Calcutta Cup Day

I must be brisk, as I need to go out and get the papers, and then prepare my husband's breakfast and lunch, and preferably have some breakfast myself, before setting out on our walk. It is difficult to date specific stages in the decline, but he is more fragile than he was, less steady on his feet, more anxious about his balance and the dangers of a fall. And I more anxious about leaving him for longer than a supermarket hour.

But I can't leave you without saying that this is Calcutta Cup Day. In 2000, when a Scotland win was pretty well impossible, but we won, the match was played on Laetare Sunday. That's tomorrow -- the word means Rejoice! It's not an infinitive, as you might think, but a deponent imperative. It's the slightly-more-than-mid-Lent Sunday when one lays down the burden for a day.

I have kept an impeccable Lent so far, and am looking forward to my cider tomorrow. But if, per impossibile, Scotland should win the cup today, I'll crack open a bottle this evening. I don't think the match has been played on Laetare Sunday weekend from 2000 until now.

Well, yesterday I cast on the Sous Sous and established the pattern, painstakingly but without error. From now on, it's mostly a matter of looking where I'm going. The cable panel is 16 rows, repeated eleven times up the back of the garment. Much less in the front. I'll carry on until I have finished the first of them.

The cast-on went pretty well, and I am extremely grateful for your help. Once you reminded me, I remembered using the two-ends-of-yarn trick at times in the past. But that would have meant winding another skein of Whiskey Barrel and I'm a bit tired of winding. And anyway, I had never tried the wraps method and wanted to give it a go.

It worked fine. The reason I say that the cast-on went only "pretty well" is that, at 100 stitches, I discovered I was using the yarn the wrong way around -- forming the stitches on the needle with the long-tail and using the yarn from the ball as the securing chain beneath. Done that way, the long-tail was about to give up. But I figured that forming the actual stitches must use a lot more yarn than just running along below, so I started over at the same measured point on the yarn and did it right and have a satisfactory but not excessive tail.

Am I making more idiotic and catastrophic mistakes like that than I used to?

Sous Sous begins with a nice little garter stitch band which is lying there neatly, showing no tendency to roll upwards the way the one on the Tokyo shawl is doing. Why? Because the whole thing starts with a single row of purl? Or because the double moss stitch above holds it in place?

Non-knit

Our friend read yesterday's blog and came around and sorted the iPad before even I had sent her a proper email of her own with a humble request. I was still confused about which button is which -- the one on top is the camera shutter button but it is also the Sleep button which needs to be pressed at the same time as the Home button to unlock a freeze. I must try to remember that.

She showed me how to take a picture of the screen while she was at it.

That's an interesting theory, that Zite is responsible. But I had Zite for years on the old, missing iPad, and it never once froze, for that or any other reason, in two-and-a-half years of daily use.

Now I must get moving.