Filthy weather – wet snow and much wind. Catullus’ caeli furor aequinoctialis.

Today's considerable excitement is scheduled to be cable television. I have had email messages, leaflets in the post, and yesterday a recorded telephone call to remind me to be here. People must let them down sometimes.

I am composing on my husband's Toshiba in order to answer a number of outstanding questions – how to edit an endnote? I've cracked that one. How to get back to where you were when you have searched up 50 pages to see whether you had mentioned Donald Duck already? how to Go To a specific page? Those remain to be solved.

And at the moment, I have no pointer, which doesn't help.

Knitting

I finished the front of the Relax last night, three-needle-bound-off the second shoulder, picked up stitches and started down the first sleeve. Real progress.

I had one of those rare moments of revelation while I was chopping up vegetables for lunch yesterday. I am, you will remember, knitting Greek Helen a pair of green Zauberball socks. Socks are my travel-and-waiting-room knitting, and since we don't travel any more and have been mercifully healthy lately, although old and fragile, progress is slow. Now I want to rush on with them so that I can start on my new Pakokku yarn.

I am knitting toe-up, Judy's Magic cast-on, Strong-Fleegle heel. I'm currently about a third of the way up the leg of the first sock, worrying about whether I'll be able to repeat the cast-on.

Yesterday's insight was: I can knit the second sock top-down. No one will ever notice. Fleegle-Strong is the same in either direction, I'm pretty sure.

[There's a little light on, on the mousepad. Is that why I have no pointer? YES – and I figured out what to do about it. Why would anyone want to turn the pointer off? The associated question is, how to use the function keys as function keys instead of for turning the pointer on and off (F5)? That must be a Toshiba question.]

“Vogue's 1^st Book of Knitting” is listed on eBay at the moment – closing on Saturday midday. It looks like an astonishingly fresh copy, and the seller has had the wit not to flatten it in order to take pictures of the inside pages. Ebay continues to tell me when VKB's come up for sale – this is only the third example of that first issue that I remember from the last five or six years: the one I bought, a coverless one fairly recently, and now this.

[I've figured out how to use the function keys AND how to Go To a specific page. It is just possible that the thing you do in Word itself to get back to where you were – Shift F5 – will work in OpenOffice.]

Mr. Virgin Media is here. I had better close – except to say that Mme Defarge is now safely in my iPad library – that was easy and fun. Thanks, as ever.