Melty Sunday

It's sunny and melty outside, which makes me happy. Is it possible that Spring has actually arrived??

(Clickie to embiggerenie)



The Hamster Blankie took my knitting mojo for a while-- it was so insanely perfect I had a hard time beginning anything else, even socks, which is sad. Thus, I decided to play around and invent something. The Interlacements red that Mum got me for Christmas was perfect to experiment making convertible mittens. I have tiny hands with short stubby fingers, so even if I found a good pattern I'd still have to make major adjustments to it.


Aren't they fun? :)


These were quick and easy-- just enough to get me back on the knitting wagon.

Snowed- in Saturday

It's white out there. Crazy white. The different weather sites say anything from 4 to 16 inches, which is quite a wide range, in my opinion. It's a doozy, whatever it is. This morning I could see my neighbor's truck across the yard, but it's gotten progressively whiter and whiter as the day has gone on.


The branches are bending down, heavy and tired.


I love watching the kitties watch the snow. They're both strictly indoor cats, so they have never stepped on snow or had it fall on them. I don't know if they know what it would be like out there, but they certainly like to watch it.


While winter seems interminable around here, there is a small miracle happening in my kitchen:


The first tiniest little green sprout is poking up through the dirt.


It's a johnny-jump-up, which is weird, because the packet says they germinate slowly, in 14-21 days, while the basil should take 5-7 days. Maybe this is one little violet seed that was extremely anxious to grow!

Scenes from a clean bathroom

Once in a while (once in a great while) I get this urge to clean things. This vacation I've cleaned the cozy room and the kitchen, and then yesterday I completely lost my mind and cleaned the bathroom. This is proof that I have finally gone over the edge.


(If you're wondering why there's a bowl on the floor, it's for the cats. They don't want their water out in the kitchen by their food. They want it in the bathroom, and if it is not provided for them, they lap the sink and tub faucets or else dive head-first into the toilet. When the bowl is empty [read "has less than ten lapfuls of water in it"], which is usually at 3 o'clock in the morning, they will rattle it and toss it around and make such a racket that even a heavy sleeper like myself is woken. They are vedddddy particular about that stupid bowl.)


This must be the beginning of Spring-- I am spring-cleaning already! And yesterday I went out and spent a whole five dollars on all of the components for this:


On the left will soon be basil, and on the right violets (johnny-jump-ups). Squeeeeeeeee!

So it is a lovely day today, by the way-- sunny and bright and warm (45 degrees!) and everything is melty outside. I went for a quick drive today before heading for school, and this corn thingy caught my eye. I don't exactly know what they do with all that dried-up corn (there is a cow barn nearby, so it is probably winter fodder-- yum yum) but it certainly looks interesting in that big thingy, in a Laura Ingalls Wilder sort of way.


Not too far from the corn is a hill where you can see forever. That might be Mt. Katahdin way in the back there with the snow on it, but I'm not sure.


Whatever it is, it is a great thing to glimpse as I crest over that hill.

Winter Fest 2008

The snowmobiles were buzzing all day today, and the snow sculptures were finished, and there were a zillion people on the lake... it must be Winter Fest time yet again. It's the high point of my whole winter.... or rather it just reminds me that I live in a tiny town and this is the kind of thing that gets these people through another interminable winter.

Thus, I bundled up in 1,781 layers of clothes and went out to the frozen lake to watch the fireworks. This year I picked a great spot only about 100 yards from where they were going to shoot them off.

First, I contemplated this sign. Does this make any sense to you? Me neither. What's the point of having an ice fishing shack if you don't have a hole in it to fish with?


Then I watched several cars, half a dozen snowmobiles and a police car with its blue lights drive out onto the ice, and in a few minutes the first fireworks went off.


The neatest thing about being on a frozen lake when these go off is that they echo like you wouldn't believe. They sound like the shotguns that go off in the fall (another fun small-town pastime) but even bigger-- as if someone's using a cannon instead of a 12-gauge to kill a deer.

And the moment we have all been waiting for, the grand finale:


And lastly, here are some very pink feet.

