Here's what happened with the Sous Sous, deduced after much anxious thought:

When I laid it aside last time, I was at the point where the shoulder shaping begins. When I resumed last week, I didn't start shaping the shoulders. Instead, I repeated the last instruction: “Work rows 1-14 again”.

With the results a) that I inserted almost a whole extra repeat; and b) that the first “work rows 1-14 again” left me with an incomplete cable crossing. The pattern is 16 lines long, and the final two finish off the cabling.

So after much thinking and consulting of Ravelry and deciding to frog back somewhat and then knit the smaller size as far as repeats were concerned and worrying about the side seams if I shortened the back and couldn't figure out how to shorten the front – after all that, I actually looked and saw the extra repeat and all became clear.

“Look at your knitting”, EZ said.

So I have frogged, and am proceeding with the pattern as written. It will be very slightly longer than specified. I am now happily decreasing for the shoulders, four stitches at the beginning of every row – the effect should very soon make itself felt. Here's a link to the Ravelry page if you've forgotten what it looks like. You'll understand my anxiety about the front when you see it.

I'm getting on fine with Flipboard, at least more or less fine, as a substitute for Zite. They're very fond of the Harlot, so I'm reading her regularly. She had a piece recently about the great pleasure to be had, reserved for knitters, when you unravel something and knit it up again and reach the point where you are knitting with new yarn instead of unravelled yarn. She expresses it better than that. Anyway, I haven't got there yet.

But I hope to this evening. I am sure the only thing to do at this point is to finish the back before I go on to anything else.

Science

Darwin himself, I gather, wondered about speciation, although the word hadn't been invented yet and he didn't even have a word for genes. He wondered why, if his theory was right, we never seemed to find species in the process of transition, either in nature or in fossils. All of us seem to be happily settled in the species we were born into.

I've read a bit more Dawkins but he gets more and more irritating. At the moment he is explaining to me about carbon dating – apparently creationists don't believe in it. Increasingly I feel that an Oxford professor ought to have more pressing demands on his time than constructing elaborate arguments against the patently absurd. I am reading “The Greatest Show on Earth”.

He promises to demolish “intelligent design” while he's at it, and I will struggle on far enough to find out what he means by that.

Wedding

This week is it. If they send my husband home, I'll have to bite the bullet and welcome him. By this time next week, I think I could reasonably say, Can't he stay here over the weekend so that I can go to the wedding?