Steam ironing seems to have subdued the bottom edge of the Relax all right. A great relief.  The fabric is lovely and drape-y, the yarn is beautiful. This is going to be a good one, if I can get the fit of the shoulders right.

My favourite madelinetosh’s are the nearly-solid ones. The range includes hand-painted yarns with more distinct colours, and others that are solid or effectively so. There was some variation in the electric red sweaters I knit for the  Big and Little Thomases but it sort of gets swallowed up in redness.

Christmas '11:

Lately, I have knit a sleeveless vest for my husband which he wears nearly every day – it’s time I got it off him for washing; and Ed’s Gardening Sweater; and now this. And they’re all wonderful.

I reached the fourth row of eyelets last night.

I paid a rare visit to Facebook yesterday. I had a friend-request from a real friend. It was fun scrolling through those lists of people who are friends of my friends. Talk about Six Degrees of Separation – the whole world was there. (And this morning I learn that Facebook has reduced the degrees of separation to four.) I signed up to be friends with Lucy Neatby and Brandon Mably and Lorna’s Laces and Annie Modesitt and some others – the Facebook pages in the Flipboard app on my iPad this morning are greatly enhanced.

If you have an iPad, get Flipboard. James told me about it. It’s great fun (and free).

(Some of) Life’s Other Problems

Cat, alas, it is true that the Surface won’t run Dropbox. Here’s a link to the Dropbox blog page. It’s full of the outraged howls of those disappointed by the App. Dropbox does, I gather, run perfectly well on a proper Windows 8 computer; just get the program, don’t bother with the useless App. Some of the howls are misplaced, for that reason.

But the Surface is advertised as a PC, or at any rate, an acceptable PC substitute. I don’t think I would have bought it if I had known about this difficulty. And I feel pretty sure that eventually it will be resolved – but eventually isn’t good enough. At some point I will write rather stiffly to Microsoft.

Presumably they see Skydrive as a useful money-spinner. You have to pay when you get past a certain storage limit, as indeed you do with Dropbox and LibraryThing.

Theresa, you won’t be surprised by now to learn that I couldn’t find RainbowDrive on the Surface. (That's a program which will synchronise Skydrive and Dropbox.) I wandered through the Store, which doesn’t seem to offer a search facility; and I searched “Apps” from that bar that scrolls in from the right – presumably that means that it searches the App Store. No luck. One of my Dummies books says that the Store shows only Apps which will actually run on the Surface…

I went to the BT website and tried their on-line chat facility for my router/call diversion problem. (See yesterday) I got only the suggestion that I ring Customer Service, with a phone number. It’s worth trying; I’ll probably do it. But I have a gloomy conviction that it’s no use ringing anyone big about anything these days – you’ll just wait half an hour to talk to someone in Mumbai who doesn’t understand the problem. Try phoning a bank!