Sunday

Again, blogging time has been squandered on other things – this time, computer problems which I will eventually tell you all about.

Nor was much knitting done yesterday – I watched the rugby, and it was seriously incompatible with lace. Not the Wales-Scotland match. I saw but little of that, and little was enough, but France-Ireland.

I have never cared much for the Six Nations Trophy, even in the glory years when Scotland was in contention. I take it match by match, and care a lot about the Calcutta Cup, as you know. Even so, yesterday was interesting. If Ireland won, the trophy was theirs. If France, it went to England – each would have won and lost the same number of matches, so it would come down to a reckoning of points-scored and points-scored-against. And it was the mighty Brian O'Driscoll's last international match – he's almost as old as I am.

Ireland won, by two points. A cliff-hanger, to the last tick of the clock. France had a winning try (=touchdown) disqualified in the closing moments because of a forward pass. According to me (who knows nothing) the two big differences between “American football” (so-called over here) and rugby, are (a) that in rugby you can't throw the ball forward, although you can kick it; and (b) that you can pick the ball up off the ground and go on struggling.

As for Scotland, they lost by the largest margin in their international history – or perhaps it was the largest margin in Six Nations history. Rachel says that the commentator said at one point, Even the cats in Scotland will find themselves being taken for a walk around now.

Today

That much I wrote for you yesterday morning. Now, as EZ says, Onward!

Computer problem

I sat down on Saturday for a much-needed session with my accounts. Quicken came up saying that my license was out-of-date – did I want to renew it now? If I said no, the program closed down. If yes, I was led down a shadowy alley to nowhere – Intuit stopped supporting the UK version 10 years ago.

I have about 25 years of data in that program (and a recent back-up: that's all right). I found the installation disk, after a mighty search – but it won't run on my new laptop. I still may be able to re-install it on Old Slowcoach. Nobody ever mentioned a license before. I was a beta tester, based on the fact that I had written a book called Money Management with Quicken about an earlier version. I think it's the beta version I was still using – until last week.

I've found a new copy of the latest (=10-year-old) UK Quicken on eBay, and it's on its way. But will it run in Windows 8?

Knitting

Not much. I'm nearly finished with the 15^th repeat of the centre of the Unst Bridal Shawl.

Stephen West has a e-book out called Crazy for Color – not scarves and shawls, this time, but bizarre hats and sweaters. I'd love to have it, if it were on paper, but I have decided pretty firmly that I don't want to address either knitting or cookery on a computer screen. You can buy some or perhaps all of the new West patterns from his Ravelry store, but that's not the same as paging through a book.