Busy week

10 days since my last post - how disgraceful! Well, a few things have happened over the past week which have made me unwilling or unable to post.

The bombs - I don't know anyone who was directly involved (thank God) but my heart goes out to those who have lost someone or have been injured.
There is not, and never will be, any justification for acts of this kind. It is reassuring to know that the perpetrators of this evil have been tracked down so quickly - a travesty that they will never have to face the consequences of their actions.

Part of the reason I haven't posted for so long is that I am dog-tired. For the past 10 days I have been on secondment to the local council and have been travelling around with one of the council's visiting officers. This means that I haven't been using my own car (I refuse to pay over £12.00 for the privilege of it sitting in car park all day) and have been "relying" on the bus or a lift to get home. The lift is no problem - it just means I'm not home till about 6.30 (which is late for me). The bus is a different matter. On Wednesday I had to wait about 30 minutes (although the service is advertised as being every 10 mins) and then sat in a queue of traffic for an hour and a half - the journey should take 45 mins max. There were road works and nothing was moving so I didn't get home till about 8.30pm. By the time I'd eaten and done a few rows, I was fit for nothing except my bed.

The other reason for not posting is that I have some tragic news - get your hankies and smelling salts ready and make sure you're sitting down - "Sonnet" is no more, it has shuffled off this mortal coil and gone to join the great stash in the sky (well, actually, the yarn is being re-knitted). It took two attempts to get the body sizing right but when it was finished I was pretty happy with it; however, after wearing the finished article a few times, it became apparent that there were problems. I'm not sure whether the yarn wasn't suited to the design or whether the tension was too loose for that style, but every time I wore the cardi, it fell off as I was walking! It was also distorting along the front edges and would soon have ended up with the fronts trailing round my knees. After much soul-searching and gnashing of teeth, I did the only reasonable thing under the circumstances - frogged, frogged, frogged. The lovely Colinette yarn is now in the process of becoming a top-down raglan cardi in stocking stitch on needles two sizes smaller - the resulting fabric is much firmer and will hopefully keep its shape. I like knitting top-down, it gives me chance to think about the bottom borders before I actually have to knit them. Haven't decided what to do on this one yet - can't decide between a flared edging or a horizontal cable edging; still, there's plenty of time.
In other knitting - I have had to frog part of the latest section of the Aran chair cover; I have no idea what happened, but the second of two identical pieces turned out about three inches too long, but with the right number of stitches! I tried bodging but it didn't work so I had no choice but to crawl back on my lily-pad and "rip-it, rip-it".

The last two weekends have seen me knocked out by migraines. I have suffered from these beastly things for about 10 years, but never very frequently. The last six weeks or so, I have had 5 or 6 migraines, including 2 that have lasted for most of the last 2 weekends and dragged on into Monday. I'm now taking some preventative drugs, so hopefully that's sorted - I can't cope with another weekend in a darkened room feeling like there's an erupting volcano in my head!