Team Bell (Ringing)
I WENT BELL RINGING TONIGHT.* YES. I DID.** At Colin’s home tower, East Persnickety. And there were even eight roughly speaking ringer ringers there*** for the eight ropes, which meant we could ring triples. Although the ‘roughly speaking’ meant it took us two tries to get launched on the touch of Grandsire Triples which was eventually derailed anyway by overenthusiastic calling on the part of the conductor†. But I was on the four, not the three, the three being my usual bell for Grandsire Triples, and I Did. It. †† The roughly-speaking also meant that it took us three tries to get through a plain course of Stedman Triples, but we did that too—barely—and I was again on a strange bell, and therefore starting in the wrong place, in the wrong direction, and over the wrong bells. This is very challenging when the lurgy has eaten your brain.†††
But it was good for morale. Hells, even ringing rounds for the beginner was good for morale. Ringing is a fatal disease, I’ve told you that, right? And it takes the rest of your life to kill you.‡
Mrs Redboots
I know you feel you are committed to writing a blog every night, but honestly, sometimes a sentence . . . will be enough to reassure us that you are alive and functional, if only just barely. Sleep – and SHADOWS – is more important than the blog (and you can always give us More Mongo, which can only be a Good Thing!).
katinseattle
Me, too. I second this. As much as I enjoy your blog, don’t wear yourself out over it.
Thank you. It’s a tricky balance, and one that after four and a half years I still haven’t found. I’ve told you that I write here every night because that’s how I make sure it gets done—if I dropped down to every other night I would soon be doing it every three nights, and then every four, and so on. There’s something about the initial getting going obstacle that only diminishes to relative insignificance if it’s a daily charge. It’s not wholly unlike hurtling hellhounds. If I ever stopped to think, You mean I have to stomp through the elements twice a day for two hours EVERY DAY for the rest of their LIVES?, I would probably freak out and starting researching very large hamster wheels on line.‡‡ As it is, it’s just something I do. Every day. Cough. More or less. But mostly more.
There’s also a certain quality of YAAAAAAH SCHOOL’S OUT to plunging into the blog after a long day of book-in-progress, like a hod-carrier coming home, ripping his steel-toed boots and hard hat off, putting on his trainers and going for a run. It’s still all sweaty and muscular, but it’s a significantly different kind of sweaty and muscular. I imagine many happy short-order chefs come home and make bread, and one of our local farmers has the most affectionate hand-reared orphan lambs I’ve ever met. ‡‡‡
At the same time . . . I admit the stress level at the moment is a little extreme. I may yet have to take you up on your kind offer to let me skive off the odd night or two. At the moment, sleep would be a fine thing if it were a little more available . . . and unfortunately most of Mongo involves spoilers. The scene he’s busy *&^%$£”!!!!! taking over at the moment, for example, is all about grmmphflgrrrglklmmph!
* * *
* Cough, cough, cough, cough, cough, cough, cough, cough . . . Colin says that his experience of the lurgy is that he has a good day and then a bad day and then a good day and then a bad day . . . I’d be very grateful for even fifty percent good days. Cough.
** Cough.
*** Plus one wide-eyed beginner still grappling with the terror of call changes.
† Hey, it’s practise night. This is what practise night is like: the Peter Principle in action. Any working bell band—barring the really annoying fabulous ones—on any given practise night will rise to the level where the majority present can no longer quite cope, and stick there, flailing wildly. CRASH. CLANK.
†† Although a veil of kindness will be drawn over the quality of my striking. Penelope, who is not usually a Monday ringer, was there tonight, and, tying up her rope after our first effort, said to me, that was like getting a bucking bronco through a dressage test. Yes. And it’s occasionally reassuring to hear from someone who isn’t used to them that those bells are baleful toads and it’s not just that I have the grace, hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness of a bottle-opener. I suppose it may depend on the bottle-opener.
