Bits:
Knitting my first pair of socks, veeerrryyy slowwwwwlyyyyy. Realising now that I really shouldn’t have just ignored the ribbing at the top, as they are clearly going to fall down ALL THE TIME, and also, the difference between 3.25mm and 2.5mm needles is far more substantial than those measurements might lead one to suppose is possible.

I have fallen off the wagon, cooking-wise – attempting to eat supper earlier has meant cooking things which are quicker to prepare, and thus inventiveness has been overturned by ease. I have plans, though – next week will see at least two new things being tried, methinks, as otherwise, boredom will set in.

I appear to have started me a set of dreadlocks. It’s astonishing what not washing your hair with commercial shampoo for about, er, two months will do for you. That, and the twist-and-rip method I came across online a few days ago. It’s not a complete birds’ nest, but it’s close. Ahem. There will be more order when I finish this twisting malarky, but my poor little arms get tired quite easily so I am taking it at a Methuselah pace. The big plus, though, is that I found a bead with a spiral on it and I now have it in my hair. Spirals. Beads. Hair. A combination that makes me squeak.

I have lots of projects in mind for the next few weeks: felted dress for the small girl courtesy of another old wool jumper discovered abandoned at the back of the wardrobe; fleece dress from sweater which had received similar treatment; trousers, with cord on one side and brushed cotton on t’other; autumn leaves made of felt for hanging-about-the-place-dustilyartistically purposes; pear wine, courtesy of two enormous bags donated by a friend.

In amongst this, the house is coming along – we now have a patio, paths around the house, drains, drainpipes, a water butt and a retaining wall, and this weekend we’re hoping to fill in the French drains with pea shingle while merrily stacking the woodstore (only a month later than planned, which is nearly a victory).

Bats:
The small girl appears to be losing the need to sleep in the day. Part of me thinks yay! about this, as it increases flexibility for what we can do when, but the other part of me is horrified – I had decided not to take on any more freelance copy-editing until the spring so that I could help Quercus by finishing off small jobs on the house (skirting boards, why must you torment me?) while the girl slept; sadly, that appears to be unlikely now. I think I’m just going to have find a new groove, frankly, so that I can manage to do things with her, but also to get some things finished in order to maintain our collective sanity. Yesterday she occupied herself quite happily for an hour on the patio, pouring water from a washing-up bowl into various pots and pans; I cleaned up and cooked dinner, talking to her through the open back door, and thought that actually, perhaps tiling with her around isn’t quite as crazy as I’d thought.

I’m also feeling more positive about the idea of having another baby, probably because my current baby is so clearly not a baby any more. She has a leanness to her, physically, which speaks of action, of activity, of movement, and of development; these are not the soft rolls of baby fat I see as I undress her for our bath each day, but the muscles of a small child whose constant zing and enthusiasm keep her moving nearly all the time these days. Also, of course, EVERYONE I KNOW IS PREGNANT, or so it seems, which does quite a bit to make me nostalgic. Not enough of a reason to have another baby, of course, but certainly I’m feeling more that adding to our numbers would be a Good Thing for lots of reasons, whereas before I couldn’t help adding ‘in theory’ in there somewhere.

I’ve been meaning to write here more frequently, but the stupidest thing has been stopping me – my camera, replaced about a month ago, is still stupid. It turns out that Kodak cameras have a problem with the operating system I use, and that there is no easy fix. Thus, getting pictures off the damn thing is a bit of an uphill struggle, and to be honest, the quality of the camera seems to be a bit of a bore too – where my old one was genuinely point-and-shoot, this one has focusing requirements bordering on the insane, and its most frequently displayed icon when on ‘auto focus’ is the one which means GET THE SODDING TRIPOD OUT – YOU HAVE AN ADVANCED CASE OF THE DTs. Not being a photographery person, of course, I have no tripod, and even if I had, using one would sort of miss the point of that sodding point-and-shoot approach I mentioned earlier. So, thinking of returning it. Anyone got any suggestions for a reasonably cheap alternative?

Right. I go, to ponder five pages of legal editing while thinking about what to have for dinner. And you? What are you up to this week?

Current preoccupations:

These shoes are fabulous, and I have been lusting after them, in one incarnation or another, for some time.

Equally, where does one go to find decent stripy tights or long socks? I had some lovely German tights the year before last, one striped like liquorice all-sorts and the other different shades of reddish-brown, yet this year, they are curiously absent from the interwebs in a manner which speaketh of bankruptcy. So, where next, I ask? What I want is long striped things, possibly black with a sage green or a nice plum-coloured pink. Is that too much to ask?

The small girl and I are going to make this tree thingy this afternoon, all being well. It looks like fun, and her glee at anything involving paper and sticking knows no bounds, so who am I to argue.

Before we do that, though, we’re going to check out a local farm which has recently started a self-service stall in its yard; driving past, I’ve seen beetroot, carrots, potatoes, free-range eggs and honey advertised recently, the latter prompting me to think of trying mead again. We made mead a few years back, and it turned out really well, but took an absolute age to get there… I’ve since read cheaty-quick-skivy methods (some involving cider, which sounds promising though highly cheaty…), and, frankly, being a cheaty-quick-skivy sort of person, that sounds about right.

I’m also gearing up to make the small girl a scarlet hooded cloak, for Chrimbol.* I have some sort of cranberry-coloured cotton velvet thanks to the wonders of Etsy, and the sewing machine and I have reached an accord recently, which has meant less of the throwing-things-in-frustration, and more of the actually-finishing-things-without-either-despair-or-murder-taking-place… So, hopefully I’ll have a bash at this quite soon.

How is it that despite owning lots of very nice strings of bells, I continue to covet more?

And why am I so obssessed with pumpkins?

