I Hate Project Monogamy

I am still working on the sock ribbing, so maybe the title should be "I Am Bored by Knitting Sock Ribbing!"

I was hoping that working on only one project would speed them up, but it seems like I avoid them more than I knit them, and they are going slo-o-owly.

So here is a choppily enhanced photo of snow with socks.

Yes! More snow! [cue slightly hysterical laughter]

I think I first read about cross-quarter days in one of Guy Ottewell's Astronomical Calendars. It had monthly sky maps, dates of meteor showers, and interesting articles about constellations and the seasons. I found it amusing that Groundhog Day, falling on a cross-quarter day, was roughly 45 days before the spring equinox. Let's see, 45 divided by 7 days in a week is . . . gasp! about 6 weeks. Huh!

I bought it from Celestial Products, the same company that sells the moon calendar I buy and put on my refrigerator.

Q & A Time

Amy asked, "Is that a printout of the 1000 Knitters' Project? Where'd you get that? Is it because you're one of them or has Franklin released something?"

That's a 1000 Knitters Project knitting bag my husband gave me for Christmas. Franklin has them in his Cafe Press shop. (And yes, my husband bought the bag - Version Two - that I'm on, wearing my "Introvert" t-shirt.)

Roxie asked, "Here in the northwest, we get through the summer on the water from a slowly melting snowpack in the mountains. And in the high desert, most of the water makes it in as snow, then melts into the aquifer. Is heavy snow good for you that way, or is it just a precursor to dreadful flooding?"

In Michigan, fall through winter and spring is the recharge season for the ground water and the Great Lakes. We've had a couple of low-snow winters (um, not this winter!) and dry, droughty summers, and Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are still at historic low levels.

The Lake Michigan-Lake Huron graph is from the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory website, which also hosts webcams looking out on the lakes.

And since this was a related question:

"All that ice on the lake - how deep does it get? Do people set up their ice fishing shacks on the Great Lakes as well as on the lesser ones? How do they know when and where the ice is thick enough and how do they know when to pack it up in the spring?"

I don't think I've ever seen anyone attempt to put an ice shanty on Lake Michigan. With an average depth of 279 feet (85 meters), it acts more like a mini-freshwater ocean than a lake. Wave heights can hit 16 feet or more in a storm, so the ice along the edges of the lake is rough, jumbled pack ice, dangerous even to walk on, let alone drag a fishing shanty out on. (Of course, we have thousands of smaller inland lakes, so plenty of ice fishermen. Pike, mmmm.)

Deborah (mtmom on Ravelry) asked, "Is that a Junco I see at your feeder, along with the chickadee? We get those here too, in Northern Arizona..."

Yes, dark-eyed juncoes and black-capped chickadees reliably visit my birdfeeders all winter long. In the fall, the chickadees will take seed after seed out of my black oil sunflower seed feeders and hide them all over the place.

I got some comments about handmade socks, and I just counted: 8 pairs in the clean laundry, 8 pairs in my drawer, one on my feet, and one on the needles. Add to that, I seem to wear out socks very slowly (I just threw out a pair I swear I had in high school), and I think I better move on to knitting something else with sock yarn. It's hard! I do love to have a pair of socks on the needles.

That life stuff . . . last week, we finally made the decision to homeschool our son. We were already talking about doing this for fifth grade. I don't want to get too much into the personal stuff, but we feel this will be better for him.

Because we're jumping into this in the middle of a year, we are working on getting school materials. Today we're going on a field trip to one of the bigger libraries!