††† I always enjoy the furrowed brows of ringers as they say this or that method is, of course, unusually volatile, or difficult to learn, or whatever. Colin doesn’t go in for this kind of deconstruction: he throws a method at you and you ring it. Or not. But I was thinking about this tonight, because both Grandsire and Stedman are on the usual-suspects list for ringer-flustering methods. There are two things about Grandsire, first, that it’s not a member of a family of methods, it’s just out there, stark, on its own; there are no clues or hooks or familiar landmarks. It’s just you and Grandsire and the wild itch on the end of your nose that begins the moment you pull off. The second thing is that most of the methods you learn at least early on in your career (I don’t yet know about the later ones) have calls that come slightly before you have to do anything. So you have about a blow to remember what you’re doing. In Grandsire for most calls you stop dead in your tracks and double dodge. This is fine in one way: while you’re double dodging you have your chance to remember what you do next. But if your over-enthusiastic plain bob doubles practise-night conductor calls two blows too soon you have time to think, no, wait a minute, this is too soon, and you’ll probably get it right. If you’re ringing Grandsire, chances are you’ll have automatically started double dodging before your brain has a chance to say, no, wait a minute . . . which means you’re now in a big mess. Well, Penelope and I were in a big mess, because we’d dutifully stopped where we were and double dodged with each other.
Stedman’s threat to humanity is different. The reason there are people in padded rooms murmuring brokenly, No, no! Not Stedman!, is because there is no anchoring treble line. Most of the standard methods, the treble has a simpler line through the method, and it remains unaffected by calls. This means that your first and in many cases most reliable means of finding out where the hell you are if you’ve just come adrift is to see where you are in relation to the treble,^ because the treble’s line does not change however many calls there have been. Not so in Stedman. The treble is following the same infernally screwed-up line that all the other bells are following. If you come adrift in Stedman, unless you have a scarily overachieving conductor, you’re just frelled. We got through just our plain course tonight (finally) because Colin is a scarily overachieving conductor. Although I’m sure that much shouting is not good for a man still half under the spell of this unusually vile and degenerate lurgy. And I still wasn’t quite where I thought I was when he called ‘that’s all.’
^ Supposing you haven’t come so far adrift that you’ve forgotten what method you’re ringing, which also happens. Not only to me.
‡ Niall’s usual Tuesday handbell group is short-handed tomorrow, so he asked if I’d fill in. Yes! Yes! I said. I’m not drooling! That’s the lurgy!
‡‡ Degus are cute. http://www.petsathome.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Info_10601_caring-for-your-degu_-1_10551
‡‡‡ All right, I don’t mean to be disingenuous here. But you could say that writing about writing is my equivalent of coming home and finding out that I’m supposed to go on carrying hods at home too. No, no! I want to ring bells!
I want to sing, some day. Sigh. Cough.
Flu, hellhounds, SHADOWS and Jodi Meadows
Okay, that’s not your average mixture. Let’s have the good news first:
http://www.jodimeadows.com/?p=525
YAAAAAAAAAAAY. It’s alive!
* * *
. . . We are now, I fear, about to plunge down a steep slope. I was feeling a little odd last night but in my current state of whatever it’s always easy to put oddness down to a surfeit of quantum physics.* Unfortunately not so in this case. I nearly didn’t get out of bed this morning, except that there are hellhounds. And SHADOWS. Which is still due the end of the month. I can’t frelling believe I’m ILL again. I was ill in October, for pity’s sake**. I’m not sure yet whether this is merely (!!!!) a sick cold or whether it’s going to insist on the full panoply of flu. At the moment the jury is still out. But I feel like stale death on toast. AND CRANKY.
So I got out of bed at about . . . noon. I barely fell down at all. There are hardly any bruises from caroming off the four-poster on the way to the bathroom, which had mysteriously moved to a new location overnight.
I got dressed. I don’t guarantee that my tee shirt is on the right way around (who cares? It’s covered up by six woolly jumpers) but I got the shoes on the right feet.*** I hurtled hounds. Yes. I did.† Twice.††
And I worked on SHADOWS. I did.
. . . And this is as much blog entry as I can hold myself together for.††† Good night. May you sleep better than I’m likely to.
