Relaxing

I'm finding it hard to relax this weekend, although I've made some considerable efforts to do so.

My school friend Leanne visited on Friday night, on her way to visit someone else. It was really good to see her. She's the sort of friend who I can not see for ages and then as soon as I see her it's like no time has passed. We had a good chat. It's a shame it was a short visit, but hopefully we'll see each other before too long.

On Saturday I woke up at my usual time (grrr...) even though I could have comfortably had a 3 hour lie-in. I made a start knitting a lacy sock pattern from Knit Today. When I fist bought Knit Today, I was quite pleased with the way it seemed to be a bit more interesting than Simply Knitting and Knitting, even though it was made by the same people. It actually seemed to have patterns I might knit in it. I'm becomming more and more dissapointed with it as time goes on. The recent issue just seems to have become more like the other two magazines, with published letters almost exclusively from the over 70s. I don't have anything against the over 70s, but it would be nice to hear from more of a range of age groups.

The other thing which is annoying me is that the sock pattern I am knitting is really badly written.

• Firstly the sizes it gives are small/medium/large, with no indication of what foot/ankle sizes these might actually be for.
• Secondly, the pattern recommends 3 mm needles, with 54 stitches for small. That seems reasonable for stocking stitch, but the lace pattern is very open and it ended up absolutely huge, so I was forced to frog it and change to 2.5 mm needles.
• Thridly, between the top and the lace section there's a row which increases the number of stitches by two. There is not mention that this should happen in the pattern, which left me feeling like I'd made a mistake for ages, until I finally figured out what was going on.
• Forthly, the foot on the picture has stocking stitch on the underside, with the pattern on the top, however the pattern, just tells you to continue with the lace along the length of the foot.
• Fifthly, the heel is done using short row shaping. The instructions are slightly different from short row heels I've done before, but I thought I'd give it ago. I'm know finding that the second part of it (picking back up the stitches) makes absolutely no sense.

I think part of the reason for the crapness of the pattern is that the editors of the magazine assume that noone who reads it knows anything about knitting. The instructions would make much more sense if they actually gave their readers some credit and explained what was going on, instead of expecting people blindly to follow instructions. The only reason I'm still knitting the pattern is that I think the sock look quite good up to now. If I can't sort out their heel instructions I'll just make it up myself. Rant over (I think I'm making my not-very-relaxed point quite well).

Following knitting yesterday Glittr, Snaterkat and I went along to the turkish bath in the City Pool. I've been wanting to go for years. It's an old Victorian building and the turkish bath still has the old style chaging rooms, in varnished hardwood, with a bed in each to recline on. There's a steam room and three dry rooms of increasing hotness. There's also a spa and hot and cold showers. It's also possible to have a massage. We were only in the hot rooms for about an hour, but I felt like we'd been there for a long time. I felt so sleepy and brain-dead by the end of it I forgot to immediatly phone Lucy and Jen afterwards as I'd promised (sorry ladies). As it turned out we'd already missed them and ended up not going to Wagamama as a group anyway.

Graeme and I did go along for a late lunch. I enjoyed it along, although rather than relaxing I found the place quite noisy and hectic. I'm not very good with crowds, particularly when low on energy.

I'm ashamed to say I did hardly anything with the rest of the day appart from knit and watch TV, in a zombie-like state. We rented Pirates of the Caribean II from our local rental place. I enjoyed it, although the plot was quite complicated and didn't reach any satisfactory resolution at the end. It felt a bit like one of those dreams you have where the story goes off on lots off tangents and you wake up before the end.

I managed to sleep for 9.5 hours last night and am feeling much more awake today. The uni work I have to do is praying on my mind. I suppose I should try and get on with things. Hopefully I can have the evening off and have a less stressful week if I do that. I'm hoping be the Christmas holidays I'll have got everything I need to do done, and won't have any work to think about. I can always hope!