Current mood:	thoughtful
Current music:	Monteverdi - Adoramus Te

Sunday morning
I listened to the BBC3 Choral Evensong broadcast from Trinity College, Cambridge for the Feast of Epiphany this morning. The first anthem was Mozart's Venite Populi, a lovely piece that I can't recall having heard before. They sang his Ave Verum Corpus too, a piece a friend once described as being closest to a perfect composition, and two pieces by Schutz. The choir was wonderful and the readings included turning water into wine at Cana.

Being able to listen to programs for up to a week after broadcast is wonderful, sort of a TiVo for radio only no extra hardware needed. You don't need to figure out time zones either.

Yesterday I passed 20 inches on the brown foldover hat. When making this kind of hat it is important to keep on knitting even though it looks impossibly long. To make it work, you need twice the length from the top of the head to the bottom of the ear, then twice the depth of the brim plus some extra for the folding. I didn't do this the first time and ended up with a beanie, fairly useless for Wisconsin winters. I split the original hat at the fold line and picked up the stiches on a 16 inch No. 1 circular needle and knit down on the old outside below the herringbone pattern in stockinette, then finished with a generous section of K2P2 ribbing. The current hat is from picking up the stitches from the former inside and knitting in plain stockinette.

This will give me three hats in this brown fingering/lace weight cone wool I bought from an eBay seller from British Columbia. The first hat was two layers throughout with a diamonds pattern, the second with a single layer and a fold up brim, and this one will be two layers throughout plus a two layer fold up brim for four layers over the ears. The trick to having a warm head where the winters are cold and windy is to use many layers of a fairly tight fabric in fine yarn (similar to the gauge for socks) rather than go for thickness with heavy yarn. The blue Lamb's Pride Coronet hat I made in December is quite thick and warm unless there is a wind. It is good under a parka hood though.

To pass the time when I got up last night and couldn't get back to sleep, I continued the double decreases on four sections started earlier in the day. I have decreased to 24 stitches on each of the four sections. It will need to go onto double point needles soon. I put markers every 48 stitches a few rows after the picked up stitches. Using stitch and row markers are a trick to keep on with plain knitting, you perceive progress. This time I used crochet thread loops with one, two, and three beads plus a plain loop for the start. If I don't get involved in anything else, may finish and block the hat today.

I have only been out once since the snow storm, had promised a friend help install DSL on Friday, but she picked me up in her car and I used the walker to get out to the street. Although the snow was plowed quickly on the streets, the result is that it was piled up and compacted along curbs, including the cut curbs I rely on to get around with the scooter.

Thursday afternoon after the snow stopped falling,I heard shouting. When I looked out the window, discovered that the crew clearing the alley was having a dispute with the crew clearing the parking lot as to where to pile the snow. Looks like they worked it out.

I am listening to Choral Evensong again, have finished a breakfast of French toast and a mug of tea with milk and sugar. The theme of feasting is mixed with prayers for the victims of the tsunami. I ran low on tea during the week, so ordered more from Uptons rather than trying to get out through the snow. It arrived two days later. I wonder about the people in Sri Lanka who picked the tea that I enjoyed earlier this morning.