* * *
* Brief, according to my present state of non-brain, update on ABSOLUTELY SMALL: It’s all maths. I don’t know how even a crazed mathematician/physicist can have had the effrontery to look Average Reader in the face in the introduction and claim that understanding quantum mechanics does not require mathematics. You are so lying, Professor Award-Winning Scientist Bloke. It’s all maths.^
What is true is something else he said in the introduction however: that in most physics books the author says something like, blah blah blah blah, and here are the equations to prove it. And you’re supposed to read the equations. What’s different about ABSOLUTELY SMALL is that he then tells you the equations over in words. The equations are still there. You still have to deal with equations. They may not look like a lot of equations to Mr/Ms Science Brain but they are totally equations. But once he gets away from those poor cats waiting trembling in boxes for the Killing Look, he explains stuff pretty well.^^
If you’re up for it . . . it’s pretty fascinating. It’s so insane. It’s so not Newtonian.^^^ I also just love that most of it you can’t know exactly. HA HA HA HA ALL YOU CREEPY OVERBEARING SCIENCE BRAINS WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL. HA HA HA HA HA. Granted I still don’t get it, but I’m a lot happier with the concept of a world that cannot be known/measured exactly—can’t be nailed down. This sounds a lot more plausible to me—more like my experience of the daily life this book is supposed to let me fit quantum theory into. ^^^^ And as he says, approximate doesn’t mean wrong: it means . . . approximate.
Anyway. It’s fascinating. But it’s probably not a book you want to strain to your bosom when you stagger off to lie on the sofa with hellhounds and minister to your brain-destroying illness.
^ Now that I’m committed, which is to say I’ve bought the thing, twice, audio and hard copy,+ I notice with a jaundiced eye that the three encomiums on the back cover about how This Is The Book We’ve Been Waiting for to Explain Quantum Mechanics in Daily Life are all by hard liners. There are two scientists and a lawyer. I’m sure he’s a very hard-line lawyer. And probably the author’s best friend since childhood. I want a hat check girl/boy or a brewer or ballroom dancing coach to tell me it changed their concept of life.
+ I cannot believe that anyone would survive the experience by audio only. If audio helps you focus, as it does help me, then the audio is worthwhile, and audible’s reader gets a medal. But you’re still going to have to have the hard copy. For the equations. If it takes the reader too long to say one of the frellers, you’ll have forgotten the beginning by the time he gets to the end. Lambda squared of the hypotenuse of the lobotomy . . . um. . . .
^^ I do wish he’d stay away from real-world examples. Even I know that a baseball is not a free particle, even when it’s left the field and is busy arcing over the stands. Speaking of the physics of gliding, however, is anyone playing Tiny Wings? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6pT_2E5xI0 I don’t know what I think of the game, but I love the graphics.
^^^ I have a new theory about why Newton was such an ugly piece of work as a human being. It’s because in his secret heart he knew he was wrong.
^^^^ Look at human nature. Look at hellhound nature.
** I think it was October. Autumn anyway. A few months ago. And my stupid throat hasn’t recovered from the last assault which is why the Muddlehamptons are forgetting my name. ARRRRRRRGH. And here I am again with an inflamed throat, a throbbing head, and that interesting kind of fever that makes you feel like you’re made of boiling aluminium. I RARELY GET THESE MALADIES. RARELY. Except lately ARRRRRRRRRGH.
*** One right foot. One left foot.
† I also deserve a medal. But so do they. At the ripe old age of five and a half, although generally speaking the advent of maturity is a little thin on the ground, they are very good about waiting till I get my crap together, even when I seem to be having unreasonably more trouble than usual with said crap, and of hurtling slowly, with pauses, once we get outside. I know the location of every public dustbin in this town . . . I also know the location of every bench, not that kerbs won’t do in a pinch. They probably just think I’m having a bad ME day. Multi-application hellhound training.
†† And the dog minder is going to take them out tomorrow. Another medal.
††† I told an American friend that what I really needed, Peter having made some excellent turkey stock for the bodily nutrition side, was someone to tell me Really Bad American Jokes. So she’s taken it upon herself to send me Really Bad American Jokes all day at intervals—for the support of my suffering soul. Here’s my favourite:
It’s the old west, and a newcomer to town sees there’s a big crowd gathered in the town square. So he spots the local newspaperman, and asks him what’s going on.
”It’s a hanging,” says the newsman. “They’re hanging Brown Paper Pete today.”
“Brown Paper Pete? Why do they call him that?” asks the visitor.
“Because he always wears brown paper pants, a brown paper shirt, a brown paper hat, and carries a brown paper satchel,” says the newsman.
