When my GP told me I could two and a half weeks off work because I was blatantly ill and exhausted, I felt like I’d been given the best present in the world: time. Time is what I always seem short of, these days – time to sleep, time to catch up on avoiding midden-esque status house-wise, time to give the small girl the sort of childhood I so want her to have (insert sickening images of wheat fields and kites, conkers and bonfires etc.) time to give Quercus the chance to finish work on various bits of renovation or construction, time to let him sleep, time to be awake and active and fun for the small girl, time to make dinner, to try to remember that if I look hard, I have still got a creative bone in my body. Time, in short, to do anything except wish I had more time.

Yet here I am, on the other side, and I feel as if I’m back at square one.

Of course, it’s all too predictable – I set myself sort of targets, when given any chunk of time; things which I will get done in that time, states of mind to which I will move in that time, levels of cleanliness or completion which will be achieved in that time. And then, if I don’t manage all of those states, I feel a bit rubbish about it, if I’m honest, which is about where I am now. I ended up having not two but three weeks off, which, added to the leave I’d already booked from work, means I’ve had about a month of freer time than normal. The things I really wanted to do were to see if Quercus going into the small girl at night would rejig our blatantly-not-working-yet-we-keep-doing-it-because-we-can’t-think-of-anything-else approach to her night-time wakings; we managed about a week of this (and it did seem to be helping; she goes back to sleep much more easily for him, and doesn’t expect feeds, of course, from the paternal bosom in the way which she – naturally enough – does from the maternal alternative) before she caught something horrible at a toddler group, and I simply hadn’t the heart to leave her to her daddy’s tender mercies (no matter how tender they truly are), when I knew that a feed and a cuddle from her mama would sort her out much more rapidly in this instance. So, cue a return to the original pattern – up a couple of times each night, much wailing if feeds were not offered, much knackeredness during the day on my part.

Then of course I caught the infection thing too – cue third course of antibiotics this year (and yes, I know they’re not very good for you, but I can’t see I have much choice, given that my immune system seems to be immune to nothing except a hard day’s work).

So, I went to Quercus’s mother, to escape the situation with the kitchen here (no work surfaces, constant dust and noise while Quercus worked his arse off to get the rest of the cupboards finished and fitted, over a very long period if working child-friendly hours) and to give him a decent working day which didn’t have to stop at five-thirty for the small girl’s tea and bedtime wind-down. And then the small girl had a bad bout of teething, and we got even less sleep, together with the normal frustrations of being away from home, under the weather, crabby and surrounded by constant – if well-meant and caring – twittering (and I mean that in its original sense).

So, here I am today. The kitchen is all but finished, which is a very good thing, but I am struggling once more with the constant sleep deprivation. The small girl is getting over whatever it is that she’s been fighting off, but is still a bit pathetic, and the normal activities I’d go for when she’s a bit listless but doesn’t really want to go out aren’t really on the cards because the worktops are covered in tung oil and thus not fit for small bottoms to sit on while baking is undertaken.

Part of me knows it’s rubbish to assess myself by standards of What I Have Done With This Time. I have read Naomi Stadlen’s excellent What Mothers Do, and I believe it wholeheartedly. Wholeheartedly. Except when applying it to myself, it appears. I so, so, so hoped that this time would just let me feel caught up. That the small girl would just sleep through the night on her own, without needing a parental nudge in that direction. That I would spend mornings in happy child-related chaos, and afternoons quietly knitting while the babe snoozed upstairs. This appears to be the day of mourning for the Month That Never Was.

The plus side:

The kitchen is so nearly done. There are cupboards, and I am putting things in them. The attic is half-empty as a result, as are the sheds.

I finished the small girl’s cardigan, and have started a second.

I bought lots of lovely beads and buttons at a shop in West Sussex while staying with Quercus’s mother; these are both playthings for the small girl, and objectively justifiable as crafty bits for me, which gets them extra points.

The not-quite-so-plus:

I’m still knackered, and I’m unutterably sad about it. I feel that this constant tiredness casts a shadow over what is in many ways the best (if hardest-work-requiring) time of my life. And I just don’t know what to do about it.

Tomorrow I go back to work. I’m dreading it, not because I loathe my job, but because, after a month of absence, people will probably ask how I’m doing, and, mostly if people ask that sort of thing, I cry, at the moment. I don’t want to do that. I also don’t feel ready to go back to that sense of treadmill which dominates the week when I’m too tired to be doing the things I have to do; it doesn’t take much for things to feel fine, but likewise, a few bad nights and I’m struggling.

I’m hoping that I just need to get a grip, and that, once the kitchen is genuinely finished, things will seem brighter. There is a list of things I need to do – tax-related stuff because of self-employed work, some copy-editing, booking the cats’ vaccinations – which is genuinely so daunting at the moment that I am employing tactics I developed during particularly  black patches on the PhD, evasion ploys which allow me to push unwanted information to one side, pigheadedly ignoring it until my mind thinks it might cope with it. The funny thing is, if I read someone else writing this sort of thing, I’d probably be saying ‘get some help! you clearly need it!’, but I still feel that this will pass, and I will be OK, and we will get there, and all the other things one normally chants at moments like this.

Ugh, in short. I think it’s time for some Earl Grey.

Much to my astonishment, the last-ditch email I sent David has elicited a response – I still have very little idea what’s happened as he was quite mysterious about it, frankly, but at least we’ve established some form of contact, and he’s emailed back saying he’ll get Jules to get in touch with us. So, that’s a big relief – I really hate conflict, particularly when it involves people I consider friends (albeit in a ‘I may voodoo you soon’ manner), and I’ll be very happy if we can resolve this amicably; it’s never good when you find yourself idly wondering if the police will be able to give you reliable advice on something, is it? So, fingers crossed, this will be sorted soon.

