Some Really Bad News, and some recent reading

 So the bad news is that our insurance company told us earlier this week that we weren't covered for losing our holiday due to a passport lost or stolen in the hours before leaving on the trip and it has taken me some while to get over this blow. We are registering a complaint; they are obviously obliged to tell you that you can do this although they also tell you it is unlikely to do you any good. I have now passed over dealing with this to the OH, partly because he is better than me at this stuff and partly because when all is said and done it's his fault. I don't suppose we will actually be able to screw any money out of the Scrooge McDuck Corporation that is NFU Mutual, but it gives me some satisfaction to reflect that we are at least inconveniencing them by not just going away and whimpering in a corner about their meanness. 

And now to some books. I have read some dark stuff lately. This was partly to do with the Bloody Scotland book club which is a Facebook based, three book, quarterly thing which sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. I've read two of the three books for the June one; The Crow Trap by Ann Cleeves and an Icelandic thing called The Darkness by someone called Ragnor Jonasson. I do not recommend The Darkness unless you are looking for an entry way into a deep depression. It was bleak squared. The Crow Trap I had read before but as with all of Ann Cleeves books I can read them over and over because I never remember who did what to whom or why. I mean, I wouldn't have re-read this if hadn't been for the prompt of the book club but at least I didn't; spend half my team reading it thinking that yes I knew where this was going. The plot is quite good actually, she's good at plot, but it can't be denied this is one author who never bothers lightening her tale with even a glimmer of humour. Her characters are all totally without any sense of it. The third Bloody Scotland book is The Waiter by Ajay Choudhry and I have that on request from the library. Whether it will turn up before the discussion I don't know. So far, no show. 

On the way back from St Pancras I started a new Karin Slaughter  which I bought to read on the miserable trip back from London to Glasgow. Even for Karin Slaughter it was really dark. She lives in a world completely dominated by the evil of men and what they do to women and I thought here she slipped over into the realms of the incredible.  Even while realising that she probably hasn't and that what she describes is probably only too likely. Her redeeming features are  that she has good people, even some good men, who try their best to hold the line against the darkness of the world, and that many of her recurring characters are people who have survived terrible things and gone onto become beacons of hope to others. Even so, it will be a while before I broach another; too many too close together would not be a Good Thing. 

So after all that when I next went to the library  I ignored the fiction shelves, because I really couldn't face another slew of misery and murder and took myself off instead to the Large Books Art and Craft shelves where I picked up some stuff based mainly on how colourful the pictures were and how life affirming the contents were likely to be. The first two that I looked at were these

Only Us by Stuart Dunn which is a series of portraits of people taken by Dunn, a professinal photographer and filmographer all around the world and Arne and Carlos Twenty Five Years of Favourite Knits (or some other such celebratory title). These did do something to restore my equilibrium. I didn't see anything I wanted to knit in the Arne and Carlos book although if I were younger I might have thought that knitting baubles for my Christmas Tree was a good use of my time, and the portraits in Dunn's book were from a limited number of places - obviously those where he had made documentaries and had taken still shots as well as film. But neither  required anything from me other than to look and admire and drown myself in colour and texture  and that was restorative.  

Baking Subscription - The Final Box

 Long term readers will remember that I used to subscribe to a baking thing where every month I got a recipe, a set of dry ingredients and a list of the fresh ones I needed to supply myself and I then baked the cake/biscuits/muffins whatever with varying degrees of success. I stopped after three years because the recipes were getting a bit repetitive and I had collected a lot of nice ones along the way. Somehow two boxes from the final year stayed on the kitchen worktop unregarded for a very long time. 

Son no 2 was home for a week's holiday last week* and this seemed a perfect opportunity to make the strawberry shortcake celebration cake. especially as strawberries are coming into the supermarkets just now. It was a real joint effort; I made the cake and shortbread, Son No 2 made the strawberry compote and the OH whipped the cream and did the assembly and decoration ( decoration being, as long term readers will also be aware, my weakness when it comes to baking. 

A couple of photos

We all did a great job and the cake was delicious. 