“Wow,” says the visitor, “What are they hanging him for?”
“Rustling.”
She’s just sent me this one, but she says that I’m sick enough to worry her if I think these are funny.
Guy walks into a bar, sits down and orders a beer. While he’s drinking, he hears a tiny voice say, “Hey mister! I like your tie!” He looks around, but doesn’t see anybody. A few minutes later, the same tiny voice says, “Hey mister! Nice shirt!” Again, he looks around, but there’s no one around except him and the bartender. A little while later, the voice says, “Hey mister! You look like you’ve lost some weight!” So the guy calls the bartender over and asks him what’s going on. The bartender says, “Oh, that’s the peanuts. They’re complimentary.”
Skiving off*
They sang COLD HAILY WINDY NIGHT. Steeleye Span, that is. Tonight. At the concert Fiona got me by the hair, forced** me into her car as I moaned feebly: I have to work! I have to work!***, and made me come to with her.† I could be happy just looking at Maddy Prior’s clothing. ††
I had brought my leg warmers. That is, I brought a remarkably-crinkly-at-one-end skein of bitchy, tantrum-prone††† yarn, a pair of needles‡, and an increasingly battered-looking pattern, including the crib sheet Fiona wrote out for me MONTHS ago. We had allowed lots of time to get lost in which we then didn’t need‡‡ so I had a good half hour to get started again.‡‡‡ Aaaaugh. Counting. Aaaaaugh. And Fiona would keep trying to talk to me. What do you think this is, a social occasion? Just because she can knit an incredibly frelling complicated frelling sock pattern on forty-seven double-ended needles and look around at the crowd and chat to her neighbour, who is laboriously going, one, two, three, purl, one, two, three, knit, DOESN’T MEAN EVERYONE CAN.
And just by the way, some of what Peter Knight does on that fiddle isn’t possible.§
At the end Fiona said, so, are you glad you came? There must be more Steeleye sheet music out there, I said, having had trouble not joining Rick Kemp for COLD HAILY.§§ I even asked Maddy herself about sheet music on the way out and she looked puzzled and suggested I write to Park Records. §§§
And then we went back out to the car park, got in Fiona’s car and drove merrily away in the wrong direction because she had decided we didn’t need the satnav. . . .
* * *
* It was a near thing. Blogmom had sent along a last sale/auction order file which I had assumed was a few final sweepings-up, no big deal, and hadn’t even bothered to open it—Fiona could do it when she came. AND THEN IT TURNED OUT TO BE GINORMOUS. Gaaaaaah. WAAAAAAAAH. I knew I was not, in fact, going to get everything out before Christmas^ but I did think we were totally heading downhill for the final assault. No. Wrong. So the first thing Fiona had to do, having been obliged to reveal the awful truth, was prevent me from murdering myself messily in an assortment of creative and unpleasant ways.
^ Once again, grovelling apologies. There Is Too Much Going On. And I really do have to finish SHADOWS before I can no longer afford to keep the hellhounds in a manner to which they have become accustomed.
** I would make three of Fiona. Well, two and a half anyway. But she’s very persuasive. Especially when she shakes out a length of yarn in this sort of garrotte and clamps sharpened knitting needles between her teeth.
*** And I have an opera tomorrow. COGNITIVE DISSONANCE ALERT.^
^ I would like to say I’m going to a Metallica concert the night after that, but . . . no. And the truth is I don’t think I have the—er—mettle to go to a heavy metal concert any more. I don’t know what the audience at a Metallica concert is like these days, but back in my misspent youth+ I went to several fairly scary concerts where I was glad that my companion was a six and a half foot bloke, who, while soft-spoken and mild-mannered, looked like Mess With Me and Die.
+ Remember that I misspent most of my youth in my thirties, so we’re talking about the eighties.
† You realise it’s Friday. Sacred Home Tower Bell Practise. Only Steeleye Span could drag me away from my responsibilities.^
^ . . . But make me an offer. A stroll across the Kalahari? Sunbathing in Antarctica? A new diving bell attempt to reach the bottom of the Marianas Trench? Sure. After all, Niall left me to cope last Friday.
