Back to Pages on the Mac this morning. The mouse doesn’t work. Why not?

I think, on a day’s acquaintance, that I would recommend Windows 10, Melfina, if only as a distraction from “the crisis wheel that is this summer”. Love the phrase. You, too? I can’t remember Windows 7. Maybe I never had it. I’m not sorry to bid farewell to 8.1. 10 has obviously got glitches — the FreeCell game doesn’t seem to have a Restart button, for example. It is believed, certainly by me, that every layout is winnable. My practice used to be to play every game I encountered over and over until I’d cracked it. Although there were one or two famous games that I could never do. (They're all numbered.)

But now, there seems to be nothing for it but to go on to the next game. You don’t get better that way.

And there was that funny glitch yesterday when the blog got stripped of formatting. Blogger has two aspects, HTML and “Compose”. I think what happened is that my text got tipped into HTML with no option for getting out. I thought maybe I could run Chrome under Windows 10 and get around it that way. But although Chrome will load, sluggishly, it doesn’t seem to want to go anywhere.

But this sort of thing is fun, compared to the horrors of real life. Unless you’ve got work to do and a deadline to make.

Knitting

I got the package from the Schoolhouse the other day — and it’s wrong. I’m afraid this has happened before, with them. I’ve got the DVD about the Fair Isle vest, and Kiewe’s book of Charted Peasant Designs from Saxon Transylvania — it isn’t going to be much use, but I remember the wonderfully eccentric Mr Kiewe from the days of his wonderful wool shop on Ship Street in Oxford.

The third item in my order was a book called Loop de Loop. That’s what it says on the packing slip, too. But what they have sent is “Norwegian Patterns for Knitting” which isn’t very good and anyway I’ve already got it.

I haven’t the oomph to complain and pack the book up and trudge to the post office (no longer conveniently located). I’ve ordered Loop de Loop from Amazon and don’t know what I’ll do with Norwegian Patterns.

Zite has revved itself up slightly, with a story about what they call “saris” (plural of “sari”) to be worn by all the performers at this year’s festival. Designed and made on Shetland — and available for sale there for a substantial sum — they appear to be large stoles, possibly in feather-and-fan, in four colours, and rather attractive. We’ll see if a link survives today’s posting. It’s from a source called Deadline News.

As for actual knitting, I am about ready to do the ninth bit of cabling on the back of the Sous Sous, still without thinking out a satisfactory distribution of percentage points for the side bar. Helen admired it extravagantly, before I reminded her that she didn’t like the pattern — she’s afraid it will draw too much attention to a less-than-ironing-board-flat tummy.