Not another Capitol!

O.K., I'll be brief. This morning we visited the very lovely and impressive capitol building of Missouri in Jefferson City. We had stunningly good weather: sunny skies, temps in the 60º's, and brisk wind.

One of the features of this building was the many inscriptions carved into the stone, above arches and around domes. Several were from the Bible, and there were even more from other sources: traditional Latin sayings, quotes from famous speeches, and just simply made up sayings meant to instruct and inspire people.

Here's a good Latin saying: Crescat Civitas, meaning, Let civility increase! (My own translation.) Here's a familiar saying: Where there is no vision, the people perish. Here is a strange combination: Righteousness exalteth a nation, followed by Party expediency is party honesty.

But my favorite is this quote from Washington's farewell address to the nation: In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion is it essential that public opinion should be enlightened. Anyone heard any enlightened public opinion lately?

Here's the view up from the rotunda through the center into the second, and in the center, the third floor of the building.

The Historic Museum is located right in the same building on the first floor, and we spent much of our time there looking at and reading those exhibits. Thought they were pretty good, but that the first nations were virtually ignored--only two small cases of display, and very little information.

Missouri has a lot of good, divided highway. Some seem quite new. They were adding lanes around Springfield but the traffic was flowing well. We went by there around 3 p.m. We've seen lots of very fine fall colours, though many trees are bare, and there are still lots of green leaves on trees also.

There is very pretty country around Branson, big, steep hills. You can't really see the depth here, but these are big, long hills.

I read that Missouri is considered one of the Midwest states, and going through the farm country north of here, and through these beautiful hills, with their colourful rock cuts beside the highway, I could relate to this scenery as Midwestern.

By the way, I finished the tuque that I started last week. This is my own design, using Noro Silk Garden, and it used just one 50 gram ball. It fits quite snugly, which is what I was planning.

I have three more balls of Silk Garden along and think of starting another hat, something a little thicker and longer, maybe with a ribbed cuff and an kind of stocking cap finish. We'll see what comes.

The last picture is a close up to show the design. I started with a 96 st. I-cord caston. Increased that to 112 stitches on the first round. Set up a 3 purl, 4 knit pattern, with a cable r and cable l, every 3rd row on the knit stitches. After 5 cables were done (15 rows) I finished two more rows in pattern, and then did a horizontal I-cord.

The crown was divided into 6 sections with a decrease on either end of each section every four rows. When there were just 4 stitches between decreases, I knit only two rounds before the next decrease, and after that only 1 round before another decrease.

I like it a lot. I'd make that pattern again!