†† I am forcibly reminded, pretty much every time I go to a concert—or, for that matter, watch a clip on YouTube—that the one great thing about performing is the costumes. It’s pretty much the only thing I miss about being a travelling, live-appearance author: the opportunity to dress up. ^ And Maddy’s clothes are prime. I was thinking about this tonight—while I sang along to All Around My Hat^^—that this is the one flaw in my choir-joining plan^^^: choir members don’t get to dress up. I like a long black velvet skirt as well as the next woman but Maddy’s flounced blue satin is waaaay to be preferred. Unfortunately being a soloist involves . . . soloing. I don’t see a way around this. Unless that’s in a chapter in CHAOS I haven’t got to/figured out yet.
^ As demonstrated at Forbidden Planet a few months ago.
^^ Maddy came to the front of the stage, thrust her microphone in our direction+ and dared us to be louder than Margate.
+ Literally. Fiona and I were in the front row.~
~ Fiona orders the tickets. I just go where I’m told. Chiefly into the passenger seat of her car.
^^^ Supposing my incredibly tiresome throat stops being a frail heroine and lets me return to two-and-a-half-hour practises with the Muddlehamptons.
††† Yes I am thinking about simply buying a couple more skeins of hellhound-blanket yarn^ and using that. Wait . . . did I just say BUY MORE YARN?^^
^ The pink option, of course.
^^ I was reading Yarn Harlot the other night+ about stash, one of her favourite topics, and how the fact that you have more yarn than an infinity of monkeys could knit into bobble hats while waiting for that other batch of monkeys to produce King Lear++ doesn’t necessarily mean you have anything to knit with. Yes. Her ratiocinations on this subject will not be mine, but in my case all my nice yarn is Waiting for Me to Learn What I’m Doing. I can’t just carelessly pluck a couple of skeins out of some tote bag and start on leg warmers. Horrors.
+ In the bath, of course. Paperback editions of Yarn Harlot are ideal for the task.
++ Macbeth would do. And it’s shorter.
‡ Yes in the right size. Please.
‡‡ We will come to the topic of the drive home again in a minute.
‡‡‡ The lights went down mid-row, of course. Oh, now I’m in trouble, I said, and the woman on my other side . . . laughed. So during the interval I said to her, do you knit? I used to, she said. I keep thinking I should start again. Don’t let me put you off, I said. I’m a beginner, and this yarn is possessed by demons. We parted amicably at the end: next time bring your knitting, I said.
Postscript: I knitted five rows. And then I ripped them all out again. Sigh. However, it more nearly resembled ribbing than my previous efforts. It just wasn’t ribbing.
§ This is clearly stated in chapter mrrmngph of CHAOS.^
^ I’m reading/listening to it AGAIN, okay? This is challenging stuff for someone whose idea of higher maths is a touch of St Clements minor on handbells.
§§ He may be a great bassist. He is not a great singer. I admit that my crossover tendencies may not always stand me in good stead when judging folk singers, but I mostly feel that to be a lead singer of anything you either have to sound great, like Maddy^, or at least have a characterful voice, like Dick Gaughan—or Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen.
^ Although she’s still singing when a classical singer would have had to give up.
§§§ http://www.parkrecords.com/ In case you’re interested. I mean, yes, I could figure out the tunes, and most of the lyrics are on line somewhere, but what am I going to give Oisin? . . . Had I but world enough and time, I might write my own accompaniments, of course, but they would be a little non-standard.
