Diving in the Book Ocean

That sound you hear, like a whale spouting and taking a huge breath, is me coming up from a deep dive into reading.

Julie mentioned a couple of Mark Kurlansky books that I had read reviews on, Cod and Salt, and when I logged onto the library's online catalog to see if they were available, I found another book by Kurlansky, The Basque History of the World. I had to know what that was about, so I put holds on all of them, and they came in just before Christmas. So I had plenty of post-Christmas reading to occupy me.

The online catalog is a dangerous place. With a couple of clicks and my library card's bar code number, I can order any book in the system delivered to my local library. I used my original library card so much that I literally wore the bar code off, so I have now memorized my second 14-digit library-card bar code.

I already had out Peter Menzel's Material World: A Global Family Portrait, a book of photos of typical families from countries around the world, surrounded by their material possessions. As you can probably imagine, the contrast between a family in a place like Haiti and one in the US is . . . pretty striking.

And I had what's-his-name, Graham-Campbell's The Vikings, too. Naturally when we went to the library for a free showing of Cars, and I saw that they had Terry Pratchett's new book, Wintersmith, I got that, too.

So, ah, what was I saying? When I'm reading, I'm 90% gone. I'm not ignoring you, I just don't hear you. Knitting has to stand in the line behind all the books and wait, too.

Watch this space: I'll be back. Right now, my sonar detects another book . . .

Enjoying Our Christmas Things

My husband has taken this whole week off, so we are enjoying some family time together, and enjoying the things we got for Christmas.

Our son got a box of modelling clay on Christmas Eve, and before he went to bed, he made his version of the Pokemon "Cyndaquil". (Yes, I too was amazed to find that Wikipedia covered Pokemon.) The things in front of Cyndaquil are some grass and trees it has set on fire.

He said critically, "It doesn't look quite like I had it in my head. I'm not a very good artist."

How do I tell him that one of the reasons artists keep on making things is to keep trying to make the thing in our hands come out more like the one in our heads?

My best friend from back in school combined two of my loves, tea drinking and Alice in Wonderland, and bought me an Alice in Wonderland teapot. Thank you -- it's a very nice pot and doesn't dribble when it pours! I was trying to get a picture of the steam coming out of the spout and my mug, but you'll have to take my word that the pot is full in this picture.

(Aside to my husband: I don't, either, collect teapots. They collect me. I have one from my mother, one from her mother, one from my dad's mother, one from my mother-in-law, and one that I rescued from an estate sale, because it was so grimy and grungy and obviously needed me.)

One of the things my husband enjoys is cooking. This is a pot of bigos, Polish hunter's stew, that simmered for hours yesterday, spent the night in the fridge, and is now simmering its way to hot on the stove. As soon as I finish typing, I am going to go enjoy a bowl of bigos. (You say it "BEE-gohs," as if you are saying "ghost" but leaving off the "T" sound at the end.)

I've also been enjoying the birds on my feeder. Since I filled the thistle feeder, I've been getting lots of goldfinches again, but it was chickadees and a red-breasted nuthatch that were flying in and out as I tried to take pictures yesterday.



I took these pictures one after another in about half a minute. The birds (mostly housefinches) had already emptied the mesh bag of seed. I went out and filled it after I took the pictures.

And yes, that's grass out there. We still don't have any snow, so no motivation to knit the last couple of inches on my scarf.

Merry Christmas!

We celebrated a lovely Wigilia last night with the Polish side of the family, and I have a few moments downtime before celebrating Christmas Day with the Heinz 57 Variety side.

"Wesolych Swiat Bozego Narodzenia" !

Happy Solstice!

It's the dark of the year, and we are having rain, not snow. Well, I'll have snow if I have to make it myself!

This gray-looking photo (even with the flash) perfectly reflects the gray, rainy day we've had.

I put up nine strings of snowflakes. They are light enough that they don't unravel the thread, and they turn gently in the air currents in the room, so that which ones I can see, and which ones are making shadows on the wall, are constantly changing.

