Just Stuff

Van is fixed. Wheel bearings, around $300. Well, it's a 10-year-old minivan with 176,000 miles on the odometer, 107,000 of which we put on it.

I sat in the waiting room, enduring Fox News (which everyone in the room seemed to be studiously ignoring), and knitted on the Pi shawl. Seven edge repeats done, the eighth started, nine ounces of yarn used and about five ounces left. Later today I'll figure out how many stitches I'm getting per yard, and if I'll have enough to knit the full twelve repeats plus a knitted-on edge.

Rural buried-cable phone line and dial-up. That's how I connect to the internet. The phone cable access box is standing at an angle again. I wonder if the guy who mowed the sides of the road hit it. The phone line was so staticky the last few days that even though I could hear a dial tone, the modem claimed there wasn't one. When I got home from van repairs and grocery shopping, I didn't even have a dial tone for a couple of hours.

Then Blogspot fell on its head again last night. I was getting "500 error" pages on Blogspot blogs, and couldn't access the status blog either.

Re: Weather

I think I mentioned it snowed overnight here Monday night, and we woke up to measurable snow on Tuesday morning. (Still didn't kill my tomato plants, though.)

Well, Tuesday night we had a killing frost (good-bye, tomato plants), then yesterday after I picked up our son from school, I went home and mowed the grass, because the temperature was up to 50 degrees F again.

Considering I knitted for an hour and a half while waiting for my van repairs, without any breaks to let dogs in or out, add wood to the fire, or refill my coffee cup, and I pushed the mower all around the yard, my wrists feel pretty good today.

I celebrated the frosty night by emptying the contents of the chest freezer into our picnic cooler, dragging the cooler outdoors on the north side of the house (32 degrees at 8am), and defrosting the freezer. The freezer suffered a mishap during the making of our son's loft bed: somehow a couple of the boards fell over and knocked the plug out of the outlet, so that it partly defrosted before anyone (me) went to get something out of the freezer and noticed.

But it is all dried and refilled now, and it was so cold outdoors that nothing could warm up.

After the frost melts off the roof, I have to climb up there and take the hops net down for the winter. If you hear an "Arrrrrgh!" and a thump, that will be me falling off the roof . . .