Laetare Sunday

British clocks have gone forward at last. It puts a certain amount of additional pressure on Sunday.

Thank you for your comment, Alexis. I've never got alongside Alexander McCall Smith myself, but I love the idea of living in a novel. I suspect the dealer who has our picture is there, too, from Dundas Street. and Scotland Street itself is just around the corner. I know someone who lives there who has a minor role in one of the books – A McC S asked her permission to include her. I disapprove of him because the Drummond Place Civic Society twice asked him to speak to the AGM, but he was far too busy. Too busy, to visit Scotland Street and speak to his own characters!

Knitting

The needles arrived, and that's that problem solved, at least. They turn out to be Addi Rundstricknadeln, with that wonderful facility of the German language for calling a spade a spade, and are labelled as “Lace-Needles”.

I'm now on round 11. The right-side rounds are pretty slow, involving as they do lots of k3togs, an awkward manoeuvre however you slice it. I'll finish off a motif in 11, and be rewarded with two whole wrong-side rows (12 and 14) which are pure purl.

“Principles of Knitting” doesn't help. Her excellent index seems to make it clear that there is nothing under “garter stitch” or “circular knitting” which addresses my problem. I tried Montse Stanley. Her much-less-good index has a couple of dozen entries, undifferentiated, for “garter stitch” and only slightly fewer for “circular knitting” but I doubt if it's worth the time and effort to toil through them.

There can't be a fourth answer to the question. In order to produce garter stitch in the round, you must either (a) purl alternate rounds or (b) wrap a stitch and turn around or (c) turn around without wrapping and use a second ball of yarn for the return circuit (Fleegle). What I want now is one of those wonderful line drawings illustrating the wrap-and-turn.

I took myself in hand yesterday and determined that at the end of a “right-side” (= odd-numbered) round, I will wrap the pivotal stitch but not try to knit it. And at the end of “wrong-side” rounds, I will knit it but not wrap it (since it's already wrapped). It's too soon to say whether this policy, pursued with determination, will tidy up that very messy corner for the future.

I have also decided – it's obvious, really – that the corner stitch markers will come before the corner stitch on right-side rounds and after it (therefore,  and obviously) on wrong-side ones. Saves peering at the work, if you know that in advance.

Health

It would be nice to have a single explanation for all this – that is, including the January nausea. I feel it's all one story, and I prefer – from my devotion to William of Ockham – one explanation rather than several. I had to switch drs midstream. When the weakness and breathlessness became acute at some point in Feb, I couldn't get an appt with the man I had been consulting about the nausea. I went for a same-day appt with take-the-doctor-you-get, who proved to be one I knew and liked from my husband's frequent consultations with him. He diagnosed heart, and I've stuck with him. But he hadn't been there for nausea in January.

Nausea could be an outrider for heart. But leaving off the osteoporosis pill seems to have cured it, so maybe the osteoporosis pill was behind weakness and breathlessness? I am told that the echo test on the heart will at least establish whether there is any long-lasting damage there. Who knows? I continue to feel about 91% OK.