Mad Hair Day

But now, for the first time in my life, I wish I had a faith, a belief in pretty much any deity who dished out miracles, one who could impart a sense of a purpose to the rotten things that happen in the world.

But in my deranged-Pollyanna moments I do appreciate though how nice it is to have the chance to spend some time with my kids gallivanting about the countryside doing all the sort of things that we never get around to doing as we are usually up to our necks in work and routine life. We also get to pity the tourists because they come here where it is lovely and then have to go home again. We don’t! We live here!  Of course, gallivanting would be much more fun if it weren’t for the 50% of my car occupants who get travel sick, but we just need to buy in Phenergan by the gallon and have buckets at the ready.

So, for all of those readers (do I have any left? I post so sporadically these days, sorry! Mostly I’m meandering around Ravelry and playing with my new spindles – photos to come soon, I promise!) I thought I’d give you a quick gallop through things-to-do in the Bay of Islands with small children once they’ve stopped puking all over the car…

If you are here on New Year’s day there is the Highland Games in Waipu, just south of Whangarei – we finally made it there this year and it was a lovely day with Scottish country dancing, crossed swords and kilts flying. There was also a huge parade with loads of pipers and everyone in tartan.

 
The children were obsessed with the bouncy castle and the baby highland cattle.

Ahhhh – aren’t they sweet? Tasty too! (the cattle, obviously. I don’t make a habit of biting my children. Well, not now that they can bite back.)

We took our visitors to see the glow-worms. This involves a guided tour into a damp cave where the guide tells you about the life cycle of the glow-worms, their habitat and so on. Then, on the way out, they turn the torch on to show you what else lives in the caves…

There’s a reason they don’t show you the wetas until you are about to leave! “Come and stand in this dark wet cave with hundreds of huge spidery bugs above your head…”

You can also feed your children to the eels if you are so inclined (how many times can you hear “Are we there yet?” before wanting to throw them out of the car at speed?)

At this time of year Northland is covered in pohutakawa trees in full bloom, known as the Christmas tree of the North (because of the red flowers, green leaves and silver buds), they are particularly common along the beaches

And for the culture vultures amongst us, there is a spot of history at the Kerikeri Stone Store and Kemp House, the first stone building and the first mission house in New Zealand. You can even take a steam boat trip up the inlet and wave hello to Chile (unfortunately not visible even on a clear day) on the Eliza Hobson:

Reality has turned out somewhat different. Instead there is paperwork, stacks of it. Enormous Matterhorns of the stuff, threatening avalanches enough to scare even the most diligent of secretaries. There are flurries of post-it notes, tacked to every surface like little neon nags, constant reminders of all the tasks not yet completed. And there is The Laundry.

I never thought there would be this much laundry in my glamorous future. Images of crunchy socks and primeval depths of teenaged-boy’s-jean’s-pockets never sprang to mind when I contemplated my jet-setting lifestyle. I never expected that a family of five could get through eight towels a day (especially as the three youngest members have to be chloroformed and hog-tied to get them into the bathroom without me yelling myself into an aneurysm.

I am a strong woman. In the face of adversity I can display hitherto undreamt-of depths of bloody-mindedness that bode well for the survival of my family in case of global anarchy. But I am beaten by the ironing. The other ugly-stepsister of the world of housework, my ironing has become my bete-noir. I am ashamed of it, embarrased by it, haunted and taunted and defeated by it. It has taken over my dining table, it fills the chairs, it encroaches into the living room and occupies the laundry room.

The top strata of recently washed jeans and shirts and blouses are misleading in their ordinariness. But the true nature of the beast lies deeper. Crumpled chinos, flattened so long ago that their cotton surface will never relinquish the creases, linen skirts that defy even the hottest and steamiest of irons, frilly girly dresses that are so complicated that goffering irons and tongs are required to make them look good, polyester non-creasing garments that weren’t. They are banding together, plotting against me, taking over the world, one plastic basketful at a time. I think it is breeding like some horrible 1970’s horror flick, it comes alive at night time and moves further into the house, slowly claiming new square footage until we are eventually forced out from our home and take refuge in the shed.

Naturism is our only hope.

Be careful what you wish for.

We are entering Week Three of House Guest Hell (patent pending) and we have reached the hissy-fit stage where conversations between Big Hairy Man and I are held in the pantry with gritted teeth and the children are threatened with “just you wait till I get you home” Medusa-style glares in public places and the novelty of having someone else in your house, with all that that entails, has worn cobweb-thin and I’m just one chardonnay away from drowning them all in the washing machine if only I could find it again under the Appalachian Laundry Mountain (TM).

