We have a new Polish cleaning woman  this morning. The last one got a well-deserved proper job with Scottish Widows (not a charity supporting indigent gentlewomen, as might be supposed, but an insurance company) and gave up cleaning. The new one has hit the ground running.

I finished knitting the Silly Christmas Project yesterday – three little pieces, red, white and green. I have pinned them in place on their panel. They look satisfactorily convincing. Today’s job is to sew them down and perhaps begin embroidering. The first and easiest of the embroidery assignments is to outline the three little pieces in dark green.

QuiltLady, thank you for your advice about marking for embroidery. John Lewis has a good haberdashery dept – I will consult them, if I can get up there in the next couple of days. The great thing with this project is to keep going – like walking a tightrope.

I also did the first two rounds on the second half of the Rams & Yowes blankie, and a couple more rows of Milano. That one is making the least progress, but that’s all right because I love it the most and can trust myself not to abandon it.

Non-knit

I’m still enjoying Reginald Hill. I looked at the whole list on Amazon yesterday – the Kindles are in a distinct minority. I’ve moved on from “Midnight Fugue” to “The Death of Dalziel”. It may be just as well that I am prevented from hoovering up the entire oeuvre.

Mary Lou, there is no religious motive in my current abstinence from cider – just vanity and a search for well-being. I had long noticed, in Lent, that I tended to eat more sweeties when I wasn’t drinking cider, and had long ago figured out that I was doing it to substitute for the missing carbohydrates. The year Theo and Jenni got married  -- when was that? it must have been ’09 – I had already started thinking about clothes when Lent began, and was not pleased with the silhouette. Previously, I had avoided contemplating it.

So in Lent that year, I forbade myself sugar as well. I was astonished at how smoothly the pounds slid off without any further effort whatsoever. When Lent was over, I went on drinking cider on Sundays only and wound up an astonishing two stone lighter. Since then, there have been Cider Phases and Virtuous Phases. Some of the weight has crept back on – by no means all.

And the great thing, as I said the other day, is that the scales respond to virtue promptly. If they are to be believed (and of course they aren’t, entirely) I am 4 ½ pounds lighter this morning than I was last Tuesday.