The Bluestocking - where the laugh emoji is sorely missed.

[MyrtleLion]

Welcome to the Bluestocking Arms!

The company is always sparkling, the drinks are always sublime, and the cakes are mysteriously free from gluten, sugar, calories, and troublesome booze… not that you’d ever notice. 😏

Our enthusiastic team of gerbil waitstaff is ably supported by capybaras, quokkas, and other charming creatures who excel at their jobs while looking outrageously adorable.

You will find many things to laugh at - usually out loud - so take care not to spit out your tea. We are considering a petition for the return of the laugh emoji - just as soon as the AI gerbils learn how to spell.

New Bluestockingers are always welcome. Men can pop along to The Staunch Ally nearby.

Currently also knitting a Woolly Hug blanket for Bluestockinger Swashbuckled. Details here if you can knit or crochet a square before the 18 July.

www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5350941-woolly-hugs-desperately-sad-news-we-are-afraid-making-a-blanket-for-lovely-swashbuckled-whose-son-has-tragically-died

We didn't get any thunder here but it was very humid. I suppose that explains why Oscar (who is at peak moult) decided to snuggle against my back for the later part of the night. Cat hair everywhere, and when I woke up and said my prayers he purred and drooled on me (he's quite sure the prayers are addressed to him).

The storm missed us too DeanElderberry . The farmers around here are getting quite desperate for rain now

Our 'desperate for rain' stage ended a few weeks ago. We've been through 'will it never stop raining?' and are now at 'every narrow rural boreen is full of agricultural vehicles the size of bungalows being driven by teenagers. In convoy'.

So far this morning is okay, but I don't think I'll do a washing until I'm more confident of the drying.

Last night's knitting.

I don't think it's terrible.

MyrtleLion that’s not at all terrible, it’s looking very good!
My Woolly Hugs yarn has just this minute been delivered.

No rain here despite a storm being forecast for yesterday afternoon and into the evening. It was horribly humid though.
There’s some forecast for this morning, which will no doubt happen while we’re out walking the puppy.

That knitting looks very even, @MyrtleLion , well done!

Drat, I forgot to NC back to my usual Bluestocking one. Maybe next thread, if I remember.

I went outside at about 1am to see if the strawberry moon was still visible. It wasn’t but the light rain we had earlier had stopped. I saw two flashes, less than a minute apart and from the same direction but there was no related sound to tell me if it was thunder or fireworks. I have no explanation.

True, it's twee and neatly swerves the cheating bit.

But prompted by the use of Andrew Gold's Thank you for being a friend on a TV ad recently , I've been listening to some songs from that era, the late 70s/early 80s and reading the lyrics, and there seems to have been quite a theme of exploring interpersonal relationships, usually in a positive way, and not always the moon-june-achey-breaky-heart kind of relationships.

Thank you for being a friend is uber-twee, but very sweet, it is actually a song to a friend, no subtexts or anything.

Lucky Stars by Dean Friedman is cornier than Kansas in August, but is about a couple working through suspicion and insecurity - in a very twee way, but nonetheless...

Dan Fogelberg's Same Old Lang Syne is about a chance meeting with an ex in a grocery store, and I think it's lovely; they are happy to see each other again, but then start to run out of things to say to each other - a realistic touch that saves it from tweeness I think, as is all the bars being closed because it's Christmas Eve so they have to buy beers and drink them in her car.

Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years deals with the same topic but it's mostly about the narrator, there's nothing about the ex and the encounter, except that they drank themselves some beers..

So the Pina Colada song is a bad example of what I think was an interesting period when serious relationship issues and feelings and complexities were dealt with in light radio-friendly pop songs.

Did I miss my vocation in Cultural Studies??😏

We had rain in the night - no thunder that I heard - and more this morning. Lancashire has had some good rain since the dry spell last month, the lawn has recovered. I badly need to do some gardening this weekend, I’ve got some sad pots which didn’t survive the drought and plants I bought a fortnight ago still waiting to be planted.

This is the reverse.

The left highlight is a dropped stitch or something, but hasn't really made a hole.

No idea what the big loop is on the right, except my tension is not great in the final stitch.

The cast on row is loose because there was a tip to cast on using two needles so the tension wasn't tight, but I think it's not helpful.

It's all good learning.

No, especially as I think you said it’s cotton which I think is less forgiving of variation in tension than wool/wool-like fibres with more elasticity.

I’m impressed by the way you’re teaching yourself, practising and learning.

Oh, that helps! Thank you!

Wool should arrive in a couple of days, so I'm glad I'm learning from my mistakes using this rather than the lovely wool.

