Safely back. We were lucky in our weather – three warm, get-something-done-outdoors days. Yesterday we drove back through serious rain.

On Saturday my husband went off to a stand of larches he planted many years ago, now towering trees of which a couple came down in last year’s storms. He was tidying the whiskers off one such, to make it ready for the sawing-up of the trunk.

I went to fetch him home for tea. When he (eventually) agreed to come, he tripped over the very tree he was working on, and fell. No harm was done, on the soft forest floor – except that he couldn’t get up again. His lower legs don’t function at all well these days.

We struggled for half an hour or more, trying various ploys. Eventually the light began to fail, and I said I thought I should go for help. The notion made him angry enough to supply the needed adrenalin, and he got to his feet.

No harm done. He went back to his larches on Sunday morning. But it was scary.

iPad

There is a good deal to report on the knitterly and vegetable-grower-ly fronts but I shall stick to the iPad for today.

I got knit.wear into it at the very last moment on Thursday. I’m not really very impressed, except that I like Annie Modesitt’s kimono.Again, I’m glad not to have it adding to the piles of knitting magazines in the bedroom.

My resources for the iPad are “iPad for Dummies” and  “The 2012 iPad Handbook”. And you guys, probably best of all.

The Handbook is one of those things that you find on a newsstand, looking like a magazine, and – like Interweave’s Holiday Knits – you only realise when you get to the checkout that it’s priced like a book, and not a cheap one. It has its uses, though, and it’s British.

While I was floundering, I noticed something in it about Zite. Zite is a free app, from the App Store, which will make a magazine for you. You get three pages of all the things there are magazines for – cars and cookery and celebrity gossip and gardening, on and on. At the end is a box into which you can type “knitting”. (You can have as many sections as you like in your magazine, and change them any time.)

And then you have a knitting magazine. It’s simply brilliant. We have come to take Google for granted as if it were a force of nature – it is salutary to re-discover how clever an algorithm can be. Unless there really is a roomful of old ladies in Florida or California, scanning the internet all day long and saying to each other, “Do you think Jean would like this?”

Articles are drawn from blogs, journalism, and commercial pages. I learned about  “Jane Austin Knits” from Zite before I had the email from Interweave.

There’s a separate free app that lets you cut things out and keep them. I’ve done that with (among other things) an article about “Craft Activism” which has a clothes-line full of Mary Lou Egan’s mittens on the cover. Hey! I know her!