Porch knitting

I had to spend a couple of hours at the house today so I thought I'd take a porch picture for old time's sake.

You can hardly see the old grey paint now!  And most of the porch is gone entirely - just enough to get you in and out of the house itself.

Thankfully we still have that bit though, because I had to sit there waiting for the cable technician to come by and run cable from the house to a distant telephone pole.   Long boring story about how that happened, but it ends with the guy kindly offering to come back tomorrow when the house will be unlocked because part of the job involves being inside it.

Actually, there is one small entertaining part of the story so I'll share it.

Backstory: we removed all the phone and cable wires from the house during the interior demolition, and now they have to go back on.  There is a narrow window in which this can happen - basically running from two weeks ago until we have the spray foam insulation installed. Once the spray foam is in, no wiring can be added or changed.

For some reason, this poses a real challenge.  When I called the phone company to ask them to bring service wires back to the house, the people I spoke with there said the company doesn't do that.  I spent two hours with them all told, being passed from one person to another, being cut off and having to call in again, then being passed around some more until I just had to give up.  All I could get out of them was that if we wanted to have them come and install all the wiring they would be happy to charge us the fee for that and begin service charges immediately even though we have no electricity or telephones.  Their other offer was to come when we had all the wiring done ourselves, at which point they would charge us a ton of money to do something with phone jacks and turn on the service.

Now I understand why people give up their landlines and just use cell phones.  I mean, we are cheek by jowl with neighbours on either side both of whom are blessed with phone service, what with being in an urban centre and all.

Anyhoo, when I called the cable company, I fared far better.  It only took five minutes in a live chat to arrange for a guy to come to the house the next day, for free.

The next day, the guy showed up at the condo to hook up our house.  Oops!  He said he'd book somebody from the applicable district to get right over to the correct address, but didn't.

I called again, and booked again, and the guy never showed up at all, so I called back to see what had happened.  Apparently that technician drove past our house, saw it was under construction, and drove on, without even calling Ray to tell him he wasn't setting foot on the property.  The person I spoke with about it said she'd send somebody else that afternoon, but didn't.

So... I called again, got everything sorted out, and booked another technician.  He came right on time - to the condo.

The fourth time I called, I explained the situation and Dawn explained that really, I should go through the Moving department.  I didn't know they had one. So she transferred me to Sheila after explaining it all for me, and Sheila said 'No problem! Let's get you all booked.  Which address?  And what time?  And - oh, we seem to be having a FIRE ALARM.  I'm sorry, I have to go.'

At this point I wasn't really expecting to get more than some sock progress out of today's housesitting episode, but amazingly: the technician Sheila booked, likely with the tips of her fingers as her body moved further toward the fire stairs, actually came to the house AND he was all set to do exactly what we needed!

Except that I didn't have keys and Ray was off dealing with an emergency.

The good news is, the gentleman who came was lovely and intends to hook everything up for us but the service when he comes back.  Let's hope an anvil doesn't drop on him first, courtesy of Wile E. Coyote.


Not that bad luck transfers itself to knitting, but here's the excitingness I was so eager to dash off and take care of yesterday:

I finally finished Julia's socks!!!  With a little yarn to spare, even.  After I took this picture my camera battery died, but I promise I really did graft the toes shut and freed the needles for Carolyn's socks.

Then I tried them on.

They are too small.

aiiiiiieeeeee

by an inch!  And I measured!  I have proof, because I am posting a whole spiel on sock-measuring as soon as I have time to prep the photos!

It's May, and these are January Power Outage-grade socks, so I decided to take a deep breath and just set them aside.  I have less than a week to knit socks for Carolyn and that's all I really want to worry about right now.

But just as a simple survey question...

If you were knitting socks for somebody who lives two provinces away and whose feet are 9.5" long, and the socks finished up at 8.5" long, would you rip out the toe and reknit them longer?

Or would you give up and find somebody sock-worthy with an 8.5" toe and start over?

Or would you say to your size 8 shoe self that your size 6 shoe friend would naturally want socks a bit small for you, willfully disregarding the fact that she said her feet are 9.5" long and you know that yours are 9.75"?


I'll let you mull that over while I go get a bowl of cereal.  See you tomorrow!