This week has been one of those weeks, where I have a full day at work, mediocre or worse, and then have another activity which takes me out of the house until pretty late at night. Most of the latter have been fun, but I still get exhausted without a couple of evenings a week at home.
This was also the week that all my usual meal planning had to be thrown out of the window when our oven broke last week. I say, broke – it wasn’t so much that, as an unfortunate chain of events that started with a brief power cut last weekend. Not a problem, you would think, and when the power was back on I set about resetting the cooker clock, which operates the timer, and has some other functions I’ve never understood.
It was at this point that I discovered/remembered that one of the little buttons that you use to set the clock was broken. No amount of pressing, hitting, cajoling, stabbing with a DPN, etc., would persuade it to allow me to set the clock. I could have lived with this – I mean, it’s annoying to have to use my phone to set timers, but a cheap kitchen timer wouldn’t have broken the bank if it couldn’t be repaired.
I didn’t even get the option of trying to live with it, though, because it turns out that the oven (which is about thirty years old) doesn’t work if the clock isn’t set. Apparently, ovens cannot be trusted to work properly if they don’t know what time it is. Who knew?
We dutifully called our letting maintenance company, who sent us a lovely chap to look at the thing. He took one look at it, prodded it a bit, and then said that he could strip the cooker down to put a new clock in, but the time it would take would be more expensive than buying a new one. We then had to wait a week for our landlord to agree with this point of view on the demise of our cooker, and order a new one. It’s being installed today, and I have high hopes of a modern appliance that actually cooks and bakes the way the recipes suggest it should.
Amidst all that, I finished knitting the pieces of the Obsession sweater, by Jean Moss. Seaming has never been my very favourite thing (total understatement) but I knew this sweater would need the stability of seams, and figured I could deal with it just this once*.
(No pictures, due to aforementioned getting home in the dark every night this week.)
Sadly, my first attempts at seaming this thing have been less than successful, and I’m going to have to take a more well-considered run at it – the stitch pattern goes right up to the edges of the pieces, and makes mattress stitch virtually impossible to perform properly. Suggestions?
*This is perhaps the juncture at which I should mention that the last piece of knitting that needed to be seamed, which was the Anais cardigan, is still waiting to have the second sleeve attached…a long time later. I feel that some self-bribery may be needed to get out of this hole.
It’s been a much-needed bright spot, and between my wonderful fiance and my knitting, there have been plenty of bright spots. Life is like that, though – hard and good mixed right next to each other every single day.
