A plethora of plump and pleasing pumpkins, and the why I greatly appreciate Lyse.

Getting on for a month ago now, we went to the festival couleurs d'automne at Coëtmieux.  The latter isn't a large place, in the countryside between St Brieuc and Lamballe, but this fête was really quite impressive: stalls and exhibitions and demonstrations of all kinds of things, this slideshow gives just  a taster, there were apples and mushrooms and wine and cider and arts and crafts, and lots and lots of plants.

This rather sinister fellow was to be seen watching us:

Despite all the lovely things there were to seen and despite having the camera with me, I wasn't much moved to take pictures, until we reached the pumpkin stand,

where all kinds of varieties of curcurbits were on offer,

warts and all.

I was especiallly impressed that so many varieties were on display so early in the season, when my small crop of butternut were still a callow pale green. 

I had just gathered a reasonable harvest of photos, turned round and found myself looking at Lyse, who was right behind me.  This was a surprise and a conincidence, as although she lives in Coëtmieux and we had communicated and knew the other would be there so were looking out for each other, there were so many people there I wasn't holding out much hope of seeing her.  We instantly fell to discussing everything very intensely, while Tom reappeared and shifted from foot to foot, rather lost. Happily he was wearing his Transfiguration Waistcoat which was thus available as an object of discussion, so his presence wasn't altogether redundant.  Monsieur Lyse remained in the shadows and was not to be seen on that occasion and we regretfully declined Lyse's kind invitation to return chez elle afterwards, since we were about done and had lunched rather well, and they were only just beginning on the afternoon. 

I greatly appreciate Lyse as a fellow blogger, not only because she knits and writes in Gallo and lives round here, but because she has become a very faithful reader here.  Although I have few other much valued French speaking visitors that I know of, mostly they are bilingual or polyglots, whereas Lyse's English,by her own account, is over fifty years old from school, and she painstakingly reads through my sloppy, idiomatic and demotic ramblings to get as much meaning as she can, then applies an on-line translator to it.

To try to get some inking of how difficult and opaque this must be, I decided to put a section of text from the middle of a recent post into Google's English to French translator, which even I could see was fairly bizarre, but just to get an impression how much so, I then put that French text back through the French to English function, and this is what resulted:

I wanted to knit in the storage cycle stitch (so it is actually a flattened tube), rather than a rib, but quickly abandoned the idea of the do in double underlined the needles as much too slow. I have tried to learn magic loop with a circular needle but has decided that I do not have the right to the circular needle and i do not have a lot of care for the practice of any way, too much tinkering with the needles and cables and not enough actual knitting. And then I hit the bold idea to take one of my incredibly cheap, bought-by-the-set directly from Hong Kong, the bamboo circular needles, of the reduction in the tubular plastic cable, forgetting the bonded connection section with a specialty of the knife, and discharged the shortened cable on it. Friction held easily in place, and the resulting needle was perfect for the job, i along whistling suite and continues to go there until I have more or less lack of wool. (The link above gives an overview of all of these terms, with the exception of my technical patent shortening of bamboo circulars, if you do not know already that I am going to speak about and care enough to know).

It has proved to be very long.

Bon courage, Lyse, et merci!