Thursday, May 10, 2012


Not much here about knitting, today.

Helen and Roger should be in Old Saybrook by now, but if so they won’t have been there long. At least no Air France plane was blown out of the sky yesterday by explosives in anyone’s underwear.

Lizzie’s socks are ready for their Gibson-Roberts heel. I remember very little of how it is done, but I do remember that it is a good idea to do the whole thing in one sitting.

Will I get that snood blocked today? Let’s try.

I pursued the IK Freia cardigan through Ravelry yesterday, and found someone who claimed to have knit it last year. The designer? The test knitter? I can’t find it this morning. Her photographs were of the same sweater the magazine showed, and included the photographs the magazine lacked, demonstrating how those tucks work at the side seam.

Liz, thank you (comment yesterday), for the reminder that exciting yarns were not in evidence when we were young – even when you were, let alone me. And they are a great blessing.

And AnnP, thank you, for the quotation from Alexander McC*ll Sm*th. That’s pretty good. Scotland Street, as you probably know, leads off Drummond Place. The outer surface of the wall behind me, as I sit here typing, is on Scotland Street. The address of the people who flooded our dining room is 1 Scotland Street. No 44, if there were one, would be down at the other end, a block away. 

I served for many years on the committee of the Drummond Place Civic Society. We struggle to keep the ugliness of the modern world away, and we have an annual general meeting with a speaker and warm wine. Alexander McC*ll Sm*th was invited several times to speak to us, but was always too busy. Other distinguished people who live here, or near here, have managed it.

Even less knit-related

I have been toiling, the last few days, to get a substantial fraction of my husband’s magnum opus into the clouds. He still works in Word Perfect on a DOS computer. I must therefore load each file, of hundreds, into a modern version of Word Perfect on my desktop, and then Save it As a Microsoft Word document and Save it In Dropbox. Lots of clicking is involved. I thought maybe my modern-world-savvy sister or brother-in-law could think of a way to expedite this process, some sort of macro, but they couldn’t, and I found that the job was much simpler and sweeter once I felt I wasn’t being stupid by doing it this way.

Today we’ll associate the Man at the Tate with the files now in the clouds. I don’t think he’s paying much attention.

As for the ceiling, I have been corresponding with Upstairs’ insurance broker, perhaps to some profit, but otherwise we are just waiting for the destruction of the dining room ceiling to be scheduled. We hope to go to Strathardle tomorrow. Snow was mentioned for the Highlands in the weather forecast just now, but my seed potatoes can’t wait.


Why the change of type-face? Not my doing.

3 comments:

  1. I always love hearing about your corners of the world. I stumbled across this photo of some part of Drummond Place, taken in 1956:

    http://tinyurl.com/d5s3498

    and there are even notecards with artistically done photographs for sale: http://drummondplace.org/PHOTOGRAPHS/Cards.htm

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  2. Anonymous12:51 AM

    Was reading about your problem and do hope you pursue this. Surely the person occupying the flat above you has a duty of care to those in other flats not to allow water to escape from his/her property. I think that negligence is the key word here. Is this not why we buy liability insurance?

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  3. AnnP in NY1:26 AM

    A. McCall Smith does seem to have a lot of irons in the fire.

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