“Solitude is fine..."

"...but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.”

As you know I have recently taken up a new job and I’m still finding my feet. Now, there are some things you always remember about being a new person somewhere. Whether it’s a new social club, a new job, a new school or a new home, you never forget certain things...

You never forget feeling lost. Not knowing your way round the building. Being taken somewhere once and thinking it was a really simple route, but being completely unable to replicate the journey when left to your own devices.

You never forget the feeling of being slightly useless. Not knowing precisely your role, or where things are supposed to go, or where you’re supposed to be at any given moment, or if you’re supposed to be participating in a conversation (or whether that will be eavesdropping).

You never forget your first impressions of people. Who was friendly or seemed very knowledgeable, who seemed scary and imposing (even if you later realise your impressions were hilariously wrong).

One thing I had forgotten about being the new person was how incredibly lonely it can feel.

I’m used to knowing everyone I work with, I’m used to having lunch with people, having ongoing conversations via email or messenger. Suddenly I feel very isolated. There’s no one to have lunch with, very few anecdotes I can appreciate and refer to. Most conversations are someone asking me questions or telling me answers.

I know this is par for the course. I know it’s a matter of time. But as I sit at my desk, unsure of how busy everyone is, debating which area of work to try and research, I feel detached from the rest of my team. I feel odd. I have rough edges - that will be smoothed with time I know, but right now they are jarring with my surrounds.

That’s not to say my new colleagues are to blame. To say the least they are incredibly friendly, chatty, and inclusive. There’s just no escaping my "Newbie" status.

I think it’s a testament to just how unhappy I was in my old role that despite feeling lonely, I don’t miss my old job. I miss some of the people, sure, but I do not have a single shred of doubt that I made the right decision in leaving when I did. I guess the only regret I have is that the role became untenable at all, but that was something over which I had very little control...

It's odd feeling lonely. You know objectively that most people feel like this from time to time and some poor people feel like this often. But it never feels like that in the moment. It feels like you are the only person in a world of automatons, that everyone knows what they're doing and why they're doing it and you are the only one who doesn't. I've used a different quote to bookend this bloglet, but I am reminded of Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami: “Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”



*Quote from Honoré de Balzac

“Time you enjoy wasting..."

"...is not wasted time.”

It’s been a little while since my last knitting post. This isn’t because I haven’t been knitting, it’s just that I haven’t got a finished object (FO) to show off. I only have a work in progress (WIP).

I’m about halfway through my Carnaby skirt in Cascade 220 (colour Jet) (link to the pattern is here):

I’m really enjoying the pattern and the wool, but as it needs to be large enough to go around my plump posterior it’s not the quickest of knits! Additionally I have this terrible habit of picking at my cuticles and the skin around my fingernails and the forefinger on my right hand is currently flayed to the knuckle:

As this is the finger that the wool gets wrapped around while knitting…

…I’m sure you can understand why I’m finding it too painful to knit for too long of an evening. I only have myself to blame though!

I’m obviously disappointed I’m not being more productive but, since I knit primarily because I enjoy knitting, I’m not going to beat myself up over it. If I cause myself pain while knitting Carnaby I will never think fondly of the finished skirt when I wear it.

I’m also disappointed with the number of books I’ve read so far this year. I wanted to read 52 books and graphic novels over the year, averaging one a week. This sounds ambitious but I have achieved it in previous years. Years before I started knitting...

I have a fast reading speed and, in PK (pre-knitting) years, I read a lot. I wasn’t living with CB and I spent my free time in the evenings reading (and smoking). I now spend my time working my way through TV series (most recently was American Gods season 1, RuPaul’s Drag Race season 9, and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt season 3) or watching CB defend the world on the Playstation (currently Shadow of Mordor, I think) while knitting. (I have also given up the smoking.)

This has inevitably taken its toll on my reading time, which was essentially reduced to the hour I spent in total commuting to work each day. Now I’ve moved Oop North, I walk to work. So when do I read, Philly-Fans? In truth I haven’t cracked my book open in weeks. My reading total now we’re half-way through the year is static at 15. This is slightly misleading as 5 of those have been weighty tomes, but I doubt it will go much higher.

I know I shouldn’t feel disappointed. It’s just a meaningless challenge I set myself after all. I should spend my free time doing whatever I what to do at that time. I just can’t help it. There’s a little bookworm in my head constantly lamenting the sheer number of books I have yet to read, the number of literary adventures I’ve yet to go on, and the number of characters I will fall in love with (and will break my heart over when they inevitably die) and it’s hard to argue with him!


*Quote from Marthe Troly-Curtin

“When we don't know who to hate…”

“… we hate ourselves.” 

