I hope you all survived the holidays intact and healthy. I discovered that I was very much dependant on the anti-histamines I had been taking to be able to breathe at night. I forgot to get them and wondered why I was sleeping poorly, why my nose was running constantly, why I had a headache unrelated to the the volume of chocolate I ate. Then I realized what I had stopped taking because I thought it expendable. Out on Boxing Day to find an all-hours chemist and now my nose is no longer dripping and I slept through the night. It seems that almost all my Christmas presents were cat related for reasons that are hard to fathom. I especially like the cat craft book's suggestion that you save up all your cat's hair, learn to spin, and then knit the result.

Today my loyal postie brought my book on Lithuanian sashes whose photos and diagrams are fantastic, even if I can't read the text, and a package of ebay fibre: wool & mohair for socks and gorgeous silk. While I am dying to spin, I must knit furiously as I discovered almost at the end of the second of the cardigan's sleeves that I had started off with the wrong number of stitches. I had to rip all the way back to the ribbing and re-knit and I am almost back where I started from. I have reloaded my iPod with podcasts, there is cricket on TV so I must knit like the wind (apologies to Breand's podcast intro).