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Papal comments

Jean is right, I think, about how the Vatican tailor has three papal costumes ready, sort of as Goldilocks might, ready for a small or medium or large pontiff. I even read yesterday that all three were displayed in that tailor’s window until the Conclave actually started. He was quoted in advance as saying that the new man would probably be one of his customers already. It doesn’t sound as if that is the case.

And I also think our new Pope isn’t quite as stout as I at first thought -- I should have had the screen-size set at 4:3.

Mary Lou, I’m a Jesuit fan like your father. For some years, when we lived in Birmingham, I taught very elementary New Testament Greek to the novices of the English province. They were delightful young men, and I loved them dearly.

Technical


We really came unstuck with the Surface yesterday. I am making considerable progress with Word-for-Windows-8-RT or whatever it calls itself, but my husband is not. He pretty well gave up in fury after a morning when the program kept producing message-boxes in mid-screen or removing his text altogether. Once he called me when he came across a paragraph unexpectedly double-spaced. I tracked down “line spacing” in the on-line help -- but the technique specified wasn’t available. (I eventually solved the problem by applying a single-spaced template to the whole document and then changing the font back to Times New Roman.)

I sent him back to his old computer, and spent my afternoon trying free, simple word processors on my own desktop. OpenOffice proved heavy and slow -- not its fault, I am sure, but that of my old slow computer which lacks much free disk space. (Archie says I don’t need a new computer, just an external hard disk. He could be right.) I then tried AbiWord, a much smaller and lighter program -- and after all, we don’t need a whole Office suite, just a word processor.

And it seems to work fine. I am composing in it this morning. I don’t see an icon for adding a hyperlink, but I can do that after I copy and paste into Blogger. It’s not a feature my husband needs. It does notes, although the one I inserted didn't come through to Blogger correctly when I copied-and-pasted.

I then looked at the John Lewis website for possible laptops to run it on -- I feel I want actual salesmen to talk to this time. The three candidates I identified -- two Asus's and an HP -- were all marked “out of stock”. I figure that doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t on display in St James Centre, and I may go up there this afternoon.

Here -- still a "technical" subject, although a different one -- is our future television cable, curled up on the area wall just inside the railing, under the lamp post.

Knitting

I’m about half-way from underarm to shoulder shaping on the front of the Relax.

That's the back view. The sides are quite straight until stitches are added at the underarm. The trapezoidal effect is created by the unseen needle which holds the front stitches.