Hubband is going

on an epic bike ride next week, so he asked me if I could use my "magical construction powers" and conjure up a solar pocket for his  Hydrapak. As in he wanted to be able to use his solar charger to charge his cell phone while riding, so of course I told him I could.

After some designing in my head, construction and application, he has an awesome solar pocket that he thinks might make him the envy of (at least some) of the other riders. He also thinks it should become regular design feature of all sorts of packs in general.

Today's coffee

and it is still coming down (my arm is sticking out the door).
Record setting, epic, and such words are being used in the news today.

This morning's coffee

looked like this. Not that it will last long, since there are snowflakes in the forecast later this week.

Last night's dinner

was very green, not that you would know it here, since no pictures were taken. It was also a bit on the experimental side, in that several new to us recipes were used. The new ones were Kale Pesto on pasta, and oven roasted asparagus with Spicy Parmesan Sauce (though I used about one teaspoon TABASCO® Chipotle Sauce along with about two to two and a half teaspoons Frank's and didn't pre-cook the asparagus before roasting it in the oven). A fair amount of sugar-snap peas rounded out the green color on our plates.
Tonight's menu has Asparagus Gruyere Souffle on it so far but I haven't settled on anything else yet, but I am thinking there won't be any pictures tonight either. Mostly because souffles look pretty normal to us I suppose. 

I had a very special present

waiting for me when I got home from knitting tonight. Then again, given that this is her box, she might have just put her BFF there for safe keeping instead of leaving it for me. I wonder if this will become the new water dish?

Yesterday

I was doing stuff in the kitchen (likely making a cup of tea since it was in the afternoon) and was able to catch a few pictures of this critter out the kitchen window.

Since it didn't seem to care about being watched, I was able to get several of  it popping up while eating (and then it would pop back down to grab another sunflower seed, or whatever it was finding in there).

After a few minutes of the up-and-down of finding things to eat in the pot, it decided to head up and see what was in the bird feeder hanging above its head (which pretty much sums up why there is food in a planter). Fortunately a couple of taps on the window resulted in a quick hop down and run up a tree.



Today it is raining and I haven't seen much in the way of furry wildlife around, just a variety of the feather covered type. Tonight the rain is supposed to transition to to freezing rain, leaving  tree branches, wires, and such coated in ice, and then more rain tomorrow with "sleet, freezing rain, and light snow Wednesday night with mainly snow falling by Thursday morning. During the day Thursday three to six inches of snow may accumulate in southeastern Minnesota" with more to the north and west. Fortunately it had gotten warm enough in the last couple of weeks, most everything is melted of, and even better the ground has thawed out enough that at least some of this is soaking in. However, our county is under a flood watch, with others near us under  the next level up of a warning. Not that it is an issue for us directly, thank goodness!
That is pretty much a summation of the excitement around here right now.

Sometimes,

it is the little things in life that make me happy, even when there is more snow in the near future.

Cabbage Yarn

I had a purple cabbage head that was left over from a church function. It had been used to hold appetizers, so wasn't deemed usable by others, but I immediately saved it from the fate of the garbage can. It had science project written all over it! I forgot to weigh the cabbage before I chopped it up in the food processor, but it all worked out. After it was a finely chopped mass, I cooked it in plain water to extract the color I needed, then processed two skeins of yarn in the cabbage water. I used my standard mordants  of alum and cream of tarter, which are both on the acidic end of the pH scale. After the yarn was done, I took the yarn out out, added baking soda (which is a base, aka other end of the scale) to the cabbage water solution, and then after the foaming went down, I put one skein back in. I was quite pleased with the immediate color change of the yarn!

The top/purplish one is the "acid yarn" and the bottom/blueish one is the "base yarn."
Each of the skeins were 50 grams/137 yards, and I have more of the same yarn, so I think I need to go get some more purple cabbage!

It is starting to look

a lot like spring might actually show up! The Goldfinches that have been around all winter in their drab winter coats are starting to put on their "Look at me! I'm so much sexier that that guy!" outfits.

