Seasons Greetings

Short days and long nights- brings pictures in my mind of curling up by the fire (carving spatulas of course, they're a little more house friendly than bowl carving in my experience) after playing out in the snow.

Only our snow has melted, leaving us with buckets full of ice but thankfully the van can get around again. We haven't found snow/mud friendly tires yet, so skid and skate with it if there is even the slightest coating of snow on the roads. Unfortunately we made the decision to get better tires after the snow started, and everywhere has sold out. I was looking rather enviously at a truck on our road with brand new snow tires!

I've been able to book onto a spoon carving course at the end of March. As we will be homeless then (our landlord wants the house for a family member as soon as possible, and our contract ends the beginning of March so we've been given notice) I luckily can use some holiday before my career break starts 1st April- travelling to work when having to live in a tent with two small children just doesn't sound fun. And that's without logistic issues like washing uniforms! We're looking on the bright side and will have a couple of weeks 'settling in' whilst being handy for where we're storing the 'living in a house' junk to rescue what has been packed or ( hopefully) store non-essentials we planned to travel with. DH is convinced we'll need a trailer as well as our long wheel based crew cab transit, and I think he might be right.
I am just hoping we'll keep warm enough in the tent with woodburner in March- we've done overnight in the snow in the smaller tent last Christmas, but that's not living in  it full time! I know we're planning on travelling in the tent all summer, but April was when I planned to start, and we might have even found somewhere with housespace for us to start off with!
I've sadly put away the sewing machine as the next 10 weeks or so will be far too busy packing up to start new projects...though I have just remembered some of our sleeping foams need covering, and the machine would hurry that up..anyway, apart from that my mother-in-law has got me onto something new.

For Christmas she has given me a crochet hook, some wool (yarn I believe may be the technical term), a patchwork bag (expertly made by herself) to keep it all in, and a book to get me started!
I've had approximately 2 dismal attempts at knitting, when I was much younger and that is the grand total of my experience of 'that sort of thing'.
Growing up in Canada meant I had options at Junior High like Hunter Education that caught my attention, with plans on Driver Ed for grade 9 had I stayed there -I think you could learn to drive at 14, back when I was there, anyway. Secondary school here didn't include much in the home crafts or cooking. I seem to recall about a school-terms worth of cooking but there being a horrible amount of writing for what I expected to be practical classes.
To avoid too much PE I did Latin GCSE- the teacher came from the 6th form next door, but the only place in the schedule meant missing out on an hour of Games and some other (non-GCSE) lessons a week. The Latin class was fairly evenly split between really brainy folk and the rest of us doing anything to avoid running around outside in just pants . That was something that really shocked me moving to England, uniform for school I could cope with,quite liked even,  but having a see-through top and big pants to wear for PE- and not being allowed to wear anything on top? Winter classes in a freezing gym 'if you're cold you need to run about more' being a repetitive strain and the classes in 'summer' (I use the term loosely, it wasn't warm most of the time by any stretch of the imagination) being outside where even more people could see you  half dressed?! I gladly scraped through Latin to avoid it, but quite possible missed finding out about fun crafting stuff (this might have been in the other lessons grouped with it on the timetable) for another decade or so.

Anyway, M-I-L has kindly given me the crochet things as something to keep me learning, and quite importantly with our travel plans, doesn't need a lot of equipment or space to work on. She's shown me how to get started, and I think she's taught me how to do doubles or something. I'm getting to grips with the row bit, but I seem to have a problem at each end of a row. I'm hunting on utube for tutorials I can follow -the first one I got showed you how to do a slip knot so quickly that, seeing as I watched it about a dozen times and still didn't see what she did, I gave up on her.
If anyone can point me to somewhere good to start online I'd be grateful!

Hope you've had a happy, healthy (sounds like half my friends have had 'flu this Christmas so hope you've escaped) and warm Christmas, and hope 2011 brings dreams to life, or at least one step nearer, for you.