As for the other box, which was soft pretzels and which I really had no motivation to make, as we are not really pretzel people, I raided it for the dry ingredients, labelled them for future use and dumped the box and recipe. So that really is the end of the baking boxes. It was fun while it lasted and I had the sense to stop it when it stopped being fun. And this last cake is definitely one to repeat for special summer occasions. 

* His presence accounts for my being MIA as far as the blog is concerned. Normal service now resumed although, much to the OH's disgust I suspect, there will be a lot of what he calls 'banging on about books' over the next couple of weeks. 

Happy mail - but not wool

So I've been doing a little bit of cross stitch recently and I had in mind to do some small 'one day' designs from a magazine and then I could be rid of the magazine. This has been a vague idea for  awhile and is the reason that I took advantage of an offer of a linen taster pack; five 8 x 8 " pieces in different colours. And  then I added a magnetic needle minder for good measure because however much you tell yourself you're not going to leave a needle to go rusty in your fabric and in the design area in a piece of work you then neglect for months or even years - it does happen. You can imagine how I know.  Plus it was cute. 

Voila!

The grey one second from the left has a sparkly thread in it so I don't know that I'll be using that any time soon; but the others are very nice. I'm pleased with them. And the mouse. 

A Sunny Stroll

I don't think it will come as a surprise to anyone that I have been feeling a bit down recently, mainly due to the difficulties of dealing with the insurance company with the underpowered server which has in turn brought back all the horror and shock of the loss of the holiday. I was very unhappy yesterday and although we had thought about going out, since the weather was good I couldn't face it. We postponed until today. 

Last night I had a nightmare in which our insurance claim was knocked back in its entirety on the grounds that the person here who had referred it to head office was known to be an alcoholic. I have absolutely NO idea where that came from. No surprise then that when I finally lifted my weary not-very-well-refreshed head from my pillow this morning - somewhat later than might be considered desirable - I really didn't feel like dragging myself out today either. 

I made myself do it though. The sun was shining, and it was time to have a bit of a stern word and do something other than moon about the house. Consequently we got in the car and drove right over to the other side of Orkney to the cliffs of Yesnaby. Normally when we get to Yesnaby we get out of the car and turn left to walk along the cliff but today, skittish types that we are (ha,ha), we opted to turn right. This led to a fearsome stile - 

seriously? 3 storeys? and took us towards the Brough of Borwick. We didn't go all the way to the Brough which involves fording a small stream and rather more up and down than I was happy to do given that it's not a proper path, I wasn't wearing walking boots and  the Brough isn't all that interesting when you get there. I have been to it once - and once was enough. In the days when the OH was a Volunteer Heritage Ranger he used to litter pick at Borwick, but that's a long time ago now. 

The views aren't really as interesting when you turn left as when you turn right as the coastline isn't quite so dramatically eroded and in any case you're rather further from the cliff edge so it's more difficult to see. But I did take  a couple of nice photos. 

As you can see it's a really beautiful day. We dropped into Stromness on the way back hoping to have coffee and cake at Julia's Shed, but all that was left was Malteser tray bake and date flapjack, neither of which floats our boats, so we came home. We stopped at Celina Rupp's, again in hope of coffee and cake, but it was the same story; cheese scones, flapjack, gluten free muffins and some lemon curd swiss roll. On another day I might have forced down the swiss roll, but it's not my favourite, it's always rather too sharp there for my taste and really what is the point of paying almost £4 for a slice of cake that you know before it arrives you are not going to enjoy? 

We're home now and after a late lunch I baked a cake which is even now in the oven. This is partly because our boy is arriving tomorrow night for a week's holiday from Glasgow and if your boy is coming home there has to be cake. The OH is out in the garden building a bridge; for which read playing with his new chain saw, but I think that's clearing the ground ready for the bridge building. It's to make easy access into our wood, all part of the pre-marketing house and garden spruce up. 

So after a fairly busy day, which has at least cheered me up a little bit, I'm off to do something relaxing. 

