And now it's almost the end of June

We've been doing the same old stuff.

My neighbour and I walked to the park with a coffee the other day. (I looked at my Visa bill online the other day and noted that practically the only places we spend money now are the grocery store and the local coffee shop.) This new park is nice and I should have taken a picture for you! It is on top of what used to be an asphalt "playground" at an underused Catholic school, and it is now a grassy space with benches and tables and even a young tree or two. I will make another trek to take some pictures.

The kids gave Stephen a new plant for Father's Day!

Too bad I don't have a "before" picture, since it was a lovely sunflower before the squirrel ate it! It's now an indoor plant, with a couple of buds on it. (Must be more assiduous with the picture-taking.)

Other things are eating our plants on the back deck, but sometimes we don't mind, like when one of these (or actually, dozens of these) eats our dill plants.

I believe they are Eastern Black Swallowtails, and I hope we get a glimpse of the butterflies one day.

I have some new knitting. This is the yarn I bought in Vancouver just before we left.

Apparently I didn't share this with you at the time, but I went to Fibre Art Studio on Granville Island and bought this single skein of lumpy Kermit-green yarn.

this photo by Stephen

They squirted me with hand-sanitizer and I was the only person in the shop. I just needed a(nother) yarn souvenir!

Because it is lumpy, or indeed bouclé, I am just knitting it plain, without trying to do anything cabled or lacy or even knit/purl textured, except you can probably see a slit on the lefthand side there. I will put a few of these holes here and there, but it will just be a straight scarf. The colour and texture are exciting enough!

I will note that this week has been filled with turmoil and betrayal and distrust and woe on Ravelry. It is a long story, but it starts with an upgrade of the look of the site. Ravelry was always a bit cute, in a quirky sort of way. You would type the word cake, and a little picture of a cake would appear in your post. There were, at various times, probably a hundred of these little things. Taco, martini, Friday the 13th, mirror ball... would all make little images appear, and now they don't. (This is a minor issue, but it was something especially Ravelry that I really liked.)

The first things I noticed in the new (or ew, as some call it) look was that it is now overly cute, and made me think of an invitation to a 10-year-old girl's birthday party. New colours, new spacing, new navigation, who can handle that?

However, some other people got migraines and at least six people had seizures! The colour contrast, the huge white spaces, the animations on certain pages were actually affecting people's health.

These things happen... and then they should be corrected right away. But the Ravelry team (which is tiny: 5 people run the site for 9 million of us users) has been pretty absent. A blog post from the designer talked about how she loved the cutesiness of it, threads were opened for feedback but then locked, and no answers were given. So disappointing from a team that has been very open and communicative all along.

A survey was put together, basically asking us how much we loved things, with yarn balls with faces to signify answers from "love" to "hate." We then learned that our answers were not anonymous, but linked to our usernames, which also link to our purchases, for example. There are talks of lawsuits, especially among Europeans who have very strict rules about these things!

We'll see how that all pans out, but one lawsuit about causing seizures or violating EU regulations could kill the whole thing. Which would be terrible.

So, that's it from me, some knitting, a new park, a caterpillar and perhaps complete collapse of my main online community.