Fat Tuesday

There was something in the paper the other day about the Carnival in Rio. I am so often irritated by the use of the word to refer to any outdoor jollity that it took me a moment to grasp that this was a reference to the real thing, the pre-Lenten knees-up, Carne-vale, farewell to meat.

There will probably be cider at lunch today in Morningside but not much and not cold and not Weston’s Vintage. I’ll make up for it in the evening.

(Sue, I loved your comment on Sunday’s post, and I want a bag like yours to take along, “I Knit So No One Has to Die” – or maybe a sweatshirt. I tried CafePress, but they offer it only on tee-shirts.)

It will be interesting to see whether Lent’s mild austerities have any further effect on my weight. I started weighing myself (x stone 12) when Lent (no cider) was already a week old last year, in early March. The decision to add the other two legs to the stool (no sugar, careful with fat) was inspired, I think, by beginning to contemplate the problem of what-to-wear-to-Theo’s wedding. And looking at myself sideways in a full-length mirror, not a pleasant sight.

The weight slid away fairly briskly – x stone 7 by Easter, the big breakthrough to w stone 13 in early May. I was about w stone 5 when I went to the wedding in July. Another half-stone eased off in the later months of ’09, and since the new year things have been pretty stable at v stone 10-12. I last saw w stone in mid-December.

The regime is easy enough, but it does involve occasional moments of active self-denial which get slightly more difficult now that there’s no weight loss to reward them.

I have heard no more about the Scotland rugby player, Thom Evans, who was so badly hurt on Saturday. Google can find nothing this morning. The injury was to the neck; he had surgery on Saturday evening; he was reported to be able to move all four limbs before the operation; there hasn’t been a medical bulletin since then, that I’ve found.

Anyway, knitting

I’m poised to take socks to our lunch date today -- sock One is finished, sock Two cast on. I also got a skein of Araucania wound yesterday for the ear-flap hat – Dawn, I couldn’t have pulled the first one from the other end because I don’t wind yarn in so sophisticated a way. Just a great big ball, not too tight. And there was even time yesterday for a bit more sleeve, still at the delicious early stage where there are few enough stitches that it seems to go like the wind.

And back to non-knit

I am so glad to hear that everybody likes Stieg Larsson. How does he do it, exactly? Both of the books I’ve read so far start rather slowly – “Girl Who Played With Fire”, which I expect to finish with my porridge this morning, has fully 200 rather unremarkable pages at the start. Unremarkable, but one keeps turning them. He’s good with names, too. One could so easily get bogged down, with everybody being named Eriksson, yet somehow the characters one needs to remember are distinguished.