Tuesday, September 03, 2013

I finished the second sleeve. It wasn’t a convenient moment for leaping up and trying on, so I went straight on to picking up stitches around the neck. The pattern is so meticulous and Japanese that I thought I’d do it properly – divide the neck into 8th’s, at least roughly by eye, and pick up the right number in each section.

I did it, but it took a while. Now all I’ve got to do is knit a couple more rounds of st st, and the job is done. I trust the neckband will roll down to cover the pick-up line, which is not as beautiful as I would like. Then the try-on!

Comparing schematics, it is clear that the Milano is more or less the same size as the Relax, give or take a centimetre or two and assuming you’ve got gauge. So it could be adjusted, once one has reached one’s final verdict on Oversized.

Then what? I’ve got a day’s grace on Strathardle – we’ll go tomorrow. The little plants are holding up, and I didn’t feel entirely well yesterday. What to take along? Stephen West’s neglected scarf? That’s in danger of slipping into UFO territory. Or dig around in the stash, perhaps wind a skein of Pakokku, look out the tattered old pattern, and start a BSJ? I’ve had unhappy results with Koigu and BSJ’s – perhaps due to faulty workmanship, but I don’t want to try that again.

Our hospital appt yesterday went remarkably well. It was at the Western, rather than our old friend the ERI. The appt was kept on time, and the whole thing including the weigh-in and the bloods and an x-ray as well as a leisurely talk with the Great Man, was over in an hour. Parking was a bitch, though.

Current Affairs

My impression trawling through Facebook, as done for me by Flipboard, is that America is very hostile indeed, both from the right and from the left, to any US action in Syria. Maybe my “friends” aren’t typical. Or maybe they are, and the President will lose his vote.

This week’s Economist is rather interesting on the 20th century history of the use of poison gas. They say that Churchill wanted to use it in ’44. His generals said no. Contrariwise, American generals were keen to use it in the Pacific at much the same stage of the war – strategically, it would have made a lot of sense on those Pacific islands that had to be recaptured  painfully one by one. Roosevelt said no. And Hitler, who had himself been gassed in WW1, apparently never considered it on the battlefield, although Germany was ahead of the Allies in its development and it might have been very useful to him on D-Day.

Since then, only Saddam Hussain and those terrorists in the Tokyo subway and now this.

I don’t know what I think, except that poison gas is a Very Bad Thing and there seems to be no doubt that it was employed. That’s the difference between now and the invasion of Iraq. Except for Mr Blair and Mr Bush, I think we all had a pretty good idea, in those days, that there were no weapons of mass destruction.

Computing


I succeeded in deleting a folder of my own yesterday – blog entries for August. I think I more or less see how it was done. At any rate, I now know that when a folder is highlighted, I must be especially careful. So it probably was me who deleted that one from Dropbox on my husband’s behalf recently. 

4 comments:

  1. are you sure that blair and bush didn't know about the lack of those weapons? make-believe is a wonderful thing, esp. for politicians! but maybe they could wait with all that action at least until they actually have a report to go on with? there's not much worse than a politician, who announces stuff and then can't (or won't) go back on what he said, just to not loose face:(

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    1. No, I'm not sure. As I remember it, a UN inspector was in Iraq at the time, begging for more time to look for WMD. But I think Blair and Bush convinced themselves with their own rhetoric. I remember my performance in bars -- not often -- in Ohio in the early 50's. By the time I had finished my speech, I had pretty well persuaded myself that I was 21.

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  2. I hope I get to see the Relax in person when we are in Shetland! As for the Stephen West scarf, it is a strange process, that movement from a WIP to a UFO. Someone needs to document each step along the way, then come up with measures to prevent it happening.

    One of the problems with the chemical weapons use in Syria, at least as far as I see it, is that while we know that it did happen, I don't think we can yet say with certainty which side did it.

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  3. I'm loving the colors of the Milano but hesitant to knit it. Oversized sweaters just don't look good on large women in my mind and the horizontal stripes are also raising alarms. But it should look good on you, Jean.

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