When the room lights are off, and the Christmas tree lights are on, they make moving colored snowflake shadows.

Today was our son's first day of Christmas vacation. As a present, I said I'd pick up his toys and not nag at him to help. He said, sitting happily in a chair and reading, that this was a great present, and even better than more toys. !! I'll have to remember that!

Something New: Email

If you've clicked on my profile, wanting to email me, and discovered I had left my already-heavily-spammed email address hidden, now you're in luck!

I created a Yahoo email address just for this blog, so email away.

Today is our son's last day of school before Christmas, so I have to wrap a couple of things for him, go out shopping for a few odds and ends, and get back in time for the school party.

Somehow I don't think there will be much knitting in there unless I bring it to the party.

Sunday is Christmas Eve, which is the big chowder and apple dumpling making day at our house, so I doubt I'll be thinking about posting a sky picture, even if I had remembered up until now.

Not to mention that Saturday's forecast is "Mostly cloudy with a chance of light rain showers and light snow showers", so today's sky is bound to be a lot prettier!

Drive-By Posting

I have lots of stuff to wrap, and I'm always surprised at how long that takes.

But I just have to send you to the Knitting Fiend's last two posts:

Post #1: Girdle Haiku

Post #2: No Girdle Haiku

Please don't look at these with food or liquids in your mouth!

Cold-Weather Scarf in Warm Weather

Only a couple of inches at the end, and the blue waffle scarf will be done! In time for me to wear it this winter . . . if we ever get a winter.

It snowed here a couple of times back in October, then November was a month with 60-degree days. December has been abnormally warm, too, with 50-degree days. But this is Michigan: at some point it is bound to get cold enough again to wear a warm scarf.

My son and I picked out our Christmas tree last week, and I cut the bottom off and put it in the stand. We have been working on getting the lights and decorations on, and this weekend I declared it done.

I always try to get a balsam fir, or at least a fir of some species. My mom always bought balsam firs, and I love their smell! There is something about smells that wake up memories, and for me Christmas and balsam fir-smell are intertwined.

One year when I couldn't find a fir tree, I bought a spruce. Ouch. I had never bought a Christmas tree before that drew blood! (Balsam needles are soft and not pokey.)

I like to decorate the tree with Christmas music playing. Two of my favorite albums are Butch Thompson's Yulestride and Bethlehem After Dark.

I have a lot of Christmas albums, but I don't think "The Little Drummer Boy" is on any of them.

My taste leans towards "ancient music," so some of my other favorites include albums like Anonymous 4's On Yoolis Night and Ethan James' Ancient Music of Christmas, Christmas carols played on the hurdy-gurdy, among other instruments.

After the decorating is done, one of my favorite things is to sit and look at the lighted tree in the dark.

But right now it's daylight, such as it is in December, and I have to go do some odds and ends of grocery and present shopping!

Ah, Saturday

The day when Blogland rolls up its sidewalks and a solitary cricket can be clearly heard.

It's been a busy week, with meetings on Monday and Wednesday, the school holiday concert Thursday night, and a field trip to the outdoor ice rink yesterday.

I was driving my husband and our son home Thursday night from the concert and happened to look at the sky to the north. I was amazed to see a distinct aurora borealis. Although beautiful southwest Michigan might be "up north" to our Chicago tourists, it's pretty "down south" to be seeing the northern lights!

There was a distinct greenish arc of light, plus some of those shimmering "curtains" you see in the movies. I had never seen them. They were spooky and so silent. There were also beams of light as if someone was shining narrow green spotlights upwards. Wow.

I did a little web-searching and found on the aurora page that there had been sightings as far south as West Virginia (36.75 deg. N. lat.), so I can be sure I wasn't enjoying extra-bright Grand Rapids skyglow. I also found a great aurora page at Michigan Tech, with pictures and links to forecasts and aurora research sites around the world.

Friday, I drove a couple of the kids and one of the aides from the school down to the ice rink in South Haven. I hadn't been ice skating since I was about 15, and all I remembered was falling. I got my son's rental skates buckled on him and then my own. (On me, thank you.)

