Burning The Candle At Both Ends

It has been three weeks since I last blogged. Every morning I wake up and say to myself that I must write something today but never do. It is perhaps in part because I don't think that anything very exciting has happened to me, but more realistically the reason is that I seem to have been burning the candle at both ends.

I have been frantically knitting during every spare moment to complete the things that are to be Christmas presents. The big pieces are now finished and awaiting blocking, and just a few small items still need to be done. Hopefully they can be completed fairly quickly, but I have been commissioned to knit a few other items so they have to take precedence. The consequence of all this is that I seem to be constantly searching for more hours in the day while getting more and more tired as each day passes. In fact, I have been so busy that I haven't had time to be depressed.

Thursday evenings are taken up with teaching my crochet class. Two groups of students have now completed the course and gone out into the world with new skills and an enthusiasm to continue improving. Another course has been squeezed in before Christmas and like the previous two is completely sold out. It just goes to show that there is a real desire by people to learn the old skills of knitting and crochet because the knitting courses are regularly full too.

I'm going to have a few weeks break from teaching after the New Year so that I can spend some time with the Thursday knitters, something that I miss out on when I am teaching, but a fourth course should begin about the middle of January. The break will also mean that I can do some knitting for myself for a change. I need some new woollies, so I shall be knitting myself a cardigan and a sweater to remedy this situation.

Last week I was asked to move from the building that I have been living in since July to one just around the corner from it. So the bags had to be packed (I couldn't believe how much yarn I had accumulated in my stash) and I moved into my new (temporary) accommodation. I now have a much larger room, my own bathroom, and fantastic kitchen facilities shared with the other residents in the house. I see little of my neighbours, who are all male, nor do I hear much of them when they are in.

Yesterday I decided that I would have a go at making a cake. I'm not a spectacular cook, but I can be quite innovative when I want to be and being someone who really doesn't like Christmas cake because I just don't like currants, sultanas and raisins, I have been mentally developing a cake recipe for some weeks now that would be a tasty replacement for the more traditional cake.
The end result was a quite dark coloured cake (that was the dark brown sugar rather than it being burned) which was filled with glacé cherries, chunks of dark chocolate, walnut pieces, cranberries (okay, so these were dried but I plumped them up again by putting them in saucepan with the juice of two oranges and one lemon and lemon zest and orange rind). I had a slice (or two) last night and while the cake is definitely not repulsive it still needs a little work on the recipe but I think I know what to do to improve it and I will be experimenting with the recipe again in a couple of weeks to hopefully produce something that is a bit closer to what I was trying to achieve. I think that I had better write down the recipe so that I know what I am tweaking as further test cakes are made.

So. having sat in bed with my laptop on my knees, I don't really have any excuses for not writing on a more regular basis again, and that is what I propose to do. I shall write a post before I get up in the morning and woe betide me if I make an excuse not to do so