When is a UFO not a UFO ...?

Bit of a quiet week so far, following a bit too much knit-brain activity last week ...

The pink top is languishing at the moment, cos I wasn't really geared up to knit it in the first place - I mean it was on my to-do list, but not just yet. I think it was having knitted too much pink that was doing it, so I've put it aside for a week or two till I get my enthusiasm back ... (but this is not the UFO in the title, read on!)

So instead, have nearly finished a curly whirly scarf, but knitting this time, which I find a bit quicker, and because I'm being virtuous, this one is all stash-busting (to whit, one ball of rowan chenille in black, one ball of plum coloured Jaeger merino, some of that sparkly rowan stuff that's like goldfingering in damson - can't remember it's name off-hand - then a ball of something that has been in the stash for about 20 years (purple acrylic/wool blend with a thin thread of lurex running through it - bought it in a sale here in UK, but it's German in origin, and finally, some of a cone of thread with little viscose and lurex tufts in green and purple shades, which I found on eBay a couple of months back. At least it's not pink anyway! Just about half-way through the cast-off row now, which I am making "lettuce leafy", by upping 1 stitch between each actual stitch, just before casting it off.

In between, I'm reading 'Bleak House' but only a few chapters at a time, as near as I can to the original serialisation scheme when Dickens first published it in his magazine. This way of doing seems to be working well for me, I find, cos apart from anything else, the book is so damn heavy that more than about 4 chapters in any one hit makes my wrists ache abysmally. Should say that I'm enjoying it, and of course the current dramatisation on BBC helps a lot, so I'm not constantly trying to remember who all the thousands of characters are ...

Work has been fairly dreary, as all I'm doing this week is processing stuff for our year-end deadline on Friday, though thinking about it, I was doing much the same thing last week, just a different deadline that's all.

And so to the UFO of the title - we've recently discovered how to get a lot of our favourite old computer games to play under Windows XP, using a nifty little utility called DOSBox. Most of my favourite games fall under the strategy game heading, and strangely most of them come from one company (Microprose, now sadly taken over by Hasbro), so much of this week, I have been playing UFO (known as X-Com in the States), and having a thoroughly good trip down memory lane shooting sdown UFOs, killing aliens, and generally making a nuisance of myself all over the planet - and the Really Good Bit is that son, who normally reckons he is good at computer games, has apparently confessed to DOH that he is AMAZED at how good Mum is at this game ... life in the old bat yet, apparently!