Can I Have My Chair Back Please?

Every time I get out of my chair Buster jumps on it. He has decided that this is his seat and whinges and sulks if I happen to be sitting on it. My son would say that I should order him off the chair but as I am Grandma now and not his Mum anymore I do tend to spoil him. I did shout at him yesterday though. As I said on my last post Buster had lasted 5 hrs without an accident whilst I was at the hospital. Yesterday he asked to go outside and before I could open the patio doors he started to wee all over the carpet. I wouldn't mind but he had been out for a wee not a half hour before. He was watching me clean up with his tail down between his legs and his head drooping. After that he decided that he wanted to go out of the kitchen door for a wee instead of the patio doors!



The cardigan for my niece is turning out to be a bit of a pain. Sometimes I wonder why I just don't look at the picture and do it myself. I find these modern patterns so hard to understand and poorly shaped. My niece came today to walk Buster and I asked her to try it on. The pattern stated 4ply and I am using DK and yet still it is very small. Normally I would expect that using a thicker yarn would make it bigger and not smaller. I am not on my own with this as on Ravelry a few people have struggled with this pattern coming out very small. The armholes are very tight despite my working 2 extra rows on the body pieces. The sleeves are crocheted downwards otherwise I would unpick the shoulder seams and add another couple of rows to the body. I would also not decrease the front shaping as much up to shoulders as the neck is extremely wide. I just hope that I can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear when I make the bands. I am hoping that when it is blocked the pattern will stretch out. The wool is silky and got give except at the armholes where I had a set number of double crochet to pick up. As the sleeves are straight if I had picked up more stitches then the sleeves would have been too wide unless I shaped them in.

It's my younger niece's birthday today but apparently she is away on holiday abroad and is sunning herself on the beach. My elder niece's birthday is tomorrow ( they were born 3 yrs apart and not 1 day lol) but I won't have either of her jackets finished by then. She likes the wool that I bought from Kemps for her Mum and thinks that she will like it. We just need to decide on a pattern for later when I have finished both of my niece's jackets.




Tomorrow is Mothering Sunday in the UK. When I go into my kitchen I feel like I have been given some lovely flowers. This Amaryllis was given to me for Christmas 2009. It flowered twice, each time with three flowers, and then just went to loads of long leaves once the flowers died. I didn't know what to do with it so I just kept on watering the bulb until all the leaves bar one had gone yellow. I was very surprised earlier this week when I saw one flower bud emerging from the bulb. As you can see I now have 2 open flowers and a bud ready to open soon. I think that this will be the third and last time that it will flower as now it has no leaves at all to feed the bulb.



I could only take a photo of one of the blooms as they are facing different directions. Although this is a pale Amaryllis it has beautiful shades of peach and pink colour. Mother's Day has come early for me.

I haven't been doing much crochet and no knitting this week. Buster is time consuming mostly because I can't walk him and so he has plenty of energy and wants to be occupied. We have to play ball in the garden or even indoors when it rains. My niece walked him for me today although it took 2 attempts for him to go with her. He suffers from separation anxiety and even though he knows her well she is not me or my son or daughter in law. He likes to keep one of us in his sight when he is out of the house. He frets if he can't see any of us. Once he got to the woodland and off his lead he was fine and took her for a walk. He remembers the way to go no matter how long it has been since he went in there. He came back like a drowned rat as I forgot to tell her that he will jump in the lake and swim. Good job I kept all of his Buster towels when he went to live with my son and his wife. I picked up some black and purple hand towels ages ago in a sale for next to nothing. I don't suppose that those colours are ones that people pick for their bathrooms but they are ideal for dog towelling.

I have just checked and Buster is fast asleep on my chair. This means that I will have to find some cushions to sit on as my sofas are too low down for me. I can get into them OK but it takes me ages to get up and really hurts my knees. I am having a bad ache day. Even the soles of my feet are hurting today and last night I could not reach around to unfasten my bra. My fingers are stiff but I put that down to not doing as much crochet or knitting as usual. Roll on the Summer, such as it is in the UK, as my old bones like the heat. I am in a catch 22 situation. My leg bones, back and arms ache in the cold and yet if I try to warm them up it sets off my eczema and I spend the time itching and making my skin sore. I can't win can I? I do hope that the hospital has an answer for me next time I go.

I need to go and find some socks as now my feet are really cold. I never used to have cold feet and used to walk about bare footed in the house in all weathers but now even with slippers on my feet are cold. After about an hour my ankles will swell up and go itchy and I will have to take the socks off again. I think that I should knit some footlets instead of socks.