Magpie's Stash

I have become compulsively hooked on Strictly Come Dancing. I have to watch it on the iplayer though, ever since I broke the digibox. Surprisingly I don’t really miss tv otherwise apart from a couple of things I keep up with like Spooks. Katie and I usually watch something first thing when she’s got up incredibly early, or rather, I watch with my first cup of tea through muzzy eyes, and she charges around laying waste to the living room until it’s time to go and make porridge.

She’s got very chatty recently, telling me about all sorts of things. After lunch every day we walk over to the park to have a go on the swings, and see the ducks in the river. We’ve been watching the family of swans grow up too over the last few months, now they’re big grey teenager swans with some of their white feathers coming through. I noticed a few days ago that she seemed to be shouting something like ‘dut!’ everytime we saw them, and then she started doing it in the bath too. So I tentatively concluded that we’d had her first word! Then yesterday, she started going ‘dut! dut!’ when we were in the living room, and no ducks in sight. Had we been a bit too ready to declare ‘genius’? Then she waved something at me - one of the bath ducks had made it’s way into the front room! Phew….

darn it,now I have to write before I can go to bed.

I am cold to the very core, and I’m hoping J can warm me up.In fact,I was so cold when I got in the car that I couldn’t drive, and I certainly couldn’t undo the laces on my very muddy boots to take them off. Now where have I been to get in such a state?

Tonight we had our scout group hog roast and firework night up at our district campsite. When I got there at lunch time they had already got the tents up, and strung the fairy lights out. The stereo was playing some rather old but funky tunes, and the scouts (who were camping) were running around in the mud and pouring rain. As the afternoon went on, and the pig cooked under it’s own little awning, the rain poured down and puddles grew into big mudslides. I only had two pairs of socks, and three layers of clothes plus a coat so I slowly began to freeze. Baloo lent me a hat (I must get/knit myself a hat). We had a surprisingly good turnout of parents and beavers/cubs etc despite the rain. J bought Katie along in her new bear suit. I had spent the morning scouring BigCity for a suitable all-in-one snow suit with feet, as she spends so much time in the baby carrier (a BushBaby Lite) that a coat would just mean she got cold legs. The general choice was either horrible pink, half-hearted blue, or vile brown with polka-dots. Luckily I found a half decent bear suit, a little like last years, in the last shop I went in. I hate shopping. It was a good evening, although I couldn’t eat anything because of the blasted gall stones. I’m still really impressed with how the scouts do everything on such a large scale (so much better than the guides!).

Anyway, must go and warm up now.

The D&D adventure I am writing for our multi-DM drop-in drop-out campaign is coming along slowly. I have the central concept down, and am beginning to flesh out the NPCs, but it is taking a lot of time and my daughter really resents me tapping away when I could be playing with her. I have a few things I really need to be knitting as well, and J. took the Eeepc away for the weekend too so I couldn’t even write it in bed. (No, I’m not sure either why he needed it at a beer festival).

Our flexible campaign concept is probably one practised by a lot of groups - we grew in size and it was very hard to get everyone together (and this was before the baby!). We also had a couple of regular DMs who both had sizeable campaigns on the go. The idea was:

• to give them a break by rotating the DMing between all those willing,
• to have some sessions where it wouldn’t matter to the plot line if some members were missing so that the rest of us could have our fix if some were busy,
• to not worry so much about a ‘realistic’ party (we have a were-tiger, a celestial trumpet archon and so on
• and to indulge some of the more wacky ideas/plotlines/monster mixes that we’ve all been dying to use but not found a use for yet
• I was seeing this as an opportunity to play fast and loose with my PC, and maybe take risks. I have to say I’m not the player most attached to my characters though - I think that part of the fun is playing the odds and taking risks. If death happens I’m quite sanguine about it.

This has not worked entirely as I thought it would - people get attached to their characters just the same as if it was a more serious campaign, the other campaigns have not been played much at all and I’m worried we’re going to abandon them, and the usual DMs have been dming as usual. The latter is probably because the other players are less experienced/very busy at work/pregnant. Anyway, I’m giving it a go, and had a brainstorm with a fellow player who fancied giving it a go but didn’t want to actually DM. My original target was to get it finished in time for WoAdWriMo in July - not yet. But soon….I hope. Or else there will be a revolt I fear. And I will have to recalculate all my monster levels since the PCs will have gone up too.

Well, the hat is looking like this:

hat with ruffled edges, half knitted on circular needles.

and Bob has arrived and is now called Jacob (lovely!). I hadn’t really envisaged how fluffy, and well, girly the hat would be (well, the pattern does call for it to be decorated with flowers). The other issue is the size. I do seem to knit rather large, and this hat went all the way round J’s head. It may be an adult size hat! I might have another go after it is finished in a 4-ply stripy sock yarn, with smaller needles and/or decrease the number of cast-on. That might make one suitable for Katie. Jacob will have to wait until I have found a stripy type beanie pattern I think.
I’m finding knitting on circulars much easier than with the dpns - my stitches kept on disappearing with the latter, which was very frustrating. I do seem to spend all my time shoving stitches round the curve though - maybe I’m doing something wrong.