restless slump of sorts

i find myself restless and discontented at the moment and i'm not sure why. things are actually going pretty well, overall. i've knitted up a couple of projects i had queued - redid the calorimetry headscarf, which came out well this time, and made my first foray into knitting-in-the-round as a preliminary study prior to starting a pair of socks, with these wristwarmers, recommended by tchatchke:

and now i am working on another wisp scarf (like the one in the last post), this time in red and unvariegated, for my mama who is freezing in the midst of an actually cold sydney winter. unlike me who is freezing in the midst of a rather wet british summer. hmm.

post-op recovery has been going really well and i've been up and about and pretty much normally mobile  (although not ready to attempt to carry the vacuum cleaner upstairs yet!) for the past two weeks, which has been grand. i made a good start on transferring all my non-vox blogs across to wordpress in our new hosting account and have learnt a ton of stuff. it's been brilliant working on this stuff again. i do miss the webstuff when i'm not doing it, so i guess i'm in the right business for my dayjob. i even played around with photoshop and pulled together an entirely new template design for one creative thing, which i'm rather pleased with and which has translated ok into wordpress, although i still need to finesse the whole comments situation. but best of all, i finally got all my Business Activity Statements up to date and was able to cancel my registration for Australian GST (Goods and Services Tax), so I don't need to worry about them ever again unless I choose to do so on our return to Australia.

and yet, ever since i finalised the BASes and dealt with the GST, i've felt at a loose end. i guess it's the release from tax trauma that has haunted me for the past 4 years, but i've been unable to settle to anything and have been slightly discontented and grumpy. i thought my trip up to shropshire to visit djeli in his new lair might sort me out, but i fear i have returned home much the same, just feeling a wee bit lonely. i suspect i need to get out of the house. i've been pretty much trapped here on my own for a month now and i think i need to force myself to go forth and do normal-people stuff. oh, and get a job. that too. i did have a couple of jobs vaguely waved at me - the first sounded really good... except that it was in slough, which would take a mere 45 minutes to get to, if i (a) drove and (b) had a car, but by public transport would take a whopping 1 hour and 45 minutes, only 20 minutes of which would be actual train trip, so no time to get anything done on anything at all, really, just 4 wasted hours of every day, so i turned that one down. the other job was certainly more convenient - with an agency near oxford circus, which is a straight run of about half an hour down the central line so i'd be there in about an hour from home, but paying £20 less than market rate for what i do, which i was a little uncertain of, and starting on monday, when i was still in shropshire. that job seems to have evaporated and i'm guessing they found someone who could actually start on monday. so heigh ho. guess i'm to remain a pauper for the moment. sounds like the market's pretty quiet, but i have other things to do here - if only i can pull myself together enough to actually do them!

Satie:The Complete solo piano music

the best thing about all this alone-time is that my creative brain has finally started to fizz again, and while i can't seem to settle to anything properly, i've been messing with a whole bunch of other things - drawing, knitting, trying new recipes (the diet is killing me - i'm so bored with everything, so i've decided that a couple of times a week i can stretch a point and include some soy sauce or do, say, a casserole which includes a little wine and salt) and yesterday i accidentally made a few purchases at the ever-so-tempting oxfam sound and vision shop up at ealing, a dangerous shop where giving in can all too easily be accompanied by the phrases "but it's so cheap!" and "and it's for a good cause!" fortunately the former, as well as the latter, is indeed true, and for the princely sum of £10 and some loose change, i picked up three cds, one of music by the american composer and organist carson cooman (who once emailed me to say he'd play anything i wrote for the organ. i still plan to accost him with this one day when i work out *how* to write for the organ), another of wind concerti by telemann, and the third the complete piano works of erik satie played by jean-yves thibaudet. i do actually own the aldo ciccolini version of the complete satie piano works, but the cds are in storage in sydney, and it never hurts to hear a different version. so far, i'm pretty pleased.