The Fasten Seatbelt Sign is Lit

Wednesday and Thursday I hit a major patch of turbulence. Thursday afternoon, my intestines pitched a hissy fit that it took two doses of antidiarrheal meds to stop, and no sooner had that end settled down when the other end tried to throw up my toenails. The one thing I didn’t have was nausea (touch wood!). I was pretty much confined to Ensure High Protein, vanilla ice cream, good ol’ Coke Cola, and Carr’s Table Water Crackers (which is the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of matzo) because I was leery of sending anything more substantial down the hatch lest it be refunded with prejudice. I started easing in some other foods over Sunday and today, but I’ve spent most of the past five days within lunging distance of plumbing.

Today, our friend CK (who is a Pearl Beyond Price, BTW) picked up my mom’s Fire tablet and her hearing aids, brought me the tablet, and took the hearing aids to the hearing aid place to get them cleaned. Greater love, I’m telling ya, because today we had a high wind advisory (25-35 mph/40-56 kph with gusts up to 50/80) for most of the day, which means the sky was outright brown with blowing dirt. It’s been trying to rain into the bargain. With so much airborne dirt, the raindrops end up muddy and hit you like a Tim Wakefield knuckleball. A while ago, it was gusting and splattering against the windows.

The problem with mom’s tablet was Google. She would try to get her email, and Google would give her their song and dance about wanting access to her Amazon account (she doesn’t have one) and she didn’t know how to tell it, “no.” (Telling Google “no” is one thing. Making it stick is a neat trick if you can pull it off.) Part of the problem is that one of my Google accounts is the recovery account for her Google account, which she got (nolens volens) when I signed her up for a G-mail account, and as a consequence, I got about 6 emails to my account giving “security code numbers” because she evidently thought she had to sign in to her account and didn’t know her email password. Anyway, I got that sorted. Then I opened her browser and, just for the halibut, started deleting open tabs one at a time, counting them as I went. I stopped counting at 685 (!!!) and deleted God knows how many others with the delete all function. About half of them were just open tabs. A good three-fourths of the rest of them were advertisements that her obviously not add-free Spider game opens in Silk every time she starts a new game. Hopefully, she won’t have any problems with it for a while.

In the knitting news, there’s not much news. Ongoing projects are ongoing.

The hexagon blanket seems to be hexed. An increase of 12 stitches every two rows is WAY too many, as is 6 stitches every two rows (DUH!). An increase of 6 stitches every four rows is not enough. Now I’m trying to work out how I can increase 6 stitches every three rows on a pattern based on a two row repeat. Sigh.

Franklin Habit, knitting mavin, whose YouTube channel and Instagram I follow, upped sticks and moved from Chicago (IL) to Paris (FR) about 8 months ago because he’d always wanted to live in Paris. If you want mostly knitting -related content that is short, sane, soothing and smile-worthy, I highly recommend his YouTube channel. Since the move, he has on his Instagram channel been featuring candid snapshots of the City of Light gathered during his outs-and-abouts. A while back, he posted this:

The text reads in part: “Passing by Foucault’s pendulum on the way home from the grocery store.” That little observation delights me on so many levels, not least because in 1851, when M. Foucault was making his experiment in Paris, there was nothing chez moi but bald prairie. For miles and miles and miles and miles.