levelling up

So we made it up to the house, and had a nice weekend with Oscar's girlfriend and her brother (the same age as Kit and Ella) staying for 2 nights.  I haven't got stuck into to things around here, because....well, in all honesty, I feel a bit overwhelmed.

We had a new roof put on recently and I was so excited to see it and it's just not been well done.  There's bits sticking out, visible nails and staples, one of the porticos covering the side door was missed completely.  Not only that, but 6 pieces of outdoor furniture were broken in the process, and there is mess everywhere as they didn't put down anything to catch the old roof that they pulled off.  I had to go and buy a magnet yesterday to start the long process of picking up everything before one of us steps on an old rusty nail!  NOT HAPPY.

This is the fruits of yesterday's labours.  That's an industrial sized bucket with 2 inches of scrap metal in the bottom that I picked up with the magnet (at the top of the bucket).  That's 3 hours work and we only did one side of the house.  We're also having to pick up scraps of broken roof tile, and I filled half a jumbo garbage bag with those...

I also accidentally went for a 8 mile walk yesterday (I thought it wouldn't be quite so far), which was lovely, but I'm feeling it a bit today, especially after spending a few hours outside picking up stuff afterwards.

So today was my day to CONQUER my new knitting project.

Isn't that gorgeous!  It's in this season's interweave knits magazine and I thought, ooh, I'll give that a go.   A stop at Webs (America's biggest yarn store) on the drive up, and some nice well priced cotton and I was already to go.

EXCEPT, oh my, what a tricky pattern!  Not so much the pattern itself, although that took a while to get going, but the grid work starts and finishes in the middle and it's oh so easy to get lost.

I think I have started this thing about 8 times.  Each time I'd get a little further, each time I'd understand a bit more about where the stitches were supposed to go and what it looked like on the needles.  I found writing each row out and colour coding it helped.  Kit thought I'd actually written a code with all the ptbl, YO, ssk, [(s1pw)x2, s1ptblw, k3tog] etc that's in there.

Ella came in today and I'd knitted back to the 8th row and she said to me "what's your best score so far?".  And actually computer game terminology really works for this kind of knitting: It is just as addictive as computer games..."just one more row, I'm sure I can beat my personal best this time"... and I really feel like I've levelled up with this pattern.  I'm playing on legendary mode now!  I'm not sure that cotton was the best choice for this pattern as it needs to have something with a bit of give, but we'll see.  With my living arrangements as they are (i.e.: 80% of the time in the tropics) I couldn't face anything other than cotton!