The evacuees have reached our town. The ones who have come into the store to buy workbooks for their kids are the fortunate ones -- they have vehicles, they are wearing their own clothes, they intend to return to their homes and believe they have homes to which they can return.

Even so, the moms are tense and the kids are solemn.

One of the local shelters has been disappointed not to have more people. The man in charge said in frustration that he had jobs lined up. I can understand his frustration, though it is also a little funny.

We are happy that things are going smoothly in our state. It is fair to say that we had more time to prepare, and that we are not seeing the worst of the situation. But the evacuees need a sense of order, and the feeling that the people helping them know what they are doing.

On the other side of the country, Son in Law bought #1 daughter a sewing machine. It is called a Shark, and has 60 buttons to push.

My husband bought our vacuum cleaner. It is called The Boss, and is black and noisy.

I have no comment to make on this. Some of us will find it amusing.

But #1 daughter intends to begin quilting. I think she will be good at this, as she has an excellent sense of color and design, and is good with details. She might actually have pointy triangles, unlike me.

Her foray into quilting moves me to suggest a few books for those who are considering taking it up. Not all quilt books are good for beginners. In fact, my favorite quilt books -- the Thimbleberries books, and Debbie Mumm's -- tend to have directions like "quilt as desired," which isn't much use for beginners at all.

Better Homes and Gardens is a better bet for beginners. Their American Patchwork and Quilting is an excellent starting point, with a nice historical overview, lots of photographs, and explicit instructions.

505 Quilt Blocks is another of theirs. It has a wide variety of blocks, with a lot of pictorial ones, and suggestions for projects that can be made with just a few blocks, as well as full-sized quilts.

Ruby McKim's 101 Patchwork Patterns is my favorite book on traditional quilting. It was written in the 1930s, so you cannot expect anything that considers new technologies, time-saving modern methods, or anything of that nature. The illustrations feature maids making up beds. But it gives good clear instructions, plenty of patterns, and color suggestions that will give you an authentically retro quilt.

My own quilt is languishing in its hoop, waiting for slightly cooler weather. While it does that, I am looking for a good quilting motif for the center squares. All the ones in my collection are too large. Hmm.

Richard Dawkins is one of my favorite science writers, but in this book he gives in to pique. You can just hear him losing his patience with the sheer innumeracy all around him. "Do the math, people!" he is plaintively crying. If we understood numbers at all, he feels, we would not believe the rubbish we do.

And it is true that we -- at least in the U.S. -- tend to be helpless about numbers, if not actually innumerate. I spend most of my working life with teachers, who are in most cases paid to deal with numbers. And I can tell you that most are not clear in their minds about the difference between 5 feet and 5 yards. I am myself inclined to lose track of zeros at the ends of numbers -- was it thousands we were talking about, or millions? There is in fact the whole eyes-slide-off-the-page problem with numbers that I have mentioned before, and I see plenty of people who are worse about it than I am.

And it is true that we, as a result, are easily led astray. Or not even astray. We are just easily led.

For example, check out the relative dangers of terrorism vs. starvation. And yet many of us have accepted that terrorism is the biggest issue in the world today, or the biggest danger, or the most significant public policy issue.

Many of us believe that major stores actually have 75% off sales every week. Or that buying things on sale saves us money compared to not buying things at all.

And after every long weekend -- like the one we've just had -- there are reports of the number of auto accidents. We never get reports of the number of auto accidents on a typical Saturday-through-Monday period, so we have no idea whether there have been more accidents because it was a long weekend, or not. But we still think the number means something.

Getting back to my school year schedule has included trying to do some work on family history on Tuesdays, and today I tried to answer a question sent to me by a possible cousin (although Dawkins makes clear that we are all cousins). Like so many other questioners, this one believes that the individual she's asking about was a Native American.

Now, since I have a lot of information about my family, I can say with assurance that we don't have any Native Americans on our tree. We have many other ethnic groups. No questioners ever say that they have heard that their great-great-grandmother was a member of any other ethnic group.