Ice is still slippery.

We all went around the wall of the ice rink, holding on with one hand. After a couple of rounds, my feet were starting to remember how to move on skates, enough so I could hold my son's hand and keep him from falling, and not be pulled down on top of him.

They had a hot cocoa break after about an hour. He really enjoyed that. By then he was starting to get tired and a little cold, although it's been crazy-warm the last week or so (50 degrees in December), and it was about 40 yesterday.

But I was starting to enjoy myself. I used to love roller-skating, and ice skating is similar enough that I could find my balance again and enjoy the swooping motion of skating. So I had an unexpectedly great time (I only fell once!) and took home the ice rink's schedule of hours.

Tatting for Bells

Okay, Bells, here is some tatting.

Obligatory apology for my cheap camera, with no close-up capability. I'm afraid the flash really washes out the detail.

The red and white doily at the top was something I made up at a demo. It is made of size 10 crochet cotton, which I don't usually use to tat except at demos. At demos, I like to use a big enough thread so people can see what is happening.

Then we have a blue snowflake and a red-white-and-green star, both from Monica Hahn's Christmas Angels and Other Patterns. These two are beaded around the edge, although the beads don't show up in the picture.

On the white piece of paper, the tatted, beaded Christmas tree is also from Christmas Angels and Other Patterns. Both of the other two patterns are adaptations. The blue snowflake was derived from a pattern in Tatting Doilies and Edgings, edited by Rita Weiss. I started the pattern, realized I had messed it up by halving the stitch count in the very first ring, and ended up halving all the stitch counts.

The white snowflake below the paper is the same pattern, and this is the pattern I used to make the silver one I gave away at the exchange. (That would be the one I forgot to get a picture of.)

The purple and pale green medallion on the paper is adapted from a pattern in Sophie T. LaCroix's Old and New Desings in Tatting, which I scored on eBay after trying to win a copy for quite a while. I remember that I worked my first try at this medallion in shaded green and white tatting thread on an Amtrak train to Chicago. (Funny how memories get encoded in the thread that way.)

The square medallion is four joined motifs from Tatting Patterns, edited by Julia Sanders. The design is kind of hidden in the book, used as a pillowcase insertion.

Tatting Patterns is one of my favorite books, although it's a reprint and not always easy to follow. I like how a lot of the motifs are designed. They seem like they were thought out ahead of time, and maybe reworked after the idea was tried out so they would look good in tatting. (That's not true of all tatted designs, some of which seem more like my red and white doily: just made up as they went along and stretched or squeezed to fit.)

My copy has a loud pink cover with a tatted medallion on it in orange and brown 1970's earth tones, but I see at Dover that they have Photoshopped the background to light blue, and the medallion to purples.

Now I really better lug out the Christmas tree stand so I don't get yelled at when school gets out!

Christmas Exchange Ornament

I forgot to get a picture of the snowflake I tatted in silver DMC embroidery thread for the West Michigan Lace Group exchange Monday night, but at least that reminded me to take a picture of this knitted "Swirl Ball", my exchange ornament for the fiber arts guild meeting.

The pattern, Copyright (c) Eve Clevenger 1999, can be found here at the Knitlist free pattern page.

In exchange, I got Jennifer Gould's Santa (or elf) ornament. The flash really washes out his expression, but it's too dark here today to get a picture without the flash. I wish you could see how lively the eyes look in real life! They are amazing.

Yesterday's Latvian mitten post is a hard act to follow when I've done hardly any knitting lately. I got a couple of rows knitted on the blue waffle scarf, bound off the swirl ball, and that's about it.

Latvian Mittens at the Riga NATO Summit

Habetrot's blog, where I heard about it.

4500 pairs (that's 9000 mittens) were knitted to be given to "NATO Summit delegations and media representatives," according to one of the pages at the NATO Summit 2006 website.

