slacker....

in case you hadnt heard, i turn 40 soon. this means i was born in 1968. (and what a year it was). my point tho, is that i cant help being a slacker, im a gen x-er... stupid and contagious, as someone once put it. this is not my only excuse for busting the blogtoberfest bubble so badly, and i apologise profusely to my diligent blogtober-mates, but i cant commit, so im out. just in case you hadnt noticed.

apart from all that other stuff going on in the last post, (thank you for your kind thoughts, things are being sorted! and the good news is the stack wasnt our fault so there is no insurance excess to pay. for once), there is just too much to do this week!

yesterday was my last teaching day at that uni, and i wont be teaching there again, which really is cause for a major celebration (i may be a slacker but gen y are something else!). i also spent an hour and a half with the dean of nursing talking about our little research project, which we now have some big wigs in nursing in the UK wanting to work with us on, and for which i now have to write two abstracts for a conference in cardiff in march. we have decided to do one short paper, and also to run a larger workshop on the problems facing the development of adequate nurse educators (this is the basic gist of the project, why a lot of nurses dont want to become researches or teachers), so there is still some work to do on that. i dont know how i will fit that in if i get the museum job, which i really want, but i wont complain about having too many work choices!

and i am trying to work from home as much as possible this week because there is a big party to organise and a big house to clean for said party, and i have a plumber coming today and a bathroom guy coming later this week, and a mattress to pick up and a fridge being delivered and the pool guy coming, and i have been asked to write a review of an article being considered for an international journal and then suddenly there is no time for anything else! there is a lot to be said for student life where all you do and think about is centred around one thing, not trying to juggle all sorts of odd shaped balls at once!

anyway, here is a pic of the 'blocked' clappy,

i started to pin it like i would lace but soon discovered this wasnt going to work, it being far longer than any surface i could pin it too and its not going to stay flat anyway. so i tried a bit of steam ironing but that did nothing and frustrated, i hung it over a coat hanger while i emailed bells about what i should do. i was going to follow her advice and stretch it out on towels but when i came back to it next morning, it had kind of blocked itself in the hanging, so i will stick with this for now. it is lovely and soft, it is in fibreworks alpaca/kid mohair/merino blend, they say its 8 ply but its not, i used 5mm knitpicks circs, and i nearly stuffed it up in one place by not doing the proper stabilising ktbl stitches, but hey, it wouldnt be a kylie project if it didnt have a drama attached!

the rest of the weekend we spent at the cemetary place handing over vast sums of money in exchange for bob's ashes and then choosing a memorial site, we are going to keep the ashes at his old house for a while though, not inter him, and then maybe he will come live here eventually as this was where he most wanted to be in the world. the memorial site for the plaque is lovely tho, and it was a nice thing to do, we managed to laugh about him as well which was good. it is still weird that he is not here, i cant quite get used to that fact, because in some ways its as though he is, and staying in close contact with his family has helped with that.

sunday we went down to wollongong for a flyball comp, our last one of the year, and it was stinking hot, and the phoenix ran their fastest time ever, 17.752 seconds, which isnt quite the australian record (that would be 17.33 seconds) but makes us the fastest team in the country at the moment. well, the dogs are anyway. we got beaten by our arch nemesis team because of a few handler errors on our part, but had a great day anyway.

and thats me all caught up. i am sorry for bailing on blogtoberfest but it was silly of me to think i could do it with everything going on at the moment.

hopefully i get some time today to catch up on what everyone else is doing!
kxx