The Mop Has Arrived

It's here at last! The parcel delivery man brought it this afternoon. It took me such a long time to assemble it as the handle pieces were so snugly fitting and I was scared to knock it too hard in case I broke anything, Anyway with a bit of swearing under my breath I finally got it together.

After I got the handle on I spent another while trying to fit the slider plate on the bottom of the mop. (It's not on in the photos)  Eventually I read the instructions again. Duh! It doesn't snap on, it just rests under the mop if you are steaming carpets. The mop only came with one pad that Velcros on and the instructions are to hand wash it !!. I know that my kitchen was in  need of a good mopping but how on earth I am going to get that pad back to white with hand washing I don't know. I will have to take a good look at the pad and see if I can adapt some pads to fit onto the mop over the pad that I can machine wash, Maybe I will crochet a little mop head with elastic to fit over the head and that could absorb a lot of the dirt. If I make my crochet mop heads in cotton then they could go into the hot wash. Or I will buy some Velcro next time I am near a shop and make my own pads as they are so expensive to buy new ones and I have a feeling that they will get extremely dirty if I have to hand wash and I hate anything that looks grey instead of white even when it is clean.

For some reason the second side looks smaller than the first one. I did count the rows. Perhaps my tension is a little tighter on this second piece. Everything will be OK once it is finished and blocked out. The good part is that I don't have any bands to knit, I just have two sleeves to make but as the jacket has drop shoulders and I have short arms that shouldn't take too long. Hopefully it will be finished for the weekend.

My friend Sue popped in to see me today. I do like company as then I have someone to chat to. Even better Sue is a crocheter so we can chat crochet and yarns. Best kind of conversation for me at the moment as I have so little else to chat about with not going out so much.

I had some bad news today. My next door neighbour (One of my lodger cat's (Oscar) Mum) is moving out on Monday. They rent their house and the landlord does precious little to maintain the place and now he wants to put the rent up yet again. She has found a new place, not too far away, where she can afford the rent. I will miss them as they have been good neighbours. Despite having a single mum with 2 teenagers and a 12  yr old living next door they have been remarkably quiet on the whole. I have asked her to leave me the landlord's phone number before she leaves just in case I get some awful neighbours renting after her. It is a small family house so I hope that it attracts a decent couple. The rest of the neighbourhood is mostly younger couples with small children as most of us oldies have moved or passed away. Young noisy neighbours just won't fit in on this quiet street. I don't want to have to move as I love my little house, shabby though it may be, it's home to me.

I had a go with my steam mop on the rather dirty kitchen floor, made worse by the fact that the gardener came today. The way that my house is constructed means that she has to drag her lawnmower through the garage, and then though the utility part of my kitchen, to get to the back garden. Although the mop was a little harder to push than I anticipated at least I didn't have to heave a bucket about and wring out a mop. It has brought it quite clean although I will be able to see better when I mop it again and get rid of any lingering dirt. It isn't fair to judge it's performance on a floor that hasn't seen a mop for a week or so. The floor did dry almost immediately which is good. It is not supposed to need any liquid floor cleanser and the steam kills bacteria which is good for the bathroom as well as the kitchen. The mop is lightweight so I will have no trouble carrying it up the stairs.

As it's almost seven o' clock I had better make myself some dinner. I will leave steaming the bathroom until tomorrow.

Third Pattern is the One

After 2 attempts with this pink Sirdar Big Softee I finally made a decision on the pattern and this time I am not unravelling it. I already had this Emu Snowball pattern in my collection from a few years ago and decided that the pink would look less like a bed jacket in this quite boxy pattern.

I managed to knit quite a few rows at the Kings Arms Knit Club last night. Since the photo was taken I have knitted a few more and the back is now finished and the pocket liners are knitted ready for when I start the fronts.

Yesterday I was just so tired. I tossed and turned and then when I finally got to sleep I had the kind of dream that I was glad to waken from. It was past 10 am when I finally got out of bed and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the day. The more sleep I have the droopier I am the day after, I did revive though when I got to the knit club.

I am still waiting for my steam mop to be delivered and when I got in touch with the firm in Ireland they gave me a reference number to check with Yodel ( previously called DHL) and when I researched it the mop didn't leave Dublin until the 9th May even though it was picked up from the firm before the Bank Holiday weekend. Some things that I order online come almost the day after and others seem to take the round about route. I guess that I will have to wait a few more days to see if it turns up. It's so maddening.

My black and white lodger Oscar turned up this morning for a sleep and slept until around 3.30pm. When he came in he was so tired that his little eyes kept shutting when I was talking to him. He must have been out of the town visiting his lady friends last night. He has scratches on his nose so either another tom took objections to his advances or the lady kitty in question did.

Buster isn't coming this week as my son cannot lay the concrete in this kind of weather. Although I don't that it actually rained today it has been very gloomy and the forecast was for rain. It's a shame that he didn't do his back patio when the sun was shining. Sunny days are so hard to predict in the UK especially in Manchester. We are not called the Rainy City for nothing. It's something to do with the Pennines or so I got told at school. The clouds come along and after they reach the Pennines they dump their rain on our side of the hills.