(The disappearance of three foot high piles of snow on the deck helps with the illusion of spring coming!)

We have been trying a new tactic

with Oribel. Seeing as she is a cat and all, she likes helping with computer stuff hogging the keyboard when one of us wants to use it. In keeping with her being a cat, she also really, really likes boxes, so we have given her a new box to hang out in.

So far it seems to be working out quite well. Occasionally we have to do a bit of  "stay in your box training" by scratching her ears or chin, but it is better than having her reconfigure the computer screen by stepping on the proper set of keys all at the same time.

An added bonus is that she doesn't mind having her box picked up and moved while she is still in it. That means we can set the two of them right on top of the keyboard when we are done using it, still keeping it safe while she thinks she is getting away with something. (I think she might be beginning to notice that she isn't getting as much heat from the keyboard as she used to.)

Last November,

Costco opened a store here in Rochester. The addition of this shopping spot has made us very happy, if not for any other reason than for the excellent choice of staples. (Though their rebate/sale on contact solution is pretty sweet too.)

Last night I got a phone call

from one of our neighbors. This is a little unusual and just as I suspected as soon as I heard who it was, it was about the water. He was calling to see how our water pressure was since theirs was low; I told him that ours was really low and I had been thinking about calling him as well. He said that he had tried calling the other houses on our shared well and that two of the folks weren't home and the third agreed about low pressure. At that time he didn't think it was worth calling the well people as there is an extra charge for after hours and we did have water after (unlike the two time the well head/electrical thingie has been covered with enough ants or other bugs to shut the water supply down completely).  He said that maybe he would go out and take a look at it and maybe see if throwing the breaker off and back on would fix it. (I don't think one can "reboot" a well, but at least one feels like they have done something proactive I suppose.)
  He called back about half an hour to forty minutes later to let us know that he had made an executive decision to have the well company come out after all. Apparently we had gone from 12 to 7 PSI (or how ever it is measured) in that half hour or less and it was still going down. Something about thinking that we would all be willing to pay the extra $100 surcharge divided by five so that showers and coffee could happen around the neighborhood for work or some such thing. I assured him he made the right choice and that was why he had the (well) executive job instead of one of us. Anyway, a little while after seeing truck lights up and down the street, we had water all back to normal.
  This afternoon I noticed at least one well company truck down there so I figured there was more that needed fixing that they had noticed last night, but had just done enough to get us by until morning. Well, there must be more, since when I got home from Knit Night there was a message from him saying that the pressure was down again and he wanted us to go easy on it as much as possible tonight as it might not last until morning. At least I got the coffee maker all set up and ready just in case it flat-lines overnight. 

Well, we certainly

got snow last night. Totals ranged from around seven to almost nine inches, depending on the area of town and its environs. According to one of our local weathermen, he shoveled about seven inches at three this morning to get to work to shovel off the weather porch for the news at 5:30. Given that it was still snowing after nine this morning, I could believe the eight or more in our area. I looked out around seven, but didn't go down to measure and figured there wasn't a lot of point by the time was ready to go out since the wet snow had certainly suffered compression under its own weight. I can certainly say that it looked like a lot though, and the school district did call a snow day (they did that last week too).
Since there was all that snow on our driveway, Hubband went with with senario #1 and worked from home today. I started shoveling us out and since the snow was sticking to the shovel, I decided to be a bit lazy. I called Hubband on the phone and asked him to meet me inthe garage with can of Pam equivalent to spray on it. I was happy with how much easier the shoveling went after that, no more having to knock the snow off after every other pass. Not as easy or as quick as last week's shoveling was, but I got it done!

