Memory Lane, May

This week, Mr Knitbert decided he needed a new external hard drive. His old one is "only" 250GB and he decided that he needed a 400GB one as well. He casually mentioned at dinner one evening that he had ordered it, and the next day when I came home there was one of those irritating little cards on the mat telling you that someone has tried to deliver a parcel.

The next evening I noticed a litle pile of cardboard outside the computer room, so I deduced that the disk had arrived.

In order to make the Memory Lane post this evening, I had to scan in my chosen photo, and as the scanner is in the computer room, I was obliged to open the door and go in. First of all, the pile of cardboard outside had grown bigger, and now included a few plastic bags as well. I cleared it away and flattened the cardboard for recycling so I could get the door open. Inside, I found more paperwork and MORE cardboard strewn over the floor, and worse still, in order to connect the new hard drive to the power, Mr Knitbert had had to disconnect something else, because there are now not enough sockets.

Luckily, the scanner did not seem to be the thing which had been disconnected, and we are off to PC World first thing tomorrow to get a trailing socket with more thingies.

So here is the photo anyway! The picture, which is of me, must have been taken when I was about 3 or 4 I suppose. What am I wearing? What was my mother thinking of? No wonder I have grown up obsessed by textiles and fashion!
I am standing in the driveway of my parents' house, which is where I grew up from the age of about two. The house was newly built and yet had no central heating or double glazing. There was a hearth in the living room and the fire there heated that room and the hot water. There was no heating at all upstairs, and I do remember it being very very cold in winter.

When I was about twelve, I think, my parents invested in some newfangled central heating system, which involved actual radiators being put in the bedrooms, although they were not very efficient and were never turned up too high on account of its being unhealthy to have your room too hot. My mother had a few eccentric ideas about that kind of thing! We never had heating in the kitchen, because it was heated by the cooker when in use, so that would have been wasteful; and the bathroom and toilet were never heated either because of course that would have been unhygienic and encouraged germs. In fact, there was always a window open in the bathroom even in winter. You can imagine how pleasant that was!
It is not surprising, then, that I give a high priority to having a warm and comfortable house.

One last strange fact about this photo is that my brother and his family now live in the house opposite where I am standing. My parents' house was sold nearly twenty years ago. Only a few years ago, Yugbert announced that he was moving again, and when he showed me the house they had decided to buy I was amazed. So now he looks at the house he grew up in every morning out of his bedroom window. I think that's weird, but then that's just me.

Some knitting news: I am trying with some success to finish my Clapotis so I can get on with Charlotte's Web with a clear conscience (and with the Denise cord of the correct size, which is currently in said Clapotis. Or should I just cave in and buy a set of pink Denises? No, don't answer that....my willpower is pitifully low in these matters at the best of times). Anyway, I am on the decrease rows now, so I hope to be able to show a modelled photo later this weekend.

In the meantime I have had a bit of a frenzy of lace pattern buying. I'll show what I ordered when it arrives, but I can show this right away:



Isn't it just the most gorgeous thing you ever saw? It is the Hanami stole from Pink Lemon Twist. I have a skein of Blue Faced Leicester laceweight in semi solid pink from Bright Dyes which is just meant for that stole. I don't have a photo handy, but I'll take one later and post it so you can see what I mean.

Well, I'd better get knitting!