Two very large projects reached completion yesterday. 9

First, here’s Erin, unblocked and with just one button. This is Erin, by Alice Starmore, from The Celtic Collection. More or less. I changed from a drop-sleeve to a modified set-in sleeve, simplified the colorwork on the sleeves and the shoulders, changed to a V-neck, and did a different sort of neck and button band. Also different colors.

I knitted this on #3 needles in Peruvian Wool and Wool of the Andes.

It is a boxy sweater with horizontal stripes, so we know it’s not going to be flattering, and my boys say it looks like an old lady sweater (actually, #2 son said the colors make his eyes bleed, but we’ll overlook that) but I think I’ll love it anyway.

The other project is my website, which went live this morning, I believe. If you are engaged in web design or are otherwise a computer guy, you should just go and admire it. Appreciate the beauty of the code. Except disregard the fact that I haven’t done the meta language yet. I may do that this afternoon.

I may also go play with the blog, which The Computer Guy styled for me to match the rest of the website. However, I must first eat and dress and go sing in church. My partner in this morning’s duet emailed me last night, saying what was the music this morning because she was thinking of coming to the early service.

There is no way to respond to this with, “You and I are singing a duet for the offertory” without having it sound a little as though you think she might have forgotten.

We are singing, “Saranam,” a Pakistani hymn to the traditional tune “Punjab.” I couldn’t find any recordings of it for you, I’m afraid. We sang through this once, last week. At the time, my duet partner suggested cutting some of the verses.

9 She and I choose the congregational music for the early service, and every week we go through this. She wants to have just one or two verses of the hymns, and I want all of them. I came from a church where we always sang them all. We sing them all in the 11:00 service. You can hardly find a single hymn nowadays that takes longer than three minutes to sing, and I find it hard to believe that people get bored of them and want to move on that fast. Some folks are only just catching the tune along about the fourth verse.

I always say, “You decide. I would sing them all, myself.”

But when we were practicing the duet and she proposed shortening it, I said, “Do you really think people will be wishing we’d shut up and let the sermon begin?” I was just wondering, you know.

If people are in so much of a hurry to get on the golf course that shaving thirty seconds off the church service makes a difference to them, then they really need to be singing longer, in order to allow the calming effects of the music to work.

After church, we are meeting my parents for a celebration of #2 son’s birthday, and then I think I’ll need to do something interesting with these apples from a local orchard. People haven’t been simply eating them, as I had anticipated they would.