It would have been today. C. and I should be sipping white wine right now  and eating a delicious amuse bouche and listening to the skipper telling us his plans for tomorrow. (Majestic Line food is superb; in the evening, the first course is brought out and handed round as one sits in the saloon with one’s new friends and one’s wine.) I ordered Kate Davies’ Evendoon pullover kit, to mark the occasion, and compounded the misdeed by ordering the hat kit which (since today) goes with it. Since KD doesn’t have a shop and sells entirely on-line, as far as I know, she won’t have suffered too much from this extraordinary year, so I can’t even salve my conscience with my usual helping-small-business excuse.

 

I could at least bring the WIP section of the sidebar up to date, as a constant spur to my conscience.

 

But I can comfort myself with the thought of how much happier my cats are this evening, did they but know it, than if I had waltzed off to indulge in amuse bouche-eating. Here’s a slightly indelicate domestic scene for you: Perdita has taken to joining me in the Downstairs Lavatory when I am seated there, and somehow we have worked out a routine. I turn on the cold tap to a trickle. She jumps up on the basin – it’s small, and the rim is narrow, and she is a fairly stout middle-aged cat by now, so that takes a bit of calculating. Then she drinks deep. And pauses for a while, and drinks again. (Needless to say, water is provided elsewhere, but that’s Paradox’s water.) I sit there until she jumps down.

 

I could hardly have asked a cat-sitter to go into the Downstairs Lavatory and sit down. Nor would Perdita necessarily have responded. She’s my cat.

 

And I’ve knit a bit further on the random-Shetland EPS. I’ve successfully increased, and have embarked on the st st body. I agree, Shandy, that it’s going to be a long way without anything that could count as challenge factor. At the moment, I feel that’s what I want. Although I think I knit more productively when there’s a challenge involved. The sweater (admittedly, there’s not much of it) is looking good, but I feel that, compared to the Evendoon, random loses out to designer stripes.

 

Life

 

Manaba rang up today – he was out for a walk with his son, I think. He says that he and Hamish click to each other responsively. He also says that there are different clicks, at least one of them slightly rude, so that Zulu grown-ups tell children not to click like that. But as far as I could gather, a click can’t be stretched into a basic word like “Mama” or “Daddy”. I’ll be glad when I can see them again in real life, to observe and discuss clicking, and to talk to Manaba about sourdough. I gave him some of my starter, you may remember, and he has shot ahead of me in the sourdough stakes.

 

I continue to enjoy “The Blessing”. But now that the weekend is with us, my responsibility for Italian resumes.