The list went well yesterday. I have adopted a variation of your suggestion, catdownunder. One of the items on today’s list is, make tomorrow’s list.

The baubles 

and cards are on their way to the US. (I don't know why the red one should have come out bigger. Same needle size. Same white yarn.) The application for the new parking permit is in the mail. Once when my mother was moving house, and in a frantic state similar to my current one, a neighbour advised her, start with the job that bugs you the most. That’s sound advice, except that it soon teaches you what Hercules had to put up with, with the Hydra. No sooner is one gone, than you remember two more. I have no hope of getting through today’s list.

I had a Fly Lady phase, some years ago. Her first instruction is, polish your sink. That’s a good one, too.

Thank you for the suggestions about easing the burden of cooking. We lived off Marks and Spencer’s ready meals when I broke my arms (one arm at a time, some years apart, but the same Marks and Spencer). The result is that such meals come (for me) with a permanent penumbra of pain and discomfort. I will investigate, anyway. Waitrose, where I shop, has a whole wall of ready-meals, and another cabinet of ready-to-cook. I tend to sweep past. I’ll look at Wiltshire Foods, too, Shandy. And thanks.

I think Meals-on-Wheels is just for people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to live independently. C. had them a year ago in the weeks between coming out of hospital after her operation, and going into the hospice to die. I don’t think she was very good at eating them, but the visits were welcome.

I finished the Little Brownstone, as hoped. Blocking it is on today’s list, and I hope to have a pic for you tomorrow. I’ve cast on a plain-vanilla beanie after a certain amount of agonizing over how many stitches to go for. It’s looking good.

Zite has, curiously, taken down the item about Vitamin D. Things usually linger there for three or four days. Today’s interesting suggestion is Setsuko, named, surely, for the designer of my Japanese shirt in distant Strathardle, but not actually designed by her. It’s distinctly OTT and doesn’t quite qualify for the HALFPINT list, but I’m glad to have seen it. It makes a positive virtue of the stretchiness and droopiness of alpaca.

I was glad to read your enthusiastic reports about Vitamin D. I’ll wander through the projects in Ravelry when an idle moment looms – there are lots (of people knitting Vitamin D, not, alas, of idle moments).

Pandas

We’ve got them, as you must know. I have been wondering what Darwin would make of them. I have never heard of such a mal-adapted animal. Reluctant to breed – the female is fertile for only two or three days a year. Twins are often born, but the mother then usually abandons one of them. The cubs are tiny, the smallest, in proportion to adult size, of anybody in the animal kingdom except marsupials. Then there’s all that insistence on bamboo – but they have unusually short intestines and so don’t absorb nourishment readily and so have to spend all day eating. (Our newspapers are full of Facts about Pandas.)

Now, in late 2011, their cuddliness pretty well guarantees that they won’t be allowed to go extinct. But cuddliness would have been no use to them through the evolutionary millennia.