Erg, can’t really think of much to say for some reason.

I went to Haysden Country Park with Suzy so that we could give our Galapagos sandals a test run. I took a shitload of photos, but then couldn’t think of any amusing words to put with them. We had a lovely time, the weather wasn’t bad, there were some cute ducklings, our sandals were great and I forgot to buy my Garnier wipes at Boots, but it just wasn’t quite bloggy. There were no mothers beating the living shit out of their children for a start. However, there was a woman who very nearly did a 180º degree turn on the footpath in an effort to get her loud toddler away from the small lady who’d caught her interest, but she decided against it in the end, making do with lobbing the child into the lake to hush her. Oh, I jest.

Today, day 2 of this delightfully 3-dayed weekend, I dug over my vegetable patch and planted 29 sweetcorn seeds. (Can you call them seeds? They’re just dried up niblets really.) My patch is behind my little wooden hut, Juniper Lodge, so I didn’t bother planting any niblets where the sun wouldn’t reach. After all, that hunky Green Giant will need somewhere to sleep. He can protect me from all the aliens that are going to infest my crop. I’ll be the Green Giant’s ho. He says there are still two slots remaining.

The Firm is on TV tonight. Should I bother watching it? Can I look at Tom Cruise without wondering at which point in his career he totally lost the plot and whether there really is a baby, or has Mother Hubbard, or whatever his name is, simply returned from Planet Zarg using Katie Holmes as a portal?

Oh, and I’ve updated The Route Here

Mmm, yummy woolly goodness. Thanks to Ebay, I got my hands on 3 skeins of this discontinued “Carnival”-coloured chunky wool. Is it not the best wool ever? I’m just airing the slight smokey smell out of it and then I shall be casting on. Who wants a hat? Or a migraine?

The other delightful wool I bought recently is this Patons Symphony. I found it at C & H Fabrics in the oddments basket and felt all thrifty-happy like Amanda as I handed over just £1 for the skein. Although of course, one skein’s not going to be enough for a scarf, so I may just end up with a medium-sized length of soft lovely stuff to stroke and coo over.

At the weekend I made a hat for John, my first production for someone I know. He’d requested black with a contrasting stripe and no turned-up brim. I adapted the pattern I used for the red hat and made it only six inches long before the decreasing as he has a tiny head. Tiny. I think I got some of his head units.

Here he is, modelling the hat. The hat with a Ring of Fiiiiire:

I also recently finished a long ribbed scarf from my own pattern. At the end and beginning of each colour block, I had two rows of stocking stitch, which made fun little indentations in the rib at the changeovers.

The hat I’m wearing below with the scarf in such totally mismatched gay abandon is the latest item to be finished. It’s the same black as John’s, no turn-up, but 7 inches long before the decreasing. The stripes and crown are done in the kryptonite green. A bit of a bitch to sew up because of the stripes, but I managed. How? Through being shit hot, that’s how.

My brother and I could be models. We’re just that beautiful.

We were graced with the grand presence of Darcie yesterday. For those of you who don’t know, Darcie is my brother’s girlfriend’s sister’s daughter. Or, if you think that’s me making it complicated, if John and Sam were married, Darcie would be his niece. There, get it?

We only see Vanessa and Darcie now and again, so it’s always interesting to see how Darcie has grown. She had a whole bunch of new tricks this time: crawling, sitting, pulling herself up, two little teeth, waving, bobbing her head about to music, clapping and banging her little pink plastic balls together. Unfortunately I don’t think Vanessa had any new tricks with which to impress us, but, to her credit, I think she had all Darcie’s tricks down pat a long time ago.

Having had a good suck on my tape measure, Darcie inspected John’s iBook as he showed her his photos of her that he’d uploaded to Flickr. John put the cursor in the comment box and Darcie proceeded to leave her mark. Patting away at the keys and touching the screen, she managed to do things for which John and I had no idea what the keyboard shortcut was. Little menus popped up, the dock locked in the up position and suddenly she was zoomed in on the screen. She’s obviously going to be a computer whizz and I guess that’s how to learn about computers: press four keys at once with a slightly sticky little hand and see what happens.

I was hesitant about posting this pic under “delight”, lest you all think I’m some kind of lush. But there’s a point to it all, I promise.

I took the shot on Wednesday, when some family friends were here. As is traditional when we have company, we all had a glass of sherry before our cooked lunch. As you can see, the glass of sherry I had was pretty big - and I love the taste so much I can’t possibly just sip at it daintily, meaning that the effect of the alcohol forewent being absorbed by the breakfast in my belly and took up ever so slightly inebriated residence in my head.

At the same time, Lauren and I were pinging mails back and forth to each other and I let her know about my friend the sherry glass. A few more typos than usual were having to be corrected and I even ended up writing “your” instead of “you’re” … which I left in for amusement. Lauren’s reply to my final missive before lunch arrived in my inbox. “Ha, that cracked me up!” she wrote.

And therein lies my delight.

Daph promised to behave (I note that no-one else took any such oath) and so here’s the promised photo of me and the hat. The amusement to be had with my camera, a mirror and my own face is pretty endless for me and thus the gurning fits in nicely with this month’s Self Portrait Tuesday theme “April Fool”.