A little fall of rain

It hasn't rained in ages. The grass in the front yard is beige and crunchy, which seems entirely the wrong way for grass to be.

So it was really great when the big grey clouds rolled over this afternoon - not so great that they chose the period in which I was walking down the hill from the bus-stop to dump really hard, but brilliant that I can see puddles in our front yard, and I'm sure my shoes will dry out.....eventually.

In knitting news, while I'm gutted that I didn't win the Malabrigo contest over at Salihan Crafts, I'm soldiering on.

I finished a wrap with love square last night and sewed it onto the growing blanket. 8 squares down, 19 to go. It's all acrylic so I hope the homeless or otherwise needy person this blanket ends up with doesn't get it too close to a fire. I'm hoping that the "knitting for charity" karma outweighs the whole "knitting with acrylic" thing.

The alpaca vest has reached the "huge and unwieldy" stage and is slowing down as a result. I've got 17 rows left on the back before the shoulder shaping and then the front from where I split for the armholes and the bands.

It's getting a little bit tricky to carry this to and from work now due to the bulk, so it'll probably slow down even more now.

Not that I'm short on "carrying to work" projects - I've decided to make bags for two birthdays coming up in our family and as a Thank You for The Boy's school teacher. I haven't decided which patterns yet but will probably fall back on the old standby bags, Booga and Sophie. They're both quick and easy and I've made many before and I know they will turn out well. I want to try out the new needle-felting needles I picked up recently as well, and I know either of these bags would be a really great starting point for that.

Oh - from the comments (Squee! I've got comments! I feel privileged that a couple of people like my blog enough to leave a comment, thanks Fenella and Maria) - Fenella asks how it went when I saw my Doc after my recent colonoscopy .....Well, it didn't. When I finally got hold of his receptionist over a week later, she seemed surprised that I was concerned and said "Oh, the polyp is nothing - some people have polyps and we tell them not to come in for 5 years!" and "Dr P said for you to come in, in three months time". So I guess he reckons I'm okay, which is good, but I wish he'd indicated that on the records I got given at the hospital so that I didn't have to go through more than a week of worrying. I was pretty crap symptom-wise for about a month after the colonoscopy but it's settled down mostly now, I can live with it, and I don't want to go back on the steroids. At least not until I really feel that I need them, or after an overseas holiday later this year (I got travel insurance cover for my crohn's for an extra cost, and contingent on the fact that I hadn't had steroid therapy for over 6 months at the time I applied) So I'm going to wait until I'm back from hols to see the Doc, unless I get worse. The holding pattern I'm in at the moment is not brilliant, but it's managable. :)

(and I don't think Dr P's receptionist really meant to be so flippant about polyps. In my previous life where I was a genetic researcher (straight out of uni, I don't mean a real previous life), I worked in a lab with a guy researching Familial Adenomatous Polyposis, which is a genetic condition where people get hundreds of polyps. FAP can be really serious and needs close medical supervision and care. I just think she was trying to say that my lonely singular polyp which they removed anyway, was nothing to be worried about)