Okay, I am going to whine. So you can go read someone else’s blog today. I will not be hurt. I do not know this dog here — this is a picture Pokey sent me — but this is how I felt last night.

I had a really stressful day. I had to go to the dentist one last time. When I go to the dentist, I just read Terry Pratchett and pretend that I am not there. The dentist and his staff are all very nice about it. I do exactly what I am told and otherwise completely ignore them. So that’s how I started my morning yesterday. Then I paid them large sums of money and went on to work looking as though I had had a stroke.

I had a LOT of boxes to unpack, and there were a lot of essentially unsupervised children. For example, the two-year old pulling all the toys off the wall while his big sister (four) hits him with a train.

“Can you see your bubby?” their mama sings out from a distance. “Y’all be nice!” They ignore her.

(Note that I am not making fun of Southerners. I am in the South. Naturally she was a Southerner. That is irrelevant.)

My son called asking for a ride home from Pinky’s house. So I went there after work. I honked. Nothing. I rang the bell. Nothing. I opened the door and called into the darkened house. Nothing.

I drove to Pinky’s dad’s house. No one was home. As I stood there debating what to do, the dad drove up. He kindly called around for me. Pinky and #2 son had been in the backyard, on the trampoline, carefully — as he later explained to me — watching the road and listening for me.

Having spent 20 minutes in search of #2 son, I finally picked him up and went home. He very sensibly did not point out that if only I owned a cell phone I would have been able to find him easily.

We got home and found that my husband had made soup for dinner. He is famous for his wonderful chicken soup. That is not what he made. This soup was what you would get if you threw a bunch of leftover vegetables, including some frozen ones, into a pot of water, hoping that they would get creative in there on their own. This dinner left me hungry and cross. My husband has been laid off for a week, following having been laid off from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. I very sensibly did not complain about the soup.

That’s all I had to say. I’m fine now.

Here is Erin. If you look really closely, you may be able to see that, right at the top, after about a foot of mostly pink and green (all right, I am simplifying) there is this jolt of wisteria. Alice Starmore’s designs are characterized by complex and gutsy color combinations. The colors are what make the whole thing so special.

I am prepared to think of the sudden purpleness as exciting.

But now I am supposed to continue from here in blue. The blue I had chosen for the purpose is the one in the center. Wisteria on the right — it’s the one I’ve knitted with for the past couple of rows. Now I should, according to the patten, do four rows of that bright cornflower blue.

Excitement is all very well, but I want to be able to wear this thing, and I am not at all sure that a shout of blue is actually going to look good. This is not after all a painting. I am thinking about chickening out and going with the grayish green on the left.

What do you think?