Lots of news.

The big news is that Mungo has posted his first American blog entries. Don’t miss. Here is a picture of him at Boston airport last Tuesday, being signed for by my sister.

Here he is hanging out with the boys after a cycle ride to the beach – Mungo is lower right.

The sad news is that – I can scarcely bring myself to write the words – I broke TWO of my beloved Knit-Pick sock needles. I had laid the knitting on the floor beside my chair, and the chair somehow shifted itself on top of the knitting. Stupid, stupid. I have just ordered a set of 2.5mm KnitPro Symfonie’s from this source to replace them. I was afraid I’d have to get a whole pack of six sizes. Was I right to go for something that looks the same but might turn out not to be?

I finished the second rank of GGB’s for the right front, and should establish the third rank today. As usual, a picture will follow when I’m far enough past the second rank that it shows up properly.

Kristieinbc, my current thought is that I won’t knit anything for the Games this year. That could still change. I’ve got the pattern and there’s plenty of suitable yarn in the stash. Or the new “Knitting” magazine has a neat little garter stitch baby hat, preemie sizes included. It wouldn’t win but it could be useful to a premature baby and the more entries there are, the more the winners can feel justly proud. The entry form doesn’t have to go in until the week beforehand.

I’ll enter some vegetables: Four Potatoes, Six Pea Pods, and Collection of Four Vegetables should all be possible. One year I got a Second for my Collection of Four Vegetables.

MP3

Progress, of a sort.

I grabbed a Reith lecture from the BBC, downloaded it, and, I think, transferred it successfully to the MP3 player. When it is plugged in, the computer sees it as a removable storage device, and in that state the Reith lecture is clearly there and indeed the computer even started to play it to me at one point.

But I can’t get the MP3 player, when unplugged, to do the same. I can’t get it to do anything except scroll through the headings. The instruction book doesn’t help. I’ll take it along to Strathardle when next we go and set Archie to work on the problem. I don’t think he’s quite the technology buff his cousin Alistair is, but he’s a Modern Youth, and that should be enough.

Theresa and Linda, I tried a total search of my computer looking for *.mp3 files, after the Italians seemed to say that I had downloaded one, and nothing turned up.

More non-knit

The good news yesterday was that we met the man who very recently bought the flat next-door downstairs – he’s going to live there. This unremarkable-sounding fact is news because for the last ten years or so an absentee landlord has let the flat to students. Although it is next door, it is also, due to the kind of complicated architecture which often prevails behind those orderly Edinburgh facades, directly under part of our house, and in particular directly under our bedroom.

Joy was unconfined.