Siiiiiick Day

I could not get out of bed this morning. I made it to the phone, called the school secretary, and then crawled into bed. Thankfully both she and I were prepared-- she had some subs available and I had written sub plans yesterday. The school nurse had checked my ear yesterday and she said the eardrum was bulging a little--- which took me back to when I was eight years old and suffered horrible ear infections. She said this one wasn't terribly bad-- I should just go home and nurse it. So here I am.

Now that it's the afternoon and I don't feel like sleeping any more, I'm listening to "Down Memory Lane" with Toby Leboutillier-- there is nothing like listening to scratchy records of Al Jolson and Benny Goodman when you are sick. Dad said he went to school with Toby Leboutillier-- I'm glad I checked the website because it is absolutely bizarre to see that he was a physics major! He certainly has the voice for long physicsy lectures... "And Newton's Law number... anyone, anyone? number two, which would make the velocity be... anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?"

[Edited on 2/19/08-- it wasn't Toby Leboutillier that Dad went to school with, but rather The Humble Farmer. (I tend to get my Friday-night volunteer radio people mixed up) I have no idea if that guy was a physics major, but his voice would also make a great lecturer. I hate to use the word "soporific", but...]

Outside my window several blue jays have been congregating under the pine tree. Their footprints look like raptor footprints. I'm scared.



On the knitting front, the Hamster blankie is sixteen inches long. If it weren't for the color pattern that is slowly emerging I think I would die from boredom. My estimations were waaaaaay off-- I thought that each panel would be 18 inches tall or so, but I still have several tennis-ball-sized balls of blue yarn that I can use. Since the total width will be 28" or so (this left panel is 14" wide) I am just going to keep knitting until the total length approaches 28" or until I die from boredom. Running out of yarn won't be an issue.

(the yarn marker, by the way, indicates the 12" mark.)


I love how the color pattern is almost argyle-ish (I googled "argyle" and this random squid came up. I haven't knitted a stuffed animal in a long time. I know of a certain sister who might be interested in something like that...). I also love how the pattern abruptly quits (just below the yarn marker). I'm just about to attach another ball-- let's see what happens next, shall we?

Speaking of my random sister, I haven't talked with her in weeks and weeks. I call her but I rarely hear back from her (her only reply to me was through my father-- "STOP CALLING ME!!!"). However, she did leave this message on my MySpace page:

Dear Emily,

I am alive.

I Love your Blog.

That is all.

love,

The youngest offspring

.......So at least I know she is alive, even though she doesn't communicate with the outside world very often! :)

Another bleeeeezard

So I got THE CALL at 5:40 am that gave me permission to roll back into bed and snooze for a while. I have a cold (or a "code", as the kids call it, because you can't pronounce "cold" when you have one), so a snow day is very very welcome. It's not a bad "code", just an irritating one. Some folks at school have a rather nasty strain of Influenza B, and there's also that vague "stomach thing" that goes around, and even a couple of cases of whooping cough. FUN!!!

It's been snowing pretty heavily since I got up several hours ago-- the pretty snow-globe kind of snow. I took a couple of pictures of it-- my little garden out back, which in the summer is all wild with cosmos and phlox and sunflowers and pumpkins, but now is just a mound of snow...


...and this dead pine branch that fell from the tree with the birdfeeders in it that fascinates me with its convoluted beauty...




A snow day also gives me the chance to just sit and veg and knit and nurse my sore throat and drink gallons of tea. I've been craving a Star Wars marathon for a while (you can't watch just one!) and my VCR's decided to become so infested with gremlins so I figured I'll watch my VHS copies just one more time before the VCR finally dies. I really would love to get a DVD set of the old version of Star Wars, with none of the new crap in it (though I do like the restored "extras" like Han stepping on Jabba the Hutt's tail) but I really think none of the old ones exist any more. I'm a purist like that. The Empire Strikes Back has always been my favorite, and I think it's funny that that's the movie that has very little new stuff in it.

But anyway, enough complaining. Mum came to visit me on Sunday and stayed through until yesterday (Tuesday) morning. Mum's truck is a piece of doo-doo, with slick tires and no weight in the back. As soon as she got to my town she did a 360 and got stuck, and got stuck again overnight when it snowed, and (my personal favorite) got stuck again backing out of the driveway:


I did nothing to help. I just stood there laughing and taking pictures. Finally some of my neighbors (not a single tooth among them) got their truck and a chain and yanked Mum out. It was great.

