New follower! Hi!

Yesterday was another tough one on the nursing front. Archie dropped in, in the early afternoon. He was there to help get my husband into bed for a nap. He said that he thought his grandfather was weaker than when he had last seen him (when was that?) and added, with what sounded like great good cheer, that he would be here to help for much of the summer. I fear I would have run as fast as I could, when I was Archie’s age, from any possibility of having to assist in the physical care of my grandparents.

And in the morning – a day for grandchildren! – we had seen Lizzie, who is in Edinburgh for a hen party. She seemed in fizzing form. She is the one who spent a year at the University of Kansas. She has subsequently graduated from Birmingham University, and has spent much of the year since then in the antipodes recovering from education. She is now working for a PR firm in London which seems to deal mostly with food – she has learned to like olives – and living at home with her parents, Rachel and Ed.

Today continued difficult, with my husband very weak and sleepy. Our midday carer, an absolute favourite, the man who got the aged Sam Martinez over to Glasgow to see Hibs lift the Scottish Cup, said he thought it was a urine infection and bullied me into phoning NHS 24 instead of waiting until I could phone our own GP tomorrow.

And he was right. The weekend dr has prescribed some urine-specific antibiotics and we hope for a transformation soon.

I continue to make progress with the Hansel hap. I have introduced the third coloured stripe, and done the third pattern round (pattern rounds occur on only one round in six). All the YO’s seemed to line up properly between the first and the second pattern rounds. The third gave rise to a bit more anxiety. Having the pattern rounds so far apart makes it somewhat difficult to determine whether everything is in order.

It’s hard to photograph at the moment, as the centre is drawn up into a sort of bowl as I knit round and round on the borders. I even began to wonder whether Debbie New’s lace coracle in “Gathering of Lace” had been inspired by centre-outwards hap-knitting. So I got the book down, and the answer seems to be, no. It was inspired by coracles. There are lots of good things in that book. I hadn’t looked at it for a while.

Mary Lou, that is a good idea, to have the Feral Knitter’s book on my iPad. I have never bought a knitting book that way. I tried a couple of such cookery books and have abandoned the practice. So I have pre-ordered it and it rather sounds as if I can’t have the pdf without the physical copy. Your recommendation, Stashdragon, makes that prospect rather attractive anyway.