The pop-up's are back, Helen is gone. On the other hand, I feel a bit better today and I realise that I can no longer say for sure that I am feeling progressively worse.

I spent some useful time with my accounts yesterday – there's lots of catching-up to do. It turns out that exporting files in a form another program can read, has to be done account-by-account. I've accumulated a lot of them, squirrel-fashion, through the years. It would still probably be useful to export the six most important once a week or so.

Since I had to fire up Old Slowcoach for more account-catching-up, I also loaded the pictures over there. It's too slow to endure – but for today, anyway, we've got pictures.

Here's the centre of the Unst Bridal Shawl. If I had ever mastered drawing little circle around part of a picture, or inserting little arrows, I could show you the trouble spot. I think it is sort of merging into the whole:

I have started the 17^th repeat, of 18 ½. It's looking somewhat more like a square. The idea is to have 19 diamonds – we started with diamonds, and so must end half-way through the 19^th repeat, when the 19^th diamond is finished. The fans are the motifs whose strong central stitches form vertical lines. The diamonds are the ones in between.

I love the peacefulness of lace knitting. You can't hurry (although I am sure it is done a good deal faster on Unst than I can knit). An evening's knitting seems to leave the work unchanged. All you can do is fit each stitch into the ones around it, each row on top of the last, and wait.

I have forgotten how I assigned percentages in my head, for the sake of the progress bar. Was it 50% for the edging and centre together, maybe? But does that leave a fair amount for the borders? The pattern says nine 25gr balls of yarn. My third ball still has a good way to go.

And here is Helen in the Relax/Milano. I think it could do with a bit of ironing, but otherwise it is a great success.

Non-knit

In my sixty years in this country, I have seen many a simple British holiday taken over and Americanised and commercialised – Mother's Day, Hallowe'en, Christmas itself. Father's Day is being inserted. EvenThanksgiving gets a good write-up on the food pages every year. But one has been left strictly for the Yanks, thank goodness: St Patrick's Day. The Irish celebrate, of course, as the Scots celebrate St Andrew and the Welsh St David. (I once saw a Welshman wearing a leek on St David's Day.) The English are relatively indifferent to St George.