Fleece on Earth

OK, if the latest forecast is correct, we are well on our way to challenge the record-breaking snow of the last two winters. Winter storm watch announced this afternoon is up to another possible nine inches to fall Wednesday through Thursday. High ice to liquid water ratio, because the air temperature will be low. In other words, more dry powder that drifts easily. Gary is rescheduling his trip to Chicago for tomorrow rather than letting it wait until Thursday.

Car went in for 30K service today, turned out to cost more than just an oil change, but I expected that. It was about due to generate a service bill, since it really hasn't before except for a tire replacement two years ago after getting an unpatchable flat. As such it wasn't bad, just $168, and that included fixing a slow leak in another tire as well as a power steering flush and a new fuel filter. The oil change was free this time.

Making progress on that knitted lace cap. By the third repeat of the pattern I've got it down now so I don't need a chart or notes. But it requires paying careful attention all the time, which isn't so much fun in my opinion. I prefer mindless knitting that lets me listen to audiobooks or music.

Off to bed now.

Oh, yeah, I squeezed one other thing into the last bit of 2009: I wrote fanfic, for like the first time since I was 12 and thought it was reasonable that Mulder and Scully would like sappy Sarah McLachlan songs as much as I did.

::is retroactively ashamed::

The one I just wrote does not have song lyrics OR X-Files characters, but I am still a little embarrassed. OTOH, I'm getting really, really nice comments on it, so that's pretty fun.

(No link because it's in a locked post in a moderated community, and also I just don't want to link it where people who, like, know my mother can click through.)

Not as cold as last night, at least for the moment.

Spinning guild newsletter completed. The 50 mile challenge is up to 11.41 miles spun in the first three months. At this rate, we'll get past 45 miles in twelve months, but not quite to 50, so I'm still pushing people. Most are not turning in their figures yet.

The lace-knitting is starting to make sense. Eventually you get the feel of the pattern and don't need to look at those cryptic little abbreviations any more.

Back to work was, well, not so much fun after two real short and quiet weeks.

And that's the news from the frozen wasteland.

I just realised it's not that many weeks to go before Picocon 2010!.
I advise people to go, as it's great fun.

A quick question for those that have been to BBC screenings - could you let me know how close to the event you usually wait until the e-tickets / confirmation turns up in your email?

I "booked" for a Being Human event for this week, that told me to wait for the e-tickets, but nothing yet (including spam folder).
The confirmation email told me I would get these "in advance".

How close to the event is "in advance", or should I assume I didn't make the short list?
Thanks.

OK, I have this knitting project to finish this week. It's a small one, just a hat. But it must be done using an obnoxious lace pattern created by someone else. This thing is called "horseshoe lace" though I have a hard time seeing horseshoes in it. If anything, it has frogs in it instead (the frog being the soft part at the center of a horse's sole, sort of Y-shaped and rubbery.)

I have spun the yarn, plied it, washed it, wound it into a ball, and cannot put this off any longer because it needs to be finished.

Knit the gauge swatch. This is a small sample you make to check that your number of stitches per inch matches the one intended for the pattern. If not, you either must adjust the pattern or change needles or yarn size until you match. Gauge tests are normally knit in the pattern that will be used in the garment but this one doesn't say. They might mean plain stockinette, but I assume they mean the pattern. No, wait, the pattern is written to be done in the round, which means you always work from one side of the fabric. A flat piece is done by working back and forth, first on the right side, then on the wrong, etc. Doing that with this pattern requires that eight rows of gibberish be inverted on alternate rows, knit for purl, purl for knit, and working back from the far end. Ugh. OK, so I work that out and write it down.

The sample is starting to take shape at last, and looks like a fairly close but not perfect match. I'll adjust the pattern by adding one more ten stitch repeat in the circle. However, keeping track of your place in an eight row lace pattern is definitly not my idea of fun. If I've gone insane by Saturday, you'll know why. I promise not to stab myself with the needles, but I hope you'll all come visit in the asylum when they lock me up there.

Oh yes, it's still bitter cold outside.

About 3°F at the moment, going down. Brrr.

Went to Crystal Lake this afternoon, where we had lunch (good) and shopped several stores looking mostly for plushies. I got some cash gifts and after buying a couple of books I wanted, thought I'd put the rest into toys. After all, it's a gift. Who wants to get new underwear and socks or whatever as a gift? I did buy a pair of slippers, actually. But I was hoping to find plush huskies at Target like the ones kaysho mentioned last weekend. No such luck. Not only that, but the total of their plush toy stock seemed to consist of those overpriced and non-cuddly "animated" plush toys that require batteries in order to wag their tails, bark, meow, or say obnoxious things. Not what I wanted.

