I’m not going to lie, the weather lately has been crap.

Endless rain, dark grey skies, dampness everywhere and freezing cold.

We are stuck indoors although I venture out every morning for a few hours to head over to my parents house to do their cooking and shopping. Today, I vacuumed and mopped their floors; as well as dusted everything.

I do enough so they don’t have to do it all as my mum overcomes her illness which thankfully, she’s now slowly on the mend.

By the time I get back home to our place, I’m knackered. I can’t think straight. All I want to do is to put on my pyjamas, read my books or catch up with my favourite YouTubers (all of whom coincidentally are travelling the world so I live vicariously through them).

My own house looks like a bomb has gone off inside it. I don’t even bother cleaning it, except tidy as much as I can and do a quick sweep of the floor. I made a mental note to do a deep clean once Andrew gets back to work. That, and paint the second bedroom. None of it though, seems a priority for now.

I didn’t even wash our dishes for five days! They were stacked up on the bench in neat piles. Our dishwasher broke down some time back and even though I tried to fix it myself (thanks YouTube!), this time it didn’t work. That’s another expense I don’t need at the moment.

Thankfully, I came home today from my parents and saw that Andrew finally washed the dishes. Happy days!

These winter days remind me of covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Dark days indeed.

It wasn’t the best time for me mentally as my previous posts on this blog show. Anyone who was reading them may have thought that I was depressed. I wasn’t. I was mainly just anxious and sad….with a lot of boredom thrown in. But then, I wasn’t the only one. The world was going through it at the same time.

However, I think I’m affected by the weather too. I get disheartened during wet, dark winters. If we had some snow, maybe that would be entertaining for me for a while. This constant darkness, rain at all hours of the day and night – it’s enough to make you go mad.

So I stay at home and reading, writing, or looking after my parents which is my daily routine for now. The hours go by so quickly. I wake up at 7:00 am every day and before I know it, it’s 6pm and ready for dinner.

Andrew is on leave from work until June and he’s spending all his time reading his books, listening to music and gaming. He’s loving every minute of being at home. He’s the type who could never leave the house if need be. I’m the type who goes utterly stir crazy after a few days when I need to be out in the fresh air. I miss my daily walks in the park because of the constant rain.

Like me, I think he’s waiting for the weather to improve so that he could go out and play more golf.

We had planned to go away for a week for a mini break in the regions, a little fishing town a few hours drive from here, but best laid plans always go awry.

We need to count our pennies now and given that we are landscaping the front yard and the weather is terrible, it seems pointless to go anywhere. Besides, the last thing I want to do is to find work again just for extra money for a holiday. Pfft. (In the meantime I buy lotto tickets 🤩)

I’d rather figure out ways to entertain myself, reduce spending and have my free time than return to work so we can have extra funds for stuff like holidays. (Yes, I do love holidays don’t get me wrong but they’re not a priority at the moment….)

So today I looked at what knitting projects I could do to while away the hours.

One of the vests I knitted Andrew many years ago, he never wore. I had gone through all the old clothes we had to see what could be recycled, recustomised or made new again. This vest is made of alpaca so it’s soft and warm however, he mentioned he found the sleeves too big for him.

I looked at the vest and saw that I could frog (rip it) the sleeves and undo the seams and then knit just those back up again. There’s no need to rip out the entire vest.

So I did that.

My plan is to sew up the seams again but take them in a bit and then knit up around the sleeves with smaller needles and less stitches and hopefully, this will reduce its size a bit so that he can wear this to work.

I’m quite happy with how this vest turned out when I first knitted it – and then knitted up another one for my mother and another one for a gift to a friend but methinks, I’m going to knit one for myself next and use double strand yarn. That is, 8ply high quality merino yarn with a strand of the softest alpaca 2 ply yarn to make the feel and the texture of the vest as plush as possible.

Life’s too short to wear itchy garments. I like my knits to be things that I reach for on winter days and that make me feel cozy, snug and luxurious.