Knitting away the hours....

Ok so it's taken my 6 days to get into this month's challenge, but there's a very good reason for that:

I had to wait for my Grandma to come visit me.

Taking-up: Knitting
People believe that your ability to do certain things is dependent on how well your parents do something. As an example, a number of up and coming rugby league players have fathers who were also successful in the field, musician's children tend to quite excel with music, and we all know about the familial six-degrees-of-separation that happens in Hollywood.

The women in my family are quite creative and crafty. My mother and aunts can sew with the best of them, knit, mosaic, paint, do ceramics, and let's not forget, make their own home-made cheese and yoghurt. They inherited these abilities from my grandmother and their mothers (for my aunties through marriage - they're also particularly handy!)

I've also noticed that my female cousins tend to have some aptitude in some - not all - of the above skills and have employed them at some point during their lives thus far.

I think I was adopted.

I can't sew, I stick more tiles to myself than the design when mosaic-ing, my painting could be outshone by a four year old and I struggle to make consistently decent cakes so it's safe to say cheese is way, way outside my skill level.

I received a 'D' in year 7 Design & Technology when we had to make an apron: I told my parents that clearly my teacher shouldn't be teaching if she thought her work was only worth a 'D' since she did most of it herself.

To prove that I can mix it with the rest of the fam' I've decided to take up knitting this month and after a couple of glasses of wine, sat down with my grandmother - under the dubious glances of my mother, aunty, husband and father - and began to re-learn the basics.

Five hours later over both Friday & Saturday nights, and this is what it resulted in:

Not bad for a first attempt right? My ultimate goal is to knit a full scarf but I'm not allowed to start on the "good wool" until I've mastered 10 rows of the coloured stuff without a mistake....

This could take longer than a month.

Giving-up: Gossip Mags / Entertainment news
I'm slightly ashamed that on any given day I could probably tell people more about what's going on in Hollywood than in my own country. Ok, that may be an exaggeration, but I am more inclined to read 'Who", "New Idea" and "Marie Claire" instead of "The Australian" "Financial Review" and "Time."

It's not because of some dream to look like the people on the cover - nothing is worth exercising four hours a day, six days a week and living on lima beans and wheatgrass for - or because I necessarily want their lifestyle (though the thought of a chauffeur does appeal slightly)

I just find the whole concept of Hollywood and life in the public eye fascinating.

How could I cope with my photo being splashed across the pages of magazines with "bulimic" next to it one day and "next-patron of Weight Watchers?" the next? Would I like to see pics of me getting the morning paper / loaf of bread / carton of milk, being the #1 trending topic on Twitter?

So in an effort get more locally-focused - and to save some cash - I'm giving up on buying, reading or looking at anything gossip mag-related.

I'm not including those apparent 'reality' mags - That's Life! and Take 5 - as since my month of entering competitions, I've become quite fond of doing all their puzzles.

Plus, hubby would have withdrawals if there were no puzzle books in the house!