Knitprogress: I've finished row 115 of the shawl. I think I'm a little more than half done in the length.

Gardenprogress: I now have a Lemongrass plant, some marjoram, a couple of lamb's ears, six marigolds, and a scented geranium planted. I need to get more stuff. There's lots of bare space in the garden.

This weekend I am going to "bust out" and go antiquing and also go to a large nursery in the city to the south of me. I'm hoping to find some varieties of basil - the ones I planted from seed are still alive but are so small....

And a complaint: I placed an order the other day with a Large Fiber Concern (which shall remain nameless). I placed the order off the website. So I get an email back the next day that an item I had ordered had been discontinued.

There were three things wrong with the situation:
1. The e-mail was very terse. There was no statement that they were sorry, or they apologized, or whatever.
2. They asked me if I wanted to replace the discontinued item with something else. No! It's not like I was getting a volume discount or something. When I go into a clothing store and they are out of blue jeans, I don't buy a pair of khakis. I've even walked out of restaurants because they were out of the "special" that I wanted.

Don't ask me if I want to buy something else - if I had wanted to, I would have.

and the worst infraction in my mind:
3. If something is discontinued, take it off your freaking website! I mean, it's not like "whoops we are out of stock right now", it's "we have not had that item and will never again have it". Grr. One of the points to having a website is that you can update it frequently.

Allow me to push another fiber oriented website that I love, that has great design - eQuilter. What's so great about this site? Well, for one thing they have very intelligently LINKED their inventory to the shopping website - on a couple of occassions, when I went to buy some fabric, it told me **when I ordered it** that there were fewer yards left than what I wanted - allowing me to make the choice then and there whether to order or not.

And from what I can tell, eQuilter is a very small operation - so it's not like you have to be Amazon or something to have that kind of technology. The particular Large Fiber Concern has done stuff like the above to me in the past - telling me first something was available, then that it was not, having things backordered FOREVER and no date given of when they would be in stock. I'm beginning to think I need to find some other Large Fiber Concerns to deal with.

But some of them don't sell the Fiber Products that I want.