I’ve been very busy lately. Firstly with work. I’ve got two weeks and two days to do two weeks worth of work. That sounds okay until I add that I’m going away for half of that. So my butt has been well attached to my office chair.

You’d think this would mean I was getting no knitting done, but the truth is quite the opposite. This work is all ‘brain work’ so I take frequent short rests so I don’t get ‘brain fatigue’. Half an hour of work = five minutes brain rest. Knitting is the perfect activity for those breaks. Easy knitting, that is, not anything that requires brain work as well. Since small projects fit nicely on the desk beside me, a sock is a good rest break project. As a result I’ve been making good progress on the Jaywalker socks:

When I finished the heel of the first sock I tried grafting on the tube left over from my first attempt. I discovered pretty quickly that grafting any kind of pattern was a fast road to madness. I gave up and frogged the tube.

Which wasn’t as disheartening as I expected. By this point I’d come to realise that if I hadn’t kept the tube to graft on later I might have just given up on the Jaywalker socks completely. The thought that I might graft it on helped me stay keen enough to begin again.

Though I have to say, the zig-zag pattern has now gone from interesting to memorised to ‘gosh, I can’t wait until it’s over’.

In the meantime, have you seen the back of my house?

This is what happens when you (ie. not us, but the former owner) use the side of the house as a retaining wall so that your paving can be nice and level. You install it over the original primitive drainage system (which appeared to funnel water into leaky pits from which it evaporated) to which you have added plastic tubing that isn’t meant for the purpose (and as a result became clogged with dirt and roots).

By doing this you create the perfect conditions for termites. Not only do you create a nice moist wall, but you give the little rotters easy, hidden access to it. The building inspectors called in when the beau bought the house never noticed they were there.

As a result, the roof and all the framework of the garage has to be replaced. On top of that we know some of the walls of the ensuite and bedroom next to the garage need to be replaced too, but we have yet to see how far the termite damage extended into these areas.

Oh, and if you want to be really sure you get termites, build a planter box right against the wall of the house. It’ll be a penthouse for your little tenants, providing moisture and access that they only dream of, and they’ll be safely hidden away from sight.

But really, we should thank the previous owner. If it weren’t for the termites, we might not have decided to explore our ideas for building a new floor above the garage. We might have decided to sell and buy a house more suitable. But they saved us from the stress of selling, since (unlike them, it seems) we can’t legally sell a house with a garage that was so close to falling down that the builders were too scared to walk on the roof.

Now we have the reassurance of knowing that it’s going to take ten or twenty years before the house value has increased enough to cover the repairs. They’ve saved us from the hassle and stress of moving house for a couple of decades. And I may as well decorate in any kooky, artistic way that I fancy, since I don’t have to worry that future buyers might not like, say, the colours I choose. In twenty years anything I do now will be old fashioned and in need of an update.

I’m getting very good at looking on the bright side.