The snow storm

arrived, pretty much as predicted.  After a warm night and day today, with plenty of standing water in fields and yards, and even more flowing water across other fields with a bit of rain, the temperatures dropped and the snow started. At 4:30 this afternoon it wasn't much of anything falling out of the sky, but by 4:45 or so when we left for a potluck and movie, there were some big flakes falling. By a little after six when one person got there for the movie, she said it was starting to get slippery, and by the time we left for home at 8:30ish, it was well over an inch, if not pushing two, and Hubband was debating the best way home to avoid as much of the highway and as many hills as possible.  The roads were slippery, lanes were indiscernible, and the on-ramp was rather nasty.  We did pass one van off the road into the median on our slow way home, but there really wasn't much we could do to help (better they went off to the middle as off the other side would have been a bit of a dropoff).  The lanes on the highway, the off-ramp, and the main road  home (the one to the gravel road to our street) were all covered with snow with no way to tell where the lanes/shoulders were.  Needless to say, the road that had been very slippery mud when we left had turned to extra icky slippery snow.  We pushed a lot of snow off the roof etc of the car in the driveway before pulling into the garage in hopes of reducing the size of the lake it would be making overnight (once again, I am grateful for the floor drain in there!).
Once inside with our stuff set down, I measured the snow on the deck, and it came in at about 1.5" at around 9:00 or a little bit after; it was up to 4" when I checked it at 10:30 or so. They are predicting the possibility of 8-9" or more by morning.  If that happens, I predict one of three scenarios, #1 being Hubband works from home for the day, #2 he gets to take my car to work and I go nowhere for the day, or #3 I drive him to work if I decide I really need to go somewhere while he is at the office (FYI, I put those in the order of most likely to happen).  I'll keep you posted as to which one of those happens (or the very remote possibility of #4, which would be him driving his truck to work).

This morning Hubband

grabbed my camera (which is usually kept either on the counter/desk thing in the kitchen, or in my purse when I am out) when he had the chance to get some pictures of the pheasant out in the yard (via the kitchen window as usual). Apparently it had been fighting with itself, but then stopped while the camera was out. Yes, we have a mirror in our yard, it belongs to Hubband, and yes, it needs to be cleaned. The yard looks a lot different now than it did this morning, due to temperatures in the mid-plus 30's all day and rain. It is kind of a lake out there now, along with the one out front, and the sloppy, slippery road to our road. It isn't going to be pleasant in the least when it freezes tonight and then gets freezing rain, wintery mix, and snow on it. Ick. (These should biggify if you want.)

Well, yesterday turned out

to be Migraine Wednesday, aka nothing happened involving me other than a lot of sleeping. Part of the time my feet had company and part of the time the company moved up to my side; I guess I might have given the company an occasional ear scratch, but that was about all I could muster.
Fortunately today was a much better day and I was able to go to a couple of appointments, shovel the front walk that still needed doing, as well as the bird feeder paths on the deck and in the yard. Then filling bird feeders also happened as well as fixing dinner and such like.So, pretty much back to normal.
While I was fixing dinner there was the normal parade of small birds at the feeders, as well as some turkeys checking out the pheasant feeder (meaning that is more than just a pheasant feeder), and then the usual parade of deer poking about to see what corn they could get out of it. The odd thing was that then one of the deer must have decided she was tired and needed to rest, as she just plunked down and settled in for awhile. We are pretty sure that some deer are doing this at night in the front yard, but we had never seen them do it in daylight, especially when they have a fairly good idea that we are watching them from the kitchen. (During dinner a four or five point buck wandered up to the feeder as well, but I didn't bother to try to get his picture as I was pretty sure I would have startled him away when I got up to get the camera. Again, we have seen "him" after dark a few times, but this was while the sun was still up.)

We had a winter storm warning

that expired tonight. Needless to say, we did get snow. That 7.5"ish measurement was taken around 9:30-10 this morning, on a flat surface that had been clean before the snow started falling last night shortly before ten.

We are rather excited that the snow gauge in the yard has registered one foot, since for a fair portion of the winter it hasn't had much of anything to register at all. The guy who made this for me by special request will probably be happy too.

A few random pictures of snow evidence.

