A Break in the Weather

To our great relief, we finally got a break in the "All Snow All the Time" weather we've been having since the beginning of January. Finally the juncoes and white-crowned sparrows were able to eat seed that was not instantly buried in the snow.The scraggly rose tangle that I spare mainly as shelter for the birds has turned into a snow-cave. At first light, birds come flying out of the middle of it.

Every fall, I think, I should prune this messy thing down to the ground in the spring - it's half-dead, anyway and every winter the birds flock to it and I spare it again.

The goldfinches are still in their dusky olive winter feathers. I'll be waiting for the very first bright yellow one!

We've lived here 18 years now. We moved in over the weekend of 26 January 1991, and promptly had our first blizzard.

It's been a lot of shovelling over the years, and my husband finally bought a snowblower. It was delivered Friday. After I put it together, he went out and tried it, and in about 8 minutes moved as much snow as the two of us could have shovelled out in two hours.

Given that we're 18 years older than we were in 1991, and the snow doesn't seem to be getting any lighter, I think we will get our money's worth out of a snowblower. And if it turns out to be the kind of weather voodoo that these things sometimes do, and we barely get any more snow for the rest of this winter -- I think he would still consider it money well spent.

The other part of my weekend was actually knitting-related. I drove up to Threadbear in Lansing again for a book-signing by Panopticon blogger Franklin Habit.

To someone like me, who sometimes calls her own brothers by the wrong names, I have to tell you, the man is amazing. He photographed 1000 knitters, he meets hundreds of people at book signings and classes, and he placed me in all of about ten seconds. Wow.

And he has beautiful handwriting.

I tried to resist all the beautiful yarns at Threadbear after Franklin signed my copy, so I went for a book first. But then there were so many squishable soft yarns to pet . . . I did come home with one ball of Regia, and a skein of Malabrigo lace baby merino in the "Purple Mystery" color.

Thanks to Ravelry, I learned that the Malabrigo lace was sometimes a bit felted in the skein, but I had only a little trouble winding it into a ball off my swift. I won't be trying to use this ball from the center, but I want to knit this into something right now. It was so soft, I untwisted the skein so I could pet it on the drive home.

This year, the drive home was much better than last year!