Little Things

Today is one of those days where I need cheering up. I have a headache, I am working on reducing the length of a paper I am writing, without removing any more content than necessary and it is just such a fiddly and frustrating task. I can work for ages and the document is only ten words shorter than it was last time I checked. I can see (thank you Bubbletimer!) how much work I am doing, so I am trying not to be discouraged, but I decided that I need a motivation increaser.

So I hunted down a yummy sounding recipe using some of the ingredients I have hanging out in my cupboards. I chose a butternut squash and parmesan tart. It could use the butternut squash that was in my cupboard well past its useby date (I am not at all in favour of useby dates. The squash is absolutely fine, but many people would have binned it without checking. Not good, supermarkets. Not good.) and up my veggie intake for the day pretty successfully.

Normally I am not into high effort cooking. Except for cakes and whatnot. I’m a fan of one-pot cooking. Minimum effort, minimum time, minimum washing up. I confess to being a very lazy person. This recipe, however, is definitely high effort. There’s making pastry (done), roasting the vegetables (they’re in the oven now), making the custardy stuff, and then combining the whole lot into a tart. And cooking it. But it sounded yummy. It sounded comforting. It sounded warming on a November evening. So I thought, ah, why not?

So, I’m making the effort. I even went to the supermarket to buy a suitable dish for a tart. And it’s been fun. And satisfying. And I am really excited about my dinner! I will be eating tart for several days, but who cares!

Being a Grown Up

Being a grown up isn’t always much fun. You have to have jobs, pay rent, clean the bathroom. But it has its perks. As a man once said to me, the good thing about being a grown up is that you can decide what that means. Sadly, that isn’t totally true. You still have to pay rent and clean the bathroom (occasionally). But, you can also decide to have a hobby collecting paper dolls, or childrens’ books, or to have a trampoline to bounce about on…or to have bright yellow bed clothes with pictures of sheep on them. I plead guilty of this last!

Looking Forward

Folks, it’s been a while. I have struggled to think what to write about, and so I am going to do something I have hardly ever done on this blog. I am going to write about me.

The knitting is very slow these days. I’ve even stopped going to knitting groups. I miss seeing the people, but I just have no real interest in knitting at the moment, which makes it feel weird to go. Having said that, I am knitting a little. I am working on my stripy jumper. Slowly. Even spinning is very slow.

Cooking and baking, again, slow. I don’t have the time. I’m just not at home enough these days, and when I am I have so much to do that needs to be done. In a way that baking does not.

So, what am I doing? Mostly PhD things. Reading, writing, worrying, panicking, analysing…and procrastinating. The process is, slowly, coming to an end. At some point in the next ten months I will have finished and whatever is going to happen next in my life can.

Of course, that leads to the question: what next?

Well, I just don’t know. Which is the source of an undercurrent of panic and dissatisfaction in my life. A person changes a lot in four years. Their circumstances change. Their priorities change. Things have changed in my life and also in the world. I am going to be looking for a job in a competitive field at a time when no one wants to be out of work. This is scary. Or I am going to do something else. Decide that I devoted myself for ten years to a given path, only to discover it was the wrong one. I am not the person I was four years ago, and maybe the things I anticipated would make me happy won’t.  And I will have to establish just what it is I want to do with my life. Also scary.

At the moment everything is about reaching that point, in ten-or-so months when this period of my life will end. I am rather excited about it, because even while doing the things I wanted to do, I feel I have lost control of my life. But ten months is still quite a way away, and there are big and significant milestones to reach in the meantime.

I’m certainly not abandoning the blog, I love it. I’ve had it a few years now, and I would feel sad to not update it from time to time. But like everything else, it needs to adapt, to become what I need it to be now, and not what I thought I wanted it to be when it began. The upshot being, there is a good chance that posts will be rather less about knitting than they have tended to be. What I will write about…even I don’t know that yet!

Muffin Report

I am now in the happy position to be able to report that these muffins are very good indeed. They are rather more savoury than muffins you buy in the shops, but that is no bad thing as far as I’m concerned, especially when I’m after breakfast foods. The first one I had, when they were only just cooled wasn’t as nice as the one I ate just now, and I had a suspicion that this would be the case. Some baking just needs a bit of time for the flavours to settle into themselves. Or something. Either way, I am very happy with these, and I will definitely be making them again. The whole process only took me an hour or so, and to take an hour out of my day every couple of weeks, when I get yummy muffins out of it, I can work with that!