When stressed I cook. Which is lucky really as I seem to be the only person in the house acquainted with the exact location of the kitchen. I’ve baked cakes which turned out well and I’ve baked cakes that did not:

This is what happens when you are distracted by laundry, the postman and small children who garble things about water and taps and bathroom towels and how somebody else “did do it” and the cat appears to be peculiarly wet and cross. I was trying to relieve stress with a quick Pineapple Boiled Fruit Cake. In true Superhero Housewife fashion (I shall call myself Domestica and wear a cape made from dusters and weild a toilet brush with powerful and magical cleansing powers) I rescued the above disaster by cutting off all the crusts, dousing in alcohol (I used sherry but rum, whisky or brandy would have done) and serving with lashings of custard. Nobody but you and I know what it looked like when it came smoking out of the oven. Well, us and the chicken who ate the evidence but she isn’t telling. Not if she knows what’s good for her.

Now some house guests are easy, they clear up after themselves, hang out the laundry when they want to use the washing machine and find it full of wet stuff. They give the bathroom a quick swipe with the cleaning cloth when the kids have drawn maps on the mirror in toothpaste (reading Paddington Bear at bedtime was clearly a bit of a mistake) and are relatively au fait with the workings of a potato peeler.

Some houseguests are not easy. Some do not put their dishes in the kitchen, never mind the dishwasher. Some do not take their shoes off after walking through mud and say nothing as they sit on the sofa and watch you scrape the crud off the carpet. Some never offer to put the kettle on, wash up the odd pot or even make the kids toast when they get their own breakfasts. Some guests, who shall remain nameless, can go two whole weeks without once saying “that was lovely” or “thank you” after yet another meal cooked up solely by yours truly. Some will even let go of your small child’s hand while crossing a busy road because their mobile phone beeped and they wanted to see who had sent them a text message. Or they drone on daily, at length, about how they really want to go on a boat trip but once aboard spend the entire jaunt with eyes closed groaning and then tell you that they always get seasick on boats and don’t understand why you would subject them to such torture.

Some guests are never going to be guests here again.

I abandoned the Kitty Pi a while ago. Pretty much as soon as I realized that knitting round and round to make something enormous just so I could felt it and make it smaller so that my cat could ignore it in favour of the nearest cardboard box/ doll’s pram/ open handbag was going to drive me insane.

Apart from the tedium of reading said story every night for months now, it is re-enacting itself in my living room with my knitting. 

No matter how much I knit on this damn scarf, the yarn never ends. The first skein lasted for less than half of the present length (I haven’t woven in the ends yet so I can be pretty sure about this) but the second skein, despite being just as long, has lasted and lasted and lasted…

I am in a knitting black hole. If I’m not out by Monday, send help. 

And gin. Send lots of gin.

So. Damn. Boring….

Take this scarf, for example. It began life as two skeins of Posh Yarn Eva 8ply (50% silk, 50% cashmere). I was suddenly overcome with the idea of knitting a scarf for my mother in law. Now this woman has never shown emotion upon presentation of a gift in the last ten years. She has never uttered the words “How lovely” or “Just what I wanted” or “Thank you” despite my scouring the planet for gifts to please her. Big Hairy Man says it is just the way in their family.

Personally I prefer my family’s approach where we enthuse, kiss, show to all and then quietly find another home for the fugly gifts. Some, which have passed into family legend, are too awful to pass on. We have A Vase. It is quite the ugliest thing any of us have ever seen but was a gift to our parents from a group of friends who they care for very much. The fact that it was clearly very expensive does not lessen its breath-taking hideousness. So our family found another way. We keep it in the cupboard and, when a family member has an important occasion in their life (wedding, birthday, anniversary, new home) it is presented to them as a family heirloom, theirs to treasure henceforth. The lucky recipient must house (safely) the grotesque vase until some other unfortunate has reason to celebrate when the thing is re-gift-wrapped and presented with all due ceremony. It has been doing the rounds for some years now and it currently resides in my brother’s storeroom and we are all careful to avoid him around the important dates although Christmas is open season on us all.

However, I digress. This scarf began life as a hat. I’ve never successfully knit a hat and clearly I’m not about to start now as it turned into a jelly-fish sort of creation and was hastily frogged before my reputation as a passable knitter was completely trashed.

