I am in far too much of a tizzy to write at any length or with any coherence this morning.

I don’t see how a photograph will be possible, of me and Kate, since she said specifically that Bruce isn’t coming. My husband will be provided with his late breakfast and allowed to keep out of the way.

Alexander phoned last night and proposed whisking us off to Loch Fyne this weekend. I hesitated, because we had planned to go to Strathardle and I had hoped to get the tatties in. A younger Jean would have stuck to that plan, but this aged one is enchanted at the idea of  Little Boys and ducks and brief freedom from meal-planning.

I will give Alexander one of the Apache chilli plants, and with but a little bit of oomph I should be able to finish the Pakokku socks and give them to Ketki (saving myself wrapping and trudging-to-the-post-office). My husband keeps suggesting that if I would but go to a shop and enlist the help of a Young Man, all his problems with the new computer could be solved. Alexander knows all that there is to be known about computers, and might be able to straighten his father out on that score.

Miscellaneous non-knit

No news from the Cardinal, who is clearly keeping schtum.  I’ll let you know.

My brother-in-law, my sister’s husband, posted this on Facebook – himself with his son, my nephew Theo last weekend. Theo and his wife Jenni came up to CT from DC where they live for the weekend, to eat shad (I suspect I’ve never had it) and asparagus from the garden (I haven’t seen British asparagus in the shops here yet) and to plant a weeping dogwood in memory of their son who was born prematurely last year and lived only a few hours.

My husband’s sister (who died two years ago) believed with maddening intensity that sons looked like their mothers and daughters like their fathers, as a general truth of life. She had a sharp, observing eye and I am surprised that in nearly 80 years she never noticed contrary examples. Her own father died when she was about 5, my husband maddeningly older, 11 or 12. Her passionate belief about resemblances was a claim on the father she scarcely remembered. But her way of (often) stating it as a truth about genetics used to produce a quiet seethe in me.