Summer!

Hello everyone!  Thank you so much for your lovely messages of consolation and concern.  We miss Tilly very much, but feel her presence with us still.  I’m pleased to tell you that after a gruelling ten months, the Dafter has finished her college course.  She managed another “battery” of exams (two 2-hour exams on one day with only 20 minutes’ break) and she has finished all her assessments.  The course was far more difficult than it might have been due to certain key individuals not really believing that the Dafter is as ill as she actually is.  This, of course, is the fate of many with ME.  It is hard to bear and takes a great deal of precious energy for everyone!  However, that is behind us now and hopefully next year will be easier.  She is exhausted and has had two collapses in the past three days, which is something we haven’t seen for a while, but hopefully her efforts won’t result in a real setback.

We had some beautiful weather in May, and I was able to take the Dafter to the beach one warm afternoon.  (Warm in Scotland being in the high 60s / low 70s.  It even got up to a scorching 25C / 77 F one day, but we survived.  We had to give the rats a bath to help them cool off, though.)

The Dafter at the beach, with seagull flying past!

The garden survived the heat pretty well, although I was unable to get calendulas planted, and apart from ones in copper-tape-edged tubs, none of my poppy seedlings survived.  My nigellas are not up to much at all, so it may be quite a plain July and August this year.  But the perennials have been happy:

Peony “Kansas” with bee.

The lilac I planted three and a half years ago bloomed for the very first time!  The scent was just fantastic.

First blooms on the lilac.  “Krasavitska Moskvy”.

Our Son has been having some challenges that we have been helping him with as best we can.  As is often said, you never stop being a parent.  But we are so proud of how both our children are dealing with the cards that life has dealt them!

On one of the warm days, I was able to go for a walk in the West End of Glasgow.  Driving along the narrow streets of Partickhill is not recommended, but walking is a delight:

House in Partickhill, Glasgow. June 2017.

Public walkway in Partickhill, Glasgow.

As its name implies, Partickhill is a hill above the bustling neighbourhood of Partick.  This neighbourhood was where many Highlanders came to live in the 19th and 20th centuries.  I would not want to equate whisky-drinking with people from the Highlands, but this old ad had no compunction about doing so:

An old advertisment for whisky, Partick, Glasgow.

I have had a bit of time to read lately.  I’ve been enjoying the two books below.  The correspondence of Henri Nouwen is something to savour slowly.  He was a Catholic priest from the Netherlands who taught at Yale and Harvard, worked amongst the poor in South America, and ultimately found a home in the L’Arche community of disabled people founded by Jean Vanier.  He such a loving and expressive friend, and his letters have been very well edited to bring out various aspects of his evolving thought about God, relationships, truth and justice.

The book about the history of The Gene I picked up from the library, partly because I have a policy that if there’s a book I find remotely interesting I check it out, to try to save our library from closing, and mostly because I wanted to try to understand genetics a bit more, in order to understand current ME research better.  I am absolutely not a scientist, but this book has been a very compelling read.  It weaves together the author’s own family history with an engaging history of scientific understanding of heredity and genetics.  I have been reminded that societal worries about immigration and racial purity go very far back into the colonial past.  The author certainly brings out the fact that many of the people who contributed to our understanding of the gene were unusual –  Darwin, Mendel and Galton all failed to pass important exams.  Ronald Fisher was blind.  The eugenics people who believed in purifying the population might well have said they were defective.

June reading

I’ve also been knitting, as always.  Here are a few things I made in the spring.  An Easter hat for the Dafter, which rather to my surprise she just loves:

Easter hat for the Dafter. “Hyzenthlay Rabbit Ears Beanie” by Sheila Toy Stromberg.  (I did offer to shorten the hat, but the Dafter likes the upturned ribbing!)

And I finally finished my travel knitting for this past winter: “Come What May” by Susan B. Anderson.

Come What May shawl, May 2017.

I used a gradient silky yarn by the Yarn Kitchen, and enjoyed the beaded cast-off.  Because I wanted to use every last drop of the purply end of the skein, I improvised a crochet picot edging.  Details on Ravelry here.

Shawl edging (with improvised crochet picot).  I just happened to have these beads already, and they are perfect!

Finally, my Bohus cardigan is ongoing.  I finished the yoke, which is very pleasing to me because of the unusual patterning including purl stitches:

Yoke of Bohus cardigan completed.

Now I am knitting the rest of the body.  The yoke came out at 7 3/4″ rather than the prescribed 6 3/4″, but I couldn’t bear to rip any of it out.  So I guess the armholes will be an inch lower, but hopefully it won’t make too much of a difference.

Bohus cardigan back, with armhole shaping.

Stockinette stitch is very soothing!

I am deeply tired, but also hugely relieved that the Dafter has managed to complete one more Higher.  She has missed so much schooling because of her ME, but she is a delight to talk to and certainly has good critical thinking skills.  Michael’s desperately overworked academic year is a few weeks from finishing, when his workload will shift back to something far more manageable.  I need now to focus on my own health and recuperation.  Some days I am so shattered that I fall asleep just for 10 minutes here and 10 minutes there – most unusual for me.  However, I am soon going on a singing adventure that I hope to be able to share with you here.

Happy June to you all!