I trawled the reams of Ravelry projects, looking for something that would use up the yarn but not require any more than I had. Two skeins is not a great deal and, given my loathing of all things scarf-y, I hit upon the Sunday Market Shawl, joyfully cast on and knit away until I ran out of yarn.

I cast off, dropping stitches as I went and began to ladder the knitting. But…

Can you see how the stitches around the ladders are larger than the stitches before the ladders? 

Oddly enough, releasing the tension of the surrounding stitches by loosening the yarn between them caused them to get bigger. This is why the shawl expands.

Now I bet you knew that. Indeed, I knew that. The fact that I hate loose netting type knitting is what I forgot.

Also, see the ladders between the pairs of stitches in the middle? Now look at the ladders between the pairs of stitches at the sides. See a difference? As I worked the laddered stitches up the length of the shawl, the gaps between the stitches began to close up. This is a slippery yarn, folks. And pulling at it moved the stitches. So I ended up with not the train-tracks of ladders that I was after but merely a large uneven net of wobbly stitches.

I liked (and still like) the yarn. The pattern is nice. But together? Yuck.

So, a quick piddle in the frog pond later and we have two yarn cakes (again) ready to go. (If I hadn’t knit it up in two days and frogged it immediately, I would have skeined, soaked, dried and re-wound the yarn to get rid of the kinks.)

And yet this yarn refused to be bullied. It still looked as lovely as it did the day I took it out of the pink package and stroked its silky skeins. So I took a deep breath and dived back into the Web to find another project. I resigned myself to a scarf and looked for an interesting one. And I found this:

Argosy from Knitty.com. I liked it, it’s a pretty pattern. It looked nice in the yarn when I knitted up 6 inches or so. But it didn’t make good brainless knitting which is what I needed. I already have a patterned sock on the needles and this scarf was to be my handbag-project which I whip out when I have a few moments to fill. But this pattern needed me to think. And when an insomniac mother-of-three, who works full time running her own business, while her kids foster and propagate every virus known to medical science needs something simple, then it really has to be coma-grade brainless.

By this point I’d frogged so much I had my own lilypad. I gave up on the internet and turned to my bookshelf. I searched the Harmony guides, I read the Yarn Harlot, I toyed with Nicky Epstein. But I couldn’t bring myself to cast on another dead-end scarf. I wanted plain and simple but some texture. No cables, that would eat too much width and yarn; I only had two precious skeins. Stocking stitch (as I’d seen while knitting the SMS) looked lovely in this yarn which shines and each stitch looks plump and beautiful. People, I began to hear the siren call of entrelac until the cold wet fish of reality smacked me round the face.

And suddenly it came to me. The simple basic pattern of what I now call my Epiphany Scarf, shining like a sunbeam through the clouds. One of the first patterns I had ever followed over 30 years ago when I learnt to knit. I think it is perfect. I love the way it looks. It is easy enough to knit while watching television, textural enough to impress the non-knitterly.

Basketweave. The perfect stitch for a basketcase.

It might look like a chicken. It certainly sounds like a chicken. But it’s not.

It’s a lame duck.

I have, admittedly, a bit of a reputation in our family for rescuing things. Animals, half dead plants, people in distress. I can’t help myself. I see something that needs looking after and I’ll drop everything to do it. This time it was Rosie who needed a home.

Every day, at the end of the school run, we stop off in a layby near our home and feed the crusts from the kids’ lunchboxes to the wild chickens. They are almost always roosters who have been dumped by people who only wanted the hens from a batch of chicks or who have decided that this particular cockerel crows a little too loudly and often for their liking. In New Zealand it is not unusual to stop in picnic areas and be accosted by a large flock of poultry all wanting a share of your lunch.

Now I like chickens. They are amusing and the kids loved feeding the roosters everyday. About two weeks ago we stopped off and found there was a new addition to the group; a little brown hen.

Presumably, because she is a brown shaver (a type of chicken used for egg production rather than eating) she had stopped laying for her owners (they don’t lay every day all their life. They can lay for up to 3 or 4 years but it tails off after the first 18 months. They can live for up to 8 years, I’m told) and it would seem that the gutless wonders she had been feeding with fresh eggs lacked the kindness to retire her in her home, or even to wring her neck humanely. Instead they had dumped her with a big lot of roosters who did what roosters do to hens. Pretty constantly by the look of her, she had bald patches and had been badly pecked on the back of her head and neck. She had also had her wing clipped so she would not be able to escape from any threats - dogs brought by picnickers, for example.

She was quite tame and stood by my feet while we tossed our crusts around. The roosters attacked her if she went near the food that they wanted. They were wary of coming too close so I fed her by hand.