In other news, I am running away from home again. The kitchen is nearing completion, but the dust, grime and hours needed simply aren’t really working with a small girl who isn’t very well and a sleep-deprived mama, so it’s off to Quercus’s mother we go, we go, yo ho ho. Or something. This means no internets for a few days, but probably lots of knitting; I’ve finished that cardigan shown in progress in the last post, and am suitably stunned at my own wondrousness (er… ‘luck’ might be closer to the truth), so I’m now casting around for something new to knit. Current possibilities are, well, largely hat-related, although truth be told I’m a bit bored with hat-knitting; somehow I have accrued lots and lots of small quantities of very pretty wool, which means lots of small projects, really, unless I buy yet more wool, when what I really want is something more substantial. The only candidate for such an enterprise is, at the moment, a huge knot of wool which looks as if the cats had scrumbled at it for at least two weeks prior to its being forgotten in the attic for about six months. Ahem. This is rather dampening my appetite for starting, shall we say.

Hoo-ho.

And you? What’s going on in your neck of the woods?

I find myself in the fortunate situation of having had my doctor give me a note which tells me to refrain from work until February 22. This, dear reader, is largely because I was approaching Def Con 1 in batshit* terms last week, which is to say that, on top of yet another bout of low-level illness, I’d had very little sleep and quite a few doses of Big Fat Toddler Tears (they being the bit where gentle grumbling turns into ‘wa-ha, wa-ha, wa-haaaaaaaaaaa’, with fully fledged tears rolling down the indignant little face). So, I found myself going out of the room and bellowing ‘why won’t you go to sleeeeeeeeep?’. Not a happy situation, but my own, dear reader, my own, at least in passing. So, the next day, I took myself off to the doctor, because I felt the need to vent at someone other than Quercus, who has had enough venting to install an entire system. And lo! the result was time off, which felt like the most enormous present I’ve had in quite a while.

Quercus’s mother came to visit, bringing stews, casseroles and large bars of chocolate (about which I was relatively abstemious, in line with my “a little bit of everything but less than that, you greedy cow” approach to what I eat), and she babysat for us on Tuesday, so we were able to go out on our own in the evening, for the fourth time since the small girl entered our lives over twenty months ago. So, extra sleep, things to eat which I didn’t cook, and the visible nature of our progress towards a finished! kitchen! AFINISHEDKITCHEN! has meant that I am not feeling batshit any more. So far, we’ve been making the most of this breathing space by focusing our efforts on the construction of the kitchen; as you can see from the pictures, the cupboards are coming along, and shortly there will be that blissful bit where I get to put things in the cupboards, and to organise ingredients into boxes, and to shuffle things around so that the nicest mugs are at the front of the row. I so love organising cupboards; it probably says something worryingly Freudian about the way my brain works, but what can I say: it soothes my soul. And there is going to be plenty of soothing to do – our attic space, which we only gained as part of building the kitchen and bathroom, is stuffed to the gunwales with kitchen paraphernalia which we haven’t actually seen for the best part of five years, given that it was housed in the shed, all in boxes, before its recent promotion to loft living. Ahem. I have a notion that sometime soon there may be a boot sale in our future.

A knock-on effect of the kitchening is that, rather than baking, I’ve been knitting – I’m on the second of the sleeves for the small girl’s cardigan, and have finished the back and the front pieces. It’s chunky wool, so is knitting up disgustingly quickly, which is just as well, given that my patience is never exactly plentiful. I’m also finding the hardwood needles I bought for this pattern rather pleasing to work with; the yarn slides easily, but not too easily, across their gently cool points, and I rather like the twiddly turned bits at the non-business end. I’ve been fortunate with the pattern, too, which I found for free on Ravelry, and not least because some very kind and deeply knowledgeable knitters initiated me further into the bewildering world of abbreviations and slipped stitches passed over, which is to say that they translated some badly-worded pattern bits for me, and hopefully I’ll finish the cardigan over the weekend – my first actual garment which isn’t a hat or a scarf or legwarmers.

I’ve also finally managed to turn an old woollen jumper of my father’s into a felted dress for the witchling – a soft blue-grey, it felted straight off in a hot wash in the machine, and it was just a matter of cutting the bits out and stitching them together (using the antiquated sewing machine, which is going through a relatively amenable phase, the unpredictable length of which only serves to heighten my suspicions regarding its having developed a personality). I tried several times to catch a decent picture of the small girl wearing the result, but so far she’s too quick on her feet; I’m taking her repeated grins and strokes of it as an indication that she likes it, and my maternal heart was so pleased at this that it threatened to beat itself inside out. My favourite bit is the felt stars I added to the front; again, rubbish picture, but that’s what those blurry pink and yellow bits are, honest, guv.

Also a work in progress, though it never feels that way, really, is the development of the small girl’s speech. Words are positively tumbling over themselves in her haste to articulate them – three-word phrases, emphasis, repetition: we have the lot. It is such a delight to converse with her; every month that has passed has found me thinking that this is it – she cannot get any sweeter, and this is the single most sweet age that there could possibly be, in any child, at any point, and then, THEN, I find myself rethinking as the next moon changes, and something new wanders into our lives courtesy of a very determined pair of size 3 feet. Possibly while clutching a percussive instrument of some sort. (And yes, technically, and I shit you not, the ol’ Joanna counts as a percussion instrument.)

Oh, and of course it’s Valentine’s Day on Sunday. So, time for some heart-related craftiness, methinks – our tenth together. To my mind, nothing says ‘I love you’ like a lie-in, and some eggy bread on rising.

* Batshit: a term generally used to indicate maternal insanity, brought on by a combination of Not Getting Out Enough, Not Sleeping Enough, and Generally Beating Oneself Up About Perceived Maternal Failings Brought On By Points One And Two.