OK, ToysRUs is just down the road, let's try them. Same story. They had a very small (like half a dozen four foot shelves) of actual plush, most of them the smallish kind (under a foot tall.) And they had lots and lots of those non-cuddly animated toys. I really wanted a husky, or a wolf, or a pony (though I have lots of ponies) and there were no good ones at all. On the way home, we stopped at the feed store in Woodstock to buy the expensive dry dog food our spoiled pooches get, and I looked at their selection. They always have horse plush because they stock a lot of Breyer toys. Breyer, for those who don't know the name, specializes in overpriced plastic castings of horses, many different breeds, in various poses. In recent years they have branched into Christmas tree ornaments and plush toys (also overpriced.) Some of their horses were cute, but priced too high for their size (small.) So we came home, without any new plushies, but full of lunch.

I don't know how my plush collecting friends do it. They're always posting photos of great plushies they "rescue" from various stores. Apparently Illinois is a plush wasteland. I could look all year and find little other than football team mascots and red teddy bears with gold hearts embroidered on them. Generally I resort to mail order, but the trouble with that is that you can't touch or squeeze the toys first. I like soft, huggable plush. Some of the prettiest looking ones are stuffed with hard fillings and made of fur that is nearly prickly, so judging by photos is risky. I have a very cute Clydesdale about a foot high who was that sort of disappointment. She's hard as a rock. Target's web site lists more than a thousand plush toy items, but their stores around here stock almost nothing. They have huge numbers of toys leftover from Christmas, but almost all of them are plastic action figures and dolls that tie into television cartoons or kids' movies. Apparently the local management thinks plush is out of fashion. FAO Schwarz doesn't have stores in this area any more. I think KayBee is gone too. So, it's back to the web and mail order, I guess.

Or is that midget digits? Anyway, what the mercury is again, and dropping. Heading down to about 3F or -15C again tonight, not that it was really that warm during the day, either.

Gary's brother and family came for lunch and then took his mom back to their place. We dashed over to our neighbor Toni's, because she was having an "anti-football" sale today in her yarn and spinning shop and I wouldn't think of missing something that is "anti-football." Picked up two books at a nice discount, and got to chat a bit with some friends who were there, as well as Toni and Al who looked like they'd had enough of a day and were ready to shoo us all out (only they're too nice to actually do it usually.)

Back home to do the barn work, bed down ponies and sheep and ducks and prepare hay for the morning while Gary brought in a barrow full of firewood to the garage. Stove has been going for 24 hours continuously now, which is what really gets the draft running right and warms the brick hearth and backstop, so it's nice inside despite the cold outside. In fact, it got so warm indoors (75F) this afternoon that we opened a window briefly and shut down the thermostat on the stove.

Now the holidays are officially over, and we have a whole weekend to recover in before I go back to work and Gary goes back to graduate school. Two whole days! Gosh, what are we gonna do with that?

As a bit of New Year amusement, have some pretty wool and stuff to look at (I had another dyeing session the other day...)

( pretties under the cut )

Some of you are already in 2010, but it's still 2009 here. It's also cold, very cold.

Gary's mom is here for the night, so this will be brief. I wish all my friends the best year ever (not that it would take much to be better than 2009 was for most of us.) This is a blue moon, lunar eclipse, and new year all at once. Supposedly the three fall together only once a century or so, and we should all appreciate the rarity of it. ;p

I made orange chicken, with rice, and squash cooked with apples for dinner. Not utterly rare, but a bit fussy. It was good, though. We killed a bottle of wine and haven't opened the champagne yet, but probably won't last until midnight. Have fun everyone, I'll see you on the other side.

An inch of new stuff since sunset and still falling. 'S pretty but I can't stay awake any longer and Gary's not back from his performance and I hope he's careful driving 'cuz it's slippery.

And tomorrow back down to single digits. Ok, that's enough winter.

Got my first solo apartment

Got my first “real” all-mine pet

Worked full time in family law for three months (and survived)

Represented clients of my clinic at about a dozen case conferences and motions, and another at a mediation for the Ontario Human Rights Commission

Landed an articling (legal apprenticeship) job that’s in my field, pays well, is a nice government position, and is in Toronto

Biked, at a guess, more than 120 hours despite Toronto’s loooong and not-bike-safe winter

Learned to bake bread

Knit three sweaters (one handspun), five pairs of socks (two handspun), and various accessories including a couple of scarves (low total because I was busy spinning)

Spun 12727 yards of yarn, made up of some 36192 yards of singles. (Comparison: last year I spun 1728 yards total. That’s not even a seventh as much as this year)

And … probably other things?

recently completed project, little cat - a felted project. Thought people might be interested!

Not as cold as last night, but certainly cold enough. The near-full moon is lighting up the snow whenever it peeks between clouds, and tomorrow we're supposed to get snow again. This is turning into a repeating pattern, snow at midweek each week it seems.

One more day and this short work week is over. Unfortunately, it's a Wednesday again, and doesn't look like I'll get off early yet another time unless the snow is a lot heavier and starts earlier than currently predicted.

Some of you know that I've been acting as moderator for the user forums on FurRag.com, a furry writing site, for several months now. I'm being invited to serve as an administrator for the rest of the site as well. Normally I'd probably decline, but this time there is a real need and no one else to step in at the moment. The site runs on PHP and MySQL, with which I have some familiarity but I'm certainly not fluent in either. I may need help at some point. I probably need help for even considering it, but I'd like to see this site stay alive. At the moment, we have an influx of new members who seem to be fleeing the shakeup at SoFurry.