When I used to travel around teaching local history, I found the same thing in classrooms. The Cherokee lived in this region for a grand total of 40 years. Their numbers were very small. Nearly all of the people who came to this region before the year 2000 were of Scots-Irish heritage. (82% were Scots-Irish from Tennessee. All our diversity is recent.) And yet, in every classroom, a third of the little blondies will assure you that they are Cherokee.

Not Quapaw. Not Osage. Cherokee. I'm told that virtually all Americans who imagine that they have Native American ancestors (as distinct from those who actually do) imagine Cherokee ancestors. One would think that the Cherokee were very prolific.

I've also noticed that nearly all the people who believe that they have unproven Native American heritage have an unproven female Native American ancestor. In fact, there are a whole lot of Cherokee princesses involved. We are not talking, therefore, about some promiscuous fellow who quickly impregnated lots of women before leaving the area, but  princesses who presumably got married and settled down. In a third of the local families? The least little bit of arithmetic will tell you how unlikely this is, even before you get around to actual historical information. Unless there was just one, who then had a son who was both highly promiscuous and highly reproductively successful. This never seems to be part of anyone's story, though.

People will tell you that this is a step forward. A generation ago, it was apparently more common that people would deny their Native American heritage rather than imagine it. I can see that this can be interpreted as something positive, even if it seems to be only Cherokee princesses who have become welcome on the family tree. Yet, it makes the innumeracy of it even more startling.

Now, another favorite science writer of mine has posited that some innumeracy is adaptive for humans. He suggests that being able to think about things abstractly, in big numbers, is not as useful for people living in natural circumstances as being able to respond quickly -- and perhaps mostly on the basis of previous experience rather than logic -- to immediate dangers. That is, recognizing the unlikelihood of being hit by lightning and therefore ignoring it is less beneficial than being scared of lightning and taking cover. Being able to size up a herd or a crop visually is more useful than being able to grasp big numbers that one doesn't meet in daily life. Using physical memory to throw a spear fast enough would be more likely to lead to survival than having the skill to calculate the trajectory.

How this might translate into imaginary Cherokee great-grandmothers, irrational preoccupation with terrorism, or inability to understand knitting gauge is less clear. However, evolution is a very slow process. And it is, as Dawkins clarifies (at a length which suggests that he has run into lots of people who have trouble with the concept), all about reproductive success.

We can only conclude that reproductive success does not depend upon math. Or at least not upon skill in math.

But skill in math does allow you to appreciate an interesting genealogical point Dawkins makes: those of us who are fortunate enough to be ultimately reproductively successful will probably have descendants in common.

We tend to think of our own ancestry as branching out -- two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on until we have more ancestors than the whole human population of the world at that time. In fact, at some point folks will have married cousins, however distant, so there won't be that many ancestors. Dawkins, being mathematically skilled, claims that if we time-traveled to the early middle ages and removed everyone who would not turn out to have descendents in the 21st century, there would be surprisingly few people left. Surprising to those of us who aren't as mathematically skilled, at least. Dawkins isn't surprised.

(My parents share an ancestor in the 1500s. Her name was Alice. I was surprised. And so of course they also share all of Alice's ancestors. And probably plenty more as we go back, if I were able to trace it back for another 1000 years. Mr. Bush and I share an ancestor, too. Notice how I am using experiential thinking to make this more plausible to you, rather than merely relying on logic? Hey, I'm reproductively successful.)

And so, even though there are many more of us in the world today, the chances are good not only that you, reader, and I have some ancestor in common way back when, but also that we will have descendants in common, whether we ever meet or not.

How much more true is this of you and the people you actually meet today! I mean, there you are living in the same place. Your great-grandchildren could easily meet and marry. So you ought to be nice to them, just in case.

I am reading The Kite Runner, and Marian Keyes's Watermelon. Alternating, really, a few chapters at a time, since I have been down with some little virus. Both are set in war-torn countries, both touch on religious differences that led to the violence, both are written with great attention to detail. Both are about friendships, family, love, betrayal, and self-betrayal.

