A fairly satisfactory day. No out – I had my Tuesday bath. Helen struggled mightily with the problem of speaking to a doctor, and has succeeded in getting me referred to someone for a replacement hip. More struggles tomorrow may reveal more details. I am hoping to go back to that posh nursing home where I was for a fortnight last summer, for a fortnight’s convalescence. The cost which Helen learned today is, as they say, eye-watering. I don’t know whether it’s a general increase, or the specific cost of post-operative care. Probably a bit of both. I've seen them in action -- one of the women at our table had just had a hip operation -- and am confident I'll be looked after.

 

And I knit happily on with the new great-grandchild's hap. That’s something. Gudrun’s instructions are to proceed in this peaceful fashion until there are 144 stitches – no fiddling about with a tape measure. I’ve marked off 80 stitches to avoid countless recounts, and there are probably another ten at either end, so I’m making progress.

 

My knitting technique (very poor) is self-taught. I’ve had various tries at self-improvement, including the Portuguese technique discussed in comments yesterday, with the yarn around your neck. That’s one of my Craftsy classes, indeed. I’ve never made much progress. That probably means, I’ve never stuck to any system for long enough. Indeed, I was rather gratified once to discover that my technique – drop-and-throw – has a name of its own. I’m not the only one!

 

I had a delivery from Mindful Chef yesterday – one of those companies that provides recipes and ingredients. I used to eat with them a lot, and then not at all for quite a while. I’m stronger now, except for this blasted hip, so I ordered four meals this week. I  quite enjoy devoting half the morning to the cooking of lunch. It involves a fair amount of exercise, or at any rate a lot of standing up and sitting down again. I allow myself a few pages of my book after slicing the garlic and grating the ginger. Today’s lunch was a considerable success.

 

Wordle: Three for me today! My two starter words gave me two greens and a brown, and I then typed in the first qualifying word I thought of. There’s an awful lot of luck involved. Ketki had grn, grn, ???, grn, ??? from her starter word, but guessed wrong twice and wound up with four. Alexander and his sister Big Rachel and Roger were the other scorers of three. Poor Thomas needed six – he got stuck on grn, grn, grn, ???, ??? and guessed wrong three times. Five for Theo, four for the small remainder.