Today, men were supposed to come and cut a giant hole in the side of my house, then leave me with wonderful modern window replacements. Yay, I thought, no more drafts while watching MASH late at night, or cold breezes in the shower in the middle of winter. Much furniture was moved to facilitate this. Except for one small problem. The installer is stuck in a shelter in Cancun, riding out the hurricane. Why, why, why, would you go someplace on vacation AFTER a hurricane was predicted to make landfall there? They can't reschedule the windows right away, so most of one of the walls of the house will be removed during the second week of November. November in Chicago! Poor Winston was even taken to the vet for the day so that he wouldn't be tempted to stage the great escape while the window was out. He was fetched a few hours later, so that he can play in whole new areas of the living room where he's never sniffed mysterious invisible objects before.

I spent a good chunck of the day asleep, since I'd stayed up all night transferring all the music from my ipod to my hard drive. There are programs that allow you to do that (since Apple had to make a deal with the record companies promising that ipods wouldn't be the little engines of music piracy that they are), but none of them work cross-platform. That is, none are written for people with FAT32 drives on their ipod moving files to a Mac OS. Macs can even "see" Windows ipods, but not vice-versa. They're just going to drag that out forever, aren't they? So, I had to hack the ipod (super easy, despite what Apple says) and transfer the files to my PC, then transfer the files via sneakernet to the Mac. This took, perhaps ten hours. That's an hour a gig. I lost all my playlists, except the one that I scribbled out on a legal pad before taking a deep breath and reformatting my ipod's hard drive. Well, it means that I'm rid of all the vestigial lists that never get played anymore, and some restructuring of my "Hard Living" playlist. It's a work in progress.

So, no knitting today. I did spend a few minutes rounding up all my needles into my big pink knitting bag (from France!), and putting patterns into my binder. It's so much better not to squint at crumpled pattern sheets, when I can squint at patterns in page protectors. I'm currently working on a bag made out of Cherry Tree Hill Melange, knit on the bias. I think it may need a lining when it's done, due to the snagginess of the yarn. It reminds me of production notes that I read in a book about Edith Head, where she states that she chose fabrics that would snag for Tippi Hedren's suits in The Birds, so that it would really show where the birds pecked at her. Design is all the little details that tell the big story! Anyhoo, there's a picture of the bag in progress, not looking like a bag at all.

I'm multitasking this post. It's time for the Late Show with Craig Furgason. I think he's the cat's pyjamas. He doesn't do a regular monologue like the other talk show hosts. He just tells amusing anecdotes in a droll Scottish accent, like a recent story about his obsession with a pinball game he bought over the weekend. His humor is so dry and smart, it's completely lured me away from years of Conan watching. He is awfully tan for a Scotsman... He often tells patently false stories about life in Scotland, such as people in Scotland being so repressed that they have sex through the mail. "I love my inhibitions," he said, "They save me from my ... hibitions". He went on to explain that kilts are practically guaranteed sex, and that men would be arrested if they acted the way that women act around a man in a kilt. Maybe you should give Mr. Furgason a chance, on CBS after Letterman.