broken arm -- more

blogger has just swallowed half-an-hour's laborious typing. phooey. this time i'll save-as-draft after every paragraph.

i am mending. i'm now in the 4th week -- about half-way through the worst of it. the plaster has been replaced with a brace, freeing the elbow and increasing comfort. the next appt is on 9/11, british style, when it is hoped that physiotherapy can start. the x-rays still looked pretty scary to me last time, but i am told that the humerus doesn't require to be absolutely straight. i'm in favour, generally, of minimum-intervention-type doctoring so i hope for the best.

i have knit a few stitches in recent weeks, without pleasure. i write from london, whither we hope to depart for thessaloniki tomorrow. i'm travelling without knitting, and hope to be able to resume when we get back. the left hand is definately making more of a contribution to life in recent days, helping to hold a book open or steadying a lemon for slicing.

i tried to interest myself in the idea of buying some luscious yarn and knitting myself an EZ bog jacket. wouldn't all that garter stitch qualify as physiotherapy by itself? but i couldn't work up any enthusiasm for the idea, oddly. alexander's fair isle is right out, for now -- it takes two hands to wind skeins into balls, and the left hand is then required to make an active contribution to colour knitting. so i inch forward with the princess, still in row 144. since the task is infinate anyway, slowness hardly matters.

there has been progress on the vkb front though. i've recently acquired 3 more wartime ones, at considerable cost. i think they see me coming, by now. my friend and agent helen, left in charge while we swan off to greece, spotted two more yesterday, including the most recent one i lack. i now own the pivotal issue in which multi-sizing was introduced. the introduction to that one deserves quotation in full, when i can type with two hands again.

non-knit

i discovered 10 days ago that my passport expired on sept 29. mercifully -- the discovery cld just as easily have been made at the check-in desk tomorrow -- the u.s. embassy turns out to have a fast-track temporary-passport system for the careless and stupid who can apply in person and prove that they have immanent travel plans. we were planning to fly from london anyway, also mercifully, so we came down on thursday and i went to grosvenor sq on friday.

it took me a full hour to get into the building, partly because i initially joined the wrong queue. i was in the 9:30 appt. queue, whereas i shld have been in the american citizens' 9:30 appt queue. i thot they might strip search me to make sure it was really a broken arm and not a bomb under my jumper, but i was spared that and once inside all was pleasantness and efficiency. i've got a passport.

when we go to pelion next weekend, we will drive through the vale of tempe, the glen farg of greece. why is the name so resonant? i half-remember a line about "lovliest of vales" but i can't find it. tempe, az, has a useful webpage with quotations from lots of poets, but the one i want isn't there. google also produced a very naughty contribution from Burns, but that isn't it either.

tempe is where apollo pursued daphne until she turned into a laurel. it was from there that the ancients picked laurels for crowning people with. if they still grow there, and we can find a convenient lay-by, we'll take some cuttings.

i think my trouble with blogger was inadvertant right-clicking on a strange mouse.