New car: Baldrick

Ugh, the past few days have been far too busy and I've been doing stuff.

The garage called me at work yesterday, telling me exactly what they told me on Friday: more research was needed to see why the cylinder was malfunctioning, it wasn't the spark plugs, etc.
We've been pouring money into Aurum for a while now, each time hoping it would run smoothly and we could look forward to a lot of kilometers without problems. At the last APK (mandatory yearly check-up) we had 1100 euro in repairs and not six months later the engine is giving us trouble.

Step-brother Raphael, who is a car mechanic, said we could have it fixed, hope it's not too expensive and sell it on. Meanwhile, he had a Nissan Micra that is perfectly kept and only had 80thou or so on the odometer.

So I picked up our new (light grey, ugh) car this morning and we're hoping to sell the Clio through the dealership.
We're still trying to pick out a name, I'm thinking about a name starting with "B" since Aurum was my first privately-owned car.

The Micra has a little bit of an attitude, though nothing like what Aurum had. It's a workhorse with a load "vroaaaaaaaaaar" in his engine, and it can do 120 kph without a twitch. We're currently stuck on Bob, Bacchus, Bruce or ...
(Bob for Blackadder, Bruce for Finding Nemo)

We're calling him Baldrick!

Serpentine Toe-up Socks

This is the second pair of socks I knitted from the free online class by Lucy Neatby on Craftsy, and I can't recommend it enough. It's a fun series of videos to watch and even if you've knitted socks before, there might still be some tips and tricks that will surprise you.

This sock has a lot of details, it was knitted toe-up and has a pretty round toe. The pattern on the top of the foot starts pretty early on and continues up the leg. There's ribbing on the sole to keep the sock snugly around your foot and part of the pattern is repeated on the back of the leg.



The heel is a short row garter stitch heel, which was new for me. I used scrap sock wool in a matching colour, but I ran out halfway through the second heel, so I used the tail I cut off "in between" the socks -- I wanted my stripes to match so I had to play with the point to cast on for my second sock.

The second sock is knitted slightly more loosely than the first, so at the garter stitch cuff and I-cord bind-off you can see a difference between the two, but I really don't mind. This was more an exercise to show [person from my family who nags about details such as these] that I can match stripes when I want to.



I'm really happy with the learning process, and I hope I'll be wearing these often when the weather turns colder. And I'm looking forward to the third pattern from this series!

Cross-posted to knitting