Snow birds

My kitchen window looks out into the woods & normally when I look out, I'll see a bird or two, sometimes a squirrel.  Sometimes even a fox or deer passing by.  This morning, there are thousands of birds out there.  Thousands!  And not just one big flock, there are all different kinds of birds.  Little birds, big birds, birds on the ground, birds in the bushes and birds in all levels of the tree limbs.  Thousands & thousands of birds.  What my momma taught me was lots of birds like that this time of year meant snow was coming.

Mr. Weatherman keeps hinting at snow.  He'll make some big announcement like "Stay tuned for snow accumulation info" or "Snow accumulations possible for Wednesday, the worst travel day of the year."  When you actually stay tuned or click on the link, he starts talking about how it's going to start as rain & if conditions are just perfectly so, it will turn to snow &/or sleet late Wednesday night.  But then he'll ramble on a while about how low the chance of the conditions lining up just perfectly for snow is.  He says it's about a one billionth of 1% chance that it will actually snow.  And then he ends his forecast with a sentence or two about the possibility of light accumulation.

In other words, Mr. Weatherman has no freaking clue.  But those birds....

I guess I should head to the grocery store & stock up on bread, milk & toilet paper.  It's a southern tradition.

Let's be thankful....

I was planning to be thankful for the internet today.  Yes, I'll admit, at the beginning of the month I made a list of things I was thankful for to use in case of an emergency during the month.  An emergency being one of those days where about the only thing I can think of to be thankful for is that I haven't killed anyone today.  Yet.  You know those days.  Right?  I'm not the only one who has them, right?  Anyway.... Today's thankful thing if I couldn't think of anything else was the internet.  Which is interesting because before looking at my list, I was thinking how glad I am to have the internet.  How nice it is to be able to obsessively watch the weather forecast.  How easy it is for me to publicly complain about the weather here on the blog, on Facebook or even in the Etsy forums.  Are you old enough to remember life before Google?  I am.  Boy, it was tough.  You had to watch the birds if you wanted to make sure you had enough toilet paper.

And just so there's something to look at in this post, here's a random picture of Max.

Max says to tell you that I have finished the Antler hat & have started another secret project hat.  Photos to follow if the sun ever comes out.

Stripes

I'm on a stripes kick.  It wasn't a conscious decision but the last seven or eight things I've knit have been striped.  I finished the blue & gray striped socks last week but never blogged about them because I wanted to sew up the toes before showing them off.  Apparently the urge to post them is stronger than the urge to Kitchner them because here they are, still hanging out with open toes:

One of these days, I'll find myself in a quiet, well lit corner with my handy-dandy Kitchner cheat-sheet & I'll sew them up.  I hope that day comes soon.  I've recently worn holes in three pairs of my socks.  It's been a sad few weeks!  But hey - those socks have been worn routinely for over 10 years.  Wow!  Ten years.  That's amazing!  And I'm sitting here thinking that that can't possibly be right, except that I distinctly remember wearing two of them in our old house & it's actually been almost 12 years since we lived there.  Wow.  Just wow!

And then there's this striped hat.  It may last 10 or more years as well.  It's knit from Red Heart!  Shhhh, don't tell.  (Yes, I am a yarn snob!)  The yarn is actually Red Heart's Boutique Unforgettable.  I have no idea how it came to live in my house but I'm glad that it did.  Although it's a Red Heart acrylic yarn, it's just as soft as it can be and I absolutely love the color.  The photo doesn't do it justice, mainly because it was taken at night in horrible lighting on my very messy desk.  But in real life, it's emerald green with stripes of purple that vary from almost black to grape.  Besides the softness & the color, I also like the way the hat's appearance changes based on the size of the head (think man vs. woman.)  On a smaller head, the hat is a bit slouchy and has just a hint of a ruffled shape around the face.  On a larger head, the ruffle smoothes out and looks like any other ribbed hat.   Anyway, I liked the hat so much, I'm knitting a matching cowl.  No photos of the cowl as I've only got a few inches of knitting done so far.

So, on a totally different note, how's the weather been treating you?  Here in Virginia, it's been typical.  Not typical as in normal temperatures, but typical as in you never have a clue what to wear and you need to have both your harshest winter clothes as well as your summer clothes available.   Our "average" winter temperatures are are the mid 40's during the day & the upper 20's at night.  Recently, when the big cold wave hit us, the daytime temperature dropped 41 degrees in a matter of hours to give us a balmy high of 6 degrees one day.  We tied a record for cold temps that day.  Three days later, we broke another record.  This one for high temperatures when we hit 68 degrees.  It's no wonder practically everyone in the state is sick & we have a reputation for dressing funny.  The extreme temperature swing brought massive, massive rains and house shaking thunder storms.  It also produced heavy fog to go along with the flooded roads.  Here's a picture of our lake.

You can see the fog rolling across it.  The picture was taken around 3:30 in the afternoon & I don't think I've ever seen fog like that in the middle of the day before.  Being a Stephen King fan, it freaked me out just a teeny tiny bit.

So, what's your weather doing?  Feel free to rant or brag about it in the comments.  Meanwhile, I'm off to knit a few more inches of cowl before bedtime.

Hail to the Redskins!

I'm not feeling overly creative at the moment, we are having a massive thunderstorm with dime sized hail and I needed a blog title so....

Hail to the Redskins.

Although I freely admit to being a yarn snob, I couldn't resist Red Heart's Team Spirit in Redskin colors.  That's Mr. Freaky Face modeling the hat.  He's very happy to have ear flaps because they cover up the dent in his ear from where he recently took a tumble off the shelf.

I haven't made much progress at all on the latest chevron scarf.

I wasn't feeling the love & quickly put it down & started another blanket instead.

I got the idea from a rug I saw in a magazine.  I'm using Fibonacci's numbers (the Fibonacci number?? not sure how to word that) for the stripe sequence & solid color scrap yarn for the stripes.  I like it & hate it at the same time.  It's bright and gaudy and tacky but oddly, the bigger it gets, the less gaudy & tacky it seems.  Is that what they mean by "growing on me"?

While working on the blanket squares, I watched Once Upon a Time on Netflix.  I started noticing all the different hats the characters wear which got me thinking about hats and how much easier & quicker they are to knit than a blanket and...

Voila!  The beginning of a hat.  On my screen, it looks like slate gray yarn but it's actually a dark gray.  Palette's "Ash" to be exact.  I chose the yarn simply because it was within reach & I had two skeins (wasn't sure one would be enough.)  It doesn't look like much yet, but it's going to be my version of Red's hat, only in gray.  It's also going to be slow going because once again, I'm using fingering weight yarn & #2 needles.  I really should stop complaining about that.  With the exception of that Red Heart hat up above, I don't think I've used anything but fingering (or worse, lace) weight yarn for the past year or two.  I think it may be time to give in and admit that all my projects take me a while.

Well, the hail has finally stopped and the thunderstorm seems to have moved on.  Think I'll go see if the newly planted tomato plants survived.