Today is Arne and Carlos Day!

It is not entirely easy for me to get away from the house. Doing it twice in three days is most unusual. Saturday is particularly tricky because of the need to have four meals lined up in advance, planned and shopped-for, instead of just two. I think forward planning could make my life easier – it's the constant thinking that's hard. Like Christopher Robin pulling Pooh Bear behind him bumpity bump down the stairs – there must be a better way.

The new knitting system has worked for another day – three rounds of Rams&Yowes, and then freedom. I've now established the third rank of yowes (out of four) in this final section. That means I'm nearly halfway through the section. “Nearly”, because the final rank of yowes have legs which take up a few more rounds.

So the edging of the Unst Bridal Shawl continues to inch forward. I've done 43 bumps – 50 will mean I'm (about) ¼ of the way around. Ball-of-yarn No. 6, the June ball, is still not quite finished, but can't possibly hold out much longer.

The lead story in Zite this morning is, by a nice irony, How to Knit an Easy Baby Blanket. When I tried to pursue the matter, the screen went not just blank, but black, and so far I have been unable to resurrect it, although the iPad seems to be functioning properly on other fronts. There was a brief, heart-piercing image on the news last night of a twisted and blackened iPad amongst the detritus from the Malaysian plane shot down in the Ukraine.

I don't think I've mentioned that James, during his recent visit, turned out to have in his luggage a spare booster, and when he heard of my failure to re-install ours after we upgraded to blisteringly fast download speeds, he fetched it out and installed it and life is much improved. But that doesn't help with Zite's tantalising failure this morning.

Reading

I've finished Old Filth. Jane Gardam hands out easy deaths to her characters rather more generously than do the powers above, but otherwise it's terrific. I'm about to read the next, the same story from the wife's point of view, The Man in the Wooden Hat. But before that I am reading a collection of her short stories, Going Into a Dark House, for the sake of the one you mentioned, Stashdragon, “The Meeting House”. It's good. They're all good. She's brilliant. But the cumulative effect of the stories is depressing, for whatever reason. Perhaps I need to deviate into Wodehouse for a moment.