Medical bulletins

Our niece F. learned on Wednesday that she will need chemotherapy to finish zapping her recent cancer. We had all been bounding about thinking, that's that. I have the news at second hand, from F's elder sister here in Edinburgh, so details are a bit blurred. Gene-analysis comes into it. She'll lose her hair. Should I knit a chemo cap? Surely yes.

All is more-or-less well here, medically.

Other non-knit

I had a grand time lunching with J. yesterday – shoes and ships and sealing wax came into the conversation. She is working at the Public Records Office – between there and the Conan Doyle where we lunched lies John Lewis. She had made some delicious purchases in their yarn dept.

 I did no more work on the tax. One event a day is about my limit. But I was most encouraged to learn that J. hasn't done hers yet, and it sounds much more complicated than ours.

Knitting

Not much of that yesterday, either, but what there was went smoothly forward.

I went back to Ravelry to see how the Heirloom Knitting Group was getting on with my query about the Bridal Shawl. I told the story in brief – Hellie's feeling that she will have missed her chance for the Princess when her brother's bride wears it. And I went on to ask whether I needed to make any adjustments to the border patterns since I was going to knit them from the other direction – Sharon wrote the pattern centre-out.

There are some interesting responses, but they all address Hellie's problem rather than mine. I'll have to try the Yahoo group which Sharon herself reads.

Lisa sent an interesting link in a comment yesterday to some new, free (to Rowan members) patterns from Kaffe. Some nice things there, but my feeling remains that he has already said what he has to say.

I was terribly glad to hear, Anonymous, that you actually saw the exhibition of knitted vegetation at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. I fear, by now, that it is a place I will never visit (in that respect, like Lake Van, in eastern Turkey, where the pussy cats swim). It keeps appearing on the horizon. I am sure it came into the story when I was obsessed by natural dyes.

More non-knit

The new Polish cleaner, Eva, hasn't turned up. Unprecedented, in our brief acquaintance. I'll have to make some phone calls. Worse, I'll have to put everything back in the kitchen, which I cleared at 7 a.m. so that she could clean it. Worse than that, I'll have to do last night's washing up. For the first time, yesterday, I thought, what the hell, I'll leave it for Eva.

I'd better get cracking.