Ooooh, it’s been a long time since I did anything anyone could call actively witchcraft-like, but in the last few days, despite being crabby (yes, more-so than normal) and stupidly tired, I have been Thinking. Perhaps it’s the windy weather, blowing in hints of the year to come. Perhaps it’s the vivid dreams I’ve been having, showing the wheel turning. Perhaps it’s rediscovering pictures of the circle of toadstools which appeared at the end of the garden, suggesting secret midnight activities involving starlight and flames. Perhaps it’s the obscene quantities of chocolate I’ve been eating, turning my blood to cacao. Ahem. Anyway. Whatever it is, I have been remembering the time when I worked in a certain witchcraft-orientated shop, and thinking about all the things I learned while I was sitting behind the counter in a nearly-empty shop for hours at a time. And I have been thinking about all those candles burned, and all that incense wafted, and all those oils accrued (for lo! there are many, many oils in a small set of wooden drawers in the living room), and the general presence of low-level witchcraft that prevailed during that time. Perhaps it’s having a little bit more sleep (last night poor Quercus drew the short straw, and ended up sleeping in the lounge, on a massive pile of cushions, while I took the night-shift with the small girl; in a way, he got the upper hand, as he didn’t have to get up for Teething Duty at three a.m., but of course the whole sleeping-on-cushions bit isn’t ideal, and I think I ended up with more sleep than normal because I had the whole gargantuan bed to myself). Either way, this morning, it feels like things are afoot, and something has shifted, and shifted for the better.

Bell, book and candle, this-a-way.

And in the meantime, I have finished the watercolour pencils drawing I started for the small girl before she even born, and Chrimbly brought me a new set of double-pointed needles and some beautifully variagated Noro yarn to play with. It is time for a new list of projects, methinks; this witching feeling that has crept up on me appears to be taking a creative direction.

1. A cardigan for the small girl. (No. 1 was finished, but it’s on the small side due to my being rubbish at maths, and having to do sums which pushed my brain in ways it just doesn’t enjoy, all because I wanted to use some wool I happened to have in my stash, rather than going out and buying the stuff specified in the pattern.)

2. A Noro hat for me. Myself. All for my very ownses.

3. A sweater for Quercus. I would really love to knit something for him; so often, my creativity is focused on the small girl or the house, but Quercus is the axis on which my world turns, so it seems only fair to clothe said axis in something appropriately woolly. I’d like a jumper with a roll-over neck and no welt, which is relatively easy to do, and which uses double-knitting wool. Anyone come across such a thing? Comment, do.

4. I have it in mind to paint a small but significant set of stars on the small girl’s wall. If things go to plan, we will be re-rending the inside of Earthenhouse this summer, so now is the time to try out such things without having to commit to them forever; we have a very lovely book with illustrations which I could copy quite easily using the aforementioned watercolour pencils, and the small girl does love a star or two.

5. A spiral for the kitchen wall. Longer-term readers may recall the spiral which lived on our wall before we rebuilt the kitchen – hopefully this one will get to stay a little bit longer. When I was little I wanted a house full of music and laughter and bright colours; that spiral said all the right things to me, and it said them in three languages.

6. I must find me a chest of drawers, narrower than a metre, and tall enough to be useful. We have a short wall in the extension, and I would very much like to use it to get Quercus off the hook of making drawers by finding drawers which fit, and doing something to make them fit in. Drawers, though. They tend to be wider than this, damn them. So, the search continues. And then, oh then, if I find some, I’ll get to Put Things In Them. I love doing that. And organising cupboards. Oh, unpacking things. I’m really looking forward to rediscovering the contents of our sheds, most of which belong in a kitchen. (I know – I need to get out more.)

Right. On that note, off to do something productive. And you?

The aged parent has just departed after a very pleasant visit which would have been improved only by the absence of my wretched cough, now in its third week and countering attack from a second course of antibiotics and steroids. We are busy on the kitchen – Quercus is machining lengths of oak as I type, and we have the carcasses of the base units in place, together with the floors for them and the side panels which divide them in two and whatnot – and I’m not in a very writerly space as a result; mostly the witchling and I have been going out for lots of little walks (she walked about a mile the other day, and was still faintly protesty when I suggested that she might need carrying for a bit towards the end), doing ridiculously sticky activities involving glue and coloured paper and – in my less sane moments – glitter, and generally enjoying the best bits of winter together. I am also delighted to have found a picture I drew for her when I was pregnant – there was a gap on the page left for the baby’s name, as we didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl when I drew it – and have started to finish it off, using some v. gorgeous watercolour pencils I self-indulgently bought some time ago.

Other than that, it’s knitting (on the second sleeve of her cardigan now, and have done the fronts and the back), blanket-stitching felt hearts and stars to go on the Chrimbly tree (which is assuming we either rob a bank or steal one, frankly, given the prices they’re going for this year – they mostly seem to start at about £30 for six foot, which seems a tad scary…), and the continual dusting involved in woodworky things.

Egad.

So, where were we? Ah yes – I was having a whinge about teeth, wasn’t I? Yes, well. That. And sore throats, and sniffly noses, and nasty coughs. Oh, and dust. Lots of dust, as Quercus is working on building the kitchen – cue lots of head-scratching, noise-making, saw-using chaos creation, and, hopefully, before Christmas, a bespoke oak kitchen, complete with deeply smug-making Belfast sink and integrated oven/hob whatsit which looks as if a Physics PhD might come in handy for doing anything other than taking the packaging off.

This week we have been pottering about with Los Que Saben and their delightful mother, who we don’t see half enough of, given that she continues (rather selfishly, in my view) to live in Ireland for some dubious, half-arsed reason having to do with, oh, I don’t know, schools, and children’s fathers, and such clearly unimportant things like that. Honestly. And in that time, we went to the sea, and we ambled around gardens, and we talked about the important things in life (mortgages, children, houses, why the Twilight film sucked so badly), and we caught up on some much-needed tea-drinking, and I enjoyed being with the tiny daughter, despite her having a horrid cough which meant far more wailing than is normally encountered, and I appreciated yet again the delights of having a brown velvet sling in which to potter her about the place. (It is just so strokey, and so brown, and so velvetty.)

And of course all of this provided ample excuses for the tiny daughter to wear her new hat, which she takes off so quickly when in the house that catching a decent picture has proved near-impossible. I like it so much, though, that I am probably going to make another, and quite possibly one in my size; the yarn, ‘Silk Garden’ from Noro, is just so delectable. I have it in mind to knit another hat, a cardigan, some wristwarmers and a hat of grown-up size before Chrimbly; the sane part of me realises this may not happen, but the magpie-like idiot who takes over whenever pretty wool is in sight will not be denied.

