Hi!

I'm a 29-year old female (it doesn't feel right to say woman, 'cause it doesn't make sense and I'm way too old to be called girl, so let's stick with female) and I'm living around Ghent, Belgium.

What's going on so far?

OK, let's start. I'll try to recapture my life in a couple of sentences.
You allready know I'm 29 and female (duh!). I come from a very messed up family and that's probably why I'm so messed up too (and that's one of the explanations for all the 'interbrackets' and stuff). My dad is a nice guy, but nothing more and my Mum, well, she's my Mum (weird, I just noticed the Capital changes, well, just visualizes it perfectly). I left the house the day I turned 18, and that says enough.
The moving-out was a blessing for our relation, since I had the means to keep her out of my business and to leave when the conversation went sideways. No bad things about her, she's just who she is, and I've learned to live with it, but it's difficult sometimes. But she's allways there when I need her and I'll allways love her for that.
Whoo, getting a bit emotional there, sorry about that. That sums about my childhood.
Since then, the usual, a couple of good jobs, a couple of crappy jobs, a couple of good relationships, a couple of bad relationships.
The important stuff happened in around the last 5 years: I quit my crappy job at McDonald's and went to college again. I didn't graduate highschool before, but managed to get it through exams of the Ministry, so it was now or never, I was almost 25, hating my job, having a great girlfriend (yes, you read correctly), so I found the courage to do it.
I went for a Bachelor-degree in Education, I wanted to teach Music in highschools and solmisation in after-school Music programs. But my piano skills were too inadequate and my timetable too busy (I had to go from Ostend or Bruges to Ghent every single day by public transportation, which is HELL!) to continue the solmisation-part, so I switched to Music and English for highschool in the third year (I would have to do my second year over for Music and start my first English that year).
In those two years that had passed I joined a fraternity (yeay! ), and quit my good relationship (sad ) and got into a few flings within the fraternity and flung right into the arms of my now fiancé (yeay!  ).
I quit my studies, well, actually, my finances ran out, so I had no more means to get to school, and I had to get working again.
The new relationship went well, so we moved in together and moved from Ostend to Ghent, where his family lived. You can think that I didn't really need to have mine around the corner, so I had no objections, his family is really, really nice.
Found a new job 2 weeks after the move, in Ostend....  So the trainrides from hell were just finished and they started all over again, but in the opposite direction. And guess what? It sucked as much as it did the first time!
But on personal matters is everything blooming, we're getting engaged (no date set, and no priority) and thinking about family-expansion (natures doesn't want her date set and priority).
My soon-to-be brother-in-law and his wife are off course expecting right away from the moment they start talking and she's stopping her pill, we're not having such luck, and that is sometimes a bit frustrating.
My ex-boyfriend (one of the other good relationships and is still a very close friend of mine) knew of a good jobopening in the governement. We all know that those are the ones you're looking for if you don't have a degree above highschool in these fantastic economic times. So I applied, and what do you know, I got in!
Out of 200 applicants, they had 5 vacant functions, and they chose little ol' me!
The job is a very new world to me: marine navigation (so sorry if I blab about boats or bridges or ports or other weird stuff). And there's a whole course attached to it... Yeay, out of the schoolbanks, into the schoolbanks.
But happy me, a couple of very frustrating months later and we're now, present day. The course is almost finished, and I'm getting ready to do my actually job, alone and single-handed.
And that's exactly what it is: alone and single-hande, 'cause I'm all alone in the room, mostly even all alone in the building.
And there's not allways that much to do. So I need a time-consuming hobby, that's easy to pull away attention sometimes and easy to carry around.
And so we come to an old love of mine: knitting. There's a baby coming into the big family, so perfect!

The knitstory

I learned to knit, like so many of us, in elementary school. I actually was kinda not bad in it, which made it the first 10 I actually deserved in arts and crafts (I was an 10 ++ student somehow and I got a frustrating 10 even if I didn't complete the damn things they made us do).
And I actually kinda liked it too. So I asked for my Mum, who knitted regurarly, for some woolies and needles and started my very first ambitious project. I must have been around 7 years old or so? I started my own hand-knitted scarf for my dad!
I learned quickly that I didn't care much about knitting sockinette (it's boring), so I asked my Mum for some advice. She showed me some knittingbooks with a variety of different stitches. (How motherly of her to give me some books, again screwed up family, screwed up relationships.) So I started to experiment with the patterns and some colors (I had gotten two out of her: pumpkin-orange scruffies and some light grey scruffies, but hey! they matched, so I didn't care much, I was knitting!). So I quickly learned it was all just combining knits and purls or switching threads and I was doing intricate patterns and jaquard-stuff.
But long story short, I didn't have a lot of patience, I was knitting very slowly, and it took my about 7 years until I decided it was finished and it measured about 70 cm long (given it's with of 30 cm, it was a ridiculous thing). But dad pretended to be happy and it probably ended up between Mum's woolies, but it was the thought that counted.
With those last stitches my love for knitting got in hibernation. I made some cross-stitch cussions in the past decades but, that's it.

The blog

But now where here: I need my new hobbie and we're about 15 years later. The allmighty internet has arrived. Even people without knitting-friends can find easy acces to tips and helpfull tricks from all over the world. And that's why I started this blog too.
On one hand to help people like me, who don't really know anyone to help them in person, and rely on the web to find their way around difficult patterns, or that one little mistake you can't find.
And on the other hand: it's a way for me to blab about my progress to people who might actually care. I love my fiancé very much, but he tends to tune out of every conversation his attention is not really required and is about something that he really doesn't give a damn, like knitting, and such. And my walls don't seem to have ears. So I'm lending your eyes instead. Hope you don't mind.
I look for everything now on the net, in post like these and other websites, so please, feel encouraged to throw in your thoughts.
Every piece of advice, little trick or hint can be helpfull.

I hope you have a good time reading my (sometimes twisted) thoughts.

Bijlagen:
http://www.ravelry.com/people/antheabe