Tag: microcrochet

285: quit bugging me

There are many things I like about summer but mosquitoes are not one of them. No matter how much go-away spray you use before you go out for a walk the little beasts always manage to find the single square centimetre you missed – the bit where your bra strap moved, or (as has happened to me a lot recently) they fly up your trouser legs and savage the backs of your knees. I’m sporting five on my arms and one on my neck at the moment. I’m sure they play a vital role in the ecosystem or something but if they could do it without nibbling me I’d appreciate it.

They are the price you pay when you’re staying by a river and want to go out bat hunting at dusk, however. After London sister Tan spotted a Daubenton’s Bat on a walk along the Blavet earlier this year we were quite keen to find some more. Although the weather has changed from summer heat to muggy drizzle, we’ve made it out a couple of evenings this week for a wander along the tow path.

It’s been magical – there will be a glimpse of one bat skimming along the river near the bank or zooming over your head, and then suddenly they’ll be everywhere – chasing each other in circles, divebombing the river or flitting in and out of the trees. We’ve found that the bridges are popular bat haunts, and we’ve stood for ages on the towpath by the road bridge watching them zip around on eye level with us catching insects. They’re so batty they look like toy bats – the sort of bat shapes that Laszlo turns into in What We Do In The Shadows or Count Dracula in Hotel Transylvania. The battiest bats, in fact.

Bonus points have been scored for the kingfishers catching a last few snacks before heading off into their holes for the night, an indignant heron who took off from the path in front of us, a muntjac deer watching us from the other side of the river before disappearing into the crop growing behind it. There’s a coypu couple who swim among the waterlilies near the bridge, chuntering away to themselves as they potter around doing whatever it is coypu do. The owls start muttering to each other shortly after the bats come out.

No sign of the hen harrier or the short-toed snake eagle so far, but there’s a week to go. The two cockerels who live on the same lane have been much in evidence, shouting at random times throughout the day, and the cherry tree outside Dad’s office window has been alive with long-tailed tits while I’ve been shortlisting job applications over three days this week. It’s great that so many people want to work with us but by Thursday afternoon my eyes were crossed and I was thoroughly fed up with AI generated introductory paragraphs. Still, I’m looking forward to meeting the interviewees.

Things making me happy this week

  • Not having to think about what to feed people for dinner
  • French bread and patisserie, especially my favourite religieuses
  • Time to do some fiddly crochet in the sunshine – these peas in pods are crocheted with perle thread and a 1mm hook. I’ve made some bigger ones as well, with friendly looking peas that pop out of their pods.
  • French supermarkets and their fruit and veg sections

Various family members are arriving today and it’ll be lovely to see them, and hopefully over the next week we’ll see more exciting wildlife (that we aren’t related to). I’m assuming my Things and my Beloved a) have noticed I’ve gone and b) are missing me at least a bit. Two of them have texted me with demands for money, so business as usual there.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading

The Book of Doors/The Society of Unknowable Objects – Gareth Brown

Lies Sleeping/The Hanging Tree – Ben Aaronovitch (Audible)

Miss Percy’s Definitive Guide to the Restoration of Dragons – Quenby Olson

63: we have the technology

Is it me or has it been the longest four day week ever? It’s been half term, and as we have now vacated the museum in order to hand it over to the people who will transform it I have been working from home. I must confess that Things 2 and 3 have spent a large part of the week building new worlds in Minecraft (or whatever it is they do) and I have not done much with them. With the help of a colleague I have, however, managed to mark 1600 objects as ‘NONE’ in the content management system, and a further 150 or so as ‘NIP’ (or ‘not in place’ for those objects that have gone into temporary storage for the next couple of years. That’s felt like a pretty big achievement! Now – the last part of the task – I just need to find anything that the system still thinks is in a cupboard at the museum and mark those as NONE or NIP as well.

Things 1 and 2 have managed to spend some time with their friends, which has been good for them, and their older sister came over in the week with her boyfriend for a barbecue. Apart from torrrential rain all day on Friday we have been pretty lucky with the weather. Their oldest sister and her little boy will be joining us today and I have promised lasagne for tea, which meant I left the village (gasp!) yesterday to have a sneaky mooch around the charity shops before a Tesco trip. Perhaps that’s why this week has felt so long: it hasn’t been broken up by being on site. Teams meetings just aren’t the same.

