white_hart | Entries tagged with weekend

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I have mostly spent the weekend sitting on my bed drinking tea and reading a book about rivers. Which seems like the perfect way to spend a soggy January weekend when you have a cold. I did print out a sewing pattern but decided I couldn't summon up the energy to stick the pieces together, let alone to actually consider doing anything with it. Plus, I was enjoying reading about rivers.

I did venture out yesterday to meet my swimming friends for coffee, as none of us is feeling up to swimming right now. We went to the cafe in Florence Park, which I'm told is very good, although at 3:45 on a Saturday they had a very limited range of cake and only enough chai left for one person when two of us would have liked it. On the other hand, the barista greeted us by saying that she didn't usually get three people at once with such excellent hair and telling us we looked like we should be in a punk band, which clearly we were all delighted by.

I woke up yesterday feeling utterly depressed, and dragged myself out for a walk in the hope that being outside would reset my brain a bit.

Two pale green hazel catkins glowing in sunshine against a sky of slate-blue storm clouds.

The light was amazing, and being outside definitely helped, but it turned out to be a bit more walking than I was really up to; the last mile home was a struggle and I spent the afternoon slumped on the sofa watching Encanto (which is utterly charming) and then attempting the 2012 film of Les Misérables (which I gave up after an hour, because if you're going to film a musical, you really need to cast people who can actually sing, and then have them sing, rather than just kind of muttering their way through it, and one Good Tune in an hour is not enough to keep me watching a saga of misery and deprivation) while reading Sandman.

Today I did the Big Garden Birdwatch, during which, as is traditional, I saw far fewer birds than I would normally do in any given hour. And then I decided to invest my remaining spoons for the day on tackling two weeks' worth of ironing (I never used to iron things, but it turns out that me-made clothes in 100% cotton need it), despite the fact that I have been wearing the same dungarees and cardigan on seven of the last nine days (and on one of the other two I didn't actually get out of pyjamas) before returning to the sofa and watching Eurovision: The Story of Fire Saga on

nineveh_uk's recommendation.

I am tired, and sad that it is Sunday evening already. I'm going to work from home tomorrow because I don't want to try to go to the office and find out that the journey has wiped me out before I even start (and I'm not particularly keen to spend more time on the bus to minimise walking, given the end of the mask mandate last week), but I still feel pretty gloomy about the prospect.

This weekend I have:

-managed two solo swims in the lake (having decided that I'm familiar enough with it to swim there by myself even in winter, and that getting to swim this weekend really was absolutely vital to my wellbeing). It was glorious, especially today when the sun was out, and no-one stole my bag. (I did order a cheap bike lock so I could lock it to things to deter thieves, but it hadn't arrived when I swam yesterday and today I had to get in at a different point and couldn't find anything to lock it to.)

-finished sewing a second pyjama top out of the leftover fabric from the winter pyjamas I made years ago, so I now have two matching sets.

-assembled a free sewing pattern for wide-leg trousers which I think I am not actually going to use as it is ridiculously wide. (I have some lovely yellow corduroy which I want to make wide-leg trousers out of, and I was going to use the pattern I used for my purple trousers recently but it has front pleats and I'm not sure how well those will work in corduroy, but every other pattern I can find for non-elasticated trousers is either really wide-legged or slim legged.)

Still to come, shepherd's pie and Doctor Who. And I have mostly managed to avoid thinking too much about work and dreading the week to come.

I had vague plans to sew the pyjama top I cut out last weekend and cut out a pair of yellow cord trousers this weekend, but in fact I have spent most of the last two days lying on my bed alternately reading undemanding books and dozing.

I did, however, finally get around to filling in the self-referral form for an autism diagnosis that I've been thinking about for at least 10 months. I also decided that I probably don't feel up to leaving a job I've been in for six and a half years, an organisation I've worked for for nearly 15 years, a house I've been living in for 16 years and a city I've lived in for 21 years all at one go, and I am therefore not going to apply for the job in Norwich, though I will keep an eye out for more local things.

And I managed two late-afternoon swims when, despite the weather having been unsettled all day, the lake was absolutely glorious in the light of the setting sun.

A lake reflecting deep blue sky and orange sunset light, with trees and a metal footbridge silhouetted against the sky behind the water.

Cutest thing I have seen this weekend: a grebe swimming on the lake today with a chick perched on its back.

Most ridiculous thing I have seen this weekend: the "gender critical" brigade on Twitter trying to tell Rhianna Pratchett and Neil Gaiman that Terry Pratchett would have been on their side. (I saw "ridiculous", but also "infuriating".)

Most unexpectedly straight-in-the-feels thing of this weekend: last week's episode of the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books podcast, with reviewer Tara Scott talking about how reading romance helped them to understand their own sexuality and gender identity.

Most delicious thing of the weekend: ridiculously simple rhubarb and custard ice cream (stew rhubarb, cool, mix with a tub of ready-made custard, churn in ice-cream maker). Though the Nigella rosemary cake is a good second.

Best thing done this weekend: booking a three-night break in a cottage near Bridlington (and about a mile from a beach) for the first weekend in September. More of a mini-break than a holiday, but a much-needed change of scene and a chance to see (and swim in) the sea.

This weekend I have (a) made a pair of wide-leg trousers in a very nice blue shot cotton: (b) cut out and assembled a set of mermaid-scale print underwear (it just needs elastic now); and (c) swum twice in the river and once in the lake. I have also listened to a large number of podcasts while sewing, watched an episode of Midsomer Murders and read some of The Night Circus.

