Eyes and Things (such as knitting)

I am walking around without glasses for the first time since quite early childhood. Not that I can see all that well without them. I experimented yesterday with an eye patch -- if I covered the good eye, maybe the old one could then function with its glasses on. If I covered the bad eye, maybe the good eye would be happier on its own. While I was fussing about with this project, I snapped the elastic against my expensive new eye. It was an instant of utter terror, followed by several hours of anxiety, but all seems well. I have put patch and glasses away and we'll just totter on like this. The sooner the second cataract can be done and proper glasses issued, the better.

I unpinned the Princess edging and, not easily, got it back on the needles. Progress was then further complicated by the mysterious disappearance of my Katcha Katcha -- the vital holder of the current row-count. I figured it out, I think, and knit three rows, not without difficulty. I plan to go on like that, a few rows a day, just so as not to forget the pattern. I have left in the thread I put the stitches on for dressing, as a life-line. Although one I sincerely hope I will never have to clutch.

Thomas-the-Younger's striped Koigu progresses. Today I should reach the point where I divide for front and back.

Non-Knit

Our son James, who lives in Beijing, has been camping recently with his son Alistair, at Xanadu. I have an anthropologist friend who has done some work at Timbuctoo, but I did not know until just now that Xanadu was a real place as well. Alistair said that camping was more fun at Kirkmichael  -- certainly the first time in human history that Strathardle has been compared to Xanadu in any respect -- let alone, favourably.

Everybody says how fresh colours look after a cataract operation, and it is true, but I am even more struck by the surface texture of things -- the ply of yarn, pixels on the computer screen, gunge in the kitchen, the grain of the wood of the tea-tray.