OUR TRIP TO GERMANY 20.08-30.08 2011

We really enjoyed our trip to Germany. We had hoped that the weather would be better than it has been here in England and it certainly was in that it was dry for the most part. However, the temperatures were in the early 90s for most of our stay!

We both thought that this was a little over the top.

As a result we spent a fair bit of time in big department stores and shopping malls!

However we did see some beautiful sites. The photographs on this page are of Bruchsal, about 40 miles away from our hotel in Mannheim. The big building is part of a palace which I have assumed was the Palace of a long gone king or prints but in fact it was the summer home of a Roman Catholic Bishop! It is good to see where the money that poor people put into the collection boxes in the Roman Catholic churches goes. After all, the message of Jesus was that we ought to be living in the lap of luxury as far as possible and never mind the poor.

I have more photographs of more places that they can wait for a different day as I do not like to make really long blog posts because I do not like to read really long blog posts.

Oh and before I sign off have you noticed how camp the statue is?

Mannheim, Germany

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I cannot recall if I mentioned here that we were going too Germany on holiday. This it's our seventh night away. It has been most enjoyable. We will be home on Tuesday.

LOVE NOT LIKE

BOURNEMOUTH SHOW

Pussy at her second show. She was placed second to my friend Sarah's girl.

Mary Grace was placed 3rd today. Her lowest placement since she has started showing.

It was a very good day and I enjoyed it very much.

BOURNEMOUTH 2011

LEVER / CATHOTLIC KNITTING

CAT FIGHT

EMAIL NASTIES

CASHMERE SILK 1

The sweater is first on it's side but it is rectified.

EXPLOSION OF RAGE

The fires in London are truly shocking. The rioting broke out near our flat, John had a sleepless night but there is nothing to target around our flat. The shopping area has all been pulled down. Nothing was near him except for the sirens and helicopters. Our Home Sec is a hard faced hypocrite. On tv , hard faced, depersonalizing the rioters,speaking crap, the look of disgust for those 'below' her palpable.

More on the Home Sec-she now says she is fully supportive of equal rights for homosexuals, now she is in power, yet she voted AGAINST every measure that aimed at ending the inequality we experience. She isn't the only one who has grown a different face because the PM wants them too. But to sneer the way she is, refusing to acknowledge that the youngsters rioting and looting and generally losing all boundaries are people. the more she and others de-personalize them the less likely it is that any good will come of it. What do we want? vengeance or peace?

We as a society have produced this situation. We have produced the ghettos. We have allowed babies to be born into poverty, born into gang culture. When one has been brought up in this culture, one is brought up in a way of THINKING. The same as we all have. The only difference between them and us is THINKING.

They grow believing the rest of society is the enemy. The 'rest of society' does nothing to disavow them of this because we sneer at them, don't even see them as human.

They see us with our good jobs, fancy cars, fancy tv's, computers etc and there they are with none of these things and no hope of getting it the 'legitimate' way.

Then they see the 'haves' getting away with financial crime. The haves having their taxes cut whilst the poorest among us are having their benefits cut.

I have lived in such areas for over 20 years. I KNOW how different the thinking is. I also know how not different to me and you these people are. I have also seen babies dragged up to become as criminal in their behaviour as those around them because it is NORMAL in their society. The moral landscape is totally different.

I just saw the most disgraceful interview between a BBC reporter and Darcus Howe, a prominent Black Briton. She was trying her best to paint him badly, asking shameful questions with shameful veiled accusations. HE brought her up short on it and shamed her by asking that she showed an old man some respect. Good on him!

Anyway back to the point of this comment: if we continue to de-personalize others, if we continue to deny the affects of child abuse, then what we have seen these last few nights will happen again and will get worse. It will be PEOPLE set upon, not goods and shops.

If it is morally and ethically correct to view our fellows with positive regard then we must do so regardless of their behaviour. A person does not stop being human when they do something we do not like.

I never de-personalized my abusers. They are very much people. I think if I had not seen them as such I would not have recovered. I do not view the men who sexually abused me as monsters but as men who did monstrous things to me. My father is still a man and still my father despite his monstrous behaviour toward me. I don't view as less than human. I don't view my mother and other women involved in my abuse as monsters either.

By viewing any of these people as less than human would harm ME and would let them off the hook because if they are not human we cannot hold them to the same standards as we do human beings. We cannot expect of them the same things we expect of a well balanced human being.

By this de-humanizing we also think we let ourselves off the hook: we don't have to take responsibility at all for others, for the way we allow society to destroy the lives of the young and the poor and uneducated.