Other things of note hereabouts this week: parsnip soup with coconut and coriander is the stuff of life, as was the chocolate ginger cake which I made for Quercus’s birthday on the twenty-third. In fact, that cake was so luscious as to warrant an appearance recipe-wise shortly; fortunately, only small quantities of it could be consumed in one sitting, so it lasted more than the thirty seconds I thought it would take to eat all of it when I first gobbled the tiny oddments stuck to the bottom of the tin post-cooking. I drool just thinking about it.

So that’s life here, only with more sniffing, moaning and hacking than the above might suggest. And you?

(I thought I’d already explained: the cakes in the pictures are Unintentional All Hallows’ Cakes, so named because they were intended to be a birthday nibble for L-Q-S during her visit, but the fates (and three children under ten) conspired against this, and they got overlooked in the general bedlam of the week. So, Quercus, the witchling and I are quietly chomping our way through them, and sending virtual crumbs to L-Q-S.)

In between colouring myself nearly entirely yellow courtesy of the yellow ochre which we’re using to colour the limewash (remind me to tell you about – wait for it: annual – and singular – scientific  term usage coming up – exothermic reactions sometime, by the way), I have also been revisiting the list of things I wanted to achieve in October. So far, so good, frankly! Here we are, midway through the month which marks properly the arrival of autumn, and today is the first time we’ve lit the stove this autumn. It’s been quite cold, but we are embracing once more the put-another-jumper-on approach, largely because, having run the stove for three years on free wood we’d collected from various people who didn’t want their spare trees and whatnot, we now find ourselves with a rather depleted woodpile. Of course, by most standards, it’s still a Pile Of Shame, but we can tell already that there isn’t enough wood there to get us through the entire winter unless we get back to scavenging on a reasonably regular footing. The thing with all this building work is that it knocks a lot of the things we have to do regularly to the back of the queue. Living in a house like this is not really a sit-back-and-do-nowt existence; the house needs a lot of work, and just to keep things from getting too damp in the changing months between true summer and genuine autumn, bearing in mind that the stove being our only source of heating – and an almightily ample one, at that - we have wood to source, and chop, and store. This means trolling around with the trailer and the chainsaw, and generally going where angels fear to tread in terms of where sane people would drive cars…  (Gratuitous fireplace picture, largely because I managed to hang those lanterns up today, having had the idea festering away at the back of the ol’ noggin for some weeks now; we used the lanterns, plus about fifteen of their friends and family, as table decorations for our wedding bash, nearly four years ago. Each time I light them, I hear a vague strain of chaotic folk music, and I smell the acrid smoke of outdoor fireworks, and I taste the sweetness of icing made by our cake-making helper, and I remember the brightness of Quercus’s smile as we danced in circles with a huge throng of our friends and family.)

We are also embarking on a little time-filler; you know, just the sort of thing to knock off in an afternoon when you’ve nothing else to do. Ahem. Yes. So. We’re building a barn. You know, as you do. And we’re attempting to make it from free timber. That whole project I described blithely as a woodshed.  So far, it’s not going too badly: we’ve got planning permission for it, Quercus having drawn up scale plans and whatnot, and we’ve specified a wooden frame with shingles (wooden tiles, effectively) on the outside, so the most important thing is that hopefully it’ll look like a giant fircone when it’s done. Um. Did I just type that out loud? I was trying to keep at least a thin veneer of serious adult concern over this one. We’ve been collecting pallets as a start – the idea is that Quercus will process them with one or other of the frankly disturbing quantity of giant saws he has accumulated during the extension build, leaving us with planks ready to be cut to shingle-like length, and off-cuts which, provided the wood is untreated, will feed the stove for a while. The only slight shadow on this particular horizon is that we worked out the other day that we probably need to find not one hundred, but probably three hundred pallets in order to get this barn off the ground. Current total? About thirty. (Maybe I should start Pallet Watch 2009, in a desperate bid to keep us motivated.)

I have finished the hat I was knitting for the tiny daughter (it matches the legwarmers I made her for Christmas last year; I can’t stop squeaking when I see her in them together, which those of you who know me personally will know is a distinctly unlikely reaction to one whose favourite word is probably ‘gruntfuttock’). (Picture of said hat to follow as soon as I work out how to distract the tiny daughter long enough to allow both the presence of said hat on the head, and the camera to be within [my] [exclusive] grabbing distance.) I’ve also gained another excuse to take the tiny daughter out for a walk around the lanes – someone might see her hat! and find it as charming as I do! Tiny legs sticking out of brown velvet sling on my back, tiny head whipping around as she peers over my shoulder, both swaddled in knitted confections. Happiness is not hard to come by with such things around the place. Mostly, we’re walking a couple of miles more afternoons than not, helped by the knowledge that when I’m really tired (did I mention the molar-cutting which has been going on at night chez nous? No? Well, that’ll be lack of sleep!) the best thing is normally to Go Out And DO SOMETHING, rather than sit here, flatly, attempting to remember which way is up.

Also, we have now got three coats of limewash on the outside of the house; the render is now protected from frost, and we’ll be happy if we go through the winter without adding any more washes. The colour is just divine – the sort of yellow which speaks – no, sings of golden sunshine, of warm autumn afternoons, and of the glorious and unexpected burst of colour to be found at the very tops of our seven-foot Jerusalem artichokes.

Next up, rosehip jam. We’ve just made our first batch of quince cheese, and it is every bit as lovely as the sample we were given by our friends the other week; I am freezing it in silicone moulds and then storing small whole cheeses for later in the year. Provided I can stop myself raiding the freezer in the quiet anonymity of the night.

So, that’s what’s going on around here. And you?

I’ve been knitting for about three years or so now, and in some respects I’m quite happy with my progress. I mean, it took me about half of that time to learn to cast on, so viewed in those terms, the rather meagre output of projects I’ve actually finished becomes more… justifiable, right? I’ve learned to knit in the round, and have provided the tiny daughter with two hats, two sets of legwarmers (which are perfect when worn over tights if she’s in the sling; her little legs stick out either side but don’t get cold), and a pixie hat knitted flat. I’ve also managed a scarf for Quercus, and a rather appealing Tibetan-style hat, together with numerous scarflets for me, made up from the walnut-sized pieces of wool I tend to end up with when I actually finish something off.

