A little purse

Well the month has flown by rather fast, and I realise that I havent posted to my blog for two weeks so here I am giving you an update of what I have been doing. I have finally unpacked and am in the new residence, though I still don't know where I have put a lot of stuff its obviously going to take me a little while to get used to the new place. The biggest challenge at the moment is getting used to having neighbours again - all whom seem to have dogs(barking ones). I of course have two of my own, but they have been brought up NOT to bark at every little movement, whilst the dogs around us seem to bark at birds, leaves and even the dark. I am used to being able to get up and walk outside in my dressing gown here if I do that my neighbour is usually the very first person that I see and my dressing gown is not the most glamorous item in my wardrobe.
I did not knit for the first 17 days of the new year, I have been given a fleece and I have been busy cleaning it and carding it ready to spin. I am only a third of the way through washing and carding and so far I have three bins full of fleece waiting to be spun and I am not looking forward to cleaning the rest of the fleece its so labour intensive. The little purse in the pic is what I managed to finish in knitting, the pattern comes from the book A Gathering of Lace by Meg Swansen and there are some beautiful patterns in this book. I really want to do another pattern in the book The Hexagonal Purse, but this is knit in the round and starts with 6 itty bitty stitches on dpns which are joined and knit in the round, for the life of me I just cannot join those itty bitty stitches into the round, I drop the needles, twist the yarn or just plain drop stitches, Ive tried everything I could think of -nothing works so if anyone has any ideas Im all ears

Four seasons in one day

Victoria has always had the reputation of having four seasons in one day, and today it lived up to its reputation. First we had extremely hot weather 41 degrees in the morning, then at lunch time a cool change came through and with it a thunderstorm, not alarming in itself but when you live surrounded by natural bush a lightning strike can strike fear and start bushfires, as was the case today. Yes we had our first bushfire in our neighborhood, about 5 km away but enough to alarm our little community especially with the wild winds that had been gusting all day.
Luckily our rangers were onto the fire pretty pronto, and managed to put the fire out without loss of property or lives. On top of this we are also moving, only about 6km away and into a more suburban area but it is still a high fire danger area, (in fact there was a fire yesterday in the area but was quickly contained -got to love the CFA )
One of my neighbors Maria, rang and told me of the fire (she was at work and heard the reports from the rangers) and she had already rung her kids who were at home and told them to leave and rang me to tell me the same, I wasn't home but she left messages detailing the fire and told me it may be time to activate my fire plan - my fire plan consisted of leaving as quickly as I could but first I had to unhitch the goat so the goat could also escape if fire threatened, I would hate to have the poor animal die because it couldn't escape but luckily that never had to eventuate.

Moving is such a horrendous job and each time I move I vow never to move again, but circumstances often force me to move and each time I do it seems to get worse, I am again vowing to go through my possessions and remove the extra things that I keep and this time I am again making that vow - do I really need to keep all the extra curtains and blankets that I keep but never use? Already the new house has one room of boxes and I dread what I know is inevitable -unpacking the same damm boxes that I packed last week and the week before - I hate moving. (sigh)

Welcome to my nightmare

This morning, I opened the bedroom door to find a humungus huntsman waiting to come in. I quickly found a jar and placed it over him and slid a piece of paper under the jar so I didn't have to touch him. I WAS going to release him outside but then discovered the whole house had been invaded by a total of 5 of these monsters.

Then I noticed something strange in the jar where I had put two of the spiders, there were worms in the jar with the spiders loooong skinny worms.

Needless to say I am totally grossed out and I think the jar will be going straight into the bin, and I will be dosing the family (dogs included) with worm medicine, I don't know if these worms infect humans but I'm not taking the risk. I think I also will be investing in some boxes of spider spray a whole truck worth should be enough!

Um please explain?

Oh dear, the model ain't happy about it either I think!

Happy little vegemite

Well after days of fingernail biting and pacing the floor I am very happy to say I have got my yarn back. Today finally the police yards were open and we were able to pick up our car. First thing I looked for was my yarn and it was there still in a plastic bag that I had put it in. No damage was done to the car, in fact not much gas was used since the car was driven only 2 blocks from the shopping centre from which it was stolen, the police actually told us who they thought had stolen the car and asked us to go thru the car and see if anything was taken.

The only thing missing was a 17 year old cordless drill, and I believe the police were going to search the suspects home and this was the ammunition that would prove the suspects guilt.

I am just glad that we have back our car, and my yarn and just want to put the whole horrible experience behind us. Already 2008 seems a lot brighter I hope it continues that way for us.

Finally its finished

Its finished, Squeeeee after 2 months of knit, frog , knit and luckily before New Years so this is the last completed project for 2007.

All I've got is a photograph

Ten days ago Mr Wombat and I ventured out of our home in the hills and drove down to a shopping centre in Carrum Downs. I needed to post out a parcel so went straight into the post office to post it. About 15 minutes later we decided to leave and headed out to the car. When we got to where the car was parked, the car had been stolen, this was devastating in itself as we had traveled some 50km away from our home (and we have no trains in our little part of the world unless you call a steam train transport) we also don't have a second car on the road yet and so we were facing a very tough time without transport. On top of this, I had brought along my yarn the Paradiso Gembrook (I had intended to show a friend that I had learnt to spin) which I left in the car. I was shattered.
We finally started to head towards Mr Wombats work where we could pick up a company car to use whilst we sorted ourselves out, but this particular day was a day that Melbourne experienced four seasons in one day (something Melbourne is famous for).

As we got off the train, the heavens opened and torrential rain literally poured from the sky, and within minutes Mr Wombat and I had been drenched to the skin.

After finally getting home (some 4 hours later) we discovered that lightning had knocked out our power, phone and Internet. Power was quickly restored, but a phone call (via public phone) to the phone company said that because of the storms our phone would not be restored until after the weekend, now for us this was bad bad news, because not only is it our link to the outside world I live in a high fire risk area and without the phone if there was a fire I could not alert people to the fact there was a fire and I would be in danger of not being able to escape.

Luckily the weather over the weekend was mild and so the fire danger was minimal. The following Monday, I waited all day, but no telephone man showed and so Monday night I rang the phone people again.

I was told because of the storm damage in the area there was a huge workload for the phone company and my phone fixing had been deferred until a later date (Jan 8th was the date they said ) now normally I would have waited, but I really really felt that this was dangerous to me and the other residents in my neighborhood fire is our biggest threat as there are huge areas of natural bush surrounding us and said so to the phone rep.

Finally after much arguing and pleading from me, the phone rep agreed to send out a technician to see if he could fix the phone line.

So 24 hours later a technician turned up to check the phone, five minutes later we had phone and Internet connection (the high winds of the storm had loosened the connections) and we had contact with the outside world.

We immediately rang the police to find out if our car had been found (it had) and currently its in the police holding yard (yay) don't know if the car is damaged (the police said the car doesn't look damaged) and they also say that nothing is missing from the car so I'm hoping my yarn is still in the car we will have to wait for the police holding yards to be open after the New Year holidays before we can retrieve the car. I am hoping that 2008 turns out to be a better year for Mr Wombat and myself as 2007 had been one long horrible year for us.
Roll on 2008!