April.

Dawn, I think you’re right – I spent too much time with the computer yesterday. Scanning my mother’s book about Brigham Young’s wives is fascinating, and I want to go on squeezing in as many pages-per-day as possible. But Palm-work continues.

I’ve probably already mentioned that I failed to grasp, for all too long, that Documents to Go not only doesn’t support endnotes but also, reasonably enough from its point of view, strips out the numbers in the text which show where the notes used to be. I was fully three-quarters of the way through the mamouth job of copying all the notes into the actual text, before I grasped that I would also have to go through each document inserting the numbers in the appropriate places.

So I’m still doing that, and there’s much still to do.

I’m nearly finished with the parallel task of identifying files to Document To Go which will thereafter be kept up-to-date automatically on Palm and computer both. That job is slow and tedious – I have to sit there dealing with silly error messages. The actual “hot-sync” is automatic and doesn’t need me.

The Palm will be ever with me, because I am responsible for keeping it up to date with what my husband is doing, and keeping his computer up to date with changes he makes on the Palm. But once those blasted numbers are in place, there’ll be less to do.

One achieves all this, Dawn, by neglecting housework.

Knitting

Here’s the current state-of-play with my sister’s shawl – the roundels finished, the stitches counted, augmented by four, and equipped with markers in the right place for the lace to come. Today’s work will begin with frogging 50 stitches or so: don’t try to establish a new lace pattern at the end of a long hard day. The preceeding rows are garter stitch. It’s not a disaster.







Last night, last thing, I went into the sitting room to fetch something and found, when I got back to the bedroom – adjacent – that I had the Princess shawl yarn around my ankles. That could well have been a disaster. Miraculously, the yarn didn’t break, and no stitches were pulled off the needle. The episode was too brief to count even as a mauvais quart d’heure but it was in that category.






The Heirloom Knitting Yahoo group to which I belong, has a “treasure chest” from which random blessings are rained on members from time to time. I am trying hard to contribute to it, to relieve my conscience by reducing my stash of lace yarn, but they seem to think that the transatlantic postage which would be involved would be too much for me. So far, I’m stuck, because I don’t know the address to send my stuff to, but I’ll keep trying.

Katherine, I’m delighted to hear that you can listen to Radio Rai, too. I’m not getting much from it, this morning. Part of the trouble is that they talk about their election a lot, and I’m not sure I know the vocabulary for that, even in print. But I’m sure you’re right that the rhythms of the language will help my comprehension in the end.