The next couple of years will see many of us continuing to work from home, however, as the way we work changes post-pandemic. It’s been hard for some companies to grasp that you don’t need the physical presence of your staff five days a week; we aren’t, in many cases, producing physical outputs as in the days of the factory. Increased connectivity, through applications like Teams and Zoom, mean that we can have ‘cross-site’ meetings effectively without being in a physical space. For those of us who were expected to be the ones travelling to the other sites it means we can meet with our colleagues without adding 40 minutes travel time each way to the meeting which was the pre-Teams reality. Over the last months we have been making use of apps like Google’s JamBoard and Miro, which have allowed us all to contribute to brainstorm sessions with virtual post-it notes (who doesn’t love a post-it thinking session?) and to collaborate on documents. I know this technology has been around for a while, but it’s taken a pandemic for us to catch up with it! You do lose some of the energy that comes from being in a physical space together, of course, but hopefully we can manage some of those too.

There are, of course, fewer people taking up desks in the museum sector at the moment – as well as many others, of course. The Museums Association redundancy tracker is showing 4,126 redundancies that have been “directly or indirectly attributed to the pandemic”. There will be more as recovery progresses. The appetite for indoor activities is, perhaps not surprisingly, lower than expected, especially in areas where virus mutations are high and there are questions around the efficacy of vaccines against these variants.

One outcome I have seen from the slashing of the workforce is a growing culture of toxic positivity. People are so worried that their jobs will be on the line in the next restructure/recovery/redesign programme that they are afraid to say no to anything. The result of this, of course, is an overload of work without the usual team back up: no successful event is delivered single-handedly, yet that’s exactly what’s being expected now as ‘business as usual’ is restarting while other teams settle down into their new structures. For any public event to work you need social media and marketing support, design support, bookings team support, on-the-ground support, support from within your own team, increasing technical support if your event is online – just for starters.

When one of these things isn’t in place – or when teams have been so decimated that they can no longer work responsively but need several months lead-in – then you have a problem. This is especially the case when everyone is competing for the same severely shrunken audience demographic: the one with the dinosaurs is going to win as dinosaurs don’t need marketing. So you have people trying to maintain pre-pandemic levels of engagement, with post-pandemic levels of support: a recipe for failure if ever I saw one. But what can you do when you worry that any sign you’re not coping will be either ignored or seen as lack of competence? So, toxic positivity reigns – and with it rising levels of anxiety, depression and other mental health problems.

Sunshine superwoman

My stress relief, as always, is making stuff: I have been turning off the laptop at the end of the day and sitting in the garden for an hour or so before making tea, enjoying the sunshine and decompressing with some crochet or cross stitch. I am still working on the Hobbit piece in between making gifts, and as May is out of the way I updated the Temperature Tree. Like April, the month hovered in the mid-teens so there’s a lot of the same greens until we get to the last few days. Hopefully this month I can add a new colour as we hit the dizzy heights of 24 and 25 degrees in half term.

  • Amazing lupins
  • Glowing poppy
  • The view from my chair

I have also been playing with some micro-crochet to create tiny toadstool jars, using this pattern found on Ravelry. I do love these tiny pieces – fiddly but so pretty. The first toadstool image is the original one I made – the others are the second version, where I added a tiny bit of stuffing to the toadstool cap and stitched the stalk to the ‘grass’ to make it stand up better. I also used a smaller bottle for the second version.

Swimming is another destressing activity: yesterday’s circuit of the lake was probably my slowest ever, as I stopped to look at the coot family with four tiny balls of fluff cheeping away, the mamma duck with her five stripy ducklings, another coot family and and a reed warbler. I had an hour while my friend was in a coaching session, so had no reason to race about, and I felt very serene when I came out at the other end. The water temperature was 18 degrees, so my skins dip at the end was quite long too.

So that’s been my week! How was yours?

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Pel and the Bombers/Pel and the Pirates – Mark Hebden

Attention All Shipping – Charlie Connelly

The Strawberry Thief – Joanne Harris (Audible)