Wednesday, April 11, 2012


A firm called Castle ChemDry (if I’ve got it right) is due to call this morning to advise on drying out the dining room – the 5th organisation to be involved, starting with our insurers. No wonder insurance costs so much. I will confide my anxieties about whether the ceiling will stay in place. And the room still smells, although not as badly.

I wound another skein of Shibui, trying to concentrate on the thought that three eights are 24. I still haven’t done very well.

And finished the ribbing for the first Hundertwasser sock. I had never heard of Hundertwasser until I met him in the form of a sock yarn. Alexander, who knows a thing or two about art, was equally ignorant, and my husband, whose knowledge is pretty encyclopaedic, claims only a dim awareness of the name. So we don’t know why Opal has so honoured him. (Van Gogh, yes, I’ve heard of him.) But he’s turning into a good sock.

I took Gibson-Roberts “Simple Socks” along to Loch Fyne and tried to read it calmly. The core of the book is her idea for turning the heel, which I don’t understand at all. Yarn overs come into it. I sort of felt that she was spinning things out to make a book of it and that the instructions were hard to understand precisely because they were so prolonged and detailed.

We’ll see. If I get to the heel of these socks in the right circumstances, I’ll have a go. If, on the other hand, I arrive at the heel while in some waiting room, I’ll put in an Afterthought Heel.

The computer is marginally more cooperative this morning. Here are some pics from Loch Fyne.

We had a Skype conversation with Rachel’s son Joe in northern Thailand. I’m not much of a Skype fan, but with a big group like that, it worked pretty well. Rachel is wearing her Adult Surprise.


Easter lunch. My husband at the head of the table, Lizzie on his right, Hellie on his left.


The Easter Egg Hunt. The adults are Rachel’s husband Ed and Hellie’s boyfriend Matt. Alexander and Ketki do not have a horse. They are hoping to tear the stable down and build a guest annex. The struggle for planning permission has taken years.


After lunch and Easter eggs I went for a walk with Hellie and Matt and the little boys.



Comment, yesterday


Sarah JS, what is your father's name? I was Jean Smits, '54. If he really was '52, he will be in one or more of my yearbooks, even if we don't remember each other. 

6 comments:

  1. Love the grandson wearing a party hat at lunch. Any excuse for crackers!

    Keeping my fingers crossed for your ceiling.

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  2. Barbara M.12:40 PM

    Is Opal an Austrian company? Hundertwasser was born in Vienna, I think.....perhaps it is honoring a hometown hero the rest of the world doesn't know so well. Anyway, I'm glad the socks are turning out well.

    Barbara M. in NH

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  3. Sarah JS3:01 PM

    My father is David Jamieson. He was a New York City boy coming "way out west" (in his mother's terms) to the wilds of Oberlin. (Grandmother just about fainted when we moved, in my early childhood, to Nebraska.) I believe his major was History. He went on to Chicago Theological Seminary after Oberlin.

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  4. Anonymous3:18 PM

    So glad ceiling is still intact!! Also delighted to discover we share '54 as our launching year!!

    And the 3rd glad is that I had the same experience with Simply Socks and gave up ... thank you for your humility which tells me that it wasn't all my knitting dimness!!!

    Elizabeth

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  5. Hundertwasser was quite popular for posters in dorm rooms when I was in school. Rather shiny, as I recall.

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  6. Jean -- I totally agree with your assessment of Simple Socks, but having said that, I did master her toe-up version of the heel and have been knitting that exclusively for about 6 years. So if you have questions, or want clarification, let me know. Eventually I focused on just two pages in the whole book. The rest is, at a minimum, unnecessary and, at most, annoying.

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