manchester to pick up Porl, spent a lovely lazy day around at Sarah and Dave's house. We read the paper, wandered to the supermarket and cooked a lovely Sunday Roast. I think Dave was a bit disturbed by my gleeful washing of the chicken (dead baby) and then carving/pulling apart of it once it was cooked. I never have believed in being a stereotypical vegetarian.

Finally got my car through its MOT, took 3 visits to the garage, and too much money, but it's done and safe and will see me through the winter, after then it's being sold. It's a lovely little car, a Citroen AX GT, it's never given me any trouble (except for MOT time) but the GT bit means the insurance is too expensive for my little pockets. In fact, the MOT, insurance, and tax added together cost more than the value of the car. So after winter it's time for it to go, and I hope some boy-racer fool will buy it off me.

I've started knitting things. it's the first time I've tried knitting anything since I was 7 and had chicken pox, I made a jumper. (Truthfully I did an arm and some straight bits on a jumper and my mum did the rest.) I'm making myself a fuzzy red scarf with 1 strand of red double knit and 1 of red eyelash yarn, using some lovely chunky 7mm needles. They're yellow too which is a bonus. I've done about 2 foot so far and I've still got the same number of stitches that I started with. Hurrah! I also sent off for a sock knitting starter pack from Web of Wool you get 1 ball of opal yarn of your choice, 5 birch dpns, a sock pattern, a tapestry needle and some stitch markers. I also got some black and silver shoelaces for some reason, I'm not sure if that was an accident though. So I don't know how to knit in the round, and I'm a bit hazey on increasing and decreasing and even purling, so socks might be throwing myself in at the deep end, but I'm sure I'll cope.

We've also had a meeting with the Mortgage Adviser, gave her all the details of what we need. I'll not go into details, but it's not a simple one. So we've left it with her and she's going to get back to us when she's got her head around it all. But hopefully by the end of the week we should have a mortgage and life will be easier. More expensive, but easier. Then once this house is bought we can start thinking about getting it ship shape, selling it and moving to Manchester.

My badge machine will be arriving tomorrow, at last! It actually arrived today but porl didn't have any money to pay the £34 import duty. But I can't play with it too much because I have to get some work done on Mark/Shirokuma's website. I should really be doing it tonight, but my mind isn't on the task at all.

My Nan-nan has gone into hospital for 2-3 weeks. She keeps saying it's respite, we keep saying it's respite, but we all know she's gone in there to die really. She's probably in a lot of pain, but she won't admit it. She has admitted she's feeling nauseous, so they're now treating that. The doctors gave her 4 months to live, that was nearly 2 years ago. A doctor friend of ours said if it was anyone else they'd give her 2 weeks to live, that was 3 weeks ago. She's getting grouchier, but she's still got her sense of humour. She keeps referring to her hugely swollen liver as her twins, and explaining that she can't be a Girl Guide anymore because when they operated 2 years ago she lost her belly button (nowhere to put the flags when she's walking in parade now). Whenever anyone mentions death she tells them she's going to live to be 100, but she knows really. She's a strong lady who I love to bits, and I don't want her to give up, but I wish she could swallow her pride a bit.

It's taken me about an hour to write that last paragraph. These entries although always infrequent are getting harder to write. Don't be surprised if I'm not around much over the next few weeks