Guess who actually got some things done today! I planted the currants and bought a peony and planted it. It looks limp now but I’m counting on it regaining its strength.

I like traditional, old-style plants like lilacs and bleeding hearts and peonies. Not their fancy, refined varieties either, but the simplest, commonest ones.

Both hydrangea bushes have actually survived the winter. Both have some dead branches, and dead buds on the live branches, but enough green leaves coming out to look hopeful.

Knitting is all about maths.

Sock yarn comes in hanks of 100 grams. One pair of standard socks for myself or Adrian weighs 51 grams. (His are 1.5 cm shorter in the foot than mine but higher in the calf.) So one hank is just barely not enough for two pairs of socks, which is a bit unfortunate, since both Adrian and I loved this yarn. But I can make us a pair each if I use a different yarn for the sock heel for one of the pairs, which would actually be pretty practical anyway, because it will help us tell our socks apart.

This is like an arithmetics problem for elementary school.

Mum has 100 grams of colourful yarn. She knits one pair of socks using 51 grams of the yarn. After knitting a third sock, using plain brown yarn for the heel, she has 27 grams of the colourful yarn left. How much brown yarn did she use for the sock heel? After finishing the second pair of socks, how much colourful yarn will she have left over for darning?

… and more rain today. The garden is absolutely sodden, and after two days of cold weather and no sun, the house is getting cold as well. I’m back to wearing thick winter cardigans indoors, while looking longingly at the deck furniture we brought up last weekend.

Non-stop rain literally all day.

When we redid the kitchen, we put in a tiled backsplash along two sides of it. Somehow we didn’t realize that the wall next to the dishwasher and the espresso machine would also need tiling. That was a mistake, because both those machines cause splashes on the wall occasionally, and scrubbing coffee stains from a painted wall is a bloody pain. So we’re now rectifying that mistake and tiling that wall.

The guy doing it uses string to space the tiles, rather than any kind of plastic spacers, which I find interesting. I’d have thought that string would get compressed but he obviously knows what he is doing.

The weather is mild and the blackbirds are singing and I like to keep the doors to the garden open to let both those nice things in. This also lets in flurries of cherry petals. Not in the same amounts as outside, luckily.

My latest pair of socks.

I was trying to think of a word to describe the colour. It’s sort of a muted brownish red.

In a book I recently read someone got a new coat, the brownish-red colour of which his fashion-conscious friend found incredibly offensive because

It was puce. There was no denying that. It was well fitted, well styled, with a most pleasing swing to the tails, and it was a deep tone that could not be explained away as brown, or red, or anything but puce.

The English language has no shortage of fancy words for colours where other languages make do, and I thought I’d come across most of them by now. I wasn’t familiar with puce, though, so I didn’t understand why it would be so objectionable.

It turns out that the colour is called “puce” (which is French for “flea”) because supposedly it is the colour of bloodstains on bedsheets after a crushed flea. Which is actually kind of icky.

Now I can’t get that idea out of my mind when I look at these socks. But I still like them.

I still firmly believe that you can never have too many photos of cherry blossoms.