What is more we can ignore the fact that society colludes in the abuse of children. despite the outward rage and disgust shown by people, child abuse happens right under our nose because we are either actively involved in it or because we do not want to see or we actively encourage it, such as the emotional and mental abuse of children done by religion and faith schools.

It could be argued the the people who truly are inhuman are those who are doing the judging and condemning and de-humanizing of fellow human beings.

Abuse and being de-humanized causes huge rage. Some of us quash that rage down with sex, drugs, food. Others take that rage out on ourselves by cutting and other forms of self harm.

Rage eventually does what rage does: it rages and we are experiencing this explosion of rage right now.

INSTANT REPLAY

WHAT A BANG!

WATCHING THE VIDEOS

The videos do not download to your computer. They stream from You Tube. If you have trouble and want to view them then go to You Tube and look up Knitman57 and you will see all my videos there.

HD is a problem for many in that their computers can't view it or their connection is not fast enough, hence I will NOT do HD videos again.

xoxo

HAND KNITTED SOCKS

I am going to return to using my DVD camera, not the webcam as this is weird too in it's lack of synchronisation.

BLOOD ON OUR HANDS

TEST-WEBCAM DIRECT 2 YOUTUBE

Quicky In HD

I NOW KNOW THAT HD ISN'T GOING TO WORK FOR THOSE THAT HAVE SLOW CONNECTIONS OR OLDER COMPUTERS. WILL NOT USE HD AGAIN.

SOILED BY SATAN

THIS 'N' THAT

It is now very warm here, about 28c and very sticky. The weatherman says it is not going to last though and it will be cool and wet by Thursday. It certainly must be warm because I am not wearing any base layers. Instead I am wearing one of those long shirt type garments that Asian men wear.

For the last couple of days I have been loading my CD collection onto my Mac Book Pro and then onto my iPod. I imagine it is going to take the rest of the week!

Pussy had to have her baby canine teeth taken out and the vet showed me the teeth and told me that they would never have come out on their own. The roots were about a centimetre and a half long! It did not prevent her eating her dinner as usual!

Fin was also castrated yesterday and he is looking for a good home. He is a beautifully tempered boy and a very well made boy but his head is too broad and his nose too short. Not what one wants in a Lhasa Apso. He is going to make whoever buys him a wonderful pet.

HOT AND STICKY

Summer is here but only for a couple of days according to the weatherman. It has been 28°C here today and it is very sticky.

John bought me a Mac Book Pro at the weekend. It has the new Intel 7 chip. It is a beautiful machine.

Physically my weekend was not good. I had a lot of trouble with pain and with my balance and I was not fit enough to bathe the dogs ready for the show on Sunday. I could not have attended the show anyway!

I am busy putting all of my music collection onto my iPod again. This takes a long time. I do find it absolutely amazing that I can put my whole record collection on such a small object as an iPod. This time I am using Apple Lossless Encoding. It certainly does make a difference in the hearing.

I have a dog show to attend on the 13th of this month, hopefully. Then John and I are going away to Germany. After we were burgled when we were away in Budapest two and a half years ago I stopped telling people that we were going away but I realise that that is completely silly because it soon becomes obvious that I'm not around! I only have to not write on Facebook for several hours before somebody asks if I am okay!

Anyway, I cannot think of anything else to say.

Waffle

CANDID DOGS

UNEMBRACEABLE

GIVING YOUR POWER AWAY

TWAT

WEIRD HAPPENINGS

Today and the previous two days have been rather strange. It would appear that I zoned out on Saturday afternoon.  I have very little recollection of what I did.  John tells me that I was stumbling a lot and that I seem to be completely elsewhere mentally.  The last time we both remember me being that bad was in Aachen in Germany a few years ago.

The reason I asked him about Saturday afternoon is because I realise I only have very vague memories of it and yet I did not take a sleeping pill until the evening.  Even that will work very quickly and John says that within 15 min of taking it I was gone and he had trouble getting me to bed.

The following day at Leeds dog show I was fine.  I was somewhat sore of course and at the end of the showing I had to go back in with all the winners and I needed to call the ring stewards to come and help me get back up on my feet from kneeling down.  I came home and I was my usual exhausted self.  I ate kebabs and some yoghurt and then fell asleep in my chair.

I slept in my chair all night.  Amazingly I awoke this morning and got up with out any aches and pains! I have been for my swim and I have also walk the dogs!

This is an extremely rare occurrence the day after a dog show as I am normally completely done in. Not today for some reason.

My attitude is to enjoy it whilst I can hence I walked the dogs.  Despite how well I feel today I know that I’m not cured and I’m just having a good day.

 

A TOUCHING DAY AT LEEDS

No embellishments. This is what happened.