As to which recipe I should try next…I’m wondering about Lemon, Sunflower Seed and Blueberry muffins. I suspect they would go down well in at least one quarter…although finding blueberries that aren’t an ethical nightmare at this time of year might be a challenge. I have my eyes on Parmesan and Paprika Scones, and “Forbidden” Chocolate Brownies (quote marks mine!), but think I would need a good excuse for brownies, whereas who can ever object to scones on a dim and gloomy October afternoon? Let’s be honest, though, eventually I will make most of the recipes in this book!

Peach and Poppy Seed Muffins

Today I undertook my second foray into the world of Harry Eastwood. Today’s recipe from Red Velvet & Chocolate Heartache, as you might have guessed, was peach and poppy seed muffins. These were towards the top of my to-do list from the outset, as I’m always after new and interesting wheat-free breakfast ideas. And I love muffins. So, it seemed like a good bet.

This recipe is pretty straightforward, and once your ingredients are assembled and prepared it probably only takes about ten minutes to get your muffins in the oven. But this is a recipe from the same book as the Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cupcakes (Post 1 and Post 2). Can you guess? GRATING! Yes! More grating. Sweet potato this time. And once more it was pretty tiresome. Having said that, I now have a shiny new rotary grater (a very different beast from the simple metal one my parents had when I was a kid!), and this made the process significantly less horrid. Still, you need a lot of energy in your arms for these recipes! Or a food processor with a grating attachment…

However, that really is the meat of the work, and once its done things get a lot less stressful. The mix, once finished, looks disturbingly salmon coloured, but they have lost their pinkness in the cooking. Which I’m quite relieved about, actually! Although it might have been amusing if they hadn’t… I didn’t find I had enough mix to fill each of the recommended nine muffin cases all the way to the top, and if I had done, perhaps they would look different, but I can’t imagine it will affect the taste. I’m pig headed. I was promised nine muffins, and I intended to have nine muffins!

They have now come out of the oven, having made my kitchen smell gratifyingly peachy and they look pleasantly muffiny:

I can only hope they taste as good as they look (and of course I will let you know…)!

Simplification

Lately I have been having a problem with head space. I am spending so much time working on the PhD, worrying about the PhD, worrying about friends and family, worrying about money and other domestic issues that I simply don’t have the mental capacity to worry about other things. Like knitting, or the blog. Not that I am abandoning either! I just need to go back to a place where knitting was relaxing and fun. This is not the time for demanding knitting.

So, I have spent the last half hour unravelling half knitted socks. I am putting Tangled Yoke away in a cupboard. I will finish it, but now is not the time. I don’t have the patience to fix things that go wrong right now, and so my knitting needs to not go wrong.

Therefore, my current projects are a pair of ribbed socks (which were previously going to be lacy) and a stripy jumper (gauge swatch drying as I type). Everything else is being packed away as far as possible, and where that isn’t possible it is being ignored.

The socks are for knitting group and when everything else makes me want to cry (actually, the spinning wheel is really for that). The jumper is my “exciting” knitting. It will be a raglan sleeved stocking stitch jumper knitted in the round from the bottom up. It will be stripy, and it will be lovely.

In Hobbycraft on Sunday I bought yarn. I bought copious quantities of Sirdar Balmoral in dark blue, light blue, and grey. This afternoon I took a bit of time from the PhD and measured my favourite fitting knitted jumper and myself to work out the sizing and fit of this jumper. I am now fairly sure what I want, and once the gauge swatch is dry and measured, I can begin to do the various maths things that need to be done.

I am very excited about this jumper! I’ve been wanting to do one for a while, and was determined not to start anything like that until after Tangled Yoke was done. But I know I can’t handle that for now, ripping back cables is NOT FUN. So I decided that rather than knitting five pairs of socks I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about, I would take the money and knit one jumper I was enthusiastic about. I think this was wise… It isn’t like the rest of the yarn or projects are going anywhere, I can come back to them later or, if necessary, pass them on.

Wintery

The world is starting to feel wintery. Strangely as autumn seemed to disappear very quickly. However, this morning I found myself on a train platform, watching my breath on the air as I waited for my delayed train. Happily, it did come along, about ten minutes late, not forcing me to embark on a chilly walk back whence I’d come. For the fifteen minutes I waited, though, I was cold. Especially my hands.

So I have been thinking wintery thoughts. I came home and put on a load of washing comprising mainly wooly jumpers; I put the heating on for the first time in months; I am planning butternut squash risotto for my dinner; and am thinking about warm things I might knit.

