Holidays, socks, Ed Byrne and dogs

Wow, where did the last 3 weeks go? I can't believe I've been back from holiday for a week already! It was a great break, especially for Colin who works so hard. We had a gorgeous villa with a pool (see photos) and the beaches went on and on and on.... It was a place called Conil de la Frontera near Cadiz on the Altantic coast of Spain. The area has not been invaded by the Brits and is not built up or anything. And hardly any English is spoken there, which was a struggle at times but we got by.

One thing I found hard was the meal times. I'm used to lunch at 1 and dinner about 7. Over there they don't serve lunch until 2 and dinner till 8.30. I was starving, hahahah!!! Although it was lovely, its always nice to get home and have a nice cup of tea!!!

While I was away I was getting excited about Sock Wars. I expected to get home and find I'd been "killed" ie have a pair of socks waiting for me in the post. But no, I was still in the game, or so I thought. I checked my email and there was no "assassination dossier" with my victims details so I checked the Yarnmonkey blog to discover a lot of people had not received their dossiers either. After some investigating it turns out that I had not been included in the game after all. I was most disappointed and wrote a comment on the blog. A very nice lady called Nina in Oklahoma offered to do a sock swap with me, so I am carrying on with my Socks of Doom and will be sending them off to her and she is doing the same. (Well I hope that is happening, for all I know she could be a big hairy bloke with a chainsaw! I hope he likes pink, white and grey!!!! )

Last Sunday night we went to see the Irish comedian Ed Byrne. He had rave reviews at the Edinburgh festival and didn't disappoint. The show is loosely wound around the story of the Michael Douglas film Falling Down, with Ed joking about how he would like to be Douglas' character, but with lots of digression onto other unrelated subjects. A good show. The support guy was a bit odd but had his moments. And luckily there was no audience participation which is a HUGE fear I have at live theatre things. I would never sit in the front! We were in row H which I thought was near enough but it then turned out there was no A-D so we were actually in row 4. Yikes. I still think The Mighty Boosh was a brilliant show though, we went to that in March. I love the Boosh - roll on series 3!!!!

Sadly, it seems our dog is getting old. He will be 15 next month and a couple of days ago he had a bit of a turn and has now had 4 of them. Its a small seizure type thing. The vet has given him medication and it hasn't happened yet today so fingers crossed. Its so upsetting to see it happen, I cry every time, probably because it makes me think of the inevitable "goodbye". Oooo quick, change the subject. Here is a pic of him a couple of years ago. Ain't he cute?

Got a new bit of kit yesterday. I went for a check up on my diabetes and insulin pump and I am trialling a piece of software for Roche which downloads info from the pump and blood glucose meter to your PC. It gives nice pretty graphs, except mine look awful cos they are all over the shop especially after the carb/insulin balancing (or mostly falling off) chaos of being on holiday, Still, all getting back on track this week. My HbA1c was slightly better at 8.8 down from 8.9. Not a great difference but I was expecting much worse, so I was secretly pleased with that. Lots of effort and gritting of teeth needed to get down to 7 still. Oh yeah, I'm going for hypnosis next Friday to see if she can help with the anxiety.

I got my first Reiki client. A friend of ours is going to let me treat her on Wed 25th. I'm not charging her, I need someone to practice on. I have had great results doing the distant Reiki so now I need someone "hands-on". Should be interesting.

Ongoing knitting projects are 3 pairs of socks and a scarf, and I just got some oddments of 4ply chenille from ebay this morning, so that will probably be another scarf and I have some chunky purple stuff coming from ebay too in the next day or two but I'm not sure what that will be yet. And while I was in Liverpool yesterday I popped into John Lewis - just to have a look, mind - and popped out again with two balls of mutli-coloured chunky and some 12mm and 15mm needles! I want to make a nice jumper in a lime-y green sometime too. I have got a great pattern on knitty.com (called Lucie) but I need to choose some yarn, the one they use is from America and VERY expensive. Oh, Christmas isn't that far off is it?