After Leeds last year I did not go to any Ch shows and thus my friend Angi with whom I go to shows, had to bare all the costs herself. So despite the fact I was not happy about entering this years Leeds, I did to be fair to Angi.

Last afternoon, she called me to say she could hardly walk and wouldn't be going. (She has similar probs to me.) I decided I would still go. Mainly because I was already geared up to go.

Now last evening I took my sleeping pills with yogurt and to my relief I did not taste the drug. It is foul and I cannot swallow it with water and not taste it. Anyway, I remember little else after that!

This is the weird bit: I did NOT set my alarm for 2am. At precisely 2am Luque barked loudly. I awoke with a jump and checked the time and as it was 2am, I picked up my phone to turn ff the alarm only to find I had not set it.

Anyway, as you now know Pussy made her debut at Leeds and she won Minor Puppy Bitch. I was very pleased. She went really well and seemed to take it in her stride tho I could tell she was a little uncertain juts by the set of her tail. I t was up and over as it should be, but slightly flopping down one side. This is her way of showing she is perturbed. She does not do it at home. Then I went in with Mary Grace and she was 2nd.

Gavin Roach was my camera man again for me and I will show the photos later.

Alison Blake really took my by surprise. I was truly touched by this act of kindness.

I had said I was taking Daniel back to car and loading him in and when I had done that, I'd be back t get my dogs and show trolley. Well, I finished loading up Daniel and was coming back into the showground when I saw Gill Watts-Catley and Allison Blake coming toward me. Allison was pushing my trolley all packed! I was gobsmacked. I tell you, that act of kindness saved me a lot of pain and fatigue. Totally unexpected.

I saw loads of other people and said hi and chatted. Again, a few I didn't have a clue who they were but they knew me so I chatted with them and didn't let on that I was thinking WTF are you?

I didn't really start to hurt badly until on the drive home. Am now home, well medicated and will have an early night. A thoroughly good day.

FRAGMENTED SOULS

part of an email response to another person:

It's brainwashing. They abuse you then deny that they did. Others collude in this too so YOU end up being seen as mentally disturbed. Which of course you are because you cannot trust your own perceptions because they have repeatedly undermined you. Told you black is white. Over and over until you really cannot tell what is black and what is white. You get so that when people abuse you YOU apologise. (Abusers most often appear perfectly lovely people and those around them would never see them as the insecure bullies that they are. Oh, they DO see the effects displayed by the victim but they pretend they do not. 1. It is frightening to them that their perception of a person could be so wrong 2 and they cannot bear the thought that the world is not as they see it. So they collude in the abuse by not seeing it.)
So the cycle goes on and on and on unless we break out. Our spirit, deep down, knows the truth and in the end we have to with that truth no matter what. If we do, if we have the courage and the fortitude to face it, then we break free of these insidious bonds and our real selves, hitherto fragmented by doubt and fear and pain, come together as one and begin to shine, with the abusers shrinking back into the dark from whence they came.
I recently saw a video, produced as an example of a positive AH HAH moment, where the man said it was the birth of his daughter and how he realised the was responsible for 'moulding her into the kind of American I want her to be'. I was horrified! Truly. The poor child stands little chance of being HERSELF and certainly even when in adulthood she finally gathers her fragmented self together, her father is unlikely to accept her wholeheartedly because she won't be what HE thinks she ought to be.
Abuse is always about control. Fear. And acting out their own abuse, the pain now forgotten, while it expresses it's self  thru abusing others.
Not all of us react to abuse by abusing others. We abuse ourselves instead.
You know, sexual abuse and physical abuse gets a lot of publicity now and at least is noiw really considered damaging and taboo BUT the most severed damage is done emotionally and mentally and we are still not connecting the dots with this most common abuse.
I noted how pervasive it's effects are. When was the last time someone gave way for you when out driving? Or said excuse me before barging through to get where they are going? yes, we are losing our sense of civility and connection with others. It is a direct result of people closing down due to abusive teaching. Even those who were not physically and/or sexually abused, live in a society that does all it can to prevent one being oneself. Truly the biggest challenge in life is to be who we are, think for ourselves, and accept that our craving to belong and be accepted can only be satisfied by fragmenting our selves and suppressing our feelings and that doing that leads to a  miserable and ultimately wasted life. We can only live by one conscience and that is our own. To try and live according to the conscience of others is destructive and fragments our self yet again.
Not belonging, being rejected by the group (family) is probably the most painful of griefs but it ultimately leads to freedom and joy.

AN ARTIST’S EYES

I am off to have a ‘field’ test on my eyes to test for any blind spots. Eye test last week suggested AMD and Glaucoma. I dare not think about this.

Jack the gardener is here and once he is finished, off I go.

