This must be my sixth Baby Surprise, at the very least. And I still don't see how it works. That's the neck shaping, top centre, but...

I've got 17 or 18 more rows to do -- with a bit of luck, the weekend should see the knitting finished and next week should complete the job. I think I'll edge it with i-cord again. The procedure is surprisingly fun, and the result very neat. I still can't decide whether those colours are cheerful or just garish.

Franklin provided a link yesterday to this essay on Finishing: http://sistahcraft.typepad.com/sistahcraft_/2005/09/row_2out_of_sea.html Franklin himself is http://the-panopticon.blogspot.com/. He just gets better and better.

After a disasterous childhood where I was the worst of everybody in all home economics classes, I have rather taken the point of view that I'm grown up now and can sew the seam any damn way I like, and I don't have to show it to the teacher, either. But Sahara almost persuades that a little effort would not come amiss. I had never even heard of a Seam Roll.

Non-Knit

My left foot has started to hurt again. I thought we were past that. Our afternoon walk yesterday was unusually fast and long. Propter hoc or merely post? Sorry -- that's for Franklin.

My husband and I read aloud at bed time, and have done so for all of our married life. We've covered a lot: War and Peace, the Barchester novels, Ulysses (which demands to be read aloud) -- anything is possible (even lace knitting) if you just keep at it.

At the moment, we're reading Churchill on the Second World War, and last night we got to Pearl Harbour. It was very moving. The fear in the preceeding weeks had been that the Japanese would attack British interests in the East, or the Dutch East Indies, and America's hands would still be tied. He phoned Roosevelt as soon as he heard the news, and got through, he says, in two or three minutes. I wonder if Tony could get Dubya that quickly today? He went to bed very happy -- there were years of much suffering to come, he was well aware of that, but he also knew that there was no longer the slightest doubt about the outcome. Hitler and Mussolini were doomed. The Island was safe. He quotes Cromwell: "God has delivered them into our hands."

My father was the Associated Press bureau chief in Detroit at the time. I can vividly remember his receiving the phone call that Sunday (and rushing off to the office). My husband, oddly, who was 16, says he doesn't remember it at all.