Polar blast? Not today.

So I took a day of work today because I've felt a cold building up for the past week and last night I felt absolutely terrible (nose running like a tap, headache, stiff upper back, wheezing).

And I thought "It's probably a good day to stay at home, what with the gale force freez-ies predicted for tomorrow"(really - folks in the South Island have been shopping like the day before Good Friday, and preparing to hunker down for the next couple of days).

But...actually it's not been that cold. I turned off my heater just now when I looked out of the bedroom window, admired the lovely big rainbow in the sky, and noticed that I can't see my breath (there's no heating on in that room).

Also, I feel not too bad.Maybe it's the calm before the storm (cold-wise and weather-wise). I suppose I'll just have to wait and see.

Time on our backsides

You've probably read the news stories about how a sedentary lifestyle can be lethal - that is, even if you go to the gym religiously, the more time you spend sitting, the earlier you'll die.

The first time I read about this, I was on my lunch break. I spent the following hour bent over my workstation, trying to type whilst standing. Then my lower back started to ache, so I had to sit down.

Well, I've spent the better part of the last three days on my bum, all because TLM is sick with a constant cough and a forehead you could fry an egg on (but she wouldn't eat it because she doesn't like egg). She's been on her bum all that time too, except during those moments when she felt well enough to leap about like a well child. And the boy - he seems to have caught the lurgy, so is spending more time that usual saving the world through computer gaming.

I haven't actually minded this relative inactivity, because it's allowed me lots of knitting time - which I've needed, because I'm trying to knit a dress and have already ripped it back from hip to armpit TWICE after realising my sizing was overly optimistic. And I would really like to be able to wear it while it's still cold enough to.

I did go to yesterday's World Knitting In Public Day event, where there was a small but friendly group of knitters including a visitor from Cape Town and an art history professor from Idaho.

My weekend of exploded sinuses

I thought I was having my third cold in 4 weeks - when it suddenly dawned on my that my latest cold (at least) was in fact terrible hay fever. It's the kind that has me sneezing so hard that I almost hit my head on the floor, and kinda sounds like cannon-fire.

It wasn't helped by the fact that I spent a few hours cleaning the house yesterday and had decided to finally tackle the thick blanket of dust around the boy's workstation. It was blanketed, I tell you!

On the plus side, I went to a sock-knitting workshop in the afternoon, part of the Handmade festival this weekend. I went to learn how to knit socks, but also to meet fellow knitters. It turned out that the women I did speak to weren't quite as knit-obssessed as I, and I even had to help a couple of them with their stitching!

So now I can knit socks (at least,  one miniature sock), which means I can finally use that beautiful sock yarn I bought two years ago...

Choo!

A last hurrah for summer

One beautiful Sunday afternoon we decided to go down to the beach and check out the rock pools. It was awesome.

Some Neptune's Necklace

Sea anemone

View of the fishing boats with Marine Education Centre at left

sea kelp, with TLM for size reference

sea slugs

And then there was one...

In memory of Munchy the caterpillar

About two months ago, monarch caterpillars finally started to appear on TLM's swan plant (which she's had since Christmas).

First one, then another, and so on until there were five caterpillars of varying size, chomping their way through the swan plant leaves. We were so excited to be part of the monarch butterfly life cycle!

TLM named them Munchy, Crunchy, Punchy, Lunchy and Yawny. They munched and crunched (as you'd expect) until there were very few intact leaves left.

And then they started disappearing. Punchy was the first to go, and then Lunchy, until....there was only one left on the plant. The birds must have been picking them off once they got big enough to be noticed.

Then we found one dangling from the top of our wooden fence. Hooray, we thought. It's about to become a chrysalis!

But he didn't turn into one. He uncurled, and then just hung there until we realised that the life had gone out of the poor creature. We were down to just one caterpillar after all.

Every day we go and check on Yawny, hoping he gets to complete his life cycle and become a chrysalis and then a butterfly. Hoping that he doesn't become a bird's dinner.

Knitting round-up

A peaked cap for me...

...using two buttons I bought at the Underground Market

A slightly chunky-fying funnel neck top...

with an abstract design on the back which I made up as I went

A beanie for my mum, for Mother's Day

And a wool/mohair/angora tunic for TLM, who wins as this post's cutest model.

Within spitting distance of Jermaine

The other night I took TLM with me to the opening of an art exhibition, featuring a friend, his wife, and  a third person whom I didn't know at all.

We started with dinner for TLM at a Vietnamese place called the Mekong, where she enjoyed two types of spring roll (the "normal", deep fried kind and summer rolls) - I had to take a photo of her with both cheeks full and both plates bereft.

The exhibition was packed. There was live music played by my friend and, among others, two librarians I knew from our local library (including one keen knitter). They sang songs in Spanish and looked like they were having the best time.

Then I saw this tallish, hairy guy just in front of me and realised it was Jermaine from Flight of the Conchords. "Of course," I realised, he is my friend's nephew so of course he'd be there. In fact this friend was the one who recommended that I go see the Conchords a few years back (pre-US tv show).

But I did the Kiwi thing and pretended he was not an international celebrity. Some would say it's because we just aren't into celebrities in NZ. In my case though it was probably just shyness (I was just as lame when I had a chance to talk to my favourite NZ artist Shane Cotton, and didn't).

Besides, I prefer Brett.

Woolly weather incoming

You can tell the drought is finally over when our laundry is once more an unmanageable mountain of unwashed clothing. I was hoping to get a couple of loads up on the line today, but of course right after it was all hung up nature decided to make a liar of the weather forecasters (who hurriedly update their forecast from sunny to rainy) - and it all came down again. Towels too, they were - nice and thick and taking an age to do in the dryer.

On the plus side, it is occasionally cool enough for me to wear my new hat (also on Ravelry).

All cleaned out

We've had a skip bin sitting on our driveway all weekend, and we've been filling it with all sorts of junk. I'm astonished that we actually managed to fill 7.5 cubic meters - almost the size of our garage!

It contains:

• heaps of crap that we found under our house (when cleaning it out in preparation for under-floor insulation a coupla years ago) - construction materials mostly
• Old ceramic dinner plates (which I tried to get rid of on Freeview, but shortly after signing up my inbox was so inundated with irrelevant emails that I've never been back to check whether there were any takers)
• A bag of rags ( we produce enough old clothes to use as rags that there's no sense in saving them up)
• the old filing cabinet I put together myself, by hand
• an old glass cabinet passed to me by my mum (and it was secondhand when she got it)
• old pillows, synthetic duvets, wool mattress liner and curtains
• old back packs (including the packs which served me faithfully through two years of OE)
• an old oil column heater (which nearly caused me to fall out of the attic because it was so damned heavy
• lots and lots of weeds
• and my friend's surround sound systems, which I didn't even know we still had (Dave L, I'm really sorry - you were right and I was wrong) and which is still up the attic because the box is massive and massively heavy.

It was rather too exciting having to be the one to go up the ladder to get into the attic (the boy couldn't get through the hole because his shoulders are too wide. No, really!) But I did it and that's enough for the next few years.

At times (generally while throwing rubbish into the skip) I felt like Derek Zoolander having a go at being a coal miner (with less posturing).

Now I'm resting, fully fed by the boy's home-baked pork spare ribs and a very large slice of framboise, with a big box of tissues because my sinuses are going absolutely CRAZY.