Work in progress

This was going to be a present for a baby, but I was making it and I found myself fighting it. It has rather spooky, foreboding spirit. I wouldn't say an evil spirit, but not a protective spirit. I couldn't give it to a baby - I think it wants to be for someone else.

So I had to stop and make something else for the baby. I'll show you that later. (Luckily I found an idea in a yarn shop in Lillehammer, Norway).

There's some rather subtle non-symmetrical shaping going on here and it's not absolutely perfect, but I'm quite pleased with it. With sock wool it does feel right to use more detail. This is the back:

 

And this is the front:

It's going to need legs, and a tail. Now that I'm not fighting it any more I think I know how they need to be.

In my open-plan office

… two of my colleagues have been arguing quietly about technical subjects all day.

They are both very bright people, very nice people. At least one of them is very well informed about the subject, and the other one has some intelligent questions. But both are profoundly incapable, in totally different ways, of giving a clear, sequential, brief and comprehensible account of anything at all. Their minds simply do not work that way.

One just starts a lot of half-sentences in the right general direction and apparently hopes that one of them will land on the target. It drives me completely crazy. The other (better-informed) one has something I don't know what to call, but I think of it as verbal dyslexia; mixing up words, answering the wrong question, getting the right answer precisely backwards. It's okay if you're used to it and you know enough to catch it.

It's like two earphone leads trying to have a fight.