I am just in from mowing the lawn. I am pooped but my knee is no worse than it would have been walking around inside. I am itching to dig up all those dandelions I mowed and trim the edges and weed the veggie beds and finish the berries and.... but I won't. There is more asparagus to pick and I generated a lot of clover mulch for the various beds. I was momentarily stalled when a flock of about a dozen silvereyes descended on the two junior plums which are in bloom. It never occurred to me that they were nectar eaters but those sharp little bills are perfect for sticking in flower blossoms. As long as I didn't move they were happy to hop from flower to flower, hanging upside down when necessary, drinking their fill about 8 feet from me. When the flock devolved to two birds I apologised and restarted the lawn mower.

My knee has made no progress from my last post. I went in to work on Thursday to attend the festivities around the Director-General's retirement from the Library. She is a very nice person and she will be missed. I spent the rest of the time getting signatures on my exit documents proving I didn't have any books checked out or laptops borrowed. That involved walking all over the Library so I left a little early and went to pick up my new contacts. They are a bit uncomfortable but new lenses always take a while to break in. They are also green, so my eyes are their natural colour for the first time in my lens-wearing life.

I have D's second sock 75% finished and I have been switching over to finishing off the black alpaca while watching the fourth and final season of The Unit. It was one of my favourite TV shows that was shown sporadically on Aussie free-to-air TV and now pops up on cable. The characters are so well acted and the plots a constant string of James Bond/Bourne exploits. Sure, I know it's not real, although the writers came up with the idea about holding captives on a ship at sea before it was known the CIA was doing just that. I suppose 4 seasons is all that could be expected, but their final season spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, which is an ongoing series of its own. I'll have to make do with Burn Notice.

My current reading is The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which so far is bleak.

My genealogical investigations turned up my great-grandfather working at the Schenectady Locomotive Works according to the 1880 census. Sometime after that the family moved out of New York but the 1900 census was burned in a fire. Good Wives has also shed light on early New England life where the upper class employed the lower class to sweep their floors and mind their children. The idea of the communion of the town only stretches so far and didn't stretch to equality of the sexes much less to class rank. It seems that the Puritans only wanted to escape parts of Old England.