Signed off

At the moment I am currently signed off with depression. I feel guilty for not being in work, even though they are hiring a temp to cover my work. I feel like I have let it beat me because up until now I have carried on going to work and taken only the occasional day off. My boss was actually quite sympathetic which did surprise me a little. Although I feel a bit crap about it I am also quite glad because I don't have to cope with work, I don't have to keep plodding on and gritting my teeth as I am so tired because I'm sleeping very badly at the moment. Hopefully being off will give me space to heal rather than make me more miserable.

p/hop

Dreaming of Ravelry

Thank you Kings of Leon for almost writing a song titled after one of my most visited websites!

Long time no blog

Why? Overcome with depression, by Facebook, ravelry and knitting. I am coming out of blog hibernation to make an important announcement for charidee.

If you support the causes of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) then please do your bit to help out. Part of their fundraising is through a knitting initiative called p/hop, or pennies per hours of pleasure. You can get knitting patterns and many other lovely knitting related things for donations based on how much enjoyment you will get from them.

p/hop is one year old this November and they are having a mega blog-athon. All they ask is that instead of blogging on your usual site you post it on their blog instead, of course leaving a note to say where you've gone! It doesn't have to have anything to do with knitting or MSF at all. Just put up what you would have said anyway! Just post sometime during the week of 23rd November, and you can visit their site beforehand to find out more information.

Flower Arranging for Dummies

In May I had tonsillitis. My grandparents sent me the lovely bunch of flowers above. Now I don't know if any of you watched Kirstie's Homemade Home but I saw the easiest way of arranging flowers with very short stems, or preserving ones that have been in a big bunch for a bit longer. It's so simple that even Kirstie Allsopp could do it. OK, being a bit harsh there as she's not stupid, just a bit irritating. I think it's the way she gets so over enthusiastic about things.

So all you need are a bunch of flowers, a dish that is wider than it is deep with some water in it and some sticky tape:
Arrange strips of sticky tape over the top of the dish to form a grid pattern, and put flowers into the holes:

Keep doing this until you can't see any of the sticky tape:

Et voila! Sadly I only had a Pyrex dish to put my arrangement in but once it was full of flowers you couldn't tell anymore.

My Five Minutes of Fame

Vince and my favourite radio station is BBC 6Music. When we get up we always put it on to wake us up a bit. This couldn’t be done without the help of the breakfast DJ Shaun Keaveny. He plays good music and is very amusing. Plus he likes to get the listener involved and has several daily features which requires stuff from us at home.

A popular item is Toast the Nation where listeners are encouraged to email in facts about their hometown or where they live now and celebrate how wonderful the country is. The more amusing or spurious the fact the more Shaun loves it. I think the only place that had been toasted in Cumbria was Carlisle but after today that is no longer the case. This morning I toasted Whitehaven, the town where I was born.

If you’re interested in hearing what I had to say then you can listen again for seven days if you follow this link. I encourage you to listen to the whole show if you can (it’s three hours long) but if you want to hear my bit then you need to fast forward to about 1hr 14mins.

Nesting Instinct

I've always been interested in interior design. Perhaps I should have pursued this interest and developed this a career. Perhaps it's not too late. The first television programme I remember watching was the magazine style Homefront. Here I fell in love with the madness of Ann McKevitt and the infectious enthusiasm of Kevin McCloud. Many people now know and love Kevin, as I do, through watching Grand Designs but I'm sure many would be surprised to learn that there have in fact been eight series since it began in 1999.

Since Vince and I got back together in November we have been taking things slowly. In February we decided that we'd like to live together again so we had to tell our respective housemates. This wasn't as bad as we thought as they'd both thought we'd want to eventually. I set my housemate a deadline of getting out by June and he has amazingly found somewhere already and will be moving out in the first weekend of April.

