This is the first day of the rest of my life -- of the summer of 2005, at any rate. Thomas-the-Elder should graduate from Cambridge today. His mother thinks she is on top of digital photography -- we shall see. An old friend is coming to stay overnight and march in the Make Poverty History demonstration here in Edinburgh tomorrow. Her son is coming along -- I think my children are old, but Tom Hutchison must be in his fifties. It'll be great to see them, but we're not marching.

I'm on the eleventh repeat of the Princess Shawl edging. It was exciting to reach double figures, but the real excitement will be when I've done 16 and there are only 69 more to do. It would almost begin to sound achievable. The striped Koigu is going faster, of course, now that I'm going back and forth over only half of it.

Non-Knit

I was wandering around a bit this morning, having read all my favourite knitting blogs, and found this: http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/arguing-with-bush-bushs-speech.html. I like the bumper stickers: "Be nice to America or we'll bring democracy to your country", for instance.

And there's not much use having a blog if one can't wander off into the pet peeves corner occasionally: I hate the word "homophobia". Etymologically, it ought to mean, "fear of the same" or "fear of sameness" -- a perfectly reasonable thing to be terrified of, but that's not what the word seems to mean. Queer Joe has wandered off the subject of knitting, too, and filled a blog entry with references to "homophobia". Perhaps it should be "heterophobia" -- "fear of the other", or "fear of the different". But I suspect that wouldn't have quite the right ring.