I do like learning how to do things, but once I can do it, I generally stop. I'm more about learning how it works rather than enjoying what I can do with it.

I was just thinking Marie, that this would have been the prime time for relationship songs that read very differently when you think about them than if you just have them on in the background. Fleetwood Mac in the Rumours period and after, when all their relationships had broken down - I've seen live shows from the early 80s when Stevie and Lindsey are constantly staring daggers at each other while both obviously being as high as a kite.

And lots of the early Billy Joel catalogue is not exactly feelgood.

One of my favourites, though I don't listen to it very often, is The French Inhaler by Warren Zevon. It's not very cryptic, just the story of a feckless woman and a drunk man gradually growing apart. Zevon's son said that, even though it was written as a "fuck you" to his mother, she still got a kick out of hearing it - it probably helped that, when he wrote songs about relationships going bad, he didn't usually spare himself.

Relationships in Fleetwood Mac - now there's a topic for a dissertation!!

I saw concert on telly a while ago - Stevie sang - I don't know the title, it's the 'If you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills' song, accompanied only by Lindsey on acoustic guitar, and at the end they clasp each others' hands, and Lindsey raises Stevie's hand and and kisses it.

There wasn't a dry eye in the house - not in my house anyway, it was so moving to see the survival of respect and admiration, maybe even affection, through all the horrible years.....

Sorry I've got carried away, this is a total derail into 70s pop songs. Then there was the 80s, with gritty social and economic realism, eg. The River by Springsteen, and a sense of yearning and questing e.g. Journey's Don't Stop Believing..

But I won't go there, I promise, end of derail😊

Quick quick change the subject before I lapse back into popsongs!😦

Just to reassure you that dear Swash is always with us in the permanent Bluestocking, here is the wall which I haven't attached yet, so I could get photos of the interior.

Her pirate ship is on the mantlepiece, and there is a map to help her navigate through the difficult journey she is on, and a bigger ship with sails of green, the colour of hope, to come to her rescue if she gets into difficulties..

The portrait over the mantlepiece is just a little image I saw in a magazine, she looked interesting, whoever she is, and was dressed in blue, so she seemed appropriate.

It's looking fantabulous, Marie.

I used to decorate my dolls' house with Great Art i.e. cigarette cards.

Thank you Edith.

Cigarette cards as doll's house art sounds like a great idea. I could do the Long Room at Lords as my next project, using the cricketer cigarette card collection I inherited from somebody

BTW the sailing ship with the green sails [unfortunately furled in the photo so not very green-looking] is the German training ship Alexander von Humboldt. I took photos of it with a 'proper' camera, and when the prints came back there was a sheet of teeny tiny versions of the photos, which I kept because they were so tiny and cute, and 'in case they ever come in handy'.

A decade or so later, one of them did.
It's things like that that make decluttering hard, isn't it?

I can't let the "pop songs of earlier eras" go by without a mention of Janis Ian's "At Seventeen". All the insecurities of being that age and not being in the popular gang. Love it and feel it still.

I once tried chaining the first crochet row using a larger hook, as I read the same sort of advice as you, but that wasn't helpful either.

Did you know unpicking work is known as 'frogging'? Rebbit.🐸

ETA Your knitting is great, Myrtle.

Loving the 'actual' Bluestocking, Marie.

Y'know, sometimes, some of you might get a tiny bit irritated by your Dear Other Halves, they might temporarily get ever-so-slightly on your nerves and you might just for a nanosecond or two think it would be easier to live on your own..

Well, take it from me, it wouldn't.

I live on my own, as I have done for most of my adult life.

I have been driving myself crazy by repeatedly singing 🎶Don't Stop Believing since I mentioned that song in a previous post.
No amount of 'WILL YOU FOR FEXSAKE STOP SINGING THAT SONG!' did any good.

Even attempting a negotiated compromise:
'WILL YOU FOR FEXSAKE AT LEAST SING THE REST OF THE SONG AND NOT JUST 'DON'T STOP BELIEVING' OVER AND OVER AGAIN!'
didn't work.

Nobody to blame but myself

The wool arrived!

It was vacuum packed and then suddenly there was wool!

Yay!

Take it from me, the presence of an other half is no protection against such insanity. Although I have been banned from singing Mary’s Boy Child all the way on the drive between South Wales and London so perhaps I am arguing against myself.

Marie, it could be worse...

I have sometimes found myself doing the odd song, let's say Goldfinger, in the style of a dramatic recitation. I will argue in mitigation that at an impressionable age I listened to William Shatner's album The Transformed Man, and never quite got over it.

Hello! Tentatively peeking my head around the door. I heard there was nice things happening here from the WoolyHugs thread? Can I crochet quietly in a corner?