Today is my husband's 88th birthday. That's old. Celebrations, such as they will be, are to be postponed until we get to Loch Fyne at the weekend. He wants a cupcake.


I bought a new computer. Archie and I fell into the hands of a talkative salesman who persuaded me to spend a lot less money than I was prepared to part with. John Lewis has a small Sale table for machines which -- as the salesman put it -- people have brought back because they didn't like the colour. If there's anything there that suits, you get it for a substantial reduction and you get everything except the box, including the normal two-year guarantee.


So I gave up my idea of a new desktop with terabytes of memory (the salesman and Archie agreed that I didn't need them), and bought a Toshiba portable, with a touchscreen and all. I'm getting on fine, so far. Open Office and Google Chrome and Feedly have been re-established. Dropbox will be next. I bought an external hard drive, which I will eventually pass on to Archie. The salesman said I didn't need to pay a man from John Lewis to come and do the transferring. So soon -- maybe today -- I will have to try to use it to move actual programs over -- Quicken and Microsoft Office and Lotus Organizer (where I record my weigh-in every morning), to begin with.


I didn't buy a monitor. I will first try plugging in my old one. I find I don't like composing on this one. And I badly need a mouse. Archie says my old one won't do.


So that's exciting.


Knitting


We had a nice time with Thomas and Lucy, although I didn't take the promised picture of her with the Princess veil. We found a moth hole in it, so that's a job for soon. Wretched creatures. They admired the Silly Christmas Project, which is lying about on the coffee table waiting for surgery on its stuffing. Thomas seems magically older and graver under his new responsibilities, Lucy funnier and happier now that she is a member of the family.


My other two projects continue well.


Craftsy had a blog entry about gauge the other day. Try this, try that, it said. It made me think, yet again, what a good thing Herzog may have invented with CustomFit. You knit your swatch, of course, and then the pattern comes to meet you instead of the other way around. She's doing a knit-along at the moment. I'm not knitting, but am following the progress of swatching and design with great interest. It's one of my ambitions for 2014.


Now that I've got a computer that can hack it, I must get back to Craftsy.