fourth edition

I am home after three days working in Yorkshire. The sun was out the first two days and our surroundings were beautiful and very rural. During one meeting I spotted a pheasant walking about on the small hill outside and predictably enough I saw plenty of sheep, cows and even deer. I do not live far from nature here in Glasgow, but it is nice when you do not get a constant background hum of traffic.

And I got a lot of knitting done during meetings, in the evenings and on my epic five-hour-long train journeys.

Harmony is working up really well. I am past the first lace chart and the rib section and well into the second lace chart. It is my sort of project, really – lace charts, fine gauge yarn and a staggering amount of knitting to be done – and I’m happy to sit knitting it.

Harmony is my only project  at the moment, though, so I will need another project to keep my sanity.  I have a gazillion ideas in my head right now (most of which involve completely  insane fair-isle, thank you Ben) but I may have to stick to summery yarns right now which limits me a bit.

I have been catching up on the Eurovision Song Contest – I was stuck on a train during the first semi-final which was heartbreaking and had to rely on text messages from Other Half (“Poland’s a pervy Hungarian animated short film”) which was fun, but Clearly Not the Real Thing. You can still catch me talking ESC on BBC World Service’s Digital Planet but for me it is now all about the second semi-final. I have high hopes after seeing energetic songs (and Belgium/Russia) making it out of the first semi-final, so I’m hoping the trend will continue with Turkey, Romania, Azerbaijan and Denmark qualifying easily with a surprise surge of love for Cyprus. I also think Armenia will do well.

Just before leaving for Yorkshire, I followed an amazing thread on MetaFiler. MeFi is a decade-old message board and one night a user posted that two friends of his had found themselves in a potentially dangerous situation – could anyone help? Newsweek has a comprehensive look at the story, but you will want to read it all unfold on the MetaFilter site. Best of the web, for sure, and proof that social networking has more to it that celebrity tweets and Farmville..