Year of the Rat

The Year of the Rat - my year. Today I sorted through my wardrobe and got rid of a lot of old clothes and also defrosted the freezer. I had lunch with the boyman, bought lots of groceries, had a shiatsu massage and came home to cook crispy skinned twice-cooked chicken, vegies with oyster sauce, char sui pork and to supervise the making of sushi (okay, okay hardly Chinese, I know, but the youngest step daughter eats it until it's coming out of her ears and as she won't eat much, it's a good, good thing.) The kids and I then hung our wishes on a tree - my thread slipped and all my wishes fell down but the girlchild retrieved them and I hung them, washing line fashion. We also ate lychees and fortune cookies. The fortuens are always vague - The wise man waits for night before saying it was a fine day. (We had that one twice!) The boyman thought they should be more specific: Unfortunately you will die from a cardiac arrest before you turn sixty.

Working on socks - socks from linen stitch, not to Cat Bordhi's pattern in the end. I chickened out and put in a heel and gusset a la Yarn Harlot. Wuss, wuss, wuss.

Read: Alice Pung's An Unfinished Gem and Nuala O'Faolain's Are You Somebody - both incredibly honest memoirs and therefore extremely moving. I'd read Nuala O'Faolain's second memoir first - just because I found it somewhere secondhand - and couldn't put it down. Almost There moved me so much - her struggle against family, expectations and history - and yet her need to be part of them, too. I looked for the first part for ages, finally found it in the Box Hill op shop. Very cheap! I do love op shop books.

I also did some spinning this week - my English Leicster/Sunshine&Zara mix - ie. English Leiscster and samoyed. Can;t wait until I ply these bobbins together, wash them and see (more accurately feel the final product - bet it's too nice for socks, although socks is what it's destined to be.