jenwren's blog

No, I didn't fall for any April Fool's Day jokes.  Year 8 tried hard, but I worked out what was happening immediately...  My class went to the other teacher and the other class tried coming to my classroom.  It might have worked if I hadn't marked their roll immediately beforehand, arrived at the room before them, and happen to know every student in that year group by name.  When I finally did get my class, they pinched my pencil case and iBook!  Problem is, the guilty party usually giggles the most and can easily be identified...

I liked the Virgin BBQ sausage credit card ad and MINI Cabrio Roof Down Squad letter in this morning's Sydney Morning Herald (pages 3 & 7 in my edition).  And MuggleNet did a great "closed down by court order" page, and I  can't wait for "Harry Potter and the Pillar of Storge" to be released in just another 4 hours!

I can finally confirm I will be moving house during the upcoming school holidays.  And it was no April Fools joke to be told by my ISP (and then have it confirmed by Telstra) that you can't even request the relocation of an ADSL service until *after* you relocate the telephone service and have dial tone at the new location.  So I can look forward to at least five days without ADSL during the change over.  Bugger!  I suppose I might be too busy packing/unpacking boxes to notice...

I hate moving house.  It's all so much work.  With the help of my wonderful parents though, a large proportion of my belongings have now moved to my new address.  My parents also delivered a sofa my sister wasn't using (well, Oscar the cat might have been using it...) and kindly parted with (thanks pooh-head!).  What's left is mainly either very heavy (books, especially the floras and textbooks) or very bulky (eg. sofa, beds) or both (eg. fridge).  A truck comes for them on Thursday.

The unexpected surprise at my new home when I signed the lease was that they'd repainted the interior walls, ahem, yellow, and that they want to recarpet the place sometime soon.  I'm going to try talk them out of the recarpeting.  It's quite enough to move all my furniture once...  And by the time I arrange the furniture and bring over the rugs (they're staying at my old place until I steam clean them at the same time as the horrible brown carpet) then no one will know there's some dreadful patches and holes underneath in the living room carpet.  Of course, the painters removed almost every picture hook too, so now I need to get permission to put some back up.

So the week ahead involves lots of cleaning at one location, and lots of putting stuff away at the other location (thank heavens for school holidays!).  I have loads more cupboards at my new place; this is probably not such a good thing as I tend to hoard things and never part with them.

Moving out so much of my stuff has meant I could spread out the Bob and Weave shawl to adjust the tension of the ribbons.  I finished knitting it a week ago, and the ribbons have been a bit more fiddly than I anticipated.  I also didn't buy enough ribbon (the shawl is a little longer than expected) so it will be a bit longer before I get a chance to get some more for the last three drop-stitched ladders.  It is very snuggly and warm already!

The latest Knitty is out.  I'm a tad annoyed because I'm on the update list and I still haven't received the notification email for the new issue.  I checked, and I am on the Yahoo! list, and Amy did send out the notification.  I suppose that Yahoo! just can't deal with a list of nearly 20,000 subscribers!  And my browser is being silly and won't refresh to the correct issue.  I'm looking forward to Southern Cross Knitting coming out - an online mag with the seasons in sync, and hopefully using yarns I can actually lay my hands on!

Tomorrow, my phone line gets shifted, so I probably won't have my ADSL connection for a while.

Edit:  the Knitty notification was in my spam box.  I've fixed the filter to allow them through in future.

Here's a photo of some of my new neighbours.  I don't think they'll jump the two fences between me and them to invade my yard, and I don't think they'll make much noise.  When I woke up yesterday morning, I sat by a window and watched and listened to the local bird life (cockatoos, galahs, rosellas, magpies...).  I like my new home very much!

Inside, the place is slowly coming together.  All 14 boxes of books are now unpacked and reshelved.  Thankfully, I did talk the landlord out of recarpeting.  I couldn't face unpacking those shelves again so soon!  But tomorrow, the lino in the kitchen is being replaced.  And I got permission to put up the pictures - only some are up so far because I've run out of picture hooks!  The poster on the wall on the left is one I have had rolled up for the last 2 and a bit years since I left Sydney - it suits the yellow walls (the colour isn't too bad, but it is a really poor paint job!).  The pile of things on the floor on the left is my school marking pile...

And the ADSL was reconnected this afternoon.  Which really makes my moving house pretty much complete!

I've just returned from seeing The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie, and it was fantastic.  I loved the "point of view gun", the factory floor on Magrathea was visually stunning, and the knitted sequence (pictured) was a laugh.  Yep, they did a knitted sequence where the space ship and all the crew were temporarily knitted dolls and knitted walls, floors - everything!  And Arthur Dent coughed up multicoloured wool, and continued to after 'normality' was restored.  The whole thing was brilliant.  If you go see it, be sure to stay through the end credits because there's a postscript from the Hitchhikers Guide...

School's back in so I'm flat out with work, but I have picked up the needles again on the kid mohair scarf.  It's at that stage where the ball doesn't seem to be getting any smaller and the scarf doesn't seem to be getting any longer but in fact both are happening according to the measuring tape.  Any day now it may actually cool down enough to wear a scarf.  It's still ridiculously warm considering it's the last day of April.  It's colder at night but there's still not been a decent frost and the daytime temperatures are above average.

Despite the lack of cool weather, I went shopping this morning and bought a pair of chocolate brown 'wool denim' jeans (expensive, but hopefully worth it), and a brown jacket.  I liked the jacket because it's 100% wool (the shop assistant described it as "boiled wool" - it's a knitted and fulled fabric) and unlined - most of the jackets have polyester linings that I hate.

I also went to the garden centre and bought a new Rosemary plant (my last one died during the first Winter I was in Armidale - it didn't adjust from Sydney's climate) and a mixed punnet of Asian greens - Bok Choy, Chinese Cabbage and Choy Sum.  My last attempt at Bok Choy wasn't very successful (raised from seed and bolted straight to flower), so it will be interesting to see what happens.

And the Bob and Weave shawl is a whisker away from completion - I have the ribbon needed to finish it and have been threading and stitching it when I get the chance.  Which is usually when watching bad television that doesn't require my full attention.  There hasn't been much time for that in the last week - I have several hours of (good) taped programs to watch.  Like I said, it's been a hectic week.