The new electric reclining armchairs are excellent. So much so I fell asleep in mine the first night they were here.

Took me several hours but finally set up the new amp. It was  not easy discovering which wire was which speaker.

I have a dog show on Sunday at Harewood Hall (in the grounds), Leeds. Weather will be dry, we are told, but at 18c not very warm.

I also got to try out new Big Daniel last night and am very pleased with him. More roomy and comfortable.

Tell me, I have wardrobes stuffed full of clothing. I mean all not often worn. Tastes change or I just choose others more often. Up to now I have only managed to re-cycle worn out or ill fitting clothing. Is it okay to re-crycle perfectly good clothes to make room for more or to just make room? I will not be recycling any of the expensive, classic stuff. I basically mean shirts. I have tonnes of them.

xo

COMFORT

IGNORANCE IS NOT BLISS

I write this sitting in my new armchair which arrived today. In fact two of them did. They are electric recliners.

I am astonished by how comfortable I am and how uncomfortable I was before. I find it very difficult to keep still because of pain. I fidget, get up and down, move around. I have already stayed put in this chair for far longer than I ever have on anything else, except my car seat.

Our minds and bodies are amazing. Or maybe it is my ability to disassociate?

My disease started when I was in my 20’s, the mid 80’s. It was gradual and I adapted WITHOUT REALISING there was a problem. John knew I had a problem long before I did but even he didn’t notice straight away.

Anyway, the point I am making is that often one does not know one is suffering until it stops. For example, the sort of pain I have is not acute like breaking a leg. It is more like a constant tooth ache which grows in intensity. I am so used to it that I had to be told to take my drugs. John and friends would notice long before I did that I had gone white and confused. I’d take the drugs and when they work I am shocked at how much pain I was in!

I am having a very similar experience right now. I am shocked at 1. how uncomfortable my previous seating arrangement was and 2. how bad it was posturally. (Spell check says Posturally is not a word. It ought to be.)

Once again I feel extremely fortunate to have been able to get these chairs. I normally cannot go out and spend this amount but fortune smiled on me last week and I wondered how to use it: on taking care of myself.

John says he is perfectly happy with his normal armchair. Ashley, the man who owns the disability warehouse, bet me that within 24 hours John will be using the other one!

WRITTEN OR VIDEO?

Initially I had loads of messages saying how those writing liked the videos. None have written to say they don’t. I have decided to ask anyway. Obviously I cannot please everyone.

The videos are unedited and what I say is spontaneous and unedited. The written me is less spontaneous and is edited.

I will see how many are bothered one way or the other. I am not promising anything. I might come up with a way to please most. It did not occur to me until today that not all can hear from their machines.

EVILS OF SEX

NO SEX

BLAME OBAMA

POSESSED BY DEMONS

PISSING OFF NUNS

A FEW UNEDITED SCENES FROM OUR PARIS TRIP

TEXTURED HAND KNIT

This is my own design. I used Garn Studio's Baby Ull (100% sw merino 350m/100g ). I used a Knit Pro (Pick's) circular needle, 2.75mm size.

BE AFRAID

GETTING HYSTERICAL

THEM NOT YOU 1, 2 & 3

MEDIUMSHIP

Homophobia Kills

WRONG SIDE OF BED

WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?

SHOULD I?

STROPPY!

CURRENT KNITTING 05 07 11

ANNIVERSARY

Posted by Knitman

BANKA MUNDI

These were knitted by Christa Nantz using one of my Knitman's Kitchen yarns, Banka Mundi which is a sw merino/bamboo blend at 400m to 100g.

DANGER AHEAD

GRATITUDE (beware-naughty words used)

MARY-GRACE AT WINDSOR

These were all taken at Windsor Championship Show June 29th 2011. The Judge was Sue Ellis of the famous NEDLIK Lhasa Apso kennel. A breeder of many Champions whose opinion I hold in high regard. Mary -Grace won her class. The picture on the bottom left is Mary-Grace giving me her paw. She does it all the time. I taught her to do it but never had one like her who just does it all the time and if you take it and say thank you, she stops!

Mary-Grace is a mild mannered, very submissive dog at home but in the show ring she switches into 'look at me, aren't I wonderful' mode. A real show dog. It is a trait I have in Whitney and her daughter Pussy. Luque too and he is the sire of Whitney and Mary-Grace and thus grandfather to Pussy. This is a trait I intend to keep.

Mary-Grace also gets executed on the morning of the show. She knows what is going on and can't wait to get into the car. She walks out to the car on her own. Whitney was not so enamoured by the drive but loved the shows and showing off.

A big thank you to Gavin Roach for taking the photographs for me.