Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Did somebody hide a rotten banana under my sofa?

I am plagued by fruit flies. Every day I'm finding one drowned in whatever I'm drinking. Matt and I have gone around the kitchen double-checking to make sure there's no bits of fruit half dessicated and hiding behind the coffee jar or toaster, no culprits.

I have my first quiz of the semester tomorrow, and am beginning to think about thinking about midterm exams. But not actually thinking about them. Yet.

One of the new crop of medical students is a Monty Python fan. A blackboard in our hallway had "Questions 23a-28b" written on it, and one day I noticed someone had added near the bottom:

"29a - what is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?"

So of course I added "African or European?". A few days later I was gratified to see "I don't know! Aaaaaaaaaargh!" had appeared underneath.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Frog Cabin

I am making a "Log Cabin" style baby blanket for a friend, and this weekend got around to taking and posting photographs of some finished objects and works in progress to Ravelry. Something immediately jumped out at me...

Next to everything else I’ve done it looks like it's being made by nine-year-old me, not 28-year-old me. The colour combinations are just NOT working, and it’s generally lumpy looking. I’m unraveling it and changing to a crochet patchwork of log cabin squares, half “warm” half “cool”, all tied together with the cream, which should be a much better way to combine these colours.

Ravelry has saved me from handing over a dodgy baby blanket! Hooray!

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Of course not

I failed to mention that the skirting boards are not done, nor have the book cases all been returned to their homes and repopulated with books, nor the clean laundry from last week put away (I am dressing from the back of the sofa to reduce the amount left to stow properly). Situation Normal in other words. It is difficult to maintain the pre-flooring momentum of frantic painting and furniture removal now that we have no deadline other than the imminent breakdown our collective sanity. Especially since this week Matt has been on pager duty, being paged once or twice a night as we sleep, he has to get up and work for an hour or more when that happens, I just go back to sleep, but it's still wiping me out. He's also got some potentially exciting stuff going on, but won't know for a week or more, and I'd really like to know NOW thank you very much, so that I can plot and plan and stop being in suspense!

Sunday, September 07, 2008

Done?

It is a strange feeling to have the entire flat painted to our liking. We've lived here for four years. Maybe it would have been better to just paint the whole place a neutral shade of a good quality paint before we moved in, so we didn't have to deal with the grotty white dirt-magnet paint they left us with (which, I suspect, was actually primer, not paint). It's even stranger to have the much-anticipated porcelain floor. I have not had a tiled home before, I've lived with wood laminate and sanded floorboards but not the hard, cool, smooth-but-textured feel beneath my feet that we have now. It makes errant cat litter granules much more noticeable, but also makes cleaning a matter of a momentary whisk with a broom. The weather is still hot and humid, so the tile feels pleasantly cold, in the winter we will probably put a big rug down in the living room.

Being back in classes feels a bit strange too. Familiar, now it's my second semester, but I am relearning things like having uni-related work to do on weekends, and having to plan my work days carefully on the days I have class to get the essentials done before I zoom off.