slip a sable under the tree for me

I don't read Captain Awkward nearly as often these days now there are no comments to the stories, but I had a look through and oh my, I like this page. The absent questions hang horribly in the air like a gamekeeper's rotting gibbet, and the answers are very sound.

*

It was Sable's official birthday yesterday. She is.... FIVE! She celebrated with a few morsels of salmon, and sat on my lap in the evening as I knitted.

She was unimpressed on Friday—the day when, hurrah, the drillers departed at last, leaving the back garden brown but flat. Because it was also the day when the plumbers arrived to take stock of the job of replacing the radiators, and indeed embarked upon it, with much noisy drilling and movings of furniture. They made a good start, which is a relief. I *really* hope the plumbing stage won't overrun the way the drilling did.

We also had the scaffolding put up yesterday along the northern wall of the house, so that insulating cladding can be applied, um, soon.

It's quite a relief to have things be happening with reasonable speed!

Snowflake Challenge #8

In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, a gift of your time to the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well.


Um. It wasn't a good year, last year, and for one reason and another I slid mentally slough-wards for quite a lot of it. So finding something to celebrate is quite hard. Here goes.

I became Chair of my mixed barbershop chorus, and got us up and running again once we were able to meet outdoors.

I entered Yuletide for the first time, and won! Received a lovely fic and wrote one that was well-received. In another fic first, I wrote two stories in fandoms I'd never written before—one was my Yuletide story (Lord Peter Wimsey) and the other was a Mad Men story.

And because I have a feeling these things should be celebrated in threes, I also knitted a rather lovely grey and lavender shawl last year (actually finished it in February). It's here, but you may need a Ravelry account to see it.