Guess what, it's raining.....

Oh yes. Again.
Right, several more days catch-up. I keep vowing not to do this, but it seems to happen anyway - maybe I do manage to cram huge amounts of stuff into my life, and it's not delusional. Who knows?

I wanted to caption this entry "Father, dear Father" but that seemed maybe a little.....Disrespectful? Odd? Anyway, here's the gist. After more than eighteen months, I finally went to York to collect my father's ashes from the undertaker. A kind friend realised that I was feeling....not good...About this, and volunteered herself to come with me, for which consideration I was most grateful. Definitely not a sunshiney experience. The undertaker almost seemed to want to make some sort of a ceremony of handing me the cardboard box containing the mortal remains of my father but didn't quite know how to. I found it deeply disturbing to be handed this aforementioned cardboard box. There was, of course, a wooden casket inside, but I didn't realise this until later.
Fast forward a bit, and we are off to Cambridge to visit old friends. Now, that was good, had a pretty relaxed time. Even found time to chat with Liz a bit about what to do with the ashes, and she agreed with me as to the location. So, Sunday, off we trot to Norfolk, to a rather comfortable B&B for the night and on Monday make the pilgrimage to view the memorial bench in Cromer, and then on to The Spot.
Except.
Except that we hadn't thought to check out the casket properly, and we found that it wasn't easily openable. Aargh. I should have thought all of this through, but I have never been in this position before, and was as green as grass about it, not to mention having a few more feelings to assimilate and deal with. Sigh.

So - we really had no option but to bring the ashes back home with us! We are going to have to make a return trip, but at least I am now very certain where I want them to be, even if not quite sure how to achieve that!

I do feel an idiot. And not only about the above, and here comes an almighty and irreverent non-sequitur! Last week, I washed and ruined half a very nice corriedale fleece, by not remembering that I had a new washing machine with a very vigorous pump out before the spin. Mad? You bet! Then just today, knitting a bit of the corkscrew scarf, I managed to wrench the end of the needle out of the knotting, and it is going to be a thoroughly buggerish job picking the stitches back up. Mad? You bet! Is anything going right, fibre-wise at the moment? Not really, but then, I haven't had much time to have a really good go at anything. One more mega-effort and the waistcoat will be at a point when I can try it on and work out what to do with the neckline - that will be good. So I need to be thinking hard about the next project......

Of course, the one thing that would help my life at the moment is for it to stop raining - and for the sun to shine. Still, we did see the sun for two entire days in Cambridge! Maybe we should move - not.

gw