Side Notes

Green and furry. Usually these are words I associate with "things that got pushed to the back of the refrigerator and forgotten". Take a look at this sweater at Lucia, the Knitting Fiend's blog, and see how these words relate to knitting!

You can see light through Mr. Stumpy now!

The blur is a raindrop on the camera lens. Yesterday it was 60 degrees at 9am: today it is 37 degrees and raining.

Yesterday I abandoned using the hatchet in favor of using my Korean hand plow, or "ho-mi". I bought it several years ago out of one of my gardening catalogs, and I love it. It worked great on the punky interior of Mr. Stumpy. I'll bet I hauled away ten full garden cartloads of punky wood.

Note to self: Take rings OFF when hacking at Mr. Stumpy. Palm blisters hurt!

Other notes: I was really surprised at how few bugs I encountered. There were insect tunnels of all sizes, from powdery-post beetle to big 3/4-inch, frass-filled "I don't want to meet that beetle" ones, but the only live insects I saw were some lady bugs looking to hibernate.

I also found all kinds of fungal decay going on in there. At least two different kinds of dry rot, a wet carbonizing decay, and probably lots of other stuff that I don't recognize. Mr. Stumpy is mostly a hard outer shell of really tough wood. Inside he is rotten. He is much more likely to slump into a heap of woody compost than fall over.

Weather

A friend emailed me to ask, "You post a lot about the weather. Where do you find out about all that stuff?"

When I was a kid, I loved it when they would show the weather radar. So I really love internet weather radar. I have found lots of US weather info at the National Weather Service website. This website is split up in peculiar ways: another part is here, but they are both National Weather Service/ NOAA links.

The internet is a great source for satellite weather data. I like IPS Meteostar. I use the North Central US view, but if you mouse across the menu at the top, there is all kinds of other weather information to explore up there.

Today's cheery Michigan "knitting weather" forecast:

Today: Rain likely early in the morning...then a chance of rain showers in the afternoon. A chance of light snow showers by late in the day. Much colder. Highs in the mid 40s. Temperatures falling through the day.

And Friday's (definitely "sit by the soapstone stove and knit" weather):

Friday: Freezing rain and heavy snow until midday...then snow in the afternoon. Snow accumulation 5 to 9 inches. Highs in the mid-30s. Temperatures steady or slowly falling in the afternoon. Northeast winds 10 to 20 mph becoming northwest in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation 100 percent.