Table totally covered in mittens

Latvian women`s mittens from the Latgale region, 11 pages (a full page shows 20 mittens!)

Latvian men`s mittens from the Latgale region, 9 pages

Latvian women`s mittens from the Kurzeme region, 6 pages

Latvian men`s mittens from the Kurzeme region, 10 pages

Latvian women`s mittens from the Zemgale region, 10 pages

Latvian men`s mittens from the Zemgale region, 9 pages

Latvian men`s mittens from the Vidzeme region, 8 pages

Latgale woman's mitten -- leaving 4499 more to look at!

This is Why I Love Snow

Southwest Michigan doesn't get a whole lot of sunshine in the winter. Most winter days are either cloudy, or partly cloudy. Plus the daylength is down to about nine hours and some minutes.

When we have snow, the whiteness scatters and reflects the daylight we do get, and makes it seem brighter out. When the snow melts, it gets pretty dark and damp and dreary!

On a brighter note, last night was our West Michigan Lace Group Christmas meeting. The library staff said we could bring food into the meeting room as long as they got cookies -- we were happy to comply! After the library closed, some of our members treated us to Christmas carols on flute and hammer dulcimer.

We had an ornament exchange, which is always fun, and I took the opportunity to walk around the tables and see what other members are working on.

Just before the meeting broke up, my friend Tatt3r confessed she has a new puppy! Take a look at that sweet little puppy face!

Edited to add: A NATO summit meeting and Latvian mittens . . . what could they have in common? Take a look at Habetrot's blog entry and find out!

Not the Mess I Was Expecting

Usually when my husband does any brewing, it's in a five or six-gallon glass carboy with an airlock or "bubbler" in the mouth.

This big barrel is different. He doesn't have a cork big enough for the bunghole. His solution was to put a clean piece of cloth over it, both to keep out the fruit flies that hatch out of nowhere (even in frozen January) in the presence of mead, and to control any foaming.

This weekend, we finally saw a bit of foaming. But the tongue of foam you see in the picture is as far as it got.

The mess we are getting that I wasn't expecting at all is that honey is weeping out of the very bottom of the barrel at both ends. Not very much honey, just a drop at a time, probably less than a quarter of a cup total so far. We put saucers under the drops, and my husband plans to weigh the honey that leaks out. But with over 100 pounds of honey in the batch, it doesn't look like it's a significant amount.

My husband and I each have a theory on why the honey is leaking out. Our theories are not mutually exclusive.

He thinks this barrel might have had a "wax seal" inside, and if it did, he inadvertantly melted it when he boiling-water-rinsed it before they filled it with honey and cider.

I think the honey has settled to the bottom, and is very slightly drying out and shrinking the barrel staves towards the bottom, allowing them to contract enough to let honey leak.

Since there is nothing we can do about the wax seal while the barrel is full, he has been stirring the proto-mead with a wooden dowel to mix the honey off the bottom. Following stirring, we got the small amount of foaming.

Two dogs trying to share a small rug. For scale, the floor tiles are sixteen inch squares. You can see that medium-sized black Truffles has the lion's share of the rug, while 100+ pound Ajax is curled up on less than half. When he was a small puppy, Truffles used to drag him around by his collar. Truffles is convinced that she can still do this. (Ajax is, too.)

Sunny Saturday

Today turned out to be a beautiful sunny Saturday. I watched a male red-bellied woodpecker, Melanerpes carolinus, pecking away on Mr. Stumpy for several minutes before I thought about getting a picture of him. By that time, of course, he had hopped to a spot where he was harder to see, so I've circled him in the picture.

Although they are called "red-bellied" the red is very low on the belly, and it's nothing like as bright as the red on the head. It looks like the bird took a dustbath in reddish powder.

Later in the afternoon, I took our son to see the movie "Happy Feet". Although this movie ends triumphantly, I have to admit the views of Earth from space brought tears to my eyes. I use so many resources, just from being born in the US in a consumer culture, that sometimes I feel guilty being a human being. If you've ever paged through Peter Menzel's Material World: A Global Family Portrait, you've seen what I mean.