Urgh I hate packing. I fully, utterly and completely hate packing. 100%. Hate doing for a holiday (how am I supposed to know if I’ll actually wear that slinky dress when we go out for a meal or if I’ll just continue to wear the same pair of shorts I’ve been wearing all day?) and most definitely hate packing up to move to a new house. 

In previous moves it hasn’t been so bad. I’ve still hated it, don’t get me wrong, but as I’ve been in shared houses it’s only been one room to pack up, along with a box or two of kitchen and bathroom things. One room is not fun, but it’s manageable. For my recent move up north, however, CB and I faced the task of packing up our entire flat. I say again – urgh. 

What’s worse is we only had a one bedroom flat. What will it be like in future moves? What will it be like when we own actual furniture, not just a bookcase and table? We spent some time before the move sorting through and rationalising our stuff, and we still managed to fill a medium sized van to the brim. I’m not exaggerating:

What you can’t see there is my carefully wrapped boxes of glasses, labelled “fragile” and “very fragile” which CB decided to stack sideways and pile things on. Luckily only one glass was broken from his cavalier attitude to crockery – his nice beer glass we bought in Brugge. I did feel bad for him, but that is karma my friend. 

Apart from the actual packing (which is bad enough) I hate the laborious task of packing up the car/van, and even more than that do I hate the inevitable task of unloading said car/van. At least leaving London we could park right outside the flat, but upon arrival we had to unload the van underground, bring it across the car park, up a set of stairs, through three doors (two of which were auto-locking and two of which opened the ‘wrong’ way) into the lift then into the locked flat. It took about an hour to pack the van, and a good two hours to unpack. Honestly, I couldn’t sleep that first night as my biceps hurt so much. 

Luckily, I quite enjoy unpacking and I’m very good at organisation. CB had to go to work the next morning, but by the time he had come home at lunch I had pretty much unpacked and sorted everything. At the time of writing this we still have a few things to finesse (for instance the spare bedroom is a bit of a dumping ground, and the bookcase took a bit of a beating so the books are still packed up) but it is a perfectly livable flat, no worse than the average messy home. 

I know it was worth it. I know it was. But it was horrific. And as much as I want to own my own home and get off the renting-roundabout, I can’t bear the thought of moving everything back downstairs again let alone into another house! 


*Quote from Chuck Palahniuk

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart…”

“…I am, I am, I am.”

England experienced somewhat of a heat wave the other week and, lucky me, I was off work and on holiday with my family in Wiltshire, staying in Longleat Centre Parcs.

It was lovely.

It was so very hot that it was actually rather difficult to do much – which I personally regarded as an added benefit! CB and I don’t own bikes so we rented a couple, and went on a cycle ride all around the park most days. The ride took less than an hour (unless we parked up and explored some of the sites) but we would come back to the lodge absolutely dripping in sweat. Yum.

There were nine of us in the group in total, seven adults and two toddlers – my mother, my father, my sister and her daughter, my brother and my sister in law and their son. Oh, plus CB and yours truly. So, as you can imagine, there were few quiet moments, multiple ‘smelly nappy’ moments, and lots of silly family jokes.

It was particularly nice for me to spend some time with the niblings now they’re walking and chattering away. I don’t attract or keep their attention much when competing with their parents but, seeing how exhausted my brother and sisters were, I think I got the best of both worlds!

We enjoyed the ‘sub-tropical swimming paradise’ and all the flumes, had a couple of games of bowling - one of which I won! (What was that? Did I have the barriers up? Err…I don’t remember…….) and, after some baby handprints gave my sister the bug, we did some pottery painting which is a personal favourite activity of mine. My sister painted a fantastic mug for her partner (and, just between you and me, I was green with envy at how good she was and how nicely it turned out, as it was her first time pottery painting) CB painted a plate with a sort of aerial view of Tekapo in New Zealand which is our combined happy-place (blog entry here), and I painted a series of cartoon monsters on a bowl I intend to use for yarn.

This is CB’s plate:

And this is my yarn bowl:

 

 

It was the perfect way to unwind after my last week at work and to prepare for the big move up North before starting the new job. And it was the perfect way to spend some quality time with the fam. 

Soppy Philly.



*Quote from Sylvia Plath

“All grown-ups were once children...”

“…but only few of them remember it.” 

I wanted to finish knitting a cardigan for my friend’s goddaughter before I moved out of London. I therefore knitted like mad for a week or two, and managed to complete this little number:

It uses Paint box Yarn Simply Aran in 7 shades:

• Champagne White (202), 
• Blood Orange (219), 
• Buttercup Yellow (222), 
• Lime Green (228), 
• Kingfisher Blue (234), 
• Lipstick Pink (251), 
• and Pillar Red (214) (I assume they mean Pillar Box). 