Needless to say, Oribel was NOT impressed with the stuff coming down that was keeping her inside. (Though she had plenty of opportunities to go out if she had wanted to.)

This morning Oribel was desperate

to go outside, which isn't terribly unusual. Well, at least the telling us she needs out part is desperate and usual, but when it comes to the actual going out part, not so much. She always thinks she wants out, until we open the door and she finds out it is cold/windy/snowy (or any combination) out there. Once she realizes it is cold, no matter how sunny, or the wind is blowing "too" hard, she has to think about it, which of course involves standing in the doorway with just her nose, or maybe as much as her head, sticking out. This morning I told her that she wasn't even going to get to sniff the air since I needed to leave, but I did promise her she could go out once I got home.

When I got home, I could immediately tell Hubband had fulfilled my promise to her, and that she was already back inside.  (There was a towel near the door to go with all the footprints, so part of her had already been cleaned up. )  He told me that he had been able to work on her feet a bit, but that her tail still looked like it had been dipped in mud and her feet were still a bit messy. I was able to wash the tip of her tail off and her feet seemed to have at least dried off so she wasn't leaving any more mud blotches about (and Hubband also had closed the bedroom doors, so she couldn't stomp mud all over the bedding).


Shortly after I was done messing with Oribel's tail, this beautiful guy flew in to see about a snack. He was able to find a few scraps left in the feeder (and stuck around there long enough for me to grab the camera and get several pictures of him through the kitchen window). 

Then he flew over to the deck railing to check out the suet feeder there. I had to grab a picture of him quickly, since it was likely he would startle easily, since there were only about twelve feet between us.  (Last week I did see his lady friend fly into the feeder, but I was upstairs and the camera wasn't, so couldn't get her mug shot.) 
Needless to say, we are both pretty excited to have these in our woods and coming to the feeders. Good thing going suet shopping tomorrow was already on my to-do list.

Leading an introspective discussion

about a movie or book isn't exactly my favorite thing to do, but I keep volunteering for it at least once a year. Don't get me wrong, it isn't like I really hate it or anything, it just means that I have to think of interesting and topical questions. As it happens, I am doing it twice in as many weeks. A week ago I was the discussion leader for The Dovekeepers for our book group (yes, I do realize I am repeating myself), and it went quite well, in no small part due to the wonderful help from my dear Hubband. He is much more practiced than I am on leading discussion groups. Round two is coming up on Sunday evening, on a movie this time. I will be showing the movie The Dark Crystal and then leading a the discussion afterwards. Hubband might be able to help me out again, but at this point we still aren't sure. Other than the obvious theme of "Good vs Evil" I am totally open to suggestions of themes and questions to ask if any of you out there have seen the movie.

This is even more exciting!

I found a way to upload pictures directly from my computer without using Pisca; much easier to use the computer keyboard than the iPad. (Sadly, I am not sure that you can enlarge the pictures at this point. ETA: You can!!!!)
This is the pheasant feeder we got from some friends that weren't using it any more (they got it from a pheasant organization). It turns out to be a pretty basic thing and we could easily make more if we decide we want/need another one/several. There is a bit of a flaw in the size of the holes for the corn to come out in terms of how quickly the corn flows out, it slows the deer down in their feeding, but they were still able to consume a lot of corn. However, the biggest flaw in the hole size turned out to be that they weren't small enough to keep squirrels from crawling inside the bucket to get stuff to eat.
Our solution was to put some hardware cloth on the inside of the bucket, which made a big difference in how fast the corn flowed out and how easy climbing inside was. However, either the deer or the squirrles, or both, figured out how to push the wire mesh up enough to render it only partly useful, so Hubband judiciously used staples to keep it in place. The deer and squirrels still eat the corn, but the pheasant is also seems to be getting plenty to eat whenever he comes to eat (maybe even two different ones). Night before last I looked out the window and noticed that the deer had kicked the lid off of the bucket and were eating out of the top, so Hubband took some screws and the electric screwdriver out to fix that problem. So far it seems to be holding well, though it is about time to add more corn. Just in case anyone is interested, a five gallon bucket holds about forty pounds of whole kernel corn.

