Monday, December 10, 2007

Insomnia

I'm bored of it.

In other news, we surprised the staff at CCC (big camping/outdoors type shop in Sheffield) today by asking their advice on waterproof over-jackets and trousers. Mostly because we said we wanted cheap and cheerful, and didn't care if they only lasted a day. I think we spent a grand total of £32 for both of us. In a related note, I want an new tent, since my brother (unintentionally) knackered mine and CCC have some nice ones.

I tried on wellies too, but the ones that fit my (evidently small) feet are uncomfortably tight around my (muscular) calves. So I gave that up. Also, wellies are impressively non-supportive, and with my muscles/joints/back/body in general I really need something that's vaguely shaped like my feet.

So why the waterproofs?

Well, since Pete mentioned it a while ago, I've been wanting to go to Donna Nook to see grey seals with pups on the beach. I haven't seen wild grey seals before, only the ones at Natureland in Skegness, and after seeing bottlenosed dolphins and common seals in Scotland this year I'm rather keen to see more mammals.

So we're off to the east coast on Tuesday. Should take about 2.5 hours to drive there. I'm anticipating it will be freezing, and to get good pictures we'll need to crawl over the wet sand to get close to the seals. Hence waterproofs. I'm quite excited - maybe we'll get a few birds too!

In other other news, we decided against the Ikea chairs because although comfortable, they feel like you're leaning back about 45 degrees. Not much use for eating off your knee, or knitting, or anything other than vegging in front of the TV. So the search continues.

And speaking of knitting, I'm knitting a hat. Which I've never done before. And I'm knitting in the round, on double pointed needles (dpns if you want to use knitspeak), which I've also never done before. It took some getting used to, certainly... twice as many needles as usual! The advantage is that there's no sewing up and therefore no seams. Yay! Plus, if I can knit in the round I can now make socks as well. Or little hedgehogs with no seams, which will probably cut 15 mins off the hour each one takes to make.

Okay, so now I'm sleepy. Off to bed.

2 comments:

  1. I have so far avoided knitting in the round. DPNs I think I could cope with but I tried circular needles and that was more like a fight (that I was losing).

    I always thought that socks seem more trouble to knit than they're worth but then I saw these http://knitty.com/ISSUEspring07/index.html
    and it seemed a bit more like it.

    Are you free on Wednesdays at 5:30 - a group of us meet to knit in the West End. Probably meeting again after Christmas hols now but come along if you fancy it.

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  2. It's kind of fun. I did try circular needles, but the fact that I bought the wrong size combined with the feeling that I was knitting the wrong way round (you'll know what I mean, with the points of the needles going towards you instead of away), made me give it up quite quickly. I figured I'd need to use dpns at the end anyway, after some decreasing, so I might as well fuck it up from the beginning so there's be less work wasted, rather than learning the technique three quarters of the way through the hat.

    I'm trying to tell myself I don't need those socks.

    Hmmm... knitting group is a possible. I'll have a look at my timetable next semester... if I'm around Wed afternoon I may well join you. Although I don't do proper knitting, only small things, because I have the attention span of a hyperactive fruit fly. Except unfortunately without the activity, hyper or otherwise.

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