Well, Greek Helen got here through the storm and whizzed through a remarkable amount of accomplishment in her 64 hours in GB – including visiting a potential school for one of her boys in York, halfway from here to London. Rumplestiltskin himself would have stood amazed at the amount of ironing she got done. It was wonderful to have a shoulder to lean on, instead of being ever the lean-ee.

The storm was fully as bad as forecast, but kept strictly to the script. The Edinburgh airport website has what purports to be an arrivals board (maybe they all do). Nothing landed during the afternoon but Helen’s flight, timetabled for 8:30 p.m., was shewn all day as “scheduled 21:30” – which was a good deal better than “cancelled”. The storm died down in the early evening, as predicted, and she landed at 21:40. From her point of view, the delay was all spent in Athens airport. Her trip home yesterday was utterly smooth.

And here we are with the solstice looming. I’m doing well with Christmas cards – five or six a day, and I’ll finish by the weekend. Miss a day, and I’m in trouble.

Knitting is well in hand. I finished the first hat and thought it, simply, perfect. (It’s from Vicki Square’s “Knit Great Basics”, a book of schematics for various basic shapes in a good range of gauges. There are other such books out there. This was the first one I stumbled across, and I use it a lot.) So I didn’t try to translate Jared’s Wanderer cap from “Weekend Hats” after all. Apart from gauge considerations, it involves a lot of purling which is less than soothing on a short circular.

I had a rare burst of common sense, and weighed the finished hat on the digital kitchen scales, followed by weighing the remaining madelinetosh yarn. Not enough. So the second hat is striped, with Paton’s “Tapestry”, wool and soybean, from stash. Do they still make it? I should finish this evening.

The only serious source of gloom just at the moment is that my husband has a cold and cough, which came upon him suddenly on Saturday afternoon. He has had his flu injection and isn’t feverish and is alert and able to eat and read and express opinions. I don’t, so far, think we need a doctor, and there’s not much doctors can do for colds anyway. But anything is serious at 86 and I am concerned.

There is a bright side even to that: we don’t have to go out for exercise-walks.

Miscellaneous knitting-related

Thinking of the sweater I am going to design when Scotland wins the Calcutta Cup in ’12, I am surprised to find that Dale Heilo yarn doesn’t seem to be available in the UK. So far, I have failed to find the words which would prompt Google to come up with continental suppliers, and the Dale website itself isn’t much use. I’m sure, with the help of a Ravelry group, a solution can be found. I have used the yarn, and I want it for this imaginary sweater, but I think I got it from Patternworks and paid duty to re-import it into Europe. I’m not going to do that again.

Kate D. has a super new pattern called Boreal, ideal for country walks this time of year. I don’t know the yarn she uses, Artesano Aran, 50/50 wool-alpaca, but mean to find out.