Watermelon, having a female protagonist, involves birth, adultery, and cooking. The Kite Runner, with a male protagonist, involves violence, rape, and sports. The Kite Runner has won numerous prizes, while Watermelon is described as "chick lit." Is a kite-fighting tournament really a more valid metaphor for life than cooking? Is rape more significant in the scheme of things than birth?

I had thought that Brooklyn (from Denim People) had narrow white stripes on the sleeves. It turns out that in fact the stripes are 4x4 cables. It is a common failing of 21st century knitting books that their photography is so artsy that the actual garment is a bit of a surprise. Denim People doesn't seem too bad in that way, actually -- they do show the entire garment from the front, at least, and the lighting is not so moody or the poses so contrived that a reader cannot guess the shape of the sweater. In this case, however, it has been a nice surprise. In this yarn and at this gauge, the white cables let into the blue fabric feel and look more like braid than like a sweater cable. It's quite a nice effect. In this picture, by the way, you are seeing the cuff of the sleeve at the bottom and the beginning of the sleeve at the top.

As for me, I am feeling a little better. I can breathe, for example, which is always an improvement.  It is Labor Day, a day off. We are planning a cookout, if it does not rain, which still seems questionable at this point. If it does rain, it can be a cook in. #2 daughter's school is in session today, as they believe that one can best celebrate the dignity of labor by doing a bit of work. Since I have been in bed with a cold all weekend, I intend to do a bit of work myself. Those of us doing the HGP are to thoroughly clean our living rooms this week. I began at the doorway yesterday morning and made it about three feet along before giving up and going back to bed, so I hope to move on from there and get a bit further today.

We all probably clean our living rooms pretty regularly, but there are always plenty of fiddly things we don't get done. In my case, there are a couple of computer desks to sort through, and stuff like these saucers which live, with their teacups, on a shelf by the door. I don't take them to be washed until it is brought to my attention, by which time they have become rather grubby. They were given to me by my mother, who was given them by her mother, and so forth. I will end up giving them to my daughters as well, so eventually there will be some women who have only one apiece, scattered over the future landscape.

We are also supposed to buy some extra flour and sugar for our holiday baking, and to put a meal in the freezer. I'm thinking a nice pot of lentil soup. I'll have to rest up a bit first, though.

I have a stack of books. Those who know me will wonder what I am talking about, as stacks of books are not exactly in short supply around my place. However, what I have is a stack of unread books. This is not so usual lately. I have taken up Booksfree, after all, and they only send you two books at a time. I have also been conscientiously buying only books that I Need (I am not prepared to defend my definition of "need" here), so I only have a couple of unread books at a time nowadays.

However, Booksfree and I have gotten out of sync, so I got two packages from them on the same day. And it happened that on that day I had bought my Book Club book, plus another lighter novel because the Book Club book looked so deeply depressing that I thought I might need a relief book in order to get through it.

So I ended up with six unread books on my nightstand. Such a feeling of luxury!

And good timing, as it happened, because I have a cold. It is also raining. If you are going to have a cold, it is an excellent plan to have it when it is raining and you have a nice stack of assorted paperbacks. I also had a visit from the Schwan's man, so overall, this cold is about as convenient as a cold could be.

I did sandwich up my quilt and begin quilting it, by the way, but it is still too hot for quilting, so I did not get very far. Also, I am too weak to hold up the hoop. Fortunately, I have Brooklyn to fall back on. I have completed both fronts (and did end up with a right and a left) and have begun the sleeves. This is not Sleeve Island, though, as the sleeves are more complex than the back or the fronts.

But mostly I am lying around reading and feeling sorry for myself. Or as sorry for myself as a person who has a home and a job and knows her family are all safe decently can.

Brainthingy and I have been chatting a bit about the great knitting controversy: flat vs. circular. Controversy? Why, yes. There are people who hate circular knitting so much that they knit mittens on the flat, and people so enamored of it that they will knit a cardigan in the round and cut clear down the front.

As with so many other great controversies -- Mac vs. PC, standard vs. automatic, arts vs. sciences -- I find myself standing firmly with one foot in each camp.

This is not because I am wishy-washy. It is because I believe in versatility.

Now, in case you are not a knitter, let me quickly mention that knitting can be done back and forth to make a flat piece, as on the right, or around and around to make a circular piece, as on the left. Some people use straight needles for flat knitting, but I prefer to use circular needles all the time. I just knit back and forth if I want flatness. And for quite small circles, I use double-pointed needles, such as those below on the right.

As a general rule, I knit flat things flat and round things round, which seems logical to me. However, there are exceptions.

For example, my usual mode of making a raglan sweater (the kind with diagonal lines at the sleeves) is to knit it seamlessly from the top down, making the lines with increases, as you can perhaps see on the left. But Brooklyn is a raglan which the designer has written in flat pieces --knitted from the bottom up -- that then must be sewn together. So I'm making it that way. You can see the back on the left, with the diagonal lines made by decreasing.

It seems a little counter-intuitive, but I might learn something from the experience And so far at least, the decreases along the diagonal make an attractive edge.

Brainthingy and I were talking particularly of Fair Isle. Fair Isle is a style of colorwork (from Fair Isle) which is characterized by a special kind of color patterning. Both the examples here use just two colors. But you can use more colors for Fair Isle. If so, it is customary to use two colors for each row, in this sort of pattern: for the first row, use color A as background and B as foreground. For the second row, you use color A as foreground and color C as background. For the third row, use color C as foreground and so on, using as many colors as you like. Each row uses just two colors, and each color gets a chance as background and then as foreground.

By the way, if you aren't using this sort of patterning, you can't, strictly speaking, call it Fair Isle. I'm not going to tell on you or anything, but I thought you might like to know.

 Myself, I make flat things with Fair Isle designs flat and round things with Fair Isle designs round. But not everyone considers this correct. There are people who feel that Fair Isle should always be done in the round. There may be historical justification for this.

I have a couple of Fair Isle projects in mind. For one thing, the beautiful glove pattern I've mentioned a few times (check out the splendid work knitting in color is doing) strikes me as just the thing for one of the bawks on my list. Bawks are done in the round, so I expect to do it in the round. But I also intend to make Erin, an Alice Starmore cardigan.

This sweater is designed to be made in the round, as though it were a pullover. Then one is to cut down the front to make it into a cardigan. I've had this on my "to make" list for a year and still haven't settled whether to do that or whether just to make it in my usual cardigan way.

There doesn't seem to be any advantage to making it in the round. I'll use circular needles either way, so the greater comfort factor of circulars isn't an issue. It seems to me that working back and forth would give nicer front edges, without multiple ends to fret over. This would make the picking up of the front bands, or the sewing on (I haven't checked what approach the pattern uses) easier -- particularly since I work a selvedge. There is no interesting shaping in this pattern that might depend on working in the round, either -- the colorwork is the whole point of it.

It may be like socks. I have seen so many patterns that appear to be written specifically in order to avoid having to turn a heel, or graft the toe, or some other technique commonly used in sock making. I even tried out a couple of them -- and I frogged the socks. They just aren't as nice.

Now, no one can say that Alice Starmore's designs aren't nice. But the cutting and steeking may be a tradition or a habit more than a sensible design decision. Unless you have trouble reading the pattern back and forth, or are bothered by having the purl side toward you half the time, then it is hard to see any value to working a flat thing in the round.

I am interested in your views on this, knitters.

Hee's something very important from arcticturtle. In particular, please read the National Geographic article from last October tha begins like this:

"But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.
 
The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.
 
Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States."

Yes, from last October. How the predictions were made, and why they were ignored, makes for horrifying reading. If you are concerned about the environment, if you think environmentalists are nuts, if you vote, if you think your vote doesn't matter, if you are interested in dystopian fiction, or if you are a pragmatist -- you should read this article.

IMHO.

I first read this book years ago, before my sister moved to New Zealand, when its New Zealand setting was just another exotic place to me. I was looking forward to reading it again now that I have a mental image of the place.

It is set in New Zealand in 1945. It is possible that things have changed. So far, I have learned that menservants are very hard to find and that kiwis refer to England as "Home." Always capitalized.

Home may be a concept that we all particularly appreciate right now when so many of our countrymen and women are without homes. It is easy to take that simple thing for granted, to be dissatisfied with our homes or resentful of the amount of effort they require, but having one makes all the difference.

One busload of refugees is now sheltering in the county where I live. We are not very close to New Orleans, but they could not find any place between there and here with space for the entire busload. They were fortunate to leave the city early, though I am sure that they do not feel fortunate at all.

Our local university is offering to take in displaced students from the Gulf for a free semester while they figure out what to do next. Relief efforts are strong here -- and I'm sure everywhere -- but money cannot solve all the problems.

With this in mind, I am trying not to be too cross about the fact that #1 son in insisting upon taking his driving test today, a process which will use up the little bit of gas I was hoping would see me through the week. Plus keeping me from getting to the gym, yet again, in a week which has been filled with places I have to go. Oh, yes, having to go places is probably part of my being cross. I don't think that he is ready, but perhaps he is. Then we will see firsthand what having a teenage boy does to insurance rates.

Larissa has written out a pattern for a nice felted bag which she is encouraging readers to make and vary as they like. She is asking that folks get back to her with their variations and pictures of their completed bags. She is also asking people who make a profit from this pattern to donate to an organization that helps kids get bicycles.

No more felted bags are currently on my knitting horizon -- I have my zombie and epic projects, prayer shawls, and Christmas gifts to make -- but I love the concept. If you have been toying with the idea of making a fleted bag, consider joining Larissa's project. The bag rejoices in the extremely cute name "Spork."

Yesterday I was working mostly on creating alluring new vistas in the toy section. There are far fewer shoppers now than there were during the back to school rush, so we are trying to clean up and restock. But there are always some customers, and most of them make a little conversation as I commune with the computer on their behalf.

The sufferings of the people on the gulf coast, the relief efforts, the possibility that New Orleans will just sink like Atlantis, and the price of gas were the topics most people chose.

There was one woman, though, who said, "I heard that Canada was the worst threat in terms of weapons of mass destruction." I was confused, I will admit. I thought she meant that Canada was at the greatest risk of being invaded.

"Because they have less security?" I hazarded.

"I don't know why," she said, "but they are the greatest risk. And they have oil reserves that would supply the U.S. for 50 or 60 years. Sometimes I think we're fighting the wrong people."

In case you are wondering, this was a little blonde preschool teacher buying books of nursery rhymes and a bead maze, not one of those heavily tattooed guys who come in sometimes to get lab equipment.

So, dear reader, I have some questions for you.

Was this woman suggesting that the United States invade Canada and steal their oil? Is there anything else she could have meant?

If this is indeed what she had in mind, then is this a common point of view, and I just don't travel in those circles? Are there indeed Americans who believe that we should even contemplate going to war with other Americans -- not because they say "about" funny, but in order to steal their oil?

How high would the price of gas have to get before you would be willing to be part of the barbarian horde? Would you cut your energy use by 10% in order to avoid bloodshed on the northern border?

How about Oklahoma? I bet they have oil. Maybe we could invade them.

While you consider your answer, here is Brooklyn. I am not sure that it is possible to see the selvedges in this picture. If you look very closely, you might be able to see that the last two stitches on the edges of the left and right fronts -- here shown stacked -- have been knitted on every row, producing a nice edge on which to sew the zipper.

Those with a high level of visual/spatial intelligence, whether they can clearly see what a nice edge this makes or not, will have realized that I have done this nice edging on the same side on both the right and the left fronts. I have in fact made two left fronts.

I did not realize this until I got ready to do the raglan shaping. Thank goodness I realized it then. I could have frogged the whole right front and begun again. I could have dropped the edge stitches on both sides and picked them back up in the correct pattern. However, I always make a 1-stitch selvedge, so I just corrected myself and I am trusting to the zipper to cover up that errant stitch. That and the fact that it's dark blue, and therefore the details are invisible.

I fervently hope that knitting errors are the worst trouble you find yourself in today.