I can say this at the moment, halfway through the 11th wedge of the current dishcloth, because I do not plan on grafting this together. At least, not right now. I am going to finish this one, cast it off, leave a long enough tail to finish it, then break the yarn. And immediately cast on another 19 stitches and begin again. I am not slowing down yet.

The current project is to blast out a half-dozen of these cute cotton round dishcloths, then build up a stock of related kitchen project – matching hand towels for the stove, maybe a couple cotton tea-cosy, if I have enough time I will design a couple of other pieces to do quickly before the summer craft fair. I have 10 cones of kitchen cotton yarn. I am knitting it up as loose and as fast as I can – which isn’t very fast – so I will have enough to sell at the craft fair at which Jaime has a paid for a table.

In the meantime, my lace is put into the bag awaiting a less-rushed moment. If I get stuck holding down the fort at the craft fair I will work on it there. People walking through without much interest in the actual knitted goods are far more likely to stop and watch as I am working out some complex lace magic than they are to just look at kitchen dishcloths.

The lace is a coverlet for a quilt I’ll probably never have time to make. The yarn is a lovely fine merino, somewhere between olive and sea foam with just a hint of blue. It’s a little dull on the needles, not as springy and lively as I’d prefer, but the over-spin means it will stay looking good for years if I take care of it. In the back of my head I am thinking an off-white cover , probably my usual window-pane pattern with the seams quilted through a wool batting so it’s warm and a bit too heavy for most people. The lace will be hand sewn to the cover, the lighter background showing up the pattern very obviously.

I chose a fairly simple pattern, from the Walker library, one of the basic lace meshes. It’s so wide – 320 stitches – that I have it on two big circular needles. And I have not even added the border yet! That is something I have yet to decide on, actually, probably something a lot simpler than what I used for the pillows I did for my mother before she died.

And here I have talked so long I’ve finished the 12th wedge, broken the yarn, and am casting on the next one. What matches up with a round dishcloth?

• une miche
• tranche du pain
• tartine de beurré
• miette de pain
• le toast ou le pain grillé

• a loaf of bread
• slice of bread
• bread and butter
• crumb of bread
• toasted bread

• mélanger
• pétrir
• rouler (comme la pâtisserie)
• cuire
• refroidir

• mix, blend
• knead
• roll out (as pastry)
• bake
• cool

• la farine
• le sucre
• le sel
• la huile (ou le saindoux ou le beurre ou…)
• la levure

• flour
• sugar
• salt
• oil (or lard or butter or…)
• yeast

We’re having guests this weekend, so I’m practicing dinner dishes. Today’s effort: green curry vegetables. It’s a thai/burmese style dish, with green curry paste spicing up a cococut lime sauce with eggplant, onions, and sweet potatoes. Fairly simple, actually, except the method for cooking it was a bit bassackward. I wish I’d figured that out earlier.

Anyway, it’s one of those long-prep style items. And, as it’s cooking, I’m picking up the living room, rolling away the rugs, etc. And every time I need to come back to stir the pot, every couple minutes, I wash my hands and dry them. And every time I find something which really doesn’t belong in the living room or kitchen, I’m jogging up the stairs to the bedrooms. Which is rather great, because I’ve been noticing I need more exercise.

Which reminds me that this morning I was baking cookies. Good old-fashioned chocolate chip cookies from the Betty Crocker cookbook. Except without the nuts and using special dark ‘chipits’, as the chocolate chips seem to be called here in Canada. The plan was to also bake a batch of peanut butter cookies, but I ran behind schedule so now we’ll see if I can do that after this dinner dish practice is done.

Not that I need to have any more sweets around the house, as I said before. Still, with the laundry room upstairs, the cleaning/cleaning going on downstairs, today at least I’m burning cals. Now I just need to do figure out how to get optimal heart rate running up and down at least every other day…

The article is listed as the lead story on their British Columbia page, yet the article is not retrievable. Have they been censoring themselves?

Mr Obama said Mrs Clinton had “shattered barriers on behalf of my daughters and women everywhere, who now know that there are no limits to their dreams”.

Nope. Sorry. What you said disproves what you said, because you could say it.

The above quote appears in a BBC news article a few hours after Ms Clinton formally suspended her campaign and threw her support behind M Obama. But as Clinton far more eloquently said the glass ceiling is alive and well in US politics, and in fact it’s stronger than US racism.

Which is a little shocking when you stop and think about it.

But not when you look back at the campaign. Lily-white and homogenous Iowa picked a [[mulatto]] man with an Islamic name over the woman who had raised the most money of all candidates at the time, including Republican candidates. Over the course of the campaign it seemed to me Obama spoke condescendingly of “Mrs Clinton”, and it worked very well to remind everyone that women do not belong on the Hill, let alone in the Whitehouse. And, particularly, when Clinton took the blue-collar states and showed a grip on that largest of voting blocks across the country, then the party elites started to roll over to Obama to give him what no primary election or caucus could give him any more – a delegate majority via super delegates and not from the popular vote.

Now for me this is academic. I will not be voting for any Democratic candidate: I haven’t voted for any dem candidate since they rolled on Senator Byrd – one of their own – quashing his filibuster preventing the Senate from supporting the invasion of Iraq. Still, I was disappointed the candidate who was clearly the stronger – in terms of government and political experience – lost out to a weaker one.

What, this is some sort of suprise to them?

For more than 30 years the world has been more than mildly aware that fossil fuels are a relatively limited commodity, that prices will rise as demand outstrips available supplies, and that eventually there will not be enough fuel for the current lifestyle.

People will need to charge more for rapid transportation, especially of small lots of goods, and even more so for exotic items from far away places. There’s no getting around this basic economic fact.

Alternative methods of doing business which do not use fossil fuels, or use dramatically less, will become more economical than those which use more fossil fuels. There are already panamax freighters which use a variety of sail-assist^[3] to reduce fuel costs – as much as 20% – and it is quite easy to imagine new vessels which use the wind primarily and fossil fuels in a supportive role as diesel prices continue to climb. Land-based transportation is less easy to envision, but the dynamic economies of India and China are pouring infrastructure development into rail systems including both traditional rail and mag-lev passenger systems.

Which doesn’t begin to reduce the world’s economies dependence on fuel for transportation; the invisible hand, though, is already at work weakening globalization. Transportation costs have nearly tripled between Hong Kong and the US east coast since 2000, which dramatically eats into the profit margin of using cheap labour in a country with loose environmental and labour laws. Canada’s “100 Mile Diet” has been an economic success both at home and abroad, almost single-handedly creating demand for locally produced grocery items in major cities, giving a boost to farm incomes and small-time entrepreneurs but also cutting into the market of shipped food.

Which actually takes us back full circle to the truckers and fishermen, protesting the cost of fuel. The cost of fuel is like the tide; inexorable, and unlikely to be affected except in the very short term. And, closely tied to this price is the profit margins of those whose livelihood depends not on the price of fuel, but on the fee for their service. The answer is to raise their prices, and make everyone downstream pay more. Which results in higher prices for everything shipped, lower sales of those items, and thus less shipping.

It also knocks-on to higher sales of less-shipped goods, more local jobs making those goods, and more people walking/biking/mass-transiting to the store to buy those goods. Better for everyone but the shippers. And those of us who like a bit of fresh fish.