Entries from January 2009 ↓

I don’t speak German but find this video from YouTube adorable – a puss cat wandered onto the set of a local TV station’s weather segment last week and the weather presenter didn’t miss a beat and just picked the cat up and carried on with the weather.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFyDJytTZyg

At one stage the cat (Lupin) actually points to the weather map as well. Am sending the link to Basel Lisa to see if she can pick out what the guy is saying about the cat – he definitely says ’studio cat’ when he picks him up and from what I can tell refers to the cat again at the end.

Update: turns out my Orange Friend in Chicago has a husband who knows German! The weather guy says “And also our studio cat has just wandered in without permission” and picks him up then straight on with the weather. Towards the end he says something about it being cold and wintry and that he hopes that all the cats have thick fur to get through the night.

Can blind people knit? When we were in the wool shop yesterday (oh how I’ve missed it … they were in the middle of their annual sale *and* had redecorated and got new Knitting Club furniture) and a lady with a guide dog came into the store. The assistant was rushing around getting her to feel various wools (and telling her what colours would go together) while the lab guide dog stood there with his nose firmly stuffed into a basket of wool giving it a good old sniff (have to remember not to buy any wool from that basket mind you it was an awful tweed looking batch which I doubt I’d want). I suppose the lady was buying the wool to knit with it, she was asking about the ply and ball weights – how would you knit if you were blind? I can’t imagine doing half the things I do without seeing but knitting seems so fiddly and dropping stitches so frequent if you’e not looking. Perhaps there’s some kind of electronic needles that can tell if a stitch has been dropped, or perhaps she was partially sighted and could knit with the aid of magnification. Hmmm.

I came away with some bamboo wool. Technically I supposed it’s not actually wool because no part of it comes off a sheep’s back. I’m using something different for my first knitting project in a while because it’s going to a baby to be born in Hong Kong soon and even in winter the temperatures are pretty warm so I thought wool wasn’t particularly suitable.

Apparently he’s now clapping, and pulling himself up to standing. If between here and Blenheim we can work out the technology I might get a video file for the blog.

A Mr Fixit guy came to visit to look at the broken draws and useless arrangement of built-in units in our wardrobe. He asked if we were “into sanding and painting at all?” Errr, no. He said he “assumed as much.” What!? Quite funny really that a guy can tell that within 5 minutes of meeting us, but so true. When it came to receiving his ideas for a new unit for the wardrobe he said “Where should I post it? Please don’t ask me to use email, I don’t do email.” So I took the chance to say that I “assumed as much.”!!

In all the date scone experiments we’ve never managed to get them quite as brown as Nikau did. After wandering passed there today to see what state of ruin it was in (still just completely empty, no tables, chairs, crockery etc) we returned home with renewed enthusiasm for experimentation. We’ve made several batches of the pinwheel variety using the fruit mincer but today blended the paste with the milk to make a very brown liquid. Result – brown date scones that look a LOT like Nikau’s!