I need something soothing

 since I have discovered this morning that all the carefully collected information that it took so long to amass and then send to the insurance company yesterday did not arrive 'probably because our server could not cope with all of the attachments'. Since you are obliged to pursue your claim by sending a lot of documents and since they have to be attached to an e-mail this was not music to my ears. If they won't let you deal with your local branch and you can't send them the paper through the post the least they could do in my opinion is ensure that their s*dding server can cope with all the bumph it gets sent. 

I have now sent them three more e-mails with fewer attachments on each but since their server has only auto-acknowledged one I have a feeling it has only accepted one and the other two are still languishing somewhere in the ether. This fills me with neither joy not confidence. 

I am totally frazzled, I cannot settle to anything (not even knitting!) I tell myself all the things like 'the ball is in  their court' and 'you have done as much as you can' and  'park it until you hear back' etc etc but none of these helps.  Nor does it help reflecting that none of this is my fault - not the original cancellation of the holiday, nor the limited capacity of the insurer's server, and yet I am the one with shredded nerves wandering round unable to function. I know all the stuff about how life isn't fair and you shouldn't expect it to be but in this instance I do feel other people could be making more of an effort to make it slightly less unfair than it is. 

I was going to post some beautiful photos of a Japanese garden that we visited the day before our ill-fated flight to London but somehow I can't being myself to do it today. Maybe tomorrow if the insurance people have stepped up to the plate. 

Phew!

I just spent quite a long time this morning getting all the ducks in a row for the insurance claim re the lost holiday. All now done and sent off, so just have to wait now  and see how much we get. It is scary how much extra cost is involved because we live in Orkney; I know everyone has to get to the airport or train statin for their holidays but not many have to travel as far as we do. 

Getting a replacement passport for the OH proved a bit of a nightmare too. I'm sure we were promised computers were going to make our lives easier, but I'm not sure I'm convinced. 

Possibly another and much more interesting post later in the day; for now I feel like the proverbial wrung out rag. 

You Decide

unforgiveable falling off of wagon or understandable consolation?

These arrived yesterday

Three skeins of Monet inspired yarn from the yarn artist. Well, after all, I wasn't going to be seeing the real thing so this was in the nature of an appropriate comfort gift to myself. I ordered three skeins of undyed from her as well and I know what I'm going to make with them , although I'm not sure when I'll get it cast on. Soon enough for the yarn not to skew my stash numbers for too long I hope. 

So what do you think? No reason why I shouldn't look for some consolation where I could find it? Or just a case of any old excuse to buy more wool? 

A Lovely Surprise

I was expecting a parcel yesterday from the  the Glasgow Soap Company which duly arrived and yes, do click the link, their stuff is gorgeous and they're very quick to deliver. No surprise then that their parcel arrived when they said it would, but very surprised to be also handed a very long thin box from postie marked Bloom and Wild. Which, when I opened it, contained a lovely selection of flowers, as above, and a consolatory card from my sister because of my lost holiday. 

It was a lovely thought and the flowers are gorgeous. I photographed them in the usual place on the front hall window sill but then moved them into the living room because in there I can find somewhere that's not in direct sunlight, so helping them to last longer.

I was half expecting another parcel which didn't come yesterday but did arrive today. More on that tomorrow...

 

Happy Valley

We were supposed to be going to Happy Valley yesterday but the weather wasn't very nice so we put it off until today. For once, procrastination was rewarded because, although there was quite a thick haar in places today, Happy Valley wasn't one of them. 

We tend to go two or three times a year and always try to catch the bluebells. It's so beautiful there and I always take loads of photographs. Here a few from today.

It was a lovely gentle morning walk. 

Completed Projects April

I spent some time in April knitting up my Little Grey Cells Club Yarn but that's far from completed so doesn't count. 

There was the standard non-knitting project, this time a cross stitch card

It's lovely but it took a very long time to stitch. Don't think that's an experience I'll be repeating. 

Then there were two pairs of socks

These were for me; pattern Oh Hello Socks and the wool was Giddy Yarns Poisoned Apple from a fairy tale themed club she did a few years ago. 