Anyway, having just finished a particularly delightful hat for the witchling (this doesn’t mean my ego has achieved yet unknown altitudes, but that the hat is delightful because she’s in it, I think, and also, the wool! the wool! is just so nice – it’s a Noro yarn, and it looks like autumn in a ball), I am now contemplating something big. Something serious. Something about which no sane mortal should joke.

Yes.

I want to knit…

A CARDIGAN.

Well, a cardigan for the tiny daughter, anyway. The thing is, though, that things are all good until I sit down and start looking at a pattern. I mean, I know how to knit, and to purl, and, with some thought, to increase and decrease. I can do kitchener stitch, thanks to this last hat effort, and I can knit magic loop-style if need be. But when I read all that k2tog and psso business, something in my head just starts thinking about lemon curd, or purple, or, indeed, anything unrelated to the task in hand. If I can look at a pattern and see how it’s done without having to read abbreviations (shudder), then I’m fine. If not, then I’m a bit stuffed, to be honest. I think I have Knitter’s Fear. The abbreviations maketh me crazy, and dimwitted.

So, with this in mind, has anyone got any recommendations for a s-i-m-p-l-e cardigan pattern for small people, the sort of thing which is done in double knitting and uses, say, 5mm needles? Your prize for suggesting something idiot-proof will be pictures of the tiny daughter in her hat (SO SWEET, although I am aware that I have probably got my maternal goggles on there, and other people may just think ‘huh – kid in hat – and?’) and pictures, rather than a hideously long-drawn-out commentary, of our gorgeous newly-rendered house, which looks like cinder toffee at the moment, courtesy of its first coat of limewash (which we squeaked in just before the first frost, over last weekend).

1. Has anyone out there got any experience of quinces? We find ourselves with a goodly quantity of them, courtesy of some lovely people across t’other side of the village from us (the same folks who have previously donated crab apples, grapes, rosehips, blackberries and mulberries), and having just sampled the quince cheese made by said chaps, I am tempted to make some myself, but am also pondering the concept of quince wine.

2. Am I ever going to get over my adoration of baby legs in stripy tights?

3. How much jam or jelly is too much? This weekend, I appear to have concocted six pounds of crab apple jelly, and about four of bramble, apple and rose. Should I start on a ‘for sale’ sign now, bearing in mind that I still have about three pounds of rosehips waiting to be made into jam, I wonder?

4. Are our chickens in league against us? Having spent the entire summer in intensive relay broody races wherein the Buff Sussex chooks tagged each other, apparently as they left the laying box, for broodiness, one of our Black Rocks is now broody to the extent that she appears to be putting the others off even approaching the empty box. We’ve booted her out for a few days running, and she’s persisting. Egg-count today? Nil. Grumpiness as a result? Plenty. Six hens and no eggs = not fair, particularly as it’s not even daylight-related yet, I don’t think. They are moulting, though, so I am trying not to hold it against them too much.

5. What do you do when your iBook is approaching meltdown in terms of hard-drive space, and you can’t upgrade your hard-drive because there isn’t room, physically? I am contemplating backing up important stuff like pictures and whatnot, and then just wiping the whole thing and starting again. I have about 2Gb of space left out of a forty gig hard-drive; not ideal.

6. Anyone ever installed their own hot-air ducting heating system? We are thinking of doing this; have stove – will burn, sort of thing. Apparently it’s more popular as a concept in North America than here in the UK; the basic concept seems good in that it would let us move excess heat from the sitting room, where the stove lives, to the extension, along the building in a direction which heat doesn’t really move naturally, or at least not to the extent it would with a small fan attached.

7. Ever noticed how ‘tidying’ the remnants of a jam-making session into one’s stomach makes for furry-feeling teeth in next-to-no time at all? Oh. That’s just me, then, is it?

Woo! It’s the first of October! Which means, er, that, um, it’s… October, she finished, flatly. Well. Despite this slightly lacklustre start, I confess that October is one of my favourite months. Not only is it Quercus’s birthday (the twenty-third, since you asked; send extravagant presents at will), but it’s also a month of last tomatoes, illicit rosehips glowing in the morning sunshine, crabapples juicing gently on the stove, and hens pecking around in the warmth of afternoons still light enough to mistake for summer. Oh, and of course, at the end of the month, there is Samhain, or Hallowe’en, if you prefer, to look forward to; our two cats would make excellent hire choices for this particular occasion, being both black and vaguely sinister, though I have to say they’ll be spoken for. This year I am in hopes that the tiny daughter will take a little more notice of the pumpkinage we are sure to acquire; last year’s number came from the post office a mile or so away, and despite the fact that it was most splendid, she remained largely above its charms, being only four months old at the time. Add a year, and hopefully she’ll be up for helping me to hollow it out a bit too.

This month, I thought I’d start out by setting down some of the things I’d like to do in the coming weeks. It’s sort of my October wishlist, because, well, it’s October, and this is… a wishlist. Right. Glad we’ve cleared that up, then. So, in no particular order:

- Finish the hat I’ve started knitting the witchling.

- Stack the chopped wood we’ve amassed in what has become the chickens’ shed, which means emptying said shed of such varied contents as… a washing machine (defunct), a potter’s wheel (very much not defunct, but sadly underused at the moment), boxes of assorted detritus, a large rat (we fear), and fourteen incomplete sets of dustpans and brushes.

- Chop more wood so we’ve got enough to fill said shed, if possible;

- Accrue roughly one hundred pallets as part of Project Free Woodshed (of which more anon);

- Make the witchling a small quilt to go on her cot; I have lots of fabric kicking about, and lots of interest, but sadly bugger-all time at the moment (yet here I am…) because I’ve taken on yet another copy-editing job when I said I wanted time off, and this one’s 23,000 words. Oops.