ANOTHER RATBAG DAY
I took New and Shiny home with me last night and . . . just by the way . . . this going to bed with your technology is getting out of control in my house. Two years ago I was only in danger of being crushed to death by falling piles of books. Then I bought Pooka—but putting her on the shelf next to my bed made some sense because it’s her phone number that the emergency-line button Peter wears round his neck forwards to. (If neither I nor either of the two back-ups answers, they send an ambulance and ask questions later.) Then there was Astarte. But I’m afraid it is extremely luxurious lying at your ease with six pillows and a duvet, reading or cruising on your iPad.* Reading. I’m still a hard-copy girl at heart** but the joy of reading hundreds of loose pages of manuscripts on an ereader makes me so emotional I can hardly type.***
Anyway. I took New and Shiny† not merely back to the cottage †† but to bed, thinking that I’d have a nice low-stress post-relaxing-bath stroll through some of its arcaneries at a time of day/night that when I can’t figure out what the *&^%$£”!!!!! is going on, it doesn’t matter. The first thing that happened is that it told me it had 98% of its battery charge. . . and 1 hour and 58 minutes remaining. Sound of Robin exploding straight up through the canopy and leaving a little dent in the ceiling. It’s probably a good thing it was the middle of the night so I wasn’t tempted to ring any archangels.††† Fortunately New and Shiny changed its mind and decided it had five hours left before I threw it off the (tall) bed and jumped on it. But one of the benes I have been persuading myself with‡ as I flinch and whinge about the necessity of learning all this new software rubbish is the prospect of watching films on an unplugged-in laptop that can actually do this without gargling, stalling, running out of battery and falling over. So New and Shiny had better.‡‡
Meanwhile . . . my bell-ringing software won’t run and several of the shortcuts on my desktop won’t open. SIIIIIGH. I haven’t even dared try my two monster programmes, the homeopathic RADAR and the musical Finale: I’m afraid there will be blood and screaming. And possibly entrails.
But my original point was that, having heaved New and Shiny to one side, to join Astarte and 1,000,000 half-read books on the other side of the bed, there is precious little room left for me. I hope New and Shiny doesn’t turn out to be a restless sleeper.
I woke up this morning out of a dream of someone holding me penetratingly at swordpoint which turned out to be a corner of New and Shiny, schlepped all four of us‡‡‡ back down to the mews, and discovered . . . that my email inbox wouldn’t open on the old laptop and crashed if I tried to persuade it and I couldn’t get into New and Shiny at all because it was rejecting both my fingerprint and my password§. . . .
At this point I did ring the archangels. And then knitted while they remote-controlled into the Battle of Hastings being re-enacted in a small Hampshire mews terrace.§§ At the end of all this I had two more hellhound squares and a throbbing headache. And it was nearly time to dash back to the cottage again to ring handbells. Frelling Niall was frelling early, and there was a knock on the door (and a cacophony of hellhounds) as I grasped the handle to flush the toilet AND THE HANDLE BROKE.§§§
* * *
* Not to mention a whole new fresh approach to playing Montezuma on a bigger screen.
** And the whole reading-in-the-bath thing is likely to keep me that way. Although you suspect you have a slight skew to your system when you’re waiting for the paperback not because you don’t want to spring for hardback prices but because you want to read it in the bath.
*** Sure cuts down on your second sheets though.^ And I’ve been getting through a lot of scratch paper lately, testing pre-doodles. And pre-pre-doodles. And . . . . ^^
^ Every now and then some mingy publisher sends you a ms where the pages have been printed on both sides. Feh. This should not be allowed.
^^ Remember the doodle it took me four tries to get right? I took #5 out of the envelope this morning, sighed, and put it back on the working side of my desk.
† I know. She? He? needs a name. It’ll come to me. At the moment our relationship is a little testy and I might inadvertently name it Grendel or Grendel’s Mother.
†† And it BARELY fits in my tattered canvas briefcase equivalent. AND IT WEIGHS A TON. It might as well be a third hellhound.^
^ Hmmmm . . . .
††† I did think about texting Raphael. Texting is a very very bad thing when you have shortness of temper problems. The immediacy of email is nothing on the diabolical immediacy of texting.
‡ NEW OS. AAAAAAUGH. Archangels did warn me that I was going to have to move on from XP this time, but . . . AAAAAAAAUGH. Gods on toast, why doesn’t someone come up with some stripped down programmes instead of the endless even-more-pumped-up ones? Sodding Microsoft is like a factory turkey—it’s already flabby and it’s half water.^ I don’t WANT a million more choices! I didn’t want about 80% of the choices in XP!^^
^ Not to strain a metaphor too far or anything, but its basic level of health is so poor it’s also full of pre-emptive antibiotics.
^^ Yes. This blog post is also coming from the old laptop.+
+ And yes, they all have names. The desktop—who is older than CHALICE, just by the way—is Seneschal. This laptop is Gonfalon, and the little knapsack-sized one is Pennoncel.