Since we found out we would be living together again sooner than expected we have spent a lot of time thinking about how we will make the house feel more homely. We've wanted to decorate the living room for about two years and have many test patches on the wall but have never made the final step. Before Vince and I decided to live together again I decided that I wanted to decorate my bedroom in Dulux colours Mulberry Burst and Soft Stone. Vince compromised and let me continue to paint the room purple. However he wasn't too keen on the curtains I bought. I love them, especially as they are 66x90" and only cost me £16 including p&p (gotta love eBay). I wondered exactly how much of a bargain this was so I checked it out Dunelm Mill as they're usually pretty cheap for home furnishings. Imagine my face when I looked at this similar pair and saw how much they were! My lovely, brand new, fully lined curtains are pictured below:

Now I'm also hankering after a new coffee table and TV stand. The coffee table that Vince and I bought was about £30 in Argos. It is made of chipboard and has fake wood pattern stuck on top. It has many ring marks and ingrained dirt. The wood effect has come off in places where Vince and I stuck bits of tape to it when wrapping Christmas presents not realising it would come off. Vince has a TV stand for his rather enormous old CRT TV which is going in the spare room so we can play on the PS2 if someone wants to watch TV downstairs. So my TV, Freeview box and DVD player need to have somewhere to sit and I've been eyeing these up on eBay:

Quite old fashioned you may think, but as I live in an early 1900s factory workers' terrace new and minimal just doesn't look right. I've asked my parents to buy me the coffee table for my birthday as it only costs £60 including postage! The TV stand is a little pricier at £150 but I still think it's a fantastic offer as it would probably set you back about £300 in a high street shop. Sadly I'm pretty much broke until I get paid next Friday so it will just have to come out of next month's pay packet.

New Look

Recently I got my hair cut shorter. Now I have just bought myself some new specs from the rather fabulous Glasses Direct. Go to a high street optician, enter your prescription details onto their website and you can get trendy glasses from as little as £19 including lenses. Yes I did say INCLUDING lenses!

The lovely pair I am modeling above are called Daquiri and set me back £38 including scratch resistant coating and postage. They look black but they are in fact black/dark red - a bit of a departure for me because the last few pairs I've bought have all had purple frames.

So whaddaya think?

Oh and sorry if my "lack of eyebrows" scares you - you can see why I don't bother doing anything with them as they are almost invisibly blonde!

Interesting story

Just came across this rather interesting story on the BBC website in my lunch break. Many theories and controversy as to the cause of the mysterious goo. Fascinating stuff.

I Am Evil

Now you can all have it in your heads mwahahahaha!

New Barnet

No it's not a new city in Australia or America named after the area of London but my new hair cut. Sorry about the red eye but I didn't get a chance to sort that out this morning before work.

So what do you think?

Gingerism

I visited JJ's blog and was greeted by this little snippet. I am immensely offended by that! I'm sick of society being ginger racist. If you can't say n****r word or p**i then i don't see why you should be able to say copperknob or ginger nut and the like. Ginger nut is not so bad, and indeed I don't mind being called ginge if it is said affectionately, but I do take offence to certain nicknames and the fact that it is still socially acceptable to use them.

When I was at school I used to get teased for having red hair. I used to get asked what colour my pubes were. Some boys used to lick their fingers, pretend to touch my hair and make a hissing noise as if it was hot. I was asked why I didn't dye it. Conversely, little old ladies and all my hairdressers have always said what a lovey colour it is. I have recently enhanced it using Lush henna dye.

I remember seeing Catherine Tate on Jonathan Ross last year. She was trying to get a kitten from Battersea and the first one they offered her had a problem. How bad? she asked. When it does a crap you'll have to push it's arse back in as it has a prolapse. We'll pass thanks.

A few weeks later she gets a call from the home. We've got another kitten for you but this one has a problem too. It's ginger. THE HATRED OF MY PEOPLE GOES DOWN TO CAT KIND she exploded. I gave her a round of applause.

Cumbrian Menagerie

Getting a train on the west Cumbrian coast railway has its ups and downs. The trains are all old and could do with being retired, there are usually several mad people you wouldn't want to sit next to and the carriages inexplicably smell of a mixture between manure and marijuana. However the views along the journey are fantastic and there is always plenty of wildlife to see.

I travelled between Whitehaven (a bit of the harbour can be seen above) and Carlisle on New Year's day. It was a fantastic journey. The first good fortune I had was that it was a brilliantly clear day so the views would be amazing; the second was that I was the only person on the train so had two carriages to myself. It stayed this way until Workington when one other person got on but he sat in the other carriage so it was still blissfully quiet and chav free. My third bit of luck was that the conductor's ticket machine was broken so I had a free journey!

The terrain changes from coast to fells as the train goes slightly more inland so there is plenty of opportunity to see a variety of wildlife. I think this journey is the best one for the amount of fauna I spotted as I speeded through the countryside. Oyster catchers, gulls, several herons, blackbirds, fieldfares, jackdaws, sheep, cows, a couple of ponies, a large rook or a raven and even a Vietnamese pot bellied pig!