I finished the second sleeve. It wasn’t a convenient moment for leaping up and trying on, so I went straight on to picking up stitches around the neck. The pattern is so meticulous and Japanese that I thought I’d do it properly – divide the neck into 8^th’s, at least roughly by eye, and pick up the right number in each section.

I did it, but it took a while. Now all I’ve got to do is knit a couple more rounds of st st, and the job is done. I trust the neckband will roll down to cover the pick-up line, which is not as beautiful as I would like. Then the try-on!

Comparing schematics, it is clear that the Milano is more or less the same size as the Relax, give or take a centimetre or two and assuming you’ve got gauge. So it could be adjusted, once one has reached one’s final verdict on Oversized.

Then what? I’ve got a day’s grace on Strathardle – we’ll go tomorrow. The little plants are holding up, and I didn’t feel entirely well yesterday. What to take along? Stephen West’s neglected scarf? That’s in danger of slipping into UFO territory. Or dig around in the stash, perhaps wind a skein of Pakokku, look out the tattered old pattern, and start a BSJ? I’ve had unhappy results with Koigu and BSJ’s – perhaps due to faulty workmanship, but I don’t want to try that again.

Our hospital appt yesterday went remarkably well. It was at the Western, rather than our old friend the ERI. The appt was kept on time, and the whole thing including the weigh-in and the bloods and an x-ray as well as a leisurely talk with the Great Man, was over in an hour. Parking was a bitch, though.

Current Affairs

My impression trawling through Facebook, as done for me by Flipboard, is that America is very hostile indeed, both from the right and from the left, to any US action in Syria. Maybe my “friends” aren’t typical. Or maybe they are, and the President will lose his vote.

This week’s Economist is rather interesting on the 20^th century history of the use of poison gas. They say that Churchill wanted to use it in ’44. His generals said no. Contrariwise, American generals were keen to use it in the Pacific at much the same stage of the war – strategically, it would have made a lot of sense on those Pacific islands that had to be recaptured  painfully one by one. Roosevelt said no. And Hitler, who had himself been gassed in WW1, apparently never considered it on the battlefield, although Germany was ahead of the Allies in its development and it might have been very useful to him on D-Day.

Since then, only Saddam Hussain and those terrorists in the Tokyo subway and now this.

I don’t know what I think, except that poison gas is a Very Bad Thing and there seems to be no doubt that it was employed. That’s the difference between now and the invasion of Iraq. Except for Mr Blair and Mr Bush, I think we all had a pretty good idea, in those days, that there were no weapons of mass destruction.

Computing

I succeeded in deleting a folder of my own yesterday – blog entries for August. I think I more or less see how it was done. At any rate, I now know that when a folder is highlighted, I must be especially careful. So it probably was me who deleted that one from Dropbox on my husband’s behalf recently.