Next time I am coming back as a crow.

Pi Shawl Recovers Knitting Mojo!

The Pi Shawl is getting so big, I can't stretch it out fully without it coming off the needles. I finished knitting the tenth repeat of section three last night and one row of the eleventh repeat. I almost need a ladder to stand on to get the whole thing in the viewfinder!

The wool blanket it is spread out on is a yellow-to-butterscotch color. On my monitor, it looks pretty orange, but in real life it's more yellow.

I'll answer a question here:

"What is a 'placki', anyway? Is that like a latke?"

Lucky you, you are going to get the story behind the story!

When our son was small, he got a lot of the "Veggie Tales" videos. One of them was "The Toy That Saved Christmas" on DVD, which has a lot of "Easter eggs," little fun undocumented features, hidden in the menus.

Okay, it's a kids' video: they aren't exactly hidden when the DVD says "I think there's an Easter egg on this page!" over and over.

On one of the sub-menus of "The Toy That Saved Christmas," the Easter egg is a song, "The Eight Days of Polish Christmas", each day of which is a Polish food.

My husband's family is Polish (and Irish, but that doesn't figure in the story). So we found the phonetic spelling of some of the foods in the song hilarious:

Golabkis, which are meat and rice-stuffed cabbage rolls, pronounced by my husband's family "glum-keys", are spelled "gwumpkies" on the DVD, and chrusciki, described in my husband's big Polish cookbook as "Polish crullers", are spelled "hooscheekies" on the DVD. (I don't have the Polish character set to put the diacritical marks, like slashes in the "L"s, in these words.)

Anyway, my husband got the bright idea that he and our son would do "8 days of Polish Christmas" at our house. The first year, they followed the menu on the video:

1. A Boiled Potato topped with Dillweed
2. Two Steamed Pierogies
3. Three Simmered Gwumpkies
4. Four Baked Paprikas
5. Five Smoked Kielbasa
6. Six Fried Hooscheekies
7. Seven Pitted Prunes
("I don't like prunes!" "With this food, you'll need'em, son," is the comment on the video.)
8. Eight Poppy Seed Cakes

After that, they branched out, picking recipes out of Polish Heritage Cookery, by Robert and Maria Strybel, one of the best presents I ever got for my husband. It has pretty much every Polish recipe his busia (=grandmother) ever made, plus variations.

A lot of the foods he knows by name phonetically, from hearing his busia say them, like the menu in the DVD. Then he pages through likely chapters until he finds the Polish spelling.

So, yes a "placki" is a potato pancake, pretty much like a latke!

Like Living in a Snow Globe

This is all the snow we got, but it was enough to close school. Our school closes when one of the bigger schools closes, and the big school got lots of snow. This is cold-air snow, tiny flakes and lots of them, plus a little wind to blow it around, brr.

In the center picture, the mourning dove says, "Brrr! I am not leaving this birdfeeder!"

I'd like to say I sat before the soapstone stove ("I am not leaving this woodstove!") and knitted all day, but that's not true. What I actually did was disassemble the switch box of an old box fan we bought at a sale this fall. I can't tell you what brand it is, because all it says is "Automatic Thermocontrol".

It's a three-speed light blue reversing fan, and can be set to turn on and off at various temperatures. The "In/Out" button, and the "Off/Low/Med/High" buttons moved, but they were very sticky. I drilled out the rivets and took the switch box apart.

Inside, the switch consisted of five strips of "circuit-board stuff", plus a spacer. There was black gunk in between some of the strips, so I kept them in order and cleaned both sides of each strip with rubbing alcohol. I cleaned the switch box ("Ark-Less Switch", that's a comfort), cleaned the button contacts, and puzzled out how to put the strips back in the box.

Short sentence ("puzzled out how to put the strips back in the box"), but a long process. I knew which order they went in, and which way they had to be oriented in the box, but it took some fiddling to get the stops at the bottom aligned exactly how they had to be in order for the buttons to work.