The kids and I went home. It seemed so unutterably sad that this little chicken had done her best laying eggs and now faced a precarious life and fairly certain swift death. Big Hairy Man could see I was unhappy about something and when I explained about the hen he pointed out that this sort of thing happens and you can’t save every neglected animal out there. I knew that.

But I could save this one. So I did.

I went back for her and caught her, popped her in the cat box and brought her home. We planned to let her free range in the garden but our cats (who have turned into formidable hunters of all things furry, feathery or insect-y) decided that she was prey and stalked her. Apparently Rosie (the girls named her) has never met a cat before. Maybe she was intensively farmed and kept in a caged run, we don’t know. But she didn’t know to run away or peck back and the cats, who hunt as a team, pounced and we had to rescue her again.

So we built her a temporary run (in the picture above) and a week later, once we were sure she wasn’t going to drop dead from the shock of being caught, repatriated, hunted by cats and caged again, provided her with a luxury chicken coop in which to live out her days. We have been keeping her on her own until her head healed and were certain that she wasn’t sick. Now that she seems fine we are going to be getting her some company, probably more dried-up hens who need a retirement home.

We knew when we took her home that her laying days were probably over. That the bastards who dumped her probably knew this and that we would get nothing in return for housing one sad little hen. We didn’t mind. We wouldn’t have slept at night if we’d left her there, it just wasn’t kind.

And Rosie seems happy with us. She gets proper chicken food, fresh water twice daily, shade and sunshine and a fresh patch of grass every other day and all the crusts she can eat. She likes to be stroked and clucks when she sees us coming down the garden to visit.

And yesterday she said, “thank you”

Well, it was my birthday on the Tuesday and the 10th Anniversary of our first blind date on the Wednesday and plaintive pleas of “What do you want for your birthday/anniversary?” have gone unanswered this year. Usually I will drop hints from around July onwards and by around September I am bookmarking online shops and attaching post-it notes to the fridge with missive such as “Dear Children, Mummy really needs a new purse for her birthday.”

Oddly enough, these clues are never enough and I end up buying my own gifts and handing the sellotape to Big Hairy Man the evening before when he asks if I really want him to bother wrapping the thing because I know what it is anyway.

So this year I handled things differently.  He asked, he pleaded, he hurled himself to the floor in agonies of indecision, but I still wouldn’t name A Thing To Give Me. I told him I wanted to be surprised. I suggested he talk to my mother about it. Or my sisters. Or our travel agent. I didn’t mind what he gave me, I just didn’t want to know what it was until my birthday. Planning was made slightly more problematic by our anticipating chicken-pox eruptions on Littlest Daughter, she was grumpy but (still!) not a spot in sight.

He told me the evening before my birthday that it might be wise if I packed a bag “in case of earthquakes or something”. Apparently it is important to be nicely dressed during natural disasters so I was advised to put in my high heels. The next morning we put the bags in the car once my sister in law appeared on the doorstep (“Surprise!”) to babysit and he drove me… to the airport.

He had a mysterious brown envelope to give me once we were in the air but the check-in attendant let the cat out of the bag. We were going to Christchurch. (I can’t tell you how impressed I am that he managed to keep it a secret! And even more so that the children did!)

We’ve been in New Zealand for 3 years now and have hardly seen any of the country. This was our first trip to the South Island and it was wonderful.

He took me to the Royal New Zealand Show. There was wine, food, livestock and horizontal rain in gailforce arctic winds. Not that that mattered a bit as we spent most of our time in the covered area seeing beauties like these:

Little Known Fact About Me #1: I like chickens.

We saw what appeared to be Dress Like Your Cattle competitions:

and this splendid chap who really tickled my fancy:

Little Known Fact About me #2: I like beards.
(Hairy men in general actually, and one in particular.)

And, most divine of all, the sheep. These are prize-winning New Zealand pedigree merino ewes with their lambs. I fell in love. I nearly fell in the pen. BHM had to grab me as I upended trying to stroke them. (Okay, actually I was fondling the fleece, but the lambs were cute too!)

We also saw the Golden Fleece competition and I was hustled out of the arena before I hurled myself headlong into their crimpy goodness. I didn’t get any photos of those but was consoled by the wine tasting in the next shed.

So, now you know what has kept me from my blog (okay, it doesn’t account for the weeks of silence but I have more entries to come. With photos!)

We came home to our children and our youngest promptly burst into full-blown poxiness. Her timing was perfect.