Tea and Cakes

It’s been a long and busy (but fun) week, with lots of long days, work and irregular meal times, meaning that I’ve been drinking too much coffee, eating a whole bunch of chocolate and relying on cheese sandwiches rather more than I like.

Now, I know from experience that eating a large amount of ice cream at the end of a meal doesn’t really agree with me – all the dairy makes me feel icky. The exception to this is Vermillion, a fabulous Indian restaurant in Dublin that has the most delicious vanilla malt ice cream and offers the possibility of a single scoop as a serving (they have bigger servings too should you desire).

Unfortunately, I’m slow to learn, and when faced with a dessert menu all common sense flies out the window and pretty soon I find myself faced with this:

Vanilla, chocolate, cappuccino and strawberry ice-cream. It was delicious.

However, the sugar and dairy hit me hard and I’ve felt crappy and in need of a bit of a detox for the evening. For me that means cutting down on sugar for a while. Not cutting it out, just cutting down. We’ll see how I do.

I made a futile attempt to knit, but the chart of the stitch pattern was confusing me.

Odd rows read from right to left, with the dots meaning to purl and the blanks to knit.

So far so good.

Even rows read from left to right. This makes sense as the knitting is turned the other way around. (non-knitters: just go along with me). However, on the even rows the dots mean to knit and the blanks to purl.

This makes sense too, but I found it really hard to switch my sugar-addled brain around at the end of every row. To me, a dot means to purl and a blank to knit. Period.

Anyway, I’m a bright young woman, I can figure these things out. I had a plan: I’d re-draw the chart, but on even rows I’d reverse the symbols for knit and purl so they made sense to me.

Note card for drawing out pattern: check
Pen: check
Ruler: check
Marker for making dots: check

“I am a genius” I think as I draw out boxes. I also make a note to myself that I need to buy a checked notebook*.

Above is how far I got with the chart before I realised the glaring error.

Yep. I was copying it directly, making no changes.

I give up.

~~

*I almost did the other day, but I remembered that I have many, many notebooks and could probably manage without, plus I’d just accidentally bought a new bag, was in the process of a book-buying incident and knew there’d be a yarn, erm, issue just after. Anyway, I put the notebook back and tonight I could have used it. There’s a lesson here.