Weekly Rundown

This week wound up being a nice short week for me, as I had the day off and the house to myself on Friday. It’s always nice to have a bit of time to yourself. I used to hate being home alone, but I’m beginning to find that I enjoy it more, the one thing I really hate is being in a big double bed all by myself when Mr Click’s not there. The benefit of having a nice long lie-in the next day is always cancelled out by the hours I spend tossing and turning trying to drift off the night before.

I’ve mentioned letting myself get a little bit behind with my OU and being more than a little bit lax about getting organised for my latest assignment. Wednesday I set that to rights and printed out a copy of the assignment brief and decided that I was definitely going to do Option 2.

I’ve gone for Option 2 for all three of the previous assignments so I kind of felt like I had a reputation to uphold. I’m being predictable! Actually, I think part of the reason for always going for Option 2 is that the two options usually cover two halves of each block, each block being covered in roughly a month; Option 1 deals with stuff from the first half of the block and Option 2 with stuff from the second. The Option 2 stuff is always freshest in my mind, so that’s what I tend to go to, because as soon as I read it, I’m able to think of what I want to say. I guess I’m being lazy because it’s just what’s easiest for me.

Once I knew which Option I was going for I was able to start looking through for references I could use and then on Thursday night I stuck on The Fellowship of the Ring and set to work writing. I’d planned on making a start that night and then working on it more on Friday morning, but by 9:30pm I’d actually managed to write about 1800 words, including a good attempt at a conclusion. So I sat and knitted while I watched The Two Towers and finally crawled into bed at 2am!

Actually, I’d felt really sleepy when I finished my assignment draft, but when the time came to go to bed all I really wanted to do was sit up and watch The Return of the King. I waited until the following morning in the end.

This week we’ve also started watching The Good Life, which I’m enjoying. We’re not watching it quite as quickly as I’d like. We were watching four episodes of Friends an evening, whereas we’ve dropped down to watching two episodes of The Good Life while we eat our tea, then watching two episodes of ER in bed. It’s probably better that we do it that way really as there’s only four series and we’d be finished within a couple of weeks if we weren’t careful. Plus we’re getting through ER more quickly now so we’ll soon be watching something new, like maybe Criminal Minds which I got for Christmas.

I’ve been getting through my reading material a lot more quickly this week than I have since the beginning of the year. Tom’s Midnight Garden was a nice quick read and I’ve been reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Call which is going quickly too. I managed to read about 100 pages of that within the first day of starting it and only slowed down because I had to write an assignment (luckily not on it).

I’ll have to look at which books I’ll be needing to read next for my course and get those ordered soon so that I don’t end up have to read them in such a rush for my next assignment. I finally finished it this morning and since then have been downloading as many free books on Amazon as I can find. I want something that wasn't written for children, isn't set in the past and which is as different from the last three books as possible. Roll of Thunder was a bit of a depressing book (rightly so given the subject matter) so now I want something really light-hearted to contrast with it.

And knitting, well, I kind of broke my plans there. After I knitted up Oscar Octopus’s hat I had to take a break because we put all the cardboard out for recycling so I had nothing to use to make the pom-pom for the top of it. I get itchy hands when I’ve not got anything on my needles, so despite using my random number generator to pick my next pattern (a clown) I just didn’t feel like knitting that.

So I printed off a free chart pattern from Ravelry to make a little thingy to pin on my muffle-board at work. I’ll share more about that tomorrow because it’s so awesome that it deserves a post all of its own! And it only took two days to make, and I needed something to reward myself for actually thinking about doing my assignment, I decided to cast on for something new.

I mentioned last week that the wool Mr Click bought me from Cardwell Garden Centre looked like it wanted to be a dragon, well, the pattern book I won from Simply Knitting has a cute little dragon pattern in it. It’s really complicated though so although I’m getting on with the body, I’m preparing to frog it or change it at every row. It’s interesting watching it come together though and I wonder if I’ll actually get it finished to my satisfaction to share here.