Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Here's an odd story, to keep us largely away from knitting for another day.

Our young Polish cleaning woman (whom I love and trust) comes on Tuesday mornings from 8 to 10, the idea being to be finished and away before my husband gets up, as he rather tends to dominate the stage. The one drawback is that the bedroom gets dustier and dustier since she can never get in there.

At Christmas Ketki came up with the brilliant idea – Ketki is very good at thinking – that we have her come one Sunday morning so that she could clean the bedroom while we were at Mass. So we did that on the 1st of February and it worked fine. She then came as usual on Tuesday the 3rd.

Sometime last week – after Tuesday, but was it before or after Friday when the iPad disappeared? – my husband came into the kitchen with a white baseball cap, and said, You have a lot to answer for. It is one of his lines. He had found it on the bedroom floor, near the head of the bed on his side. I've never seen it before in my life, I said. It must be Gosha's. He thought, indeed, that it might have been lying there a day or two before he confronted me with it, and we agreed that it was probably hers.

So yesterday (another Tuesday) I gave it to her as she was leaving, and she said she had never seen it before in her life.


We are profoundly puzzled. We had an opportunistic thief once in Birmingham. It can happen. He got in through the open back door while my husband was working in the garden and got away with his wallet from the pocket of the jacket on the chair by the bed. Pretty cool.

This time, the wallet is still there and the drawers undisturbed. The Bad Man would have had to have his own key, to have let himself quietly in while we were almost certainly in the house, to have gone to the room almost the furthest from the front door – and to have thrown in his hat before quietly leaving. With or without the iPad.

No, it's improbable. Maybe Gosha's husband came in that day – he often comes to fetch her and hovers outside. Maybe it's his. But why would he snatch his hat off and throw it on the floor? Why wouldn't Gosha recognise it?

I undoubtedly had the iPad all last week, until Friday the 6th. Its disappearance can have nothing to do with the bedroom-cleaning on the 1st.

Knitting

I finished the linen square last night, and cast on one using the two balls of Jaipur silk held together. I like the result a lot. It's slow work – even with two together it's going to need more than the 44 stitches of the pattern to make a reasonable-sized square. The pattern is corner-to-corner, so I just have to go on until it's an acceptable size. And one has to be terribly careful to include both yarns in every stitch – all too easy to leave behind a loop.

But the resulting fabric is very nice indeed, firm and shiny, despite my clumsiness with garter stitch. Despite slow-th I think I could knit eight such Pocket Squares before September without stress. This could be it.


Sue posted a comment yesterday directing us to Techknitter's discovery of a way to knit Kitchener stitch. It is very interesting indeed. I don't need it myself because, as it happens, I absolutely love Kitchener-ing with a tapestry needle, but I recommend it to all needle-phobes.

9 comments:

  1. Might the hat belong to Archie? He was helping you look for the iPad wasn't he?

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  2. Anonymous11:13 AM

    That is an exclusive brand of JD Sports - likely to belong to a young/youngish man so Archie may be the answer, it is a high street store popular with young people. Unless it has anything to do with your recent plumbing problems?

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  3. The plot thickens.

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  4. Regarding the iPad: You didn't by any chance take it with you when you visited your neighbor last week, did you?

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    Replies
    1. PS: Thinking also of the odd places I've found misplaced things, it might be wise to thoroughly recheck all the bookshelves, book stacks and magazines. In my world, more than few things disappeared and were later discovered because I accidentally shelved (or buried) them.

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  5. Hmmm....as MaryLou says "The plot thickens...". Perhaps you can put down the knitting needles, pick up a pen and write a best seller - and it can pay for a new i-pad?
    Unless it ends up belonging to Archie though I will find it rather disturbing.

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  6. Best lost (and then found) story I know: a friend lost her keys and ID card in her room. We tore the room apart, the dorm and campus as far as possible, and she ended up having to get new ones (not cheap sadly). A couple weeks later, I had to borrow a pad as my period started earlier than expected, and lo and behold, I found her keys and card sitting in her container of pads. Best we could figure, she had them in her hand when she went to get a pad and thought "well, don't need to take these to the bathroom" and left them in there without thinking.
    We do lots of stuff on autopilot (as it were) so I'm still hoping you were using your iPad happily, got called off to do something and placed it on a shelf or bookcase without thinking about it. Bookcases are really good hiding places, after all, especially if it had been placed on top of books and then slipped behind them.

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  7. I know you are a fan of Kate Davies. Check out the interview of her on the Shinybees podcast.

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  8. Oh, and here, this will make everything better! http://jezebel.com/109-year-old-man-spends-his-time-knitting-sweaters-for-1685217379

    Because hand-knitted sweaters for penguins.

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