It is nice to know

the picture posting thing works, it makes this more interesting for me, and probably to the audience out there (no matter how small it may be).  Though it would be nice if I can figure out a way to re-size the pictures; that shall be another day's project.
The first picture up yesterday of Oribel was when she was contemplating going outside into the eight inches of snow; the second was how far out into it she went, which wasn't very. It was kind of funny watching her trying to figure out how to turn around and get back inside, all while doing her best to step back into the footwells she had already made in the snow.  
Today I shall give you a picture of the most recently finished knitting project that I have been going on about. A highly modified two-color color cowl, that for the most p[art I am pretty happy with how it turned out. The two-color part could still use a wee bit of tweaking, but I think I know what it needs if I ever decide to do it again.

The second picture is from this afternoon, just for entertainments sake.

Test, test

Did it post a picture? Or several?

Well, that challenge didn't go well.

Or perhaps it is better put that I lost the challenge, or something. Also known as a shiny new idea ran around and around in my head and the only way to get it to stop was to bring it to life.  So on Saturday I got some yarn out, scrounged around to find a needle compatible with the yarn, cast on a bunch of stitches, and knit them for awhile to see how it would turn out.  Of course I was also telling myself that this new idea would be a lot easier to take out in public on Sunday since it was only one color and I wouldn't need to look at charts and other "pay attention stuff" that could be distracting to the people around me.
The only thing was, after working on it for several hours yesterday, I decided I wasn't crazy about the gauge and how long it was taking me to knit each row.  So today I ripped it all out, added a second strand of yarn and with bigger needles cast on fifty less stitches than I had before, and now have something that I am a lot happier with.  That said, I did work on my "two-color-at-home" project tonight and now have it back to just one color on the final ribbing, so it will quite likely get bound tomorrow.  (If it is any help, think of it as kind of like the difference between N and HO scale.)

Snow came here overnight.

Eight inches worth, or there abouts, at least that is what I measured with a ruler on a flat, clean last night, part of the deck. It was seven inches on the sidewalk out front, but in that case I might have had the ruler at a bit of angle, since I was trying to avoid stepping off the porch.  This is probably our deepest snowfall of the season, not that we have really had very many decent snowstorms so far.  Unless something changes radically, we might be headed for another drought year. (I am still working on figuring out the whole picture thing, both with the computer/Picasa/camera interface and with the iPad/Blogger interface.)
I wound up shoveling the length of our driveway but only the width of two garage doors up closer to the house. It is a lot easier to do it that way than shovel the whole two-car width for the whole length; it's not like we would ever drive two cars down at the same time, even in the middle of the summer.
I still couldn't leave well enough alone with my knitting project and just keep knitting. I decided it needed to be two colors instead of just one, so ripped back about seventeen rows of the pattern, reknit   Four rows plus two pattern repeats of the fifth row in the two colors when I realized I had messed up the second color on the third row, so ripped back again. Seriously, if I can just settle down with it and just knit, it will be done in no time! Well, ok maybe in a little bit of time, like two or three days of intermittent knitting, but that isn't very long. Of course, once I am done improvising the pattern to my preference, have it figured out, and the challenge is gone, I will be busy thinking about/wanting to start a new project. I am challenging myself with finishing it before starting the next shiny thing. Depending on what new shiny thing runs past when this is done, I am hoping to repeat that challenge. We shall see how well that works out.
The weekend around here is going to involve grocery shopping, cooking, baking, some more snow shoveling, and clearly some sorting out of a knitting challenge. I imagine other stuff will come along as well; anyone out there have exciting weekend plans?

