Row 46 is done, of the 50 needed for the top front of Relax2. I should be shaping shoulders this very evening.

Stephen West has posted another blog entry about his summer travels, but instead of Scotland we have him teaching on a Mediterranean knitting cruise. I have been thinking a bit about Part I, to which I linked yesterday. What wonderful yarn shops you have in America!

It’s a big country, of course. But, gosh! StevenBe! KnitPurl in Portland where (amongst much else) they have every colour of Shibui in every base! I don’t think shops like that exist in Britain. We have Loop – I wish I had had time to explore it, the day I was there for Franklin’s classes. We have many excellent small shops with specialist yarns carefully chosen by intelligent proprietors. But I think we lack the big showstoppers.

But maybe it’s just that I don’t get about much.

Non-knit

Yesterday’s event was a computer disaster. I’m still trembling.

My husband took some time off in the morning to write to our granddaughter Rachel in Beijing. He saved the note to Dropbox – or rather, I did; he still doesn’t know how to save a new document – so that I could fetch it on my computer and add a photograph before dispatching it.

And when this simple chore was completed, and he wanted to get back to work, we discovered that the entire folder he has been working on for weeks, was gone. With more than a hundred files in it. The system said I had deleted it, and that may be right, although I’m not sure the system can distinguish between us.

But the really terrifying consideration was, how can such a thing happen without so much as an are-you-sure from Dropbox or the operating system?

The missing folder wasn’t to be found in the Recycle Bin of either computer. Fortunately, Dropbox keeps copies. If there is a way to restore an entire folder at once, I didn’t discover it, but I could and did sit there for much of the afternoon restoring the files one at a time.

In the good old days of DOS – fairly recent, for us – my husband saved his work whenever he finished a document, and knew how to make a copy to an external floppy. That system saved our bacon two or three times in the last quarter of a century. A hard disk crash, a new machine, everything restored – he hardly noticed. Now that I can’t trust Dropbox, I’ll have to think out a new system.

It didn’t threaten the end of the world, yesterday’s crisis. My husband is currently making relatively minor verbal improvements in his work, nothing of substance. The earlier, unimproved version is well backed-up and printed-out. But I wouldn’t have cared to break the news to him that his summer’s work was lost.