‡‡ Meanwhile, when the frell are they going to get both batteries and battery read outs a little more RELIABLE?
‡‡‡ Three hellhounds, that is, and me
§ And because this laptop was designed for the business market you can’t merely turn off the security pass thingy. What?
§§ My purling is improving. My counting is getting worse. But maybe it’ll be easier to pay attention when it’s counting stitches instead of rows. I’m eyeing the leg warmer pattern again.
harpergrey
I remember you mentioning that you are on Ravelry…may forum members add you as a friend?
Of course you can. For that matter I can’t stop you. But I haven’t really figured out the purpose of friending on Ravelry. Perhaps I haven’t reached Full Knitting Saturation Point yet or something.
§§§ Handbells after this were going to be unusually exhausting, but this was exacerbated by Colin deciding to call St Clements and bob minor spliced. So you have not only to remember what frelling method you’re ringing, but what the calls do to you. The calls themselves are the same—at least I think they’re the same—but since the methods are different you come out the other end of the calls into different places in DIFFERENT PATTERNS. ::blergablergablergablerga:: Then we rang some little bob minor just to finish the brains-as-spaghetti job. And then Gemma showed up so we had to ring MAJOR.
And I have to flush my toilet by taking the lid of the tank off and YANKING till I can get a plumber in. And have I mentioned I have Fiona coming tomorrow? Yo, Fiona, how are you at cold water, limescale and yanking?
Mercury is retrograde
Jeanne Marie
Mercury is in retrograde. NOTHING has been going right for the last couple of days. I cannot say the right things, forget how to do simple things on the computer, stare at my office desk as if it will sprout something. Mercury is in retrograde. ACK!
Great. We have an EXCUSE. I had to get up this morning, as I count getting up (and morning), because Raphael was finally coming to pick up my old saggy laptop to beseech it to pass on its secrets to the flash shiny new laptop still on the launching pad back at the office. He was going to meet me at the mews at 10. So my alarm went off at 9 and I said right, okay, yes, I’m getting up now and . . . the next thing I knew something large and heavy was thudding through the mail slot in the front door AND IT WAS TEN O’CLOCK.
I was racing around putting my jeans on backwards and my glasses on upside down* when I heard a phone message coming in. Peter’s voice: You’re probably on your way, he said. But Raphael is here. HE’S ALREADY HERE???? WHY DOES HE HAVE TO BE ON TIME TODAY? HE’S VERY OFTEN—HE’S USUALLY—LATE.
Hellhounds and I were in the car in just about a quarter of an hour, which is a new record.** And then we got halfway down Main Street and came to an abrupt halt because . . . I don’t know because what. There was some gigantic highway maintenance vehicle parked—parked—in the middle of the intersection, thus blocking four streams of traffic, while some dipstick in a yellow reflective jacket dragged his mechanical equivalent around in some arcane pattern too abstruse for us mere apoplectic mortals. What was the thing? It looked like a cross between a trotting-race sulky and one of those garden-hosepipe-winding gizmos available at your friendly local garden centre. Aside from the invisible-rune marking I couldn’t see it was doing anything. Except blocking traffic, of course.
We were eventually allowed to rejoin our lives, which had run down the road ahead of us. I tore into the mews courtyard and . . . And . . . Raphael has a motorcycle. Whimper. I miss riding horses more than I miss riding motorcycles but . . . whimper. So he packed up my laptop and the seventeen tote bags of programme discs*** and told me that he’d bring the laptop back this evening. This would mean I would not have to write tonight’s blog on my knapsack computer—a sort of two-palm-top. It’s totally brilliant for the train, or for sitting in a café nursing your sixth cup of tea and pretending to work, but it is not ideal for common use. Its main disadvantage is that the frelling screen doesn’t open far enough—because it’s so small you need to be able to open it out nearly flat so you don’t have to crouch down and bend your neck the wrong way like a horse against the bit. Except that you can’t open it that far, so you can either give yourself permanent vertebral damage or prop the front edge of the keyboard up about six inches.† It’s also missing a few keys because the keyboard doesn’t have room for the full complement. It has the triple-dranglefabbing ratbag key down at the bottom left that MAKES YOUR ENTIRE DOCUMENT DISAPPEAR IF YOU ACCIDENTALLY NICK IT†† but it’s missing the option that will let you toggle easily to the bottom of your document and back again.†††
You know the end of this part of the story, right? Raphael rang me at about three o’clock and said he wasn’t going to be able to get my old laptop back to me tonight because there was so much stuff on it it was taking forever to do the transfer. So I’m hunched over the little knapsack ’top tonight with two Yarn Harlot books‡ raising the front end.
