Knitting

In the past 2 months I've had the fridge-freezer fall apart on me - LITERALLY *ON* me!!! - and had to replace it, for just over £300, almost exactly a month ago.

Before that at the beginning of April it was one front tooth which broke off at the gumline, and which I've finally had sorted out; I now have the One Tooth, a single front tooth on a plate, though so far it's mostly decorative. I can glue it in place with Fixodent, which is nasty muck, and the plate leaves my mouth sore. Unglued, the tooth (and/or plate) just wobbles around, I can't bite on it, and my lower teeth hit the underside of the plate. I suppose it may improve when the socket is fully healed (the extraction was a week ago), but I am pessimistic. Anyway, that little lot was just over £95 - I have an HC3 form, which gives me partial relief on health charges, but it expired, usefully (NOT), in the middle of treatment, which meant delaying things till the replacement arrived.

Yesterday - May 28th - I had an email from my opticians, Specsavers, saying my NHS eye test was due on May 26th. The email did not contain a time-machine, though, so I booked (online) for today. I went, I was tested, and there's enough difference in the right eye to need new lenses. There was a lot of back & forth to sort out how much I had to pay (HC3 rules again - 'no, it's this much deduction, but we charge X for this, not Y', and so on), and I've forked out £342 for a new pair. Same frames as before, same spec except new prescription.

I would like nothing else to break, break down, or otherwise need replacing for at least the next 3 or 4 months, please. I has a grumpy.

In Knitting Knews, I am reknitting yet another pair of socks, this time with *spit* cables, though I have fiendishly worked out how to make those go away for the rest of the socks, having reached the heels. They have to be worked one at a time because of the 2-stitch (1 stitch to front, 1 to back...) cables going in different directions on each one, but as soon as I've finished the second heel I'll put them back on a single needle to work down to the toes. I also have another pair of toe-up socks, which so far have been bus-knitting, as the feet are just plain knit; but when I've turned the heels on these, they'll have to go onto separate needles, because they have a stitch pattern which spirals around, so won't work if they're being magic-looped on one needle. I also have a fiddly project from a friend - she found some single-ply laceweight silk in her stash, which she gave to another friend, but the skein fell off the swift as she was winding it, and the last bits tangled themselves. I currently have both ends on separate nostepinnes, and am happily untangling it.