We’ve decided to make a dash for Strathardle today. The roads will be open, anyway, even if, at the worst, we have to abandon the car in the driveway and walk down to the house. Blogging will resume on Friday, insh’Allah. I’ll be able to bring Rachel’s striped Koigu back and finish it here over the weekend, before we go to London on Monday. At the moment, it lacks about half of its collar. Beyond that, it needs the sleeve seams done, general tidying, and buttons for the placket.

I’ve packed the Guernsey yarn and Brown-Reinsel and Thompson and a selection of needles. I’m going to knit at the tightest gauge that isn’t a strain on my hands. But I doubt if I’ll get even as far as swatching on this brief visit. We’ll be staying with Alexander and Ketki next week (the latter being the intended recipient) and I can get issues of size settled definitively.

Guess what: the doorbell just rang, since I sat down at the computer ten minutes ago. My Malabrigo yarn is here! I like it a lot. It's slightly rougher and more artisan-y than either "Maya" or Manos. I went to the HipKnits website yesterday and discovered that they had had a grand opening of the new shop over the weekend, which no doubt explains the delay. But she might have taken 30 seconds to explain by email. After all this waiting, we deserve a picture. It's pretty bleached-out. This morning’s light isn’t good yet.

I’m within two repeats of the end of row SIXTY-ONE of the Princess border, and hope I’ll be able to steal ten minutes at some point this morning, before we leave, to polish them off. Row 62 will see this page of the pattern finished. Row 66 is where I plan to stop for now. Alice, I was very touched by your comment. I’m going to miss the Princess like mad, but I would have thought paragraphs like this one made the dullest imaginable blog.

Footnotes

Thank you yet again for your comment, MamaLu. I am as distressed as you are about the loss of the eyelet-elephant notes. Could one outline an elephant in eyelets?

As for notes, again, thank you. My husband’s ones are in fact endnotes already. In the antique DOS-based system he uses, it is impossible to view them en masse until a document is actually printed. It hadn’t occurred to me that things are otherwise now. I’ll fiddle around (both with WordPerfect and with MS Word, if need be) and see if I can figure out how to copy them as a bunch. That could speed things up materially, especially with the documents which have a lot.

I did hundreds and hundreds of notes, at the beginning of this task, in the modern way, with a mouse. Then I accidentally stumbled on the fact that it can all be done from the keyboard, and I have increased productivity by a factor of three, at least. You’ve got to keep your wits about you: Alt,I,F; type in the next number; Alt-E; Shift-End plus down-arrow if it’s a long one; Alt,F,C; Alt,E,P – and there you are. Much quicker than clicking.

I've heard from Documents to Go, to my surprise. They don't support footnotes, and suggest that I leave a suggestion on their suggestion page. I may do it, as I would have thought a lot of academics might like to press a Palm into the service my husband intends: storing a substantial work-in-progress so that it's all accessible when you are looking up small points of detail in various libraries.