Miscellany

The calendula had me rather worried when several days had passed and only one of the five had sprouted, but a second sprouted yesterday, and another this morning. *phew*

The dianthus started popping up yesterday or the day before too. :)

I just discovered something really cool... McNally Robinson books are much cheaper online (I suspect to compete with Amazon), and if you choose to pick up the book in-store, there's no shipping! Woo-hoo! I looked there for Ann Feitelson's "The Art of Fair Isle Knitting", because KnitPicks didn't have it (a friend is doing a KnitPicks order, and KnitPicks has their 40% off book sale until the end of the week), and so it occurred to me to check McNally. McNally is Canadian, and lets us knit there once a month (even moving things and putting out chairs), so I like to support them. I can't afford to do so very often, but I did order this book. :) (They didn't have it in stock, and so said it will be a week or I could cancel my order... however, since knitting is there next week, if I'm lucky, I can pick it up when I'm there anyway!)

Yesterday I listened to an interesting podcast episode of CBC's Ideas, Aboriginals and New Canadians: The Missing Conversation. It talked about the effect that aboriginal culture had in shaping Canadian culture (among other things). It made a lot of sense, and explained a bunch about why Canadians are different than Americans.