from yesterday with love x

So here's something a bit weird. I'm actually writing this on Thursday and not Friday, even though I'm posting it on Friday and not Thursday, and you're probably reading it on Friday and definitely not on Thursday. But if I didn't tell you that you wouldn't know any different. The internet is funny like that isn't it? All this information and all these assumptions and in the end we just have to sort through it all and decide for ourselves what we believe in.

But you can trust me I promise. The reason I'm writing it a day early is because we're going to The Australian Sheep and Wool Show tomorrow (Friday) and on the way home we're going to pop in on our old friends in their new house, and I don't want to feel all rushed or like I've got something at the back of my mind that I feel like I should be doing instead.

So here I am. It's Thursday evening and it's dark and rainy and cold outside. I'm sitting about as close to the heater as I can get, Bren's in the other room practising guitar, the smalls are next to me programming a robot that Pepper and Bren just finished building, and Indi is on a bus home from Woodend. When she gets home we'll have spaghetti with lentils for dinner.

The top photo is of the kitty cat hot water bottle cover I knitted for Miss Pepper for her birthday last year. I was just looking through my Ravelry page before and noticed that I had never taken a photo of it, so now I have. The details are here.

This is the tractor hot water bottle cover that I'm just finishing off now. Did I mention it's cold? 

I feel like overalls are the only clothing option that makes any sense these wintry days. I pretend that I wear them for work, but really it's the handy hot water bottle sized pouch up front. So cozy.

Speaking of sheep and wool and knitting and stuff, here's a little shearing shed drawing my farmer boy found in a box of his primary school exercise books. This one's from grade three. There are more pages of sheep drawings but I forgot to photograph them and now it's dark. Oops, hopefully I'll remember and add them in tomorrow. So cute!!

I'm reading my daughter's copy of Once & Then by Morris Gleitzman, trying to stay ahead of her so we can discuss it as she goes. Once & Then are fictional books that follow the life of a 10 year old Jewish boy called Felix living in 1945 Nazi Poland. I've only read 50 pages so far but I'm already completely engaged in the story. I'm so interested to see how the book progresses and how Morris deals with the horrors of the Holocaust through the eyes of a child and for an audience of children.

I'm also interested to see how the conversation with my daughter evolves. She says that most of the kids in her class have already read the books and she's grown up in a house where many discussions about the Holocaust have taken place in front of her over the years. But still it's pretty tricky subject matter for a kid. I'm hoping that I can trust Morris Gleizman to be sensitive to his young audience and their naivety, but like I said, I'm reading ahead just to be sure.

I'm thrilled to report that my onion seedlings have finally decided to show their sweet green faces a month after I planted them. These were the first seeds that I planted in our new green house so it means so much to me that they have. We also eat a lot of onions so it'll be great to have a big stash.

When we were first talking about and designing the green house I just assumed we'd use old windows for the roof as well as the walls. But then I was quickly talked out of that because their weight and fragility would make the structure unsafe. If we wanted to use old glass, we'd have to build a proper roof structure to support them. 

So after much research and discussion we ordered some poly tunnel plastic and popped it on up. We thought it would be reasonably priced, easy to fit and that it would be UV sensitive come summer.

What ended up happening is that it looked flat and ugly, and when it rained huge pools of water collected in the low points. We tried shoving bits of wood and tubes of cardboard up to stop it, but nothing stopped the pools and we were worried that one day the weight of the water would burst through the plastic and flood the space. 

So this week the plastic came down and some good old, practical Laserlite went up in its place. It's strong and sturdy and safe and now that it's up there I don't mind that corrugated look as much as I thought I might. It does the trick in the rain anyway.

And look at that. Remember in my last post when I told you that we'd been having issues with our Esse stove since it was installed in 2012? Well, on Monday Bren's Dad's plumber came back and after another big day they lit it and ever since then it's been running like a dream. Our house is warm, tonight's dinner was cooked on the hot plate, and if you sit with your back to that radiator in the photo above to write your blog you'll feel as toasty as a marshmallow. So my farmer boy is happy and so say all of warm us!

And that's me all blogged up and no place to go. That is until the sheep and wool show tomorrow. Can't wait!

And just for fun, if you could have anything at all knitted into a hot water bottle cover what would it be? I think I'd like three little girls on mine, or maybe a sheep.

I hope you have a great Friday, honey bunches. I have no idea how to schedule a blog post so I think I'll just publish this early before we leave. And I haven't decided if I'll take my big camera along, but I'm certain I'll be posting to my instagram stories if you want to follow along over there.

Big love!

Kate
xx