See? This – this list of utterly lightweight and irritatingly delicous tangents is the reason why I never seem to get on with writing that book, or submitting that paper, or writing an article for a journal. Ahem. It is also the reason why I am continually afraid that someone, somewhere will realise, shortly, that I am in fact an idiot, and revoke my doctorate forthwith.

That said, I have an idea for a novel, and after a conversation with Quercus the other night, I think I might actually try to write it down. Its main character has had a comfortable little space in the corner of my mind for the last decade or so, and I think he is beginning to find that his legs need stretching, and actually, he could quite do with a cup of tea. So, we’ll see. Maybe my current feeling that I should be writing something academic based on my thesis can actually be sublimated into a more useful project of a fictitious nature. Maybe it’s nostalgia, this academic stuff, anyway, given that I lived and breathed it for so long, and maybe fiction would actually give me the brainwork that I seem to crave (and fear) while letting me do something that’s always been on The List.

And you? What are your current preoccupations?

* Yes, this is yet another barbarous modification of the English language of the sort which is prolofic in the Earthenhouse.

So, there you are, full of good intentions and just about to write something constructive and informative and jolly and otherwise uplifiting and whatnot, when a bout of the east wind strikes, and you feel hacked off, and you retreat into your cave, where you stay, hacked-offedly, for a few weeks.

And then, the wind starts to shift. You can smell new things on the breeze, and you can hear new tales in the whispering of the leaves. The sky is changing with each passing day, and the nights are drawing in; already, twilight appears not long after supper, and a cobweb of stars which covers the sky is plain for all to see not long thereafter. All around, you see the fields, the hedges, the trees overburdened with fruits and fecundity (and what a delish word that is), and you immerse yourself in transforming the hedges which surround you into small crystaline pots of goodness, which you then eat, smugly, as the year progresses, and as those lazy sunshine afternoons become brisk with the quickening east wind.

There are vests to be knitted, and shoes to be made, of nut-brown leather and sunflower flashes of bright yellow. There are slabs to be laid, and pumpkins to be felted; nappies to hang in the late summer sun; hats to be discovered, and chairs to be waxed; first pairs of socks to be undertaken, with much trepidation, and peacock brilliance to be found in woollen form. Dragons take form on leftover wood, and rainbows appear next to them. There is action, movement, progress. And more jam than you can shake a big, gnarled stick at.

I’ve been struggling this summer with feelings that I ought to be doing more, being more, making more, creating more. Always the pressure to somehow exceed expectations, to juggle efficiently, to find time where none makes itself known. This pressure comes from me, from inside myself, and it’s something I think I’ve always known. Indeed, I think it’s the thing which has got me, in many ways, to where I find myself now. And the thing about that pressure is that it’s very hard to turn off. Near-impossible, for me.

Sometimes this is useful – finishing a PhD while pregnant and renovating a house? No problem – I’ll knock that off by next Sunday, and still have time to make cheese scones… – but at other times, it’s exhausting, and self-defeating, and just a downright pain in the arse. This summer, it’s mostly the latter, though I think I haven’t really noticed it until the last, say, two months.

So, I’ve been struggling to find the right words for this space, to explain myself without sounding either hideously repetitive or boringly downbeat. And I’ve failed at that, too, really, in that I’ve just taken the alternative option: don’t say anything at all, and just hope it’ll all go away. It’s coming to something when your own blog becomes a bit of a whatsit around the neck – a duty overlooked, a task ignored.

I think back to when we decided to stop having a television in the house, and the sudden ingress of time with which I found myself flooded.

What has helped me to dig my way out of this lovely little hole I’ve been burrowing away at for the summer months of this year has been cutting back on the time I spend online. It’s very easy for me to simply procrastinate away an entire hour or two online, without achieving anything beyond looking at some lovely things which other – less procrastinatey – peope have created, and thinking to myself a repeated loop of ‘that’s very cool – I must make one of them’, or ‘shite – I really should have done something other than this in the time I’ve spent online’, or ‘arses – I am utterly crap at management of time, and thus have nothing to show for today.’

So, cutting right back, spending a week with no time online at all, has really helped. It’s reminded me of all the things I can do, and do do, when I’m not time-hogging on blogs, or Facebook, or email, or somesuch nonsense. It’s also left me with a feeling of wanting only to dip a toe in, of avoiding previous bad habits, which seems to be helping longer-term.

Whinge, whinge, whinge. No more. (At least for now.) (Ahem.) Let us think only happy thoughts, with cheerful productivity thrown in, while I try to work out what it is that drives me like this, and why I feel that there are ‘right’ words, and ‘right’ things to spend time on, and, oh, so many other ways in which I drive myself (and others) insane.

Struggling to find time at the moment – camera not talking to iPhoto (tiresome), copy-editing (tiresome), lots of jams and pickled fruits and wine and frozen things (not tiresome at all), less time overall on the internet (tick; v. g.), knitting hats, scarves, legwarmers and cardigans for the small girl’s doll (also v. g.) = not much time spare. This should change later this week, I think; in the meantime, a few questions for the universe (and you, if you know the answer):

1. Why won’t my MacBook’s installation of iPhoto recognise JPGs as a valid format?

2. Where have I come across a reference to apple and sage jelly, and did it include a recipe?

3. Would Picassa circumnavigate the iPhoto problem?

4. Should I be attempting to be more proactive about nappies?

5. Why do I always find myself making jam when I haven’t got enough jars saved? And why do the jars I have saved always have labels affixed with the stickiest substance known to man?

6. Just what has taken place in that gallon of plum wine from the year before last which has made it taste so unholy?

7. Will I be less tired if I pull my finger out and go to be half an hour earlier?

Right-oh. Back shortly.