Very little to report. I scarcely knit, yesterday. If I’m back in the saddle today, I should reach the armpit decreases on the half-brioche sweater and be ready to switch back to the Sous Sous.

Thank you very much indeed, Skeindalous and Catherine, for the reference to Matthew 12 (comments yesterday).  I’m sure that’s what I was thinking of – and it’s maddening to have something on the tip of one’s mind like that. The only NT commentary (Knox) I have in the house is a bit puzzled by the passage, and certainly offers no line of thought which might be applied to stash-enhancement. Be careful, is my only conclusion.

But I’m glad I am buying for specific projects and hope that I can, at least, stick to that.

I’m glad to have such good reports of the Crazy Stripes Tee, from Mary Lou and Kristie. And, oh! Kristie, you are right – I bought the yarn for KD’s Northmavine Hap when we were in Jamieson & Smith that day, and I have even started it, and it’s all in a shoebox here and should have been listed.

I probably won’t reappear here until Tuesday at the earliest. I’ll have to spend leisure moments today preparing to leave all behind on Monday, when I am to go to Strathardle. I need to write out a programme-of-the-day for my husband’s meals and medication.

It will be wonderful to be there. Will this be the first time since Pentecost, 2014? when Rachel and Ed came up and took us there for a two-nighter. It is impossible to believe I have been away so long, and equally impossible to think of a later trip. I am not feeling terribly strong, and still don’t know whether this is the inevitable decline or the lingering effect of last summer’s pulmonary embolisms (in which latter case, I might still improve a bit).

 All I hope to do is to ensure that everything is all right – most especially, that when I turn the water on, it stays where it belongs. The people who sold the house to us (and for whom it was also a second home) gave up when they got there in the spring of 1963 and turned the water on and it all came down into the kitchen from the tank above. But ’62-’63 was an especially savage winter. I remember it in some detail – Greek Helen was born in that January.

I’m hopeful – but I don’t trust water.

I will take a thousand pictures. I will go down the commonty to see our trees. If I have the strength actually to do anything – and if it is still alive – I will weed and mulch our pinus bungeana. It is a tree which often grows in the courtyards of Chinese temples. This will have been its third winter, I think. Or fourth? It replaces the pinus sylvestris aurea – the golden Scots Pine -- which our children gave us as a golden wedding present and which was eaten by a neighbour’s horse. I couldn’t bear to just buy another, so we went for Something Completely Different.