I have achieved pastrami. I've been experimenting with recipes ever since I found out, a month ago, that good pastrami is not available in Astoria. Tom has been eating my experiments, and approved the current one. Relief.

I also spent much of the day knitting swatches. I was designing a cabled sweater for myself, and didn't want to find out in the middle of a sweater that a given stitch was either beyond my abilities or that I didn't like it. As it turned out, I didn't like the 5-strand cable I found in the book, but a 10-strand cable I devised myself (using the same principals as in the given cable recipe) turned out fine. That discovery turned my plans on their head: literally. I pulled out the bottom edge I had already knitted, and re-cast-on from the top down.

It's a good thing I knit those swatches.