- Rosehip jam, of which probably six pounds; we have quite a few rosehips kicking about – I’ve already got three gallons of wine going, so I think something new is called for. This jam is supposed to be almost cheese-like in texture, and a most glorious colour, so it sounds worth a go.

- Walk a couple of miles on at least three of the five days a week that I go to work. I’m trying to remember to do this, because since I’ve been working in the mornings, the obvious time to take the tiny daughter out for a walk in the sling has become a slot which Quercus has to himself, mostly. But I don’t want to turn into the Woman Mountain (TM) just because I’m working a desk job for a portion of my week; work, after all, is something I see as a minor interruption to Real Life, so I’m buggered if it’s going to be responsible for any further slide down the hideous slope to the point where hiring oneself out as a temporary roundabout becomes an option. Quercus and I both enjoy walking, so at the weekends I’m hoping that this month, which sees less pressure on us in terms of house work (although if we want a kitchen this side of Christmas, we do need to press on with the work inside; at least for now the outside is weather-tight, again, of which more anon) might find us out for some Proper Walks, which tend to be a full morning or afternoon, and often amount to something like seven or eight miles. But these walks alone will not suffice to escape Woman Mountain status, after all; I need regular exercise, and although I hate to admit it, I actually seem to thrive on it. I feel better. I feel more energetic. I sleep better (!). So, I must do it, and make time for it, because such things are important. (Although how best to manage it when it gets dark at four and we live in the middle of lanes with no lights, I wonder? I used to walk quite cheerily to the station in the dark morning and afternoon when I worked full-time, before the tiny daughter was born, but I feel I’d be living life on the edge slightly to wander about with her in the sling and no lights… Paranoid?)

So, that’s what October, if I manage to retrieve the small shred of discipline I once possessed, may bring me. And you?

It’s happened again, hasn’t it? All that tripe about posting more regularly and whatnot, and yet another week has escaped me and I’ve not even had a sniff of a post. The thing is, this lime rendering malarky – wow. It… well, it really takes A LOT OF TIME. As in, we have been eating, sleeping, breathing (that last is not a joke, come to think of it) lime render for about the last three weeks, once way or another, and now we’re on the fourth coat of four, so the end is sort of in sight, but time is short (I have a job to go to, and freelance work, and a tiny daughter, while Quercus too has a job to go to etc.) and the weather is only going to get colder, and that of course brings worries about frost, which would be fairly deadly to newly-applied lime, as it gets into the water in the render and makes it flake off the walls.

And… breathe.

So, this is just to say that I’m still here, wanting very much to post about such varied delights as:

- Steiner schools – are they all they’re cracked up to be, and, indeed just what are they cracked up to be?;

- Knitting, and why it melts my brain when I look at all but the very simplest of patterns (nearly typed ‘recipes’ there; do you think cooking is perhaps more my natural thing?);

- Wine, and how on earth we can possibly have run out of demijohns;

- Our ongoing – and frankly logic-defying, in view of current circs – desire to build a house ourselves;

And more of all that, with some cocoa fudge cookies thrown in for good measure. I want to come and comment on interesting posts, and I want to say hello and ask about the weather with various chaps out there, but for now, it’s lime, lime, and a little more lime (but sadly no coconut, and no drinking it all up). We’ve got help until Monday (by which time hopefully the streaming cold most of us have had for about a week now will finally have fucked the buggery off), from Quercus’s mother and various neighbours who were too foolish or too slow in their escape to avoid being drafted; after that, come what may, we’ll at least have to change the pace of the work we’re doing, as this is a two-man, and really a three-man, job. Hopefully, at that point, some sense of normality will return…

Oh, and it’s autumn. For us, that means the wind’s changed, the blackberries are bright jewels in the hedgerows (at least, those which haven’t been most thoughtlessly chopped about by large tractors just at the time when I wanted to go and plunder the goodies for alcoholic purposes [though see previous point about demijohns, the lack thereof, for a possible up to this down]), we’re stacking wood ready to light the stove shortly, and I’m crocheting the tiny daughter a cardigan using Cornish wool my mother had in her considerable knitting stash.

And you? What does autumn mean to you?

The rendering is going on at the moment, so the entire house – outside and, regrettably, inside, to a rather large extent – is covered in spatterings of lime. It’s not very lovely stuff – corrosive and burny – but it’s lovely in terms of covering up cob, and with autumn coming on apace, we’re really squeaking in at the last minute. Today we have been aided and abetted in our lime doings by the lovely Mr. Valley, who has lime plans of his own in the near future (we hope); three people makes such a difference, you know, and so much so that we hope to seduce him back to us at some point with promises of such esoteric goodies as, er, beer, and, well, chocolate biscuits.

In other news, I’ve lost my whatsit. My writingy crafty whatsit, that is. I’m not really in a writing place, it seems, despite my best intentions to write more regularly here, and I’m not really managing the crafty bits that I want to start, what with the work on the house and the teething-related tiredness. But I am reasonably happy nonetheless – wine is being made, cooking has been achieved, the house isn’t quite the utter bedlam I’d thought it might be at this stage, and I have plans afoot for various knitting projects which I will begin once this round of teeth – and lime-rendering! –  is out of the way, I think. (That said, I’ve just cast on a new hat for the tiny daughter; it’s called ‘Tubey‘, and is knitted in the round, which I love, and, in my case, using a skein of Noro’s ‘Silk Garden’ which is just gorgeous – it looks like blackberry crumble, with apples and ice-cream thrown in for added loveliness.)

