I think I will ignore the US election

and think about other things - like work that needs to be done and knitting.

Someone asked me yesterday why I hadn't retired yet. Well, I'd like to and I am trying. I do manage to sneak work off to other people occasionally.  Then something special will come in. It will be a challenge. Do I want to try it? Another language to get my head around? Who is going off to try and help? Is it someone I have worked with before? Is it someone new and anxious? Actually most of the aid workers I know are anxious in their own way - even if other people don't realise it.

I wonder about these people, I really do. How can they head off to a foreign place, often a very dangerous foreign place, to do a job which may be even more dangerous? Someone I know was climbing around inside an extremely unstable heritage building recently. It could have collapsed around him at any time. He didn't speak the same language as the men who were supposed to be putting things in place to save the building and the "interpreter" provided had none of the necessary vocabulary. In semi-darkness he was relying on a communication board and a torch shining on it to tell them what needed to be done. He wants some extra words and symbols. I'll do it for him simply because he has risked his life to save something which is not just beautiful but means a lot to the people who live around the building. 

Last week my friend Z... was called to deal with yet another dam, a vital water supply, which had been sabotaged. It did not collapse but it was in danger of collapsing. There were urgent messages backwards and forwards asking me for symbols and words he and his team have not used before. The local language, one I have worked with, does not have some of the words that we would use. The concepts are there but they are there in different ways. Their ideas about the future are only expressed in the present. What might happen if action is not taken is something which is understood of course but it is understood in a different way.

I sat and knitted while I was watching the evening news. I have written a pattern of sorts for what I am doing. A friend who called in to pick up something saw this and said, "That's not a pattern Cat!" It is a pattern - for me. I understand it. It makes sense to me. It is all I need.  We argued for a bit over whether a pattern is a pattern if other people who also knit in our language (English) don't understand it. I thought of all the badly written patterns I have come across - and decided I had a pattern!

Later someone else dropped off yet more yarn. It is a donation for the group of which I am a member. He doesn't knit but he knows about yarn. He can talk in "N/M counts" - the way that yarn is weighed and measured.  I know about this but not in the intimate way he does. 

There is so much I don't know about language and languages. I can't retire yet!