I am grateful for your messages – I’ve missed you too.

Thank you for the suggestions about managing life in Strathardle. We’re due for a routine hospital appt in August and I can discuss some of them – including the blood sugar monitor you mention, Kristie. James has made some notes for us, too (he is a Type I diabetic himself).

So here we are back in the real world  = grappling with the dining room. The first of the decorators has already presented himself on the doorstep.

But I promised some pictures. Here is a summer pudding in posse

in fieri

And in esse.

(That middle phrase is a coinage of my own, meant to mean, by analogy with the other two, “in the process of becoming”. Notice the weight on top of the bowl.)

Every year on Games Weekend I take pictures of grandchildren with the trees we have planted down the commonty, each tree associated in one way or another with one of the four families. Since the Beijing Mileses weren’t going to be here on Games Day, I took this one in advance:

The tree – I must have mentioned this before – is a metasequoia glyptostroboides. One of those tales of a fossil described in a learned article, and after WWII when such things became again widely circulated, the Chinese said, oh, yes, we’ve got one of those at the bottom of the garden.

Our one was planted to commemorate James’ and Cathy’s wedding and struggled at first for being planted on a slope. It is a water-loving tree, and our soil is basically very sandy, and there were a couple of Sicilian summers in its early years. All seems to be well, now, and it is at last taller than the children.

Knitting

Here is Alexander, trying on his Bedroom at Arles socks.

I finished the first sock last night, of the current pair I am knitting for our niece,  and have succeeded in casting on (Judy’s Magic) the second. It was a titanic struggle.

I’ll have to carry on with this. I don’t understand what I did right. And I didn’t do it entirely right, at that –- there is a little row of purl bumps. Did I not execute the turn at the end properly?

I watched several videos as I struggled, nearly in tears. (I don’t have time for this.) Usually, that is the solution that makes all clear. Not this time. In the end, it was Wendy Johnson’s “Socks from the Toe Up” that did the trick, as I think was the case with the first sock. But what did I do differently, that time, to make the top and bottom stitches lock together? Perhaps the solution will be to take an afternoon, like Kristie – but where am I to get one of those? – and cast on the Longitudinal socks from Knitty.