Today wasn't nearly as exciting

as yesterday, which is just as well. I don't need that kind of excitement again in the near future, if at all. Today pretty much consisted of staying home except for a brief outing to walk a friend's dog, and then I was back home again. Being at home consisted of exciting things like emptying the dishwasher, feeding the birds, looking for/through stuff, making dinner, deciding that the thing I had started knitting wasn't working out on the size needles I was using so I pulled it all out and put the yarn to work on a totally different item. I know, really low key stuff, pretty much the way I prefer for things to be. I am really happy with the new/improved knitting project, I think it will only take me a couple of days to finish.

It is warmer today

than it was yesterday. As in, it is 11°F (-12°C) with a windchill still above zero at almost 10 PM, compared to yesterday's reported in at 2 PM conditions. Today's heat wave turned out to be a good thing, considering I got locked out of the house this morning at a bit after ten. I went out into the garage to grab something out of the car and then this transpired. .   

Go back to door into house to get rest of self ready to leave. Discover the garage door has locked itself (it used to do this a lot, hasn’t for awhile). Go to grab spare house key we keep in the garage and discover it is gone. Search around for a bit and decide to just call Hubband. Go to grab cell from car to realize/remember it was in the house charging. Look a bit more for key, give up, and decide I am going to have to walk up to the corner house to see if they are home (since their daughter has a key she has used to feed animals). Walk to corner, get two possible keys from them (we don’t know which one it is for certain and said daughter is now in CA). They also loan me a coat to walk back home in. Get home, neither key works. Think about it for a moment and decide to walk to a neighbor who might be able to help me find Hubband’s office number in the work directory. Those neighbors aren’t home, but I hear music coming from the house in between the one I am at and our house, so go over there (hadn’t expected them to be home). Call a friend who is able to give me the number of someone who can connect me to Hubband’s office number, he doesn’t answer but she can look at his calender and tell that he is in a meeting for another ten minutes, and can send him an email letting him know the neighbor is driving me over to get the key.
Neighbor drives me to Hubband’s office (and is willing to wait to drive me back home), I go up to the third floor in hopes of finding H back in his office. No luck, so I ask someone three doors down if they know where he is. Turns out they don’t even know who he is, so go in search of someone who knows him. Find someone who does, she looks up his calender and we head off to the room he is supposed to be meeting in. Turns out he isn’t there, so we go back to look it up again and she realizes she was off by an hour, so we head to another room and find him. He asks why I am there and I explain I need the key to the house, he wonders, “What is this you are wearing?” and I tell him it is the neighbor’s coat. We walk back to his office so he can get the keys from his coat, with me listening him giggle the whole way. The neighbor drives me back home and waits to make sure I can get in the house. An hour plus after going to check on my yarn supply I am back inside the house, but my regular gig is two-thirds over, and if I left then, there would only be about fifteen minutes of it left. The spare key is now back where it belongs in the garage. 

Some excitement just isn't needed in life, but it all turned out fine, so no complaining here. (Plus I got to visit with the neighbor  about his newish job and make my husband laugh.)

On days like today,

I am really thankful for Polar Fleece lined jeans when I go walk my friend's dog. Oh, and hand-knits too, of course.

 Current conditions:
    Blowing Snow and Breezy
    5°F (-15°C)
   Wind SpeedNW 24 G 30 mph
   Wind Chill-17°F (-27°C)

Apperantly

blue jays can be rather picky eaters. I know they prefer peanuts, and definitely in the shell is the best in their opinion. I have watched them toss aside sunflower seeds, dried fruit, and other stuff in their pursuit of finding peanuts in the bird seed mix. Saturday Hubband and I went to the feed store to get some corn for the poor starving peasant that lives in the woods. He comes into our yard pretty much every day and we are doing our part to turn him back into a pheasant. While we were getting corn (and water softener salt, since they sell that too) I decided to get a bag of peanuts in the shell as well. Yesterday I filled garden pot with some and put it on the same pole that holds one of our bird feeders. This morning Hubband got to watch a blue jay pick through (and toss aside onto the deck below) several peanuts in the pursuit of the perfