Here is Erin, with the blue bit. In fact, this is the section of the blue bit with the error in it.

It is three rows down -- or at least the beginning is. Three rows before this I made an error. I discovered it, of course, on the following row. I thought "hmm... this isn't right." But at that point it could have been some little thing, you know, so I continued.

On the next row, it was evident that I had made an error. But I figured I would fix it when I got back to the right side on the next row. It wasn't that kind of error. So I thought about what to do -- still knitting as I thought. So I had at this point something like 1,456 stitches done since I made the error. (I believe it is Lydia over at Lanam Facio who writes about her knitting in terms of thousands of stitches. I've always found it impressive. Not enough to actually calculate real numbers or anything, but enough to make some up.)

What to do? What to do? Because after all this is the blue part, which I might have to take out entirely once I see how it looks with the other colors. I don't want to knit the whole thing twice and take it out twice.

No, in an unusual example of insouciance, I have just gone ahead. As you can see here, in this photograph, I have done another 1,763 stitches, and the error still isn't particularly visible. I believe that this part of the sweater will be covering my bottom when I wear it, and no one is going to be studying my bottom if I have anything to say about it. I promise, if I make an error at any place that a person could decently study while I am wearing this sweater, I will correct it.

There are a number of teams for the Knitting Olympics -- Norway, Canada, the U.S., California, and Luxembourg all have their own, with buttons. But you might want to join me on Team Wales.

One of my goals from last year was to continue with my family history. I have reached the point at which I no longer find new ancestors for my tree, but just little details of people's lives (last year's big breakthrough was coming up -- with Kali Mama's inspired assistance -- with a possible career for a nineteenth century guy). So it is easy to give it up entirely. Which I did at some point last year. I had declared Tuesday Family History Day, but it got submerged under all the other things I had to do. I am taking it back up.

Today I will interfere in your family history. If you want to find a Welshman on your family tree, you might be able to. I will tell you where to look.

The first group of Welsh immigrants came as colonists in the 1600s and 1700s. I have one of these guys on my tree: Joseph Motley, indentured servant to a fishmonger. He went on to have offspring who fought in the Revolutionary War, an excellent way of ensuring that you will have lots of good records for your descendents' genealogical research. If you have one of these guys, you may not know it at all, except by the possible Welshness of the name. These folks joined right in with the English, fighting in the war, signing the Declaration of Independence, and so on. If you have at this time depth a Davis, a Jones, or anyone with a suspicious number of w's and y's in their first name, you can join Team Wales.

The second group came in the 1800s. There was political unrest in Wales at the time, and hardship following the Napoleonic wars, and American mine owners were over there recruiting. Young men left from Liverpool in droves and came to New York and Pennsylvania and -- if they were not inclined toward mining -- thence down the canals to Ohio. I have one of these guys, too: William Lewis. He might as well have been named John Smith, or Lee Chang. I will never find this guy's parents. The whole of the county he lived in was stuffed full of Lewises, none of them provably related to my William. Sigh.

The Welshmen of this vintage made themselves churches. Not because they wanted different denominations from the locals. They were mostly Baptists and Methodists. It was probably because they wanted to sing more lustily and with more harmonies than the other people. Even today, the church musicians of Wales write diatribes against the common practice of having the whole congregation sing melody. Or of course they might have wanted to sing in Welsh.

Anyway, if you have folks from the upper Midwest in the early 1800s, and particularly if your ancestor in this time and place is a single man engaged in mining, stonemasonry, or other physical labor, you are likely enough to have a Welsh ancestor that you can go ahead and join Team Wales. Especially if you love leeks.

I swatched for my Knitting Olympics project. I did a short-row module from lesson 5 or so of the Artyarns modular knitting tutorial that Dweezy told us all about last year. You can go subscribe, and they will email it to you for free. This particular module turns out to be essentially the same as the Tychus hat from Knitty -- I don't know why I didn't notice that when I was making Tychus. And I realize that this invalidates my claim that I haven't made anything modular before.

In any case, this poor little swatch was enough to show that adding elastic thread  to the module just makes the wedge misshapen, rather than adding useful stretchiness. I was afraid of that. I will therefore be knitting it with elastic only at the edges, or entirely without elastic and then sewing some in, or something.

My knitting may not be challenging enough for the Olympics, but if I add plenty of dithering, it should still be hard to finish on time.

Seduced by their extremely cool button, I am joining Team Wales for the Knitting Olympics. I am not in Wales, but being of Welsh ancestry, I am eligible. Actually, being partial to daffodils and crying over Cym Rhonda will do it, too. Mostly, I really like the Welsh flag. This is also among the criteria. And I found the argument for joining the Knitting Olympics at the site convincing.

Frankly, I had thought that the Olympics were beginning this past weekend. Apparently they are not until February.

So I need a challenging project to cast on during the opening ceremonies on February 10th and complete by the ending on the 26th. I have been thinking about what might be challenging for me, and I think it will not be about the level of difficulty of the knitting, but about finishing it in that time, because I am not one of your fast knitters. I also have a lot of other things going on in my life. However, it seems to me that it would violate the spirit of the thing for me to make a pair of mittens or something. Therefore, I intend to make a modular headband. I have never before done any multi-directional knitting, and I also intend to do it with elastic thread held together with the yarn, a technique I have only used once before. This ought, then, to be sufficiently challenging, given that the Yarn Harlot has declared that the challenge is only as crazy as you want it to be. The rules allow swatching beforehand, so I do intend to determine whether the multi-directionality cancels out the usefulness of the elastic. If this turns out not to be sufficiently challenging, I will change my plan.

I am still rooting for Elizabeth H., who is making an Erin cardigan. I will be setting my Erin aside for those sixteen days in order to complete the Olympic project, but I still say more power to her, wherever she may be.

LostArts told me about this clever means of reading while knitting. This thing is a chip clip. #1 son absent-mindedly clipped it to his shirt at a friend's house and wore it home without realizing it. If this strikes you as implausible, then you do not know any 16 year olds. In any case, I find that it works on thin books. Most of my mass paperbacks are too fat for this method. However, when you are reading a thin book, you will find it an excellent method. I am most grateful for the suggestion. Since this particular one must be returned to its rightful owner, I have to find one of these for my house. I looked in the chips section of the grocery, but did not find it there. Where do stores keep these?

It occurs to me that I have an intarsia chart of that Welsh dragon. If the modular headband is too easy, I could do some socks or mittens with the dragon worked in. It would be challenging for me to do that in sixteen days, particularly given the current stress level of my life. On the other hand, plunging into something pointless and difficult can be a good antidote to daily stress. You know Parsifal never moaned about the little troubles of daily life while on that quest for the Holy Grail. Hmm. Holy Grail, modular headband... Not quite the same. But then, Parsifal and I are not quite the same either.

I love The Wall Street Journal on fashion. For example, they say that pastels and beige are the coming thing for spring. Then they helpfully explain that this is because the sales of clothes are so poor that the fashionistas were afraid people would keep wearing their old stuff rather than shopping. So they went to beige, which hasn't been in style since the 1990's. Now you can't wear last year's hot pink and lime green, and will have to buy new clothes. Muah hah hah!

One of my goals last year was to become well-groomed. Or at least to look as though I owned a mirror. I was partially successful.

For example, #2 daughter accompanied me to the mall as part of my Overcoming Agoraphobia last spring, and assisted me with the buying of clothes. She also told me the other things I should go back and buy later, but of course I did not do that. Instead, I continue to wear mostly clothing which does not fit me, and which has frayed bits and holes. I wear these loathsome garments with my lovely sweaters. Um, the sweaters also mostly do not fit me any more, of course, and some have frayed bits and holes, too.

Obviously, I am not the sort of person who will give up wearing last year's clothes because the fashion industry is pushing beige.

However, I am trying to make more suitable choices when I get dressed in the morning. Last year, I got to where I actually got dressed in the morning, rather than covering myself loosely with stray bits of textiles. I now put on sunscreen, and make-up, and brush my hair. I often wear socks. There are occasions, even when it is not snowing, when I remember to put on a coat, though I admit that I still do not make that whole weather-clothing connection on a regular basis.

So I am ready to continue this amazing transformation. I am trying to notice when my clothing does not fit and has holes in it, and throw it away. I intend to explore the concept of accessories.

At some point, I will I suppose have to buy something, because the six things my daughter had me buy last year -- though that came to about twice my normal annual clothing purchases -- do not, I suspect, constitute a wardrobe.

Anyway, I figured that, having read this news about fashion and thus being prepared, I would look at clothing yesterday.

Actually, the Journal was not the only influence. I also, at the insistence of my friend Cleverboots and because I was waiting for "Monk" to come on, watched part of this program called "What Not to Wear," in which two New Yorkers say sharp things to people about their clothing. On Friday night they featured a woman who spent $1,000 a year on her clothes, shopping only at one thrift shop. They were pretty harsh with her, I'll tell you.

I have not spent $1,000 on clothing in this entire century. (You can say things like that at the beginning of a century. It is good to take advantage of the opportunity.)

So I went to my closet and tried to imagine what these New Yorkers would say to me. I suppose they would take the six items I bought last year and say that they were last year's styles. Then the rest of the clothes -- well, the remaining twelve things. They would probably ask whose clothes they were. Or ask why I have cleaning rags hanging in my closet. Or perhaps whose cleaning rags those were in my closet. Except for my Mother-of-the-Bride jacket and dress ensemble, which is now a few years old but which I still pull out on any occasion when I need to look as though I have made an effort. Probably my friends say, "Oh, it must be an occasion, she has put on her real dress."

I also noticed, in the charming movie "Must Love Dogs," that the unhappy divorced people at the beginning of the movie are schlepping around in oversized rags with their hair a mess and no make-up. As they improve, their grooming improves. When they backslide, they get back to looking frumpy (one is  a man, but the principle holds).

It is not that I think this is true, but that it is so much part of our notion of reality that the viewer is not supposed to notice the details, but merely to see the characters becoming happier and better as they fall in love. By the end of the movie, the heroine is wearing accessories.

So it seems that the people from New York are right, and that when I schlep around in an unkempt state, I am giving a false impression of pathos, rather than an accurate impression of my mind being on higher things.

I am therefore trying to continue this year on the goal of being well-groomed. Or more nearly so. I incorporated this into my errands yesterday. I had to fill a prescription, which I do at Target because they donate a percentage of all prescription sales to St. Jude's.

The pharmacist told me rather mournfully that he was a creature of habit. I allowed as how that was probably a good thing. "Creativity and spontaneity," I said, "are not what you look for in a pharmacist." I hope he was comforted.

Anyway, I glanced around at clothing there, because they do sell it. Then I went to T.J. Maxx and glanced at clothing there. I did not find anything beige and likely-looking at either spot, but I was rewarded by two boxes of Yorkshire Tea, which I found in the Christmas clearance section, where I ended up in some confusion. I took this to mean that I had done enough looking at clothing for one day, and was being rewarded by God. Unless it was the Tea Fairy. I bought the tea and left.

I think it very likely that, by the time one of my daughters comes to visit me, I will have gotten mentally prepared to go to the mall, which is where clothes are sold hereabouts, and possibly to buy things. They will assist me in this task, I feel sure.

In the meantime, I finished  making my nightgown, so that I can be suitably clothed while I am sleeping if at no other time.

Note how well the hand-rolled hem coordinates with my Fuzzy Feet.

You cannot tell in this picture, but I have also used a moisturizing mask and am toying with the idea of brushing my hair before I go to bed, even though I brushed it once already today. Any day now I will begin filing my nails. People will hardly recognize me.

By the way, those of you who are more fashionable than I will be interested to know that one of the biggest looks for women this spring is a long slim pair of pastel walking shorts worn with high heels and a blazer. The Wall Street Journal said so. Do you think this will look like the Olympic team from Bermuda in drag? If you take up this look, I expect you to post a picture.

Emboldened by your comments, I have bravely begun knitting with the blue.

Craftymomma asked if this sweater is hard. As with so many things, the answer is a firm, "It depends." If you are accustomed to color knitting and comfortable with charts, then no it isn't that hard, because there are only two colors in every row. If your normal knitting is garter stitch scarves at 3 stitches to the inch, then yeah, it is a lot harder than that.

I'm enjoying it quite a bit, but the progress is slow, so I guess for me it is neither hard nor easy.

It is raining here this morning, for which we are all very grateful. We are one of those states where the governor asked everyone to pray for rain. Your local news probably made fun of us for it.

I stayed in bed for a while this morning, reading and drinking tea and listening to the rain. As the sky lightened, I could see the rain dripping off the trees outside the window. Lovely.

One of my kids got chewed out by a teacher yesterday. It made me think about how we respond to criticism.

Not kind, constructive suggestion-type criticism. We all know how to respond to that. The mean, attack-type criticism is something else. The natural reaction, I think, is to defend oneself. Aloud, if that is possible, or to others later if, as in this case, there is a big power imbalance. At the very least, internally.

But I think that, as in so many other cases, the natural reaction is not the most useful one. I try to put off the initial response. Be quiet, listen to what they have to say, and apologize profusely: this is the response I have trained myself to. Then I complain about it and how wrong they were to some non-gossipy person, or here in my blog (I was going to say whine, but Sighkey has pointed out that whining is longer than I allow myself ).

Then I make a sincere effort to find the element of truth in what was said. After all, even the most unreasonable complaint is not a random string of words like Tourette's syndrome. Something made that person say it. It is possible that it was that person's nasty jealous nature, or a bad mismatch in style, but it is also possible that there is some change that I could make in my behavior that would improve things for me or for that person. Or there may be an aspect of this situation that can allow me to improve my skills in some area, or help me to further my spiritual journey, or even allow me to help the person who has been mean to me, not because they deserve it but because it is good for me to provide unmerited kindness to others.

Having done this serious thinking and made those difficult changes, I then ensure that I will never again have to interact with that nasty person.

Sometimes that is not possible. Sometimes we are stuck with them. And then I think we see a male/female difference.

Of course, such differences are only statistical. When we say "Men do this and woman do that," what we really mean is something like "65% of men do this and 72% of women do that." But I have noticed that men, at least in movies and books, sometimes have a fight and find that it clears the air and they are then able to become good friends. This may just be a myth, since I can only seem to think of fictional examples.

Women do not do this, in fiction or in life. I am reminded of The Princess's friend, who remarked offhandedly that all she wanted for Christmas was a hit man. Or The Poster Queen, the sweetest and kindest woman you would ever hope to meet, who holds permanent grudges. My mother, who writes people who make her angry into her books as really creepy characters. The movie "9 to 5," which I suddenly think I ought to watch again one of these days.

Me, I just write them out. Note to self: never speak to this person again. This does sort of echo agoraphobic aversions, I guess, but I bet that it is not that uncommon a reaction.

Still, I do not smack them, so it could be worse.

Okay, I am going to whine. So you can go read someone else's blog today. I will not be hurt. I do not know this dog here -- this is a picture Pokey sent me -- but this is how I felt last night.

I had a really stressful day. I had to go to the dentist one last time. When I go to the dentist, I just read Terry Pratchett and pretend that I am not there. The dentist and his staff are all very nice about it. I do exactly what I am told and otherwise completely ignore them. So that's how I started my morning yesterday. Then I paid them large sums of money and went on to work looking as though I had had a stroke.

I had a LOT of boxes to unpack, and there were a lot of essentially unsupervised children. For example, the two-year old pulling all the toys off the wall while his big sister (four) hits him with a train.

"Can you see your bubby?" their mama sings out from a distance. "Y'all be nice!" They ignore her.

(Note that I am not making fun of Southerners. I am in the South. Naturally she was a Southerner. That is irrelevant.)

My son called asking for a ride home from Pinky's house. So I went there after work. I honked. Nothing. I rang the bell. Nothing. I opened the door and called into the darkened house. Nothing.

I drove to Pinky's dad's house. No one was home. As I stood there debating what to do, the dad drove up. He kindly called around for me. Pinky and #2 son had been in the backyard, on the trampoline, carefully -- as he later explained to me -- watching the road and listening for me.

Having spent 20 minutes in search of #2 son, I finally picked him up and went home. He very sensibly did not point out that if only I owned a cell phone I would have been able to find him easily.

We got home and found that my husband had made soup for dinner. He is famous for his wonderful chicken soup. That is not what he made. This soup was what you would get if you threw a bunch of leftover vegetables, including some frozen ones, into a pot of water, hoping that they would get creative in there on their own. This dinner left me hungry and cross. My husband has been laid off for a week, following having been laid off from Thanksgiving to New Year's. I very sensibly did not complain about the soup.

That's all I had to say. I'm fine now.

Here is Erin. If you look really closely, you may be able to see that, right at the top, after about a foot of mostly pink and green (all right, I am simplifying) there is this jolt of wisteria. Alice Starmore's designs are characterized by complex and gutsy color combinations. The colors are what make the whole thing so special.

I am prepared to think of the sudden purpleness as exciting.

But now I am supposed to continue from here in blue. The blue I had chosen for the purpose is the one in the center. Wisteria on the right -- it's the one I've knitted with for the past couple of rows. Now I should, according to the patten, do four rows of that bright cornflower blue.

Excitement is all very well, but I want to be able to wear this thing, and I am not at all sure that a shout of blue is actually going to look good. This is not after all a painting. I am thinking about chickening out and going with the grayish green on the left.

What do you think?

Here's Erin, coming along at a very slow rate. I've been busy, that's all. Here is Junieann's Erin, and Nyl's, and one from Tricotfolk. Elizabeth H. is planning to make this entire sweater in 16 days for the Knitting Olympics. I assume that she does not have a job or a life, but I look forward to watching her progress. Indeed, I plan to root for her.

When the kids were small, we used to attempt to pay attention to the Olympics and choose a country (other than our own) to root for. I am not a true sports afficonado, and tend to root for teams on the flimsiest of grounds. For example, I am pulling for the Seahawks to win the Superbowl because they have a cooler name. I understand that the Knitting Olympics is not competitive, but since my support of athletics obviously is pretty perfunctory, I do not feel that it will alter anything if I root for Elizabeth H. I do not know who she is and cannot find her blog, so it may be a very abstract sort of rooting. (That word is beginning to sound extremely strange. I'll stop here.)

Yesterday at Book Club, we had a most entertaining discussion about The Great Gatsby. The discussion ranged from the book itself to other books of the time period, to history, to the behavior of men and of women, to the class structure of the U.S. (which we do not like to admit that we have at all), to regional differences. It was fun.

At work, I am unpacking boxes. I take the stuff out of the box, find its label, put the label on, rearrange things to provide a place for it, and put it away. This allows me plenty of time to think, and in my mental spare time while my body is working I have figured out most of the details of the murder for the writing contest which Chanthaboune and I are entering.

At one point during the day she called me. "Ah, yes!" I said, "I've figured out what to do about the blood." I went into a good bit of detail on the subject while my colleagues looked askance at me. Any customers who overheard probably slunk away in fright.

At home, I have given up reading The Food of Love, because it turns out to have very little of the story in it, being at least half composed of lascivious descriptions of food. Yes, you heard me right. And the food itself, while doubtless delicious, is largely repugnant to me. I do not have any desire to become a vegetarian, but I am a slight and squeamish meat eater. Half a pound of meat is sufficient for me to feed six people (unless they are boys from Kansas City, in which case I figure one pound per person and hope it will be enough). And all the meat that I buy is neatly divided into rectangles bearing no resemblance to any animal. Sniffing the mouth and anus of a baby bunny before skinning and gutting it is, to me, a repellant scene. Continuing on with all the things involved in making that hare into a pasta sauce does not improve it. And bringing sex into the equation really doesn't improve it.

So I have moved on to the Spenser books, kindly suggested to me by feebeeglee, bless her. In general, my idea of a hard-boiled detective is Arly Hanks, but I am really enjoying this book. The narrator is wittier and smarter than most, in addition to being a man of integrity. Well, he has shot someone, but for a hard-boiled detective, he is as he claims pure of heart. I am hoping that some of this will rub off on the story I am writing. Pureness of heart comes naturally, but hard-boiledness does not. Chanthaboune is reading Greek philosophers, which is unlikely to provide any useful influences.

The encyclopedia article is finished and mailed. I even found an event in that uneventful town. During the Civil War, nine prisoners of war were shot in the town I was writing about.

Shot, mind you. Not suffocated, tortured to death, or sexually abused before being killed.

The commanding officer (in another state) heard of it, and immediately called for an enquiry. The commanding officer, not a whistle-blowing reporter. He called it "murder" and "an outrage" and insisted that the guilty parties -- specifically, the officer who ordered it done -- be called to account. This took place within two weeks, in a time and place without regular mail service and of course before telephones. It took place when there was an actual war going on, with -- in this particular area -- heavy guerilla warfare in addition to organized battles, on our own shores. No one suggested that the constitution, or indeed common morality and decency, should be forgotten for the duration. No one suggested that things could be justified, or ignored, or explained away, or overlooked in a parody of patriotic support for the Union.

In our newspapers now, cowardice and villainy are routinely excused on the grounds that "we are at war." If we examine our history, it is clear that this is not the American way.

Partygirl and I were discussing this last night while commuting to and from our class. She mentioned that she was fasting for the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, something the bishop asks them to do every year. She is Catholic and she is my friend and no way am I going to argue with her about abortion. So we moved right to the constitution. (She did suggest that perhaps God allowed our current administration to gain power simply to allow the overturn of Roe vs. Wade, which might be better than my explanation, which is that we are being punished.)

Have you checked out the bill of rights lately? #2 son has been studying it in school, and then #1 daughter and I got into a discussion of it in relation to the supreme court, so I refreshed my memory of it. It is worth reading. And worth defending, too. When you read some of those things, you may be just about ready to laugh. What made them think of that? you might wonder. But the book I was using to refresh my memory explains just the kinds of things that made them think of that. They had, fresh in their minds, the problems that arise when people in power abuse that power.

And here, in case this seems too serious, is a very funny blog. And a blog-reading tip which everyone else already knew and no one told me. You know how you want to go around the Yarn Ho! blogring, but now that there are twice as many members as there were at this time last year, there are a lot who don't update or don't actually knit, so you have to click through a lot of stuff to find the real Yarn Ho!s? Actually, you can click on the name of the webring and find a list of all the members, and it will tell you when they updated and you can visit everyone very efficiently and not spend so much time on the computer that your family ends up having cold cereal for breakfast. I am aware that no one told me this because it did not occur to anyone that I could be so incompetent with my xanga as not to know that. That's why I am telling you -- there might be someone else out there like me.

This is the fabric of the 1912 nightgown -- I'm sorry for not giving details before.

It is a woven check, all cotton. It doesn't show to best advantage in this squashed-against-the-scanner shot, but it is a wonderfully soft fabric in a subtle red and beige. Unfortunately, unlike yarn, fabric doesn't come with a nice little paper reminding you of the name and manufacturer, and I don't remember those details.

In answer to knitsteel's question, I will certainly wear it, supposing I ever manage to get it finished. I'll probably make another in flannel, too. This is my bedroom --  it's a nightgown kind of place, isn't it?

On the subject of creature comforts, there is something rather sad going on chez fibermom.

Every morning I get up and look in the tea caddy, poking down to the bottom in case there is hiding in there another bag of Yorkshire Tea. I have been doing this since I ran out over the weekend, as though the tea fairy might have brought me just one more bag of it.

It didn't, frankly, seem all the special while I had it. A good tea, certainly, and it made a stout pot with just one tea bag. But I did not anticipate that, when it was gone, I would pine for it in this pathetic way. I am drinking my Earl Grey, and enjoying it well enough, but -- it isn't quite the same. It seems now like an afternoon kind of tea, not the kind of tea you want first thing in the morning. No, in the morning you want some Yorkshire Tea.

The trouble is, I got the stuff at T.J. Maxx, a sort of liquidator place. It is not sold at my local grocery stores. I cannot just go and buy another box. If I could, there would be no difficulty. I would go pass my $5 over the counter and go on my way rejoicing. No such luck.

If I am to have more Yorkshire Tea, I must order it online. And I have already ascertained (at Pokey's sensible IM suggestion) that it is sold in many, many places on the web. And so I have fallen victim to the scourge of online comparison shopping.

This stuff is available at all different prices. So I had to go look at Froogle. And it is available loose and in bags in many different quantities, making it difficult to compare the prices in a meaningful way. And then, a light, inexpensive item like a box of tea bags will cost more for the shipping than for the item. So I have to calculate the various costs with their associated shipping costs to see which one is really the best deal. And, once I find that the shipping is only reasonable if I order some other items along with the tea, I have to see what else the various places offer, in order to determine which has the best balance of cost with items-that-would-also-be-useful. At which point mysterious British confectionary that we have read about or heard mentioned on the BBC comedies enters the picture. Walnut Whip, Jammie Dodgers, even Chocolate Hobnobs can be had along with the Yorkshire Tea.

And I am not supposed to eat sugar or spend money on frivolities. So, really, I may not ever get my tea.

Why isn't there a shop which sells the tea with books or yarn? Then at least I would feel that -- while I would still be spending money on frivolities -- they were my favorite frivolities, and worth it.

Really, though, it is the time-wasting compulsion to comparison shop which comes over me when I buy things on the internet. When I was getting ready for my daughter's wedding, I made charts. I realize that -- even if I end up saving seventy-four cents per box on the tea after counting in the shipping -- this is a silly thing to do. I don't waste my time in this way in real life. It is something that happens to me when I shop online. It seems that there is always one more place which might be still better than the eight I have already seen.

The result is that, after I have done this idiotic surfing around once for an item, I stick with the purveyor that I determined was best on that occasion. I have two places for buying soapmaking supplies, two for yarn, two for books I cannot get at work, and so on. So I suppose, once I have used up the time I should spend on hemming my nightgown by chasing down the perfect, the philosopher's purveyor of tea, I will be able to consider that task finished. I might as well get on with it.

Later: While I have not yet found a book or yarn merchant which sells this tea, I have found a bicycle parts store in Louisiana which does. We are getting more practical by the moment.

I am not sure that it is possible to see the details of my 1912 nightgown.

The front is on the left and the back is on the right.

It may be for the best that the pictures are not very clear, as I appear to be ruffle challenged. Oh, my hand-rolling is nice enough, but the whole distribution of the gathers... well... There are supposed to be ruffles at the sleeve as well, but I will think about them for another day before deciding. There may just be enough ruffles already.

In any case, I did get a bit of work done on this sewing project yesterday. It is Folkwear Pattern #224, "Beautiful Dreamer." In case you are considering making one yourself, I will share my experience with it. Having read several comments about it from others complaining about the tightness at the shoulders and bodice, I made a larger size and cut the armscye an inch deeper. This solved the problem entirely. It also made for a sufficiently voluminous gown that I left out the godets. The fullness which in modern gowns of this type is usually provided by gathers is, in this case, done with pleats in the back and a small yoke at the front, which makes for a more graceful line. It is quite comfortable, and the sleeves, made in the old and complicated way, are particularly nice.

Apart from sewing (and church of course), I spent yesterday writing. I worked on my second encyclopedia article (I have made it past Reconstruction), and also the mystery story contest Ozarque told me about. Chanthaboune and I are going to try our luck. It is only a total of 3,000 words, and should be fun.

"Fun" may describe the encyclopedia entry, too, but in an entirely different way. This time I am writing about the county seat of the county to the east of us, a town which is still trying to reach 2,000 in population. All the sources of information on this town are little books full of stuff people made up. For example, one book claims that this town is the oldest inhabited place in the United States. Just like that, with no references or reasons for believing it or anything of that nature. Another gives the name of a native American chief who used to live here, or maybe just hang out here. This name turns up nothing when googled, and hasn't come up in any reliable source. But these are sufficiently intriguing claims that a body wants to follow them up, so I am once again getting my hourly pay rate down to nothing on this project.

My boys went to the gym without me. I do very slightly regret not joining them (although the football game meant that there probably would not have been a treadmill available for me), but I did enjoy the quiet spell while they were gone. I did handsewing before the fire and listened to the rain and read Claire Matturro's excellent novel. My eldest daughter always wanted to be a lawyer, and the main character is the kind of lawyer I imagine #1 daughter would be if she pursued that -- honest, rather tough, rather glamorous. Matturro's heroine also has obsessive-compulsive disorder and gets shot at, but after all, it is fiction.

"The best-laid plans of mice and men aft gang agley," as the poet Burns said -- though I can now never hear those words without thinking of Eddie Izzard. (It's #14 if you scroll down the page, where it says  "The best laid plans of mice and men…' Exactly which mice plans was he really honing in on here?")

Anyway, I had a plan for Saturday. It involved reading the last bit of The Great Gatsby and then watching the movie of it while finishing my sewing project, which has stretched out way longer than I had intended. The errands and housework were supposed to be done early, leaving the day free for this Fitzgerald frolic.

The first thing that ganged agley was my husband coming in at 3:00 am and waking me up. I could not get back to sleep. I got up at last and read (though not The Great Gatsby, I confess) until nearly dawn and then went back to bed. This meant that I didn't get out of bed till nearly 8:00, which is as we all know practically the afternoon.

The second thing that happened was that Rosalyne01 called to tell me to listen to Al Gore's speech, being broadcast on CSPN. If you did not the have the opportunity to hear it, you should certainly go read the text. I was going to excerpt some of the more striking parts, but really the entire thing is worth reading, and worth thinking about very seriously, regardless of your political orientation. Gore speaks of the growing power of the presidency. Even if you like the current president, and trust him to decide when to use surveillance, torture, and kidnapping, you might not feel that way about a later one. Are you prepared to allow changes in our laws and in our constitution that throw away the protections against tyranny inherent in the American political system?

Having seen this stirring speech, I went off to do my errands and came back intending to do the housework and THEN get on to the Gatsby bit, but I had to call Rosalyne back and discuss the speech with her. I did this while opening my mail, which is where I found my new encyclopedia entry assignment. Also a new Frugalreader book. So I came to the computer to mark the book "received" and to get going on my article -- and found a request from #1 son to decipher his chemistry homework for him

With the help of Google, therefore, I began attempting to learn about electronegativity, at least enough to be able to help #1 son figure out what his assignment actually is. This is where I gave up on that.

At which point, Ozarque sent me word of a mystery writing contest with a huge prize. Obviously, I added that to my list of computer tasks. My ability to concentrate on Fitzgerald and the hand-rolling of hems was thus hampered by my back-of-the-mind puzzling out how mustard could work into a murder. "Docent gloves!" I would think, and there would go five minutes.

I also had approximately forty-eleven phone calls. I have been backsliding on the whole answering the phone thing over the past -- oh, five or six months. So I have resolved to answer the phone every time it rings. Yesterday, it was mostly my children, so of course I was glad that I answered. I always enjoy talking to my kids. I also enjoyed talking to the researcher asking questions about No Child Left Behind, a subject on which, as you know, I can become very emotional.

But, enjoyable or not, the phone can definitely cause one's plans to gang even further agley. The ruffles got extremely uneven, the pinning went awry, and there was one point at which I put the entire front assembly together wrong and had to take it out and do it over.

Thus it is that this is all the further I have gotten with the 1912 nightgown.

There is a boy sleeping on the couch, and I know from experience that he will still be there when I leave for church, so there will be no sewing this morning. I hope to finish in the afternoon. Maybe I should have gotten some mice to lay my plans for me.