View from my commute

Thursday was a long day.  Thanks to two meetings, I had to work in our London office,  so left home at 6.30am to get the bus then the Tube.  The view on my walk to the office certainly made up for it...

That's right.  I spent the day looking out if the window at Tower Bridge, with the Tower of London in the background.

Sometimes, I feel very lucky living on the outskirts of London.

- Pam

And so the season begins

You can guess where I am.

Come on Chelsea!!!

Oops!! I slipped

I'm knitting a Five Hour Baby Sweater out of Stylecraft Baby Aran in the shade Baby Lemon for the newborn daughter of one of DH's colleagues. With 20 rows to go on the body, I know I will run out of yarn. I always knew it would be tight, even after inserting the reminants of some white aran yarn into the yoke to pad out the yarn as a styling detail. (Photo below.)  I can't do another stripe of the white - I've used all that I had - so this morning, I unwillingly went searching online for some more. 

(I really didn't want to go yarn shopping. Even with the Fashion on the Ration challenge, my stash is approaching epic proportions.) Below, is the exact transcript of a conversation I had with with DH…

  ME: Just to let you know that I've ordered some more of the baby yarn from a shop on line. It'll arrive over the weekend (probably).

  DH: Cool. So I assume you order lemon/yellow? 

ME: Yes, same shade. Probably a different dye-lot, though, so I'll have to wait for it to be delivered and then alternate rows in order to ensure the change in dye lots doesn't show up.

 [ cough ] 

In order to get free P&P, I had to buy some other wool. Some 4-ply in French Navy. [ cough ] And it made sense to buy 12 balls because a) I don't know how much I'll need to knit the jumper I want (I'll be knitting "off-piste"), and b) it got me an extra discount. (I only paid for 11.) 

[ cough ]

 I'm sure it'll squish down into nothing.... 

[ / cough ] 

DH still hasn't responded.

-  Pam (another 16 coupons spent)

Nickle and Dime-ing it

 (How annoying - I wrote this post and then lost it.)

Have I ever mentioned to you our coin collections?  How, every day or two, DH and I empty our wallets of 1p, 2p, 5p and £2 coins and pop those coins into various jars and a money box.  The coppers (1p and 2p) go into one Celebrations sweet jar; the 5p pieces into another; while the £2 coins, aka the "Running Away Fund" goes into a Maltesers phone booth money box.

 The coppers jar holds about £22 and takes a year or two to fill.  Ditto the Running Away Fund, which holds £600.  In the thirteen years since we started filling it, 5p jar has never been emptied.  The above photo is at least three years old and, even though we have been adding to the jar assiduously since then, it took forever to fill.

A couple of weekends ago, the jar was finally full.  And heavy (once they were bagged and tagged, I weighed the coins: 10.2kg).  It took the two of us over an hour to count them all.  5p coins are small, about the size of a dime, and the instructions from the bank was to put £5 in each bag - i.e. 100 coins.  We filled 32 bags.   DH lugged them into the bank on the Monday and added them to our Running Away Fund (holiday money) savings account.

Thirteen years of saving 5p pieces netted £160.

- Pam