Right now, due to circumstances beyond my control, I am utterly impoverished. So no new yarn for a while. Old yarn, that has been hanging around, like a millstone around my neck…well, that is fair game! So some Mirasol Hacho in Sapphire Jade I got in a swap has come into its own. It is now in the process of becoming some fingerless gloves. At some point I will need some fingerful gloves, or maybe mittens, but right now I need fingerless. My house is reasonably chilly, and if I can keep my hands warm and cosy while I type away on that there PhD jobby, so much the better!

September Has Come…

I could quote Keats again, but I think I did that another year…although I can’t find the post!

It is that time of year again. The new knitting magazines are coming out, and there are many new patterns for our perusal! Not least among these is the new Knitty. Which has the delightful benefit of being free. I like free.

I had been quite disappointed by the last issue, but then summer knitting patterns are never quite my thing. So, I am pleased to see this issue is full of lovely things! There are actually several things in it that I would like to knit, which possibly means that I will knit none of them… but I am particularly keen on Margot, Ruby Red, Renaissance, and Holla. Of those, I would probably go for Margot or Holla first, as I am more convinced of those actually suiting me. I tend to like the look of pretty, slightly fussy cardigans like Ruby Red, but they are the kind of thing I wear one day in a whole month, at best, and on a student budget I really need to play the odds a little!

I am very keen to try the Hat-Heel Socks. I don’t particularly like the look of them, actually, I don’t like the clear signals of construction where all the stitches are picked up. But I love a bit of novel construction, and may actually turn out to like them a little better in the flesh. It wouldn’t be the first time it happened! Plus, there are clear advantages to them, as the designer actually says, in terms of yarn-budgeting. As someone who hates toe-up socks (I just can’t do it. I hate all toe cast-ons, and if I manage to get that far, I start the heel too soon. It’s just irritating!), I often end up with lots of yarn left over because I’ve been afraid of running out. Which, with a construction like this, I could avoid. So it’s certainly worth a shot!

Riding on the success of my Ishbel, I am also quite keen to try another shawl. Something bigger and cosier and less elegant. As suggested above, I don’t get much of an excuse to do elegant these days. So, I could knit something to keep me warm in my rather chilly flat over the winter…

Ishbel

In June, on a complete whim, I cast on for an Ishbel. I don’t know why. It’s a pretty pattern, but I’m not really a shawl person, so it was an odd decision. However… I finished it while I was on holiday and it took me until today to get around to blocking it. Here are the results, with which I am very happy!

And, if you’re interested, I also have a version modelled by my lovely self…

Ahem…

I made it from Rowan pure wool 4 ply that I bought in the John Lewis sales at the beginning of the year.

Meeting Targets

You might remember a series of blog posts a while ago, they were lauding BubbleTimer to the skies. After three weeks where I was on holiday or in a situation where I didn’t really need to track my time, I came back to it, and streamlined it all dramatically. Although I still use it, I no longer use it for tracking everything. It turns out that there are some things I do that don’t need to be tracked. Some things do. Time spent on the PhD and on any freelance work (wonderful for when it comes to filling out time sheets!). Time spent on doing blatantly wasteful things like checking Facebook for the third time in fifteen minutes. Knitting and spinning time, which have a tendency to get out of control quickly. These are useful. But I no longer feel a need to know how much of my week is spent asleep, travelling, or watching television. I have concluded that as long as I am meeting my targets, none of this matters.

Which has led to my re-evaluating my short term goals. I realised that my goal for time spent on the PhD in a given day or week were hopelessly optimistic. They were big enough that they weren’t met with some frequency, and the weekly one didn’t account for the way I spend my weekends. Effectively, I was setting myself up to fail. So, I have dropped the target significantly. To something I cannot fail to meet. Which was a good idea. I am meeting the target every day, and am often passing it and waving it a cheery goodbye as I type away on my Introduction.

I have also combined this with a return to Remember the Milk. I always liked the idea, but I just found it wasn’t working for me. However, for my birthday I was gifted with an iPod Touch. It turns out that Remember the Milk with the iPod app is really working for me. So much so that, if I still feel the same when my free trial (of the app, which is free to RTM pro users) expires, I will get a pro account on RTM so I can continue to use it. Because I can keep on top of my tasks even when I’m away from the internet, I am feeling significantly more in control of my to do list. That is worth $25 a year to me!

These two together have really led to a major boost in my productivity since my return to reality from the land of holidayness and sloth. Of course, it may be a fluke, but I’m feeling reasonably confident that it isn’t. In the end, it is all about feeling in control, and not being overwhelmed by keeping my many balls in the air. For the time being, I seem to have that. Hooray!