I’ve been feeling blurky since last Tuesday. Head spins and sore neck to begin with. Before the concert I kept telling myself “I am NOT going to be sick today” over and over. On Wednesday I was very, very tired but blamed being out ‘late’. On Thursday I began to see that it was more than that – I had sinusitis, which would explain the head spins. Friday and Saturday I had a stonking bad headache but thankfully by yesterday it was gone and everything else settled down but for feeling a bit feverish.

The copy edit of my current book arrived a week early. Today I’m going to try starting on it. That means approving/rejecting the editor’s corrections and tackling queries about possible problems in the text. I get two weeks, so I divide the number of chapters by ten and that’s what I have to get done per day.

On Friday I skipped drawing classes in favour of naps and Top Gear, then went into the city to have dinner with a Canberran writer friend, Nicole Murphy, and take her to the Melbourne Science Fiction Club to do a talk. She stayed overnight – though we had to give her the old single sofa bed to sleep on because our guest room is still full of boxes from the old car port.

The Garage Project is still stalled, as we wait for building approval for the new garage. (Twiddles thumbs, drums fingers.)

Craftwise, I’ve made good progress on Summer Solstice, getting the sleeves of the yoke-arm piece sewn up and the body knit. I had to map out the body section as well, only to discover that the increases and decreases mainly serve to create fake ‘seam’ lines and not much in the way of shaping. So I simplified again, knitting a straight rectangle. Except that I didn’t think I’d fit the whole thing on the machine so I did it in two panels, to be sewn up the back. Later I realised it would have fit – just. Oh well. It’s a “design feature”. And I find cotton garments need a seam or two to give them a bit of structure. There’s just the collar to knit now, and it turns out it’ll require exactly the number of needles I have on the machine, with the extension kit added.

Oh – and I actually did some hand knitting the other say. I’m adding a collar to a vest. I kept it to half an hour, two nights in a row. My hands didn’t hurt at all. But then I had to stop because of my neck getting sore. Still – yay!