my guilty secret

I have a secret, a deep, hidden secret.  It's not a long hidden secret, just since I moved here, but it's a secret I am glad my mother never knew I had.  She would be even more shamed to learn this secret than she was when she discovered that both my sister and I read while eating our meal, breakfast or lunch when we are alone.  Not dinner, we still have some standards to maintain.

It's time for me to get this out into the open and I have taken steps to remedy my poor behaviour.

So here it is.  In all my fourteen months here,  I have washed up after dinner perhaps five times.  Dishes have been rinsed and left till the next day to be washed.

Well, that feels better.  It may not look good but it certainly looks better than discovering the cutlery still has bits of last night's meal on it or  there is still a scrap of onion in the frying pan.

My kitchen is  small and U-shaped with sink across the bottom of the U.  Unfortunately, the light is above my head and well behind me as I stand at the sink.  There is a large shadow over the sink and even if I lift dishes to the side, it's not always easy to see if they are really clean.  I had planned a dishwasher and was assured there was a cupboard already set up for one.  True in some other apartments perhaps but not this one.  I  am glad I did not order one to arrive with new washing machine and refrigerator.

I'm considering what to do with the kitchen and am on my way to finalising plans.  However, I still have light problems.  I was in Kmart the other day and found this LED light with an extremely strong bulldog clip.  It was just $15.  "Let there be light!"  I have it clipped onto the bottom of what is supposedly shelf for microwave.  The cord is wound up onto two small hooks I stuck to tiles and the transformer plugs into the point on the shelf intended for microwave. I can bend the light to shine right into the sink.  The shelf is too high for me to safely use microwave up there as it is placed where the cook has to stand side on to use it.  Not good design, one of the few bad points I have seen here.  Generally the design is well thought out and well built.

Picture was taken with main light out so the brightness of this could be seen.  It's not terribly attractive to me, but scraps still on plate are worse.  I'm not worried about it falling.  The clip was so strong I needed two hands to open it to clip on to shelf.  The jaws of the clip are rubber lined for extra grip.

I have started three separate designs for the Old Jeans merino from the Yarnyard in Britain.  Each has not really worked.  Today I found this mystery shawl pattern.  It's been ages since I did something like this so I signed up.  Nine clues delivered to my pattern library on Ravelry through June.  I've done the first which was only 18 rows long.

The very first mystery shawl KAL I did was on a Yahoo group many years ago.  I was a total beginner at lace and really had little idea about watching the pattern develop, or about reading charts, I used the written instructions.  I could not make my stitch markers work properly.  I realise now that stitch count varied between rows and in repeats.  I was always looking  for the omitted YO or finding where I hadn't knitted two together.  To really cap off how much I was out of my depth, I had picked a pattern with lace on both sides, not just on the right side row.

I struggled a lot and eventually gave up when I could not fudge any more on the stitch count and when I realised pattern was all over the place.

I'm older and wiser and more skilled now.