In other, other news, um, well, nothing, really. Perhaps that’s partly why I’m not very writingish at the moment; beyond the house stuff, which is of limited interest to those not living with/in it, there’s not a lot on chez Earthenhouse, and that makes for a dull, but busy, Earthenwitch. Also, I’m doing silly quantities of copy-editing, and, despite giving a stupidly high quote to the latest person to approach me, I appear to have landed myself with a further thirteen thousand words-worth of work to do by the middle of September. The stupid quote was pitched at a height vertiginous enough – or so I thought – to put off all but the most determined, and my intention was to claw back some time to do crafty things when the tiny daughter has her snooze; that one didn’t go quite to plan, really, but at least I will be getting a comfortably ridiculous hourly rate with which to console myself, even if the closest I come to craftiness is staring absently at the wool as I read my way through lots, and lots, and lots of stuff on marketing…

Despite all this, though, and despite my generally brain-dead state, I am thinking of joining Mon’s reading thing. I mean, an extra excuse to read – as if one were ever needed – is no bad thing, right? And the opportunity to discuss books in a way which doesn’t involve marking or being marked? Well, there’s nothing there to dislike, really, from my point of view. Of course, the downside is that it involves buying more books, and, as someone who lives in a tiny house with limited surfaces available for shelving, that’s not entirely a good thing. Wait. What am I saying? That was the practical part trying to assert itself, but worry not: that doesn’t happen often… and I have got the excuse of having sold quite a few of the more boring books associated with my PhD (note: the more boring books – most of them are boring, but some of them are especially boring, so boring that only a very, very, bored person would even think of opening them, never mind actually reading them).

So, that’s life here at the moment. And you?

I have no idea how an entire week has passed since I sat down to whinge about the internal thought process I’m working through about the whole procreation idea. (As an aside, how would one go about having an external thought process? Ah yes – a whingeing blog post.) Yet somehow it has, and here it is, Wednesday again, and me all good intentions about posting a bit more regularly too – I don’t know if it’s just me, but discussions with one or two other bloggers tend to suggest that to call oneself a blogger, one must lever oneself off one’s proverbial at least twice a week, and ideally more frequently, and bloody well write something. This works well with me because when I write frequently, I tend to think of more things to say, and I even remember to plug in the bloody camera and go through the iPhoto-related angst (I have about 8000 photos in my iPhoto library, which means it takes roughly the power needed to light Liverpool for a week to open the app, and once it’s open, it needs another kick, this time of a nuclear-like level, to actually bring the pictures up and let me sort through them, and that’s before we even begin challenges like uploading the blighters to Photobucket) of adding pictures! pictures! to my otherwise blocky text.

Anyway. Where was I? Ah yes.

So, this past week has seen Quercus finish cleaning up the old window frames in the front of the house, cutting in bits of chestnut wood where the rot had got too bad to make the original recoverable. I’ve glazed most of three windows, leaving only the tiny daughter’s to do; we left that one until last so that we’d hopefully have perfected the technique, insofar as we were ever going to do so. This morning, furthermore, will see the arrival of the replacement window catches – the old ones were rusted to the point where their continued existence was just not on the cards, frankly – which may even mean closing windows! with glass instead of board! glass! which you can see through, and everything! this very day. After two or three weeks of living with boarded-up windows in the original house, I’m quite looking forward to the restoration of light.

We’ve also been scavenging about in various hedges, procuring nine pounds of sloes (rough translation: fifteen – eighteen bottles of wine, in about six months), four pounds of rosehips (thirty bottles), shedloads of apples (mostly cooked and frozen for the tiny daughter’s afters), shedloads of blackberries (ditto) and some plums, which are nearing the end of fermentation as I write.

It’s that time of year where you can smell autumn just around the corner; this morning there was a slight mist coming across the fields and a cool breeze coming in from the west, and (annoyingly, for those of us with a scavenger’s eye) the hedges were cut last week, meaning there is a newly-spartan look to the borders around Earthenhouse. How did it get to be autumn again already? It seems only yesterday that we were taking down the wreath over the stove in January, and here we are, contemplating cleaning out the woodstove prior to lighting it for the winter (because in a house where it’s our only source of heat, it basically stays lit until spring).

And oh – we’ve got so much to do on the house before the weather gets colder. The render, for a start. The cob is still bare at the moment because the preparatory work has taken ages (sorting out the windows, the door-frame, the top of the cob walls just beneath the thatch, the fact that someone is now living in the cob wall at about bed-height in our room…), so this coming week, Quercus’s mother (who obviously drew a short straw sometime in a previous life, given that she’s a sixty-odd- year-old woman, and clearly shouldn’t have to spend her visiting time hoiking lime render into a mixer; on balance, though, she is also incredibly, astonishingly, bewilderingly irritating at times, so perhaps it’s a fair trade-off) is coming to help Quercus; hopefully, this will be the time when we actually begin to get the cob covered up again. If we manage to get the render sorted and the windows done, and the guttering on the extension, and the lead on the join between extension roof and cob wall, I shall be a very happy bunny indeed. That only leaves the woodshed to sort out – we’ve now got planning permission to build a large wooden shed which we’ll use for storing the wood we burn in the stove, so all we need to do is, er, build it. Oh, and source the wood – possibly pallets – to do so. So, yes, um, a few bits and pieces to be getting on with.

However: coming soon – crumble topping to beat off feelings of overwhelming chaos, hotly followed by a detailed – yet not depressingly-so – list of works-in-progress I’m going to allow myself to contemplate over the coming few months. Repeat after me: I will not – repeat NOT! – keep accepting copy-editing work which turns out to be written by someone for whom the English language exists only by reputation; rather, I will develop extensive x-ray writing-standards vision which will detect the looming presence of such bedlam, allowing me to decline, politely and in words of one syllable which are not open to misinterpretation, such projects.*  And, of course, stopping taking on work which ends up being rather longer-winded than once anticipated, I will reclaim my evenings, and thus, some crafty creativey whatsit time (hereinafter known as CCWT).

* As an aside, working as a proofreader/copy-editor has really pushed my moral boundaries, and I make no apology for the pompous nature of that statement. I keep getting approached by international students who are blatantly failing their assessments, sometimes at PhD level, because their English is simply not good enough. Surely the universities must have known/know what their language ability is? Or is not, more to the point? How can it be right that they are accepted on to programmes they have little hope of completing successfully? Or, worse, how can it be right that they’ll complete, having paid someone to sort their work out for them, or that they’ll complete because these universities give them a free pass in order to keep getting the fees? And where does that leave the qualifications I got myself from these bloody institutions, having spent a decade working, from time to time quite hard, in order to do so? De-valued, surely. On the other hand, I know that if I don’t do this work, someone else will; that’s not a justification for contributing to this system, and it pisses me off to be doing it. And one the other other hand (and yes – we now have three hands), we need the money. And it’s easy work for me. And round we go again, and again, and again… I still haven’t answered this one, in other words.