Meanwhile, after watching Raphael teem down the road in a terrifying red-shift blast,‡‡ I took hellhounds for a sprint and then hauled all of us back to the cottage again in time for the arrival of the Nonpareil House Alarm Man to spend thirty seconds making my house alarm go FEAR! FIRE! FOES! AWAKE!‡‡‡ to prove that it can, and then giving me forty-six pages of annual certificate and an invoice for enough money to hire the horn section of a medium-sized orchestra for a year. The hellhounds were very glad to see him. Oh, he said bemusedly, emerging from the fawn-and-steel-grey maelstrom, aren’t whippets and greyhounds usually rather shy? Some are, I said noncommittally. Of course he came at the end of the appointment slot he was going to arrive some time during, by which time it was now hammering down rain, and hellhounds had to be hurtled again. They hate their raincoats almost as much as I hate the frelling ergonomic keyboard on my desktop. I wish the thing would BREAK so I could buy a new one. . . . .§
AND NIALL AND PENELOPE ARE GOING TO THE OPERA TOMORROW. WHAT DO THEY WANT TO DO THAT FOR? WHY CAN’T THEY GO TO THE MET LIVE ON SATURDAY LIKE ME?§§ NOOOOOOO. THEY’RE GOING TO THE OPERA TOMORROW. WHICH MEANS I AM IN CHARGE OF TOWER PRACTISE TOMORROW EVENING. Here I was feeling chirpy for the first time today, because Gemma was ringing plain courses of both bob minor and bob major on handbells tonight, straight through without looking at the lines, and may be going to make a handbell ringer after all.
It was after this that hellhounds and I re-arrived, dripping, at the mews, and I discovered that I’d left my working hard copy of SHADOWS back at the cottage.
And now . . . I have to go sing. Maybe I’ll work on Eensy Teensy Spider.
* * *
* Today was not one of my pinnacle of alternative fashion days either.
** I had my socks in one pocket and my necklace and earrings in another. I finally remembered to brush my hair after lunch.
*** He has three enormous carrier bags and . . . he had to do some substantial rearranging to get it all in.
† Knitting-bag-sized knitting books are ideal for this purpose.
†† In the time it takes to hit ‘undo’ you can have several heart attacks. Now someone tell me what the hell this option is for? The technological equivalent of the hollow tooth filled with cyanide in case you’re captured by enemy agents? WHOOPS—there went the immaculate proofs for superstring theory, the equations for cold fusion, and the recipe for foolproof meringues! Sorrrreeeeeeee!
††† Which is emphatically less than desirable for situations involving frequent footnotes. However my knapsack computer predates the blog by several years.
‡ Things I Learned from Knitting and At Knit’s End. And the whole works is raised up half an inch off the table by The A to Z of Knitting which has become my default beginner how-to book, not because it is a good book and has lots of nice clear photographs of things like which way to wrap your yarn when knitting and/or purling, but because it has ROSES on the cover. http://www.amazon.com/Z-Knitting-Ultimate-Beginner-Advanced/dp/1564777847
‡‡ I lie. Raphael is a very nice, polite, corporate young man who left the gravel-strewn mews jigsaw courtyard tactfully, which is to say standing looking after him wistfully as he left I was not scarred for life by the backlash. And . . . his bike is navy blue. Which is very sensible if you want to drive it to work, when you’re a nice polite corporate young man. But I didn’t know they even made bikes in navy blue.
‡‡‡ The official Brandybuck horn is not available, but we do our best.
§ But not till after I get SHADOWS turned in.
§§ I’ve told you, haven’t I, that this Saturday is Rodelinda . . . which means I get to hear either Renee Fleming or Andreas Scholl singing Frelling Dove Sei. And I’m going to this one, even if—as seems likely if this miserable weather continues—I am a grand throbbing assortment of aches and pains again. Snarl.