Now I need to go in the other room by the stove, before my fingers become completely stiffened.

Not the same as Mercury retrograde, but sometimes similar effects. The inside of my car windows was all frosted when I left the library today. Because of the way the glass is curved, a scraper does little to help, and it is necessary to sit with the engine running until the defroster heats up and thaws them. Going down to somewhere around zero F. tonight they say. Ugh.

Work was surprisingly busy, given the cold and the season. There was, of course, a pile of work accumulated over the long weekend as well. Cataloging, network issues, etc. kept me going much of the day. I'm glad this is another short week.

Now I think I'll go find something to do nearer the woodstove, rather than in this chilly office. ;p

Well, other than cooking a fairly elaborate dinner, I didn't get much done today. The reason?

SoFurry.com has gone live, and apparently before they were really ready. The code bugs and holes are enough to make several termite hills. It's all quite strange to me, why they would take a successful, long-lived site like YiffStar and rebirth it into something that looks like a bloated copy of FurAffinity, with extra bugs. But that's what they did.

About nine months ago, users of FurRag.com, the writing site I have frequented for several years, learned that there were plans to shut the site down, merging it into YiffStar which would be reborn as SoFurry. Not surprisingly, the resistance was strong. Though FurRag allows erotica and fetishes, those are not the primary focus necessarily. Quite a few of us had no wish to move to YiffStar or SoFurry, and said so. The forced exodus was at least delayed indefinitely if not cancelled. Today I was greatly amused to watch the erupting controversy over at SoFurry, as long time users there threatened to move to FurRag if they didn't get back the features they liked about YiffStar, and pronto. The forum section on FurRag hit a peak user count of 152 on Saturday, by far the most users who had ever been online at once there. I believe it was YiffStar users checking us out. It appears that some of the migration may go in the opposite direction from what was originally planned.

Snow finally stopped late this morning at an official accumulation of somewhere around ten inches. Driving to work tomorrow may be an adventure. Winds are picking up and this stuff is all powder and will blow around very easily.

We had rain for Christmas, just enough that we worried about flooding where the runoff was being held back by collapsed snow, so we ended up out cutting drainage routes through snow and ice around the barn. The temperature dropped right after that, and around sunset it began to snow. Tentative at first, we thought it might amount to an inch or so by morning.

Well, it picked up overnight and we got to three inches of fluffy powder by dawn. It's still coming down and has added another inch, with no sign yet of stopping. This has to be an edge effect of the major blizzard that is affecting Nebraska and the Dakotas, hundreds of miles west of us.

Here it's just pretty. The power is back on since yesterday, the predicted temperatures will hover in a manageable range of 15 to 28°F. over the next few days, and nothing is urgent until at least Monday. I suppose I could clean house but I'm more likely to read one of several books I got for Christmas.


[EDIT: As of sunset, we had accumulated somewhere between nine and ten inches of new powder over the top of the old hard frozen snow from two weeks back. It looks beautiful, but is so deep it goes above the top of my rubber boots in some places. Gary discovered that the fields out back have a lot of standing water under the blanket of snow. Once again, we are being damaged by the ruined drainage the subdivision idiots created to the north of us. And the snow is still falling here.]

Happy Christmas to all my friends. I hope you are safe and warm, with friends or loved ones, and able to enjoy this special time of the year at least a little.

Our power did come on this morning just before seven. I had put a teakettle on top of the woodstove to boil so I could make coffee by dripping it through the coffee maker. It boiled, I carried it to the kitchen, and the lights came on. The outage was over 30 hours, probably the longest we've had at this address. (We once had a 48 hour outage at our house in Chicago, many years ago.)

I can't tell you how good it feels to have running water again. Especially hot water in the shower. With the generator hooked up and running, we do get running water but only cold. This time of year you have to be desperate to take a shower in that.

Today we stayed home, though it wasn't just rest. Chores had to be done, of course, and we feared a flood in the small barn again if all the predicted rain materialized. So we had to clear drainage channels in the snow to let water drain off even if the remaining snow freezes hard where it is. The rain didn't happen much, though. Now it's snowing, and they say we'll get up to three inches before it ends tomorrow.

Supper today was a bit too classy for this kind of lazy day, but it was good (so far, haven't cut the pie yet.) Cornish game hen stuffed with oranges and baked in a clay covered pot with orange juice as liquid. Mashed sweet potatoes; Brussels sprouts; Home baked bread; red wine; tea and home made mince pie.

Still no power here, out since one this morning. As usual, the power
company is offering no information about the cause or extent of the
problem.

[Edit: It finally came back on after 30 hours of outage, the whole of Christmas Eve plus a few hours.]

Originally published at WormSpit. You can comment here or there.

I tried taking photos, but it’s hard to catch it:

You can see it a little better, when it’s moving:

The weather radio was saying we may have blizzard-like conditions in the morning, with more snow, high winds, and temps in the low twenties.  Whee!  I don’t think I’ve seen a white Christmas in Dallas since I’ve lived here.