After a productive weekend, the crapness of last whenever-it-was has just about dissipated, I’m happy to say, though some low-key teething on the part of the tiny daughter means that Quercus and I are once more entering the Sleep Deprivation Olympics. However, the sleepiness didn’t prevent us…

1. Stripping the windows back far enough that we’re going to be able to have them as plain wood inside the house; we’d thought they’d be far too buggered, and had prepared ourselves for yet more gloss painting, so finding that, actually, they’re really strong wood underneath the years of neglect has been a nice surprise; they’ll be painted outside, partly because of the listing requirements and partly because of the weather, but inside, our earthy house is going to be a woody earthy house;
2. Freezing another couple of bags of blackberries, picked in the field behind the house; I can’t decide what to do with them – jam? jelly? wine? cordial? – so I’m thinking pick ‘em while they’re there, and work out the details later, not least as the entire house is somewhat bedlam-ish (and covered in dust) because of the ongoing work on the windows;
3. Making up some lentil, tomato and onion soup, part of which I’ve frozen in individual servings for the witchling’s suppers-to-come;
4. Re-glazing the downstairs window, which now opens after being painted (and rotted) shut for about thirty years – I have come to know the love that is linseed putty, and while I didn’t really think about it when we couldn’t, I find myself delighted that we can now open the window, should the fancy take us;
5. Whipping up a couple of batches of beeswax balm, this one with a mood-lightening effect in mind – I’ve christened it Bright Skies, and it’s got indecent quantities of marjoram, cedarwood, sandalwood, rose and neroli, so hopefully it’ll do the trick, or at the very least, smell gorgeous while it’s trying.

Oh, and then, I discover that Mel has very lovelily (and yes, that is a word) given me an awardy-whatsit, with a very lovely pic to boot. The idea is that one passes said loveliness on to three people who have reminded one of witchiness and, for me, the existence of The World Beyond, so here goes:

1. Doc Witch, whose meditations on subjects ranging from striped tights to the mythical status of fairy-tales are always a pleasure;
2. Mon, whose explorations of astrology continue to pull me in, particularly in combination with her determined attempts to crochet the entire world;
3. LQS, whose ongoing explorations of What It Is To Be keep me fascinated, and all the more-so because I know some of What She Is In Person.

Happy Monday, folks.

Gosh. It’s actually sunny outside for the first time in what feels like months. Now that I’ve written that, of course, a dirty great black cloud will feel it incumbent on itself to slorm over here as fast as the quixotic zephyrs will permit, just in order to throw it down all over me, doubtless, but hey, at least in future years, I can look back to this post and say ‘look! there! it was sunny for at least ten minutes!’.

Anyway.

With the bright morning comes a brighter mood. Thank you for the lovely comments and suggestions on how to rediscover my inner creative mojo; I shall be attempting to put my money where my mouth is over the weekend, and I am already adopting witch of oz’s suggestion that I reframe my view of my current activities and start trying to see them as creative in themselves (cooking, making wine, sorting out the house and looking after the tiny daughter). What an excellent way to look on things which the drudgery of which might otherwise threaten to overwhelm. There is no doubt in my mind that simply working our way through the day in a cheerful, careful, interesting manner is, in relation to the tiny daughter, really rather important work in itself, but sometimes I need to remind myself of this, and to think that, actually, it’s OK if the only thing I do ALL DAY is keep her happy and healthy, because at the end of the day, that’s pretty bloody good going. And most days, she is indeed happy and healthy.

And I think I also ought to acknowledge more often the work that I do which is either creative (baking, cooking, wine-making), or which goes towards allowing Quercus to get on with the big, visible work on the house. I have spent a lot of time recently feeling mildly shifty for not being out there with him, chucking things in a cement mixer and getting covered in a mildly corrosive substance from head to foot, but then I realised the other day that someone has to keep us running, and basically, that’s what I do – with the witchling to look after, someone needs to be clean and presentable (or, at least, as presentable as I ever manage), and as I’m needed for feeds throughout the day, it’s probably the most sense for that someone to be me. Someone needs to make sure there is food in the cupboards, and there are bowls to eat it out of. Someone needs to keep the bathroom clean, and the rugs washed. Someone needs to feed the cats (who have hollow legs at the best of times) and clean out the chickens. Ideally, someone needs to keep the small patch of garden to which the tiny daughter has access, surrounded as it is by woodpiles and cement mixers, free of the usual bedlam, and full of things to look at (currently, lemonbalm, mint, courgettes, potatoes, runner beans, Jerusalem artichokes and sage).

So, my new resolve is to remember that it’s creative to cook meals which mean convenience food never makes it through our door, and it’s creative to think of meals ahead of time so that there are frozen bags of smugness for the witchling’s dinner, and it’s creative to think of next year, when we will be drinking plum wine (three gallons started yesterday), elderflower wine (nine gallons started about three weeks ago), or honeysuckle wine (two gallons started about a month ago). And it’s at least a part of being creative to make sure that the house is clean and clear, because otherwise I get so bogged down in the need to clear and clean that knitting or sewing or making or doing gets shunted so far down the list that it’s not even funny. Maybe this is my fallow period, in terms of actual tangible creative products – and I suppose that’s what I’m missing, really: the knitting project finished, the stitching bound off, the end result toted around by one of my lovelies as an outward and visible sign of my love for them – but that doesn’t mean it’s a fallow period in the bigger picture.

Anyone out there doing alternatively creative things? Found a way to look on the washing-up as all part of the artistic process? Let me know. In fellowship, there is strength (or something equally  communist-sounding), and the knowledge with more people searching for it, We Shall Overcome The Crap And Find A Way To Justify Knitting Instead Of Housework.*

*Obviously your mileage may vary on this one; feel free to substitute a loathsome occupation of your choice for housework, and the scintillating freedom of whatever you choose for knitting.