This morning our dining room furniture is due to come back from storage. It’s lovely to have the room like this, all clean and empty. I am reluctant to resume responsibility for all those things.

Both VK and IK turned up in yesterday’s post. I don’t think anything stirs the blood in either, although I need to spend more time with them.

I liked Mary Kaiser’s article in IK. I had a hopeful look at her blog but she writes rarely and briefly. She says in the article that she thought of having a Year of Old Shale but then remembered a tax collector in Flaubert “whose hobby is churning out thousands of napkin rings in his little home workshop ‘in one of those states of utter bliss…which divert the mind with easy challenges and gratify it with the most utter and complete success.’”

So Kaiser eschewed the too-easy challenge.

And I thought, oh dear, what about me and all these socks? But then I cheered up. Judy’s Magic Cast-On, at the very least, is not an easy challenge. And I have no doubt that (unlike thousands of napkin rings) people really do like socks. It’s not just that they wear them when I am around – they do that, and they know I like to see it. But they also bring them to me from time to time for darning – you can’t fake that.

I am progressing nicely up the leg of the second sock of the current pair.

Franklin has an article in VK about knitting resources in Iceland. Interesting, but I’m sorry he didn’t include the picture he posted in his blog, of the yarn section in the supermarket.

Termessos

Thank you for the link to the discovery of the Hittite statue in SE Turkey, Lisa. What a lot of interesting things there are in the world! I especially love the remains of the later Roman Empire which litter the west and south coasts of Turkey, all rather irrelevant to the Turks who came from further east. Rose Macaulay’s “The Towers of Trebizond” is the book to read, if you haven’t.

I Google’d her just now, to check the spelling, and found her wearing this rather choice sweater.