Games Day

I wonder if anyone will notice that we’re not there. This is the first miss in a very long time. It’s sort of sad, but the wonderfulness of my birthday party more than makes up for it – all the fun of the Games without the tedium. Sort of like Thanksgiving -- Christmas dinner without the tedium of Christmas.

The weather forecast isn’t good – but it may not be taking account of the Strathardle microclimate.

Knitting

Well. I finished the straight bit of the front of Relax 2. I knit four short rows, to begin shaping the shoulders. The next instruction was to knit to 19 stitches before the centre marker, turn, and start shaping the neck. I was sailing along. Then it became time to make my husband’s tea, and when I sat down again I found that poltergeists had been hard at work. The working yarn was in an impossible place. Nothing made sense.

I still can’t explain what went wrong – I think it’s clear that when I got to 19 stitches before the centre marker, I didn’t turn, decreased the wrong stitches at the neck, and went on to the farther shore. But that mistake would have required that I frog only 2/3rds of a row. The mess was worse than that. I never did understand it.

I have recovered my footing. It took a while. The stitches on the first shoulder have been re-oriented on the needle, un-split, and where necessary laddered back up. The rest are back on the needle but await further attention when the first shoulder is finished.

What on earth? I might add that cider wasn’t involved. I am nearly as stout as I was at the beginning of Lent, so this week, after a summer of indulgence, was cider-free. To have this happen only the day after I deleted (if I did) my husband’s computer folder, is rather alarming. Am I losing my grip?

I thought as I toiled on of EZ’s remark somewhere, that a split stitch is the one knitting mistake which can’t be redeemed by turning it into a “feature”.

Computing

I am very grateful indeed for your help and advice. I didn’t know about cloud back-up services like Carbonite, and it’s useful information. But I think I’ll go with flash drive. Back in DOS, I wrote little programs called macro’s that let my husband do things for himself. I haven’t figured out how to write macro’s in Open Office. But I can back up the whole thing myself and then make it part of my early morning routine, before writing to you, to back up what he did the day before.

Dropbox creates the illusion of multiple copies – there it is on his computer, in the cloud, and on my computer. But it’s only one, really.

Back to knitting, and to Kirkmichael

Here is my sister, on the morning of the Big Party Day, in the shawl I knit for her 70^th birthday. It’s Amedro’s Cobweb Lace Wrap, I think, with patterns from Heirloom Knitting substituted, knit in Heirloom Knitting’s merino lace. Which they are discontinuing – sad news, although there is a bargain to be had at the moment. It’s lovely stuff.