I love this fan. It weighs a ton (read: my 111-pound dog cannot knock it over). The grills are metal, not plastic that breaks after a couple of years of use. It has a thermostat, and is reversible. And it has lovely rounded corners. The white plastic handle on the top is reinforced through the center with a strip of spring steel. You just don't find fans made like that any more.

Any knitting today? Yes, I did knit a couple of rows of the blue waffle scarf, and I am almost finished with repeat 10 of the Pi shawl. I hope to get more knitting done tonight, after plackis (potato pancakes) and sausages. Yum!

"I am not leaving this plate!"

Double Knitting

If you double knit, any of the forms of double knitting, please join the Yahoo double knitting group which I moderate.

If you are interested in double knitting, check out Alasdair's antiblog, complete with double knitting with different images on each side. Wow.

Check out his student, amy!'s work.

If it's cold where you are, maybe Catlady's double-knitted mittens are what you are looking for.

Or how about anneland22's banana scarf?

I Have A Michigan Blog

I'm not sure how my blog got added to the "Absolute Michigan" blog list. Just because I live in Michigan and often post about our goofy local weather and life in rural Michigan, does that mean this is a Michigan blog? I guess it does.

Surely Marguerite's blog is at least as much of a Michigan blog as mine is. Look at all the snow she got! We only got a fluffy inch or so, which today is turning soggy in 37 degree temperatures.

This morning's southwest Michigan weather headlines show it turning colder again and lake effect snow for tonight.

I meant to knit on my blue scarf yesterday, but I was waylaid by my half-circle Pi Shawl. Here is the last picture I took of it, back at eight repeats, on October 27th.

I realized that one reason I stopped working on it was that while October was Snow-tober (and I knitted on it a lot), November was Summer-vember. It was so warm so often (60 degrees in November?) that a shawl didn't seem high on the list.

Another reason was I had just knitted through a slubby section of the yarn, and was pretty ticked off at it.

Anyway, I sat down by the window last night to knit some more, and the cold air was sheeting down the glass onto my lap. Suddenly having all that mohair in my lap felt a lot nicer again.

I have said before that when a project loses its "knitting mojo," when I just don't feel like knitting on it, I have learned to set it aside. It might hibernate for days, weeks, or even months, but if I force myself to work on it, it might sit for years! I just wait until it looks like the coolest thing on the planet to work on. Eventually it will come around again, or else it will get frogged.

So I finished the ninth repeat on the Pi shawl (cheater picture is from October, as Blogger says "your request could not be completed" when I try to upload a new one), worked my calculations again, and am tentatively planning to work three more repeats and a knitted-on, probably seed stitch, border. That will give me three lace repeats in the first section, six in the second, and twelve in the third, nice and symmetrical.

Speaking of Pi Shawls, Tatt3r is knitting a full-circle one. Having seen this yarn in person, I can tell you that the camera does not pick up its beauty. On my monitor, it looks basically sand-colored. In real life, it has a lot of subtle color shifts, almost an oil-on-water iridescence.

I don't often push charity knitting, even for a good cause. I figure knitters are good people, and they can figure out for themselves where to best send their charitable efforts.

But frame knitters, particularly those who knit on round frames like the Knifty Knitter, pump out hats like nobody's business. Save the Children's "Caps to the Capital" project needs hats for newborns, 9 to 11 inches in circumference.

I leave you to figure out the rest.

Blue Waffle Scarf: Internal Structure

I draped the blue waffle scarf over my desk lamp (don't worry, it has a fluorescent twister bulb in it, so the scarf didn't burn up) and took a picture so you could see the structure better.

It looks like a microscope photo of plant cells to me. The "cells" are full of air. I just wish I could knit it fast enough to wear it yesterday.

I'm knitting it on US size 11 aluminum needles, and they are so heavy and awkward. I've tried my bamboo needles, and they are just too draggy on this yarn. I even transferred it to a scarf board (a double rake) that I got in an antique store, but the nails are too thin to make each stitch the right size. (The knitting board is much much faster, though!)

