Blogger is acting like me in the morning. Slow, creaky and running in fits and starts. What a way to run a business!

Went to a concert of traditional Chinese music tonight. My 75 year old neighbor plays in the student orchestra at the community college just down the street from where I live. She invited me to come and hear the group. I had been a couple of years ago so I kind of didn't want to go but she is my neighbor, after all. Overall it was pretty amateurish. There was one soloist who played the erhu, two stringed violin, who is a professional and his performance made up for everything else. And the zheng (Chinese long zither) ensemble was pretty good, if you like angels and harps and such. Almost forgot. My neighbor didn't play tonight after all.

I had a student this morning who is duplicating a Christmas stocking that her grandmother made sometime in the '60s. Everything was going okay until she got to the heel. Now, I've never made socks so I didn't really know what to tell her to do. So we grabbed one of the kits we have on display. I told her we would just used the directions in the kit and see what happened. After some adjustments for the different number of stitches we began the heel. Not really understanding what the directions were telling us, we just slavishly followed the pattern. Pretty soon we figured out that we were duplicating the pattern of the original stocking. What luck! If people keep making stockings and socks, and coming to me for help, I may never have to make socks myself.

Well, off to spend a little time with my Nordic hat.