just the very quickest of quick updates as it's my birthday weekend and i'm preoccupied with a million and one things at work which seems to get busier each and everytime i go in. so anyway, it's been my birthday and i've been gifted with lots of lovely things, none of them wool related unfortunately. but despite having very little time to myself of late both i and lsb have been able to finish knitting projects, he finished his milk jug striped scarf with a little help from me and i finished a non-blog kid silk haze scarf i'd been working on for the past few weeks.

i really hope people will forgive me for not having updated for the past week and a half but i've been so busy of late that sitting down to type this is the first time i've sat down today, and probably the first time i've drawn breath in even longer.

working on a psychiatric intensive care unit is so much busier than i'd ever imagined, the rates of admission and discharge are pretty high, and as if that wasn't enough i had to deal with my first missing patient (who thankfully turned up, and is by this time hopefully on their way back to the unit). i should probably explain a little bit for those people who aren't really up on modern psychiatric hospital layouts - the psychiatric intensive care unit (or picu) is a special locked ward where people who are very acutely ill are cared for when they can't be managed on an open (or unlocked) ward, usually all the patients on this type of ward are held there under sections of the mental health act, for a variety of reasons a list of which is probably about as long as my arm - the short version of which is that the patients there are generally ill rather than bad, and in most cases the locked door is to protect them from themselves rather than to protect society from them. there's usually set goals for a patient to achieve in order to be discharged from a picu and from there they go onto open wards if they still need hospitalisation and occasionally patients are discharged back into the community, into their own homes with a support package from community nurses and social workers. it's quite an interesting area really and one i'd hope to think about working in full time someday.

just onto my needles is a scarf in ann budd's basketweave pattern, available over on knittingdaily if you're a member. pictures to follow once i get my camera back from lsb, i will tell you though that it's done in vibrant green colonia140 from handpaintedyarn and after the first repeat looks rather nice. i'm not sure whether it's for me or lsb yet (i'm running out of ideas for his hannukah presents with under a month to go, so it's possible he's going to have a knitted scarf for his last present). talking of lsb, knitting and scarves a quick update on his own knitting project, he's doing really very well on his milk jug striped scarf and he's pretty close to getting me to cast off for him.

Ratify The Convention Against Trafficking

Ratify The Convention Against Trafficking