So anyway, I'm going to go finish up the Star Wars marathon and work on the Hamster's blankie. This panel is about 10 inches long now, and I love how the shades of blue are striping and pooling around... veddy niiiice...

A Winter Weekend

So this weekend was really warm and Spring-like, which just means we are going to get hammered the next few months. Still, it's pretty to look at.




I love the little camp/fishing shack on the right of this picture (click on it to embiggeren). Every time I drive by I just fall in love with it.


But, not everything around here is quite so lovely. I went on some errands this weekend and look what somebody had parked in a nearby parking lot:



I could just imagine one of the rednecks around here saying, "Uhhh, dude, where's my house?"


So I spent a teensy bit of the Christmas money not on fuel. Bad me. But I was tired of having these beautiful hanks of yarn and no real way to wind them, so I bought myself a swift. It was the cheapest one they had, and certainly not the flashiest, but it's so much easier to use this thing than to wind yarn around two back-to-back chairs.


This yarn is Interlacements' Reds Plus which Mum got me for Christmas. Yes, it's different shades of crimson and maroon, but also has little bits of purple and charcoal in it.


But after winding it all up I realized I was more in the mood for something less dramatic. Usually I'm not in the mood for something lacy or pink, but there's something about this yarn that I love... maybe it's the fact that it is incredibly soft, and I'm trying out a new pattern, and the colors seem to be swirling interestingly... I think I like it.

Covered Bridge

If you're ever wondering if I ever get out of the house, I do. In fact, now that I have my camera, I drive around looking for things to photograph. Today I drove by the covered bridge and thought it looked especially nice in the snow.








As I took these snowmobiles buzzed in the distance like some hibernal nest of insects.



The original bridge lasted from 1830ish until 1990, when a particularly bad spring flood floated it away. Now that would have been something to photograph. This new one is a replica. I wrote this in my journal on September 21, 2007:

"While this version [of the bridge] is only 17 years old, it is a close replica of the one that stood for over 150 years. The stone masonry below is original, save the top three feet. It must have been utterly unspeakable when it collapsed in 1990--imagine 130 feet of 150-year-old wood splintering and collapsing downstream. What I find even more remarkable is that this used to be the main road between [the two towns], once upon a time. Now it isn't anything-- a fancy covered bridge used primarily by ATVs and snowmobiles, since the road itself doesn't go anywhere but to the trails. Now the major crossing is several miles to the west, making this bridge nothing more than a weathered artifact of a landmark. And I don't know how I feel about rebuilding collapsed/destroyed structures--there's something relatively lame about that. Did they use any wood from the bridge that collapsed? That, at least, wouldn't seem as pathetic. Some things were meant to pass away, like the Hesper and the Luther Little, while others, like old barns and mills, finally succumb to the fate of time. This bridge is gorgeous-- don't get me wrong-- and I'm glad when they rebuilt it they did so according to (most of) the original specs, but still-- I don't know how I feel about it. Our lives are so damn artificial and we have such a hard time distinguishing between "real" and "replica"-- they had made the boards for the new bridge our of that weather-proof plastic fake wood crap, how many people would notice or care?

"And how many people out there are as seriously in love with the the "old" things as me-- the old, the lost, the abandoned, the forgotten? On one of my walks recently I wandered down a rarely-used ATV trail and in a field I saw a derelict car with its hood up (a Caddy, I think) and an RV sitting amongst the weeds. The side window of the RV was broken and a tattered curtain hung in the hole. I was afraid someone-- animal or human-- was inside, so at first I didn't want to investigate, but my curiosity got the best of me and I tromped through the tall grasses and the milkweeds to investigate.

"The RV had obviously been abandoned some time ago, but there were a few interesting items lying out that made me wonder if people hadn't been there fairly recently-- perhaps over the summer. A half-burnt candle sat on the table, and there was a tossed-aside blanket on the couch and another in the loft. I vaguely remember an ash tray (?) and other bits of whatever lying about. None of it looked like it was being used presently, but it was just this air of human presence that fascinated me. I found it so beautiful-- I want to go back and take pictures of it. But why does this abandoned derelict of an RV seem realer, more authentic, than this behemoth of a replica covered bridge? Why would I even think that the garbagey mess of abandonment is more beautiful than a historic landmark? Hmmm."