I think I typed out the stitch pattern before, but if not, here it is again:

Cast on a multiple of four stitches.
Knit each group of four as follows, passing the yarn between the tips of the needles after every stitch, as if you were knitting a K1-P1 rib or single moss stitch.

1. Knit one
2. Purl one
3. Slip one with yarn in back
4. Slip one with yarn in front

And now I suppose if I really want to get it done, I better go work on it!

Blue Waffle Scarf Gets Longer

Technically, this is double knitting, but the two layers interlock at every pass, so it is not a tube scarf. It could be made on a double rake knitting frame, sometimes called a knitting board, but probably would need to be on a finer gauge one than the purple Knifty Knitter.

What this scarf has is "loft", or dead-air space, insulation space, in it. I could really have used it this morning: the temperature has fallen from about 20 degrees F. at 7am, to about 14 (-10 C.) at 10 am. Brrr! At 30 inches, it's only about half as long as I want it.

But if you want to see pretty double knitting, take a look at the Knitting Nurse's Double-Knit hat.

My husband could use a new hat . . . he should be so lucky.

And if you want complexity and color, how about Samurai Knitter's Ruana Thingie?

The Knitting Fiend has picked up where "You Knit What?" left off. Today's offering is a beaut. But old green-and-furry still has the prize, in my opinion.

We're waiting for a burst of lake-effect snow. The weather forecast is all dire again, "Snow accumulation of 6 to 10 inches can be expected by early Tuesday morning," but we never know if the snow bands will get us or not. (Lake-effect snow is when the wind blows across Lake Michigan, picks up floods of moisture as it goes over the lake, and drops it onshore as snow.)

New Snow, New Buttons, New Socks

The weather has turned cold now that it's December. Today's high is supposed to be in the 20s, about -5 C. On the Lake Michigan shore, we are getting some lake-effect snow, soft, feathery flakes.

I finally edited my blog template to add Bloglines and Technorati subscription/favorites buttons to the left sidebar. Editing the template is not on my list of favorite things to do, which is why I read a whole list of blogs but only once in a while add them to the sidebar.

I'm making good progress knitting the "Blue Mist" socks (that's the Wool-Ease yarn color). This time I turned the toes for a little variety.

I just read in the newspaper that not only does chicken soup help ease congestion when you're sick, people who were chilled in an experiment by putting their feet in cold water were more likely to get sick afterwards than unchilled people. I love that chicken soup does make you feel better, but I hate that getting cold makes you more likely to get sick!

For years I've been saying that getting cold doesn't give you a cold. Now researchers find out it does?! Remind me to wear my warm handknitted socks! And a hat! And my scarf!

Cool Beans

I date myself with that phrase, I'm sure.

However, there is knitting, bean-related content at this link.

Good Socks for the Weather!

The blue socks are done and washed just in time for snow!

I've been asked more than once, "Do you really like wearing such thick socks?" Yes, I love it! I even wear them in the summer a lot of the time, when I wear shoes at all.

I completely ran out of the "Denim Twist" color, but I am happy with the stripey transition to the "Blue Mist" yarn. In fact, close up, the "Blue Mist" is a blend of blue with fibers of other colors. It's so pretty to knit that I've already started the toe of yet another pair of socks.


We did get some snow, but we got ice first. All this white stuff is on top of a layer of ice. The trees are creaking and clicking in the wind. I felt lucky that we didn't lose power.

When the electricity goes out, we still have heat -- the soapstone woodstove heats the whole house. What we lose is water, since the well pump runs on electricity. I don't mind burning tealights or pulling out the pierzyna, but I really miss flushing the toilet.

Here is our friend Mr. Stumpy in the snow. You can see that the snow is not very deep. Locally, we mostly got ice and just a little snow. But it was icy enough that all the schools were closed, so I have had a fun day of watching old cartoons (Bugs Bunny, Three Stooges cartoons, and Tweety and Sylvester from the early 60's) and making cocoa for a chilled kid.