I Did It! I Did It!

I finished something!

Apologies for the picture: it's overcast outdoors and my low-battery indicator came on when I turned on the flash.

This is the waffle scarf (stitch pattern here) that I've been working on since 26 January . . . of 2007. According to my blog. Two years, whoa.

Two years in which I've worked out that the structure is two interlocking layers of 1-1 rib. It wasn't hard, just something that I kept putting down more than picking up.

And I finished it just in time to wear it out into this:
No more pictures for today, because now I am waiting for the camera batteries to re-charge. After this shot, I started getting a blank preview screen when I tried to take a picture, so into the charger with the batteries.

In case it looks like my red (not white! really!) Honda Fit has not moved since last Friday, I just drove it yesterday. Last night, even.

But I didn't drive it this morning to take our son to school, because we are having another snow day. I've finally gotten into a routine of checking online if the weather looks iffy, and I did check, and our school was not on the list. So I woke the child up, and he was dressed and eating breakfast when I got the automated phone call ("This is a call from Blah School. Blah School will be closed Tuesday, January 13 due to weather conditions.") letting us know he had the day off.

Here is a lovely radar image of "weather conditions", also known as lake-effect snow.

The green spot in the middle is Kent County, or more specifically the heat-island of the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The little red speckles are heavy snow clouds that blow inland and dump snow on us.

The two common comments I get about my winter-weather posts are "Boy, you sure get a lot of snow there!" and "x degrees is not cold!"

Both are lake-effect comments.

Any little storm that blows over Lake Michigan, winter or summer, sucks up moisture out of the lake and then dumps it on us. So it snows snows snows here, sometimes in narrow bands you can drive into and out of.

The lake also moderates the temperature, so an Arctic storm can go across Minnesota ("Boy, it gets cold there, eh") and Wisconsin, and when it gets here, it's ten or even 20 degrees F warmer.

(In the summer, same thing in reverse: we warm up a little slower because of the cold lake water, and our summers are cooler. But oh the humidity!)

Of course, while it's still a balmy 19 F (-7 C) today, the wind is whipping the windchill down to 5 F (-15 C). Brr. Later this week the high temperature is supposed to be 5-10 F.

This is definitely weather for a knitter of warm woolly things!