Is John a girl's name?

[todayiamadaisy]

Thank goodness it was my mother's birthday on Friday, otherwise the big excitement from this week would have been Wednesday: the day my alarm clock needed new batteries. Not that it mattered. No need for alarms when I have a five-second commute to work.

Anyway, my mother turned seventy on Friday. I was working, and from the office I could hear her answering her phone for most of the morning. Some of her friends dropped cards in the letterbox. Her friend Barb rang the doorbell and dropped a bag of apples off. (When my mother bought this house twenty-five years ago, there was a sickly apple tree in the garden that clearly didn't like where it was, so my mother sent it to live on Barb's farm, where it thrives, and every year Barb gives her a bag of apples.) I went to my bedroom, which is at the front of the house, to get a scarf and caught another of her friends about to put a bright red potted cyclamen on the doorstep.

One of the morning's phone calls was from her best friend, Colleen, who doesn't live in the City by the Sea. Her daughter does, though, and just after seven in the evening, she knocked on the door, having just finished her shift (she's an emergency nurse), to drop off a present on Colleen's behalf. Mum sent her home with some fresh-picked tomatoes, a couple of apples and a slice of birthday cake.

(My gifts to my mother were a new iPad, which she has had for several weeks now, and a Japanese hori hori soil knife, which seemed to go down well. She also has her eye on an incredibly dangerous-looking Korean sickle, so that's Christmas sorted.)

Weekly knitting photo

I optimistically thought I could do a row of spots each day. I'd be finished in a fortnight! But no. A row of spots per week is the actual speed.