I'm feeling awfully tired for the end of the weekend, but I suspect that's mostly down to having terrible hayfever now the weather has broken (for some reason, my hayfever is always worse on rainy days - I don't know if the rain shakes the pollen into the air or something).

At least four-day weeks feel much easier than five-day weeks.

I've had a long weekend of sewing and swimming adventures. Sewing-wise, as well as the shirt I've made two more pairs of pants as part of my quest to replace all of my shop-bought underwear with me-made, and I also finished the cardigan I've been knitting for the last couple of months.

As for the swimming, on Friday we went to Clifton Hampden (which is pretty much the first time I've been out of Oxford or Kidlington since last September, apart from taking T to Islip for his two jabs) where the river was flowing so fast we ended up walking upstream and then swooshing* back down. On Saturday we swam nearly all the way round the lake, then yesterday we thought we'd take advantage of the current to swoosh from Iffley Lock to Kennington, though as it turned out the current seemed to have dropped off a lot since Friday and it was more of a swim. And then today we went to Kennington and swam the whole length of the meadows, including going around the back of the island, and saw lots of goslings.

A pair of Canada geese swimming with a cluster of goslings.

Four days is nowhere near long enough to recover from burnout, though, and I've had terrible Sunday-night anxiety all day (though the swimming has helped). I think having time off was definitely the right thing to do, and I'm sure there won't really have been any crises, but I am a bit worried about how much email is likely to have piled up in my absence, when this is a short week and pretty heavy on meetings until Friday...

*swooshing = swimming along a current

I spent yesterday afternoon working, and was determined that today should be a day of doing relaxing non-work things. Which ended up being going for a swim in the lake (because after the recent rain the flow on the river is pretty strong again, so that there were moments in yesterday's swim where it was impossible to make any headway upstream against the current) and making a changing robe out of Mountain Warehouse microfibre towels, because the one I made out of fluffy cotton towels last year is a bit too bulky to squeeze into a tow float if I also want to carry warmer clothing and not just shorts and a t-shirt.

I am still feeling knackered and really not ready to launch into what's going to be an extremely busy week at work tomorrow. I hope that working yesterday will have been enough to prevent me from failing to meet three significant deadlines, but there's still an awful lot to do to get there. And I would really rather like to just stay in bed and do nothing.

I went for a swim yesterday and a walk today. Normally it would be two swims, but the friend I swim with on Sundays's car has broken down, and thanks to COVID just picking her up isn't the option it would normally be. Still, I had a nice walk instead, and found the first violets of the spring.

I finished knitting what I realised about a third of the way in is definitely a Wesley Crusher jumper.

( Jumper picture )

I finished it off and wove in the ends while watching the new Netflix film of Rebecca, which was...fine, I guess?...but felt deeply unnecessary when the Hitchcock film exists. It certainly wasn't as bad as the recent film of The Secret Garden which we watched last weekend, and which was actually objectively terrible*.

I also had another attempt at mask surgery and succeeded in turning two of my large masks with ties round the back of the head, which were awkward to put on and take off and not great with glasses, into smaller, neater origami-style masks with ear loops. I'm planning to do the same thing to my other masks, though there's no hurry as I rarely do anything which needs a mask (T does the shopping, so I think that since the New Year I've only needed masks three times, once when dropping the car off and picking it up after its service, once when we picked up a click and collect delivery we'd booked at Sainsbury's to top up on the things that aren't available at our little Tesco, and then on Friday when I had to go in to the office to scan some documents from a paper file) so after I'd done two I switched to something more fun and have now made a set of underwear with tigers on.

( Underwear picture )

*Apart from being set in 1947 rather than the early 1900s for no apparent reason, it managed to miss the entire point of the story, i.e. the fact that it's about personal growth stemming from learning to grow things, and makes the garden...magic or something? At least, it's never explicitly stated, but the locked and neglected garden isn't overgrown with weeds, but in perfect order, and also full of greenery and flowers while the outside world is wintery.

I have always been really, really bad at doing nothing, which means I have a tendency to feel that I've "wasted" my weekends if I spend them resting and recovering from the week (which is often what I really need to do, especially at this time of year) rather than making or doing things. Yesterday I managed to ignore the voices telling me I should be using my time productively enough to go back to bed after swimming and spend a couple of hours dozing and listening to podcasts, which made me feel a lot better, and I have still managed to do a few things:

-Went swimming twice (and because it's warmed up so much, I was in for just under 15 minutes both times)

-Experimented with taking a twisted nose-wire out of a mask and replacing it with foldover elastic (this didn't really work; the elastic certainly helped with the fit of the mask but my glasses steamed up horribly. I really dislike sewing masks and have come to the conclusion that if/when I go back to working in the office and need to wear them regularly I'm just going to buy some and save my sewing time for fun things).

-Finished applying foldover elastic to a pair of pants.

-Mended T's pyjama trousers, which I made quite a long time ago (seven or eight years, I think) and which are starting to wear into holes).

-Ironed some fabric for another shirt.

-Made a loaf of sourdough bread.

-Made pancakes for breakfast this morning.

-Watched The Dig on Netflix (gentle, reasonably pleasant watching, pretty East Anglian scenery but fairly forgettable).

This is, even I have to submit, not actually "nothing"...