Anyone thinking these might look vaguely familiar would be right; I tried making them as a Christmas present for the OH several years ago. They didn't fit, because I hadn't taken in that the wool I was using was DK weight and had therefore used my normal needles and cast on numbers for 4 ply. I had a lot of the yarn left over - goodness only knows why I bought so much of it in the first place - and I had always meant to have another go. The yarn was languishing in Box 2 so doing them was a bit of a no brainer. I have to say he was thrilled with them and here they are being modelled. They looked huge as they were being knitted but they fitted well. Possibly neither of us appreciate quite how big his feet are.

And finally there was a cowl; yet another iteration of the Anne of Green Gables Sampler Cowl. It wasn't meant to be, I had originally intended just to use the numbers and i-cord edging and make the centre all moss stitch. However it quickly became apparent that if I stuck to that plan I might be wearing the cowl by the time I was 75, or I might not. The yarn was supposed to be fingering weight, which I sort of doubted since it was  called Ella Rae Lace Merino but everywhere I looked said it was definitely not lace weight - and I suppose it isn't, but it ain't a particularly robust 4ply either. I've had this in my stash for years, having got it in a swap and never really known what to do with it, but I loved the colours too much to give it away. I'm pleased I've used it up and I'm pleased with the result, so win/win I suppose. 

I honestly don't feel it was a very productive month; fingers crossed for better, or at least more, things in May!

The Great Wool Sort Out Update 3

First off the stats, which are disappointing in that I ended the month with a net increase.The numbers were Wool In - 984g, Wool Out -  734g,  which was a net increase of 250g. Part of the large amount of yarn in was the clubs which was expected, and part of it was receiving quite  a large amount of yarn. much more than anticipated,  in  a swap. I didn't use up quite as much as I would have liked either because I took on two very time consuming projects in April which, although lovely when finished, seemed to take ages to do and didn't use up much wool. I am still 3179g down on the year to date though, so that's good.   

And look! what is this? 

This my friends is Box 2 and it is empty. Hooray! Some of the wool in there got sold, some of it got given away, some of it got used up. Some of it went into other boxes; the stuff I have specific plans for went back into Box 1 to wait until I have time to carry out said plans, some 4 ply went into the big 4 ply box and some stuff I was unsure about moved into Box 4 to be considered at a later date. But I have an empty box and that's a win. 

Here is Box 3 which is being dealt with in May and June. 

To the left of the demarcating carrier bag are all my commercial sock yarn left overs. The right side has various other left overs of different weights, some of which I will sell and some of which will doubtless find its way to the charity shop.  

My plan for the sock yarn is to hold it double and crochet a granny stripe blanket and to this end I added to the box all my partial balls of West Yorkshire Spinners* sock wool, after which it looked like this.

I have rather gone off WYS for socks as I find it both splitty and too thin, and there is always loads left. Some people might call that value for money, and I can't argue with that. But I would prefer a plumper softer yarn with less yardage to the ball, because then there is less left over to hang about  cluttering  up the yarn storage because, while there is too little to be of much practical use, there is too much to throw away. Hence the granny stripe blanket, which I have been told will use up mountains of yarn.  I have started this today, very carefully and following a You Tube tutorial, because I have very little confidence in my crocheting abilities. I'd like to get more confident and expand my crochet skills and although a granny stripe blanket will not do much to teach me anything new, it will hopefully make me more confident. I am on row three and so far it looks fine ....

* Yes that does live elsewhere. The six plastic boxes contain my main stash but I also have two sets of small plastic drawers where I keep specific sorts of yarn; my very small stash of cotton yarn, my mini skeins, some other bits, and my WYS yarn. The full and partial balls of the WYS took up two of the drawers  but  after I had removed the partial balls to be put into the blanket, I found I could fit the rest of the WYS into one drawer rather than two. So a double win really; an empty box and an empty drawer. Go me. 

Oh Look! Not in France

 Somewhere between boarding the London flight in Glasgow and arriving at St Pancras Eurostar Terminal the OH lost his passport. Possibly left on the plane. Wherever it is, the fact that he didn't have it meant we couldn't travel. All my lovely plans for the next two weeks gone in an instant.

There are no words to express how devastating this is for me. Other people might take it  in their stride but I am just too miserable to speak. It follows that, although I'm back, I'm too miserable to blog as well. 

I will be back here , but no idea when.