I love the colours, I think they are so cheerful and bright – perfect for a child’s jumper! So perfect in fact that I bought enough wool to make two of these jumpers, one for my friend and one for my niece.

The pattern is also by Paintbox Yarns and is simply called Rainbow Cardigan (Love Knitting link here). I know my sister will love it for her daughter. I have a sneaking suspicion, in fact, that she will love it so much she might “jokingly” ask if I can make one big enough for her. And I probably could, but after making two of these I doubt I’ll want to embark on a third for a little while!

The pattern is relatively simple, but does get a bit confusing when knitting the neckband on each piece. There are also a lot of ends to weave in owing to the colour work:

I made a silly mistake when I knitted the first section, the back. I miscounted the number of lines left – actually I didn’t miscount the lines, I did something sillier. I miscounted how many colours I had. Actually I don’t know what I did. All I know if I thought I had 39 lines and thought 6 rows of each colour would work out. Which it obviously doesn’t – so now I have an extra row of white around the top:

Which I think looks quite nice (far better than an extra-long red section) but let’s just say I won’t be repeating it on the next cardigan.

One thing I learned when sewing it all together was that you really should begin with the raglan sleeves, otherwise it's very confusing! Plus even when you're sick to death of a project and just want it to be finished, it's worth it to do all the finishing touches. CB had to convince me to include the edging along the two front edges but it looks so much neater with them. Sigh...I hate it when he's right! 

*Quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you…”

“…And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”

As I write this, I am embarking on my last week at work. Well, at this work, not last working week ever, but still!

It’s always bittersweet leaving a job. You’re keen to start the next challenge, meet new people, take on new responsibilities, but you’re sad to leave the familiar.

Personally, I hate change. I hate the unknown. It’s one of my biggest weaknesses – I even hate surprises! No surprise parties for me, no mystery gift, no ‘pack your bag darling, we’re going away this weekend’, I would hate it with a passion.

So despite having some extreme frustrations with my current job, there’s something comforting about knowing what will happen (even if it frustrates me). Over the past four years I’ve grown enough to be a big fish in a little pond, knowing every rock and plant, every eddy and flow.

A result of my hatred of the unknown is that I tend to over-prepare for things. I’m trying to not do that in this case. I’m preparing, but not over-preparing. For instance I’ve prepared my list of committee deadlines, but I haven’t populated it. I’ve arranged to meet my new manager for a cuppa before I start, but I haven’t planned a list of questions. I’ve gathered some key documents on being an effective manager, but I haven’t planned to do or say anything specific for my new team. This may not sound like a lot, but it’s good for me.

I am thinking ahead to my first week at the new job:

• I want to be friendly and enthusiastic, but not in a cheesy or overwhelming way.
• I want to be a human sponge to take in all the information I can.
• I don’t want to be too reliant on people showing me how to do things; I want to be shown once and be able to do it with only a few specific follow-up questions.
• I want to take notes when people show me how to do things.
• I want to remember people’s names and what they do.
• I want to get a feel for the culture and the team dynamics so I can fit in.

Essentially I want to get along with the people I work with and be good at the job I was hired to do. And only I can ensure that happens.


*Quote from Neil Gaiman

“If such things have not been part of your own experience…”

“…you probably won't understand what Bastian did next.”

I recently spent a few days in Munich with two of my best friends. It’s such a lovely city, small enough to be navigable but large enough to always have options for activities.

I made sure to keep my beer quota up:

Fabulous beer.

Other highlights included the English Garden, which has a fast flowing ice stream running through it (perfect for a hot day) and people surf on the permanent wave at one end! Very hypnotic viewing.

Marienplatz in the Old Town has an amazing clock with moving bits and although the bells are seriously out of tune the song they play is so catchy I was singing it for a while afterwards (much to the annoyance of my friends!).

We also visited the Munich Residence just off Marienplatz which was a long morning of walking but worth it. Beautiful rooms, lots of information, and the Treasury was really interesting too.

Our main reason for visiting was to worship the fabled luck dragon Falkor. Be still my beating heart… And not only can you see the original film prop, you can ride him!

The tour round the Bavaria Film Studios was brilliant actually. We were on a German speaking tour (without knowing much German) but still loved every minute. We had a super nice guide who tried to give us as much translation as possible so we appreciated everything we saw, but really the star of the show was Falkor. Honourable mention to the U-Boat from Das Boot:

But Falkor rules all.

Long live Falkor!


*Quote from Michael Ende