Freecell in Windows 10 has added a “Try Again” button, at least in certain circumstances, so I tried composing a couple of paragraphs over there and pasting them into Blogger. No luck. In they went as HTML, as before, with no provision for escape.

So I mailed them to myself, and here they are, over on the Mac:

My INR was up yesterday: 3.2. “1” means your blood clots normally. Higher readings indicate degrees of thinness, non-clotting-ness. They are aiming at something between 2 and 3 for me, perhaps for everyone, with 2.5 the ideal. So far, I have been bumping along at the bottom, 2, 2.1, 2.2, no more. I was even thinking of adding the allowed 2 units of alcohol a day to my diet, in the form of half a bottle of Westons Vintage Cider with my supper. It might improve appetite – I've lost half a stone.

But alcohol, in moderation, augments the effects of rat poison, so I don't think I'll try that just now. What I will do, in moderation, is to eat a bit more of the delicious foods with Vitamin K in them. Avocados, hummus, ripe cheese. They encourage blood to clot, i.e. they counteract rat poison. Drs have reduced my daily dose, but only very slightly, and I won't have another blood test for a fortnight. I'm not entirely happy, but at least I don't have any of the alarming symptoms listed in the leaflet that comes in the Warfarin box — yet.

Many thanks for all your help with feliculture yesterday.  A friend sent a link to this interesting article. Perdita understands spoken English perfectly — she is just pretending, like any toddler, when she affects not to recognise “no”. I have tried reinforcing it with a sharp hand-clap, as the article suggests, and am having some success. I think she wants to please me, and is trying to understand how.

She has got many of the toys you suggest, including a laser which she adores. If there is no one to play with her, she is quite happy to use the instrument itself as a toy. 

When we lived in Birmingham, a cat lived nearby named George Smith, a big ginger tom. He would often sit on his gatepost, at a convenient height for conversation, and engage passers-by. As the conversation developed, one might try to scratch George behind the ear in a friendly fashion. Then he would bite. He thought it was funny. I don’t want Perdita to grow up to be like George.

Knitting

Very little to report, yet again. I haven’t quite finished the current broad stripe of the Tokyo shawl — i.e., am not much advanced on where I was yesterday.

I looked up the article in IK that I mentioned yesterday. It’s about what might be called scientific knitting, but doesn’t say anything about Fibonacci as Loop-d-Loop implied it would. I googled “Fibonacci knitting” but found only articles about stripes, nothing about swirls. I think I’ll give up. It’s too difficult for me, anyway.

The article started off with an account of a PhD student who worked out a rather ingenious pattern for knitting the double helix onto a scarf. The pattern is in IK, elsewhere in the issue.  It had a certain vogue in the scientific community for a while, and someone wrote to the designer to say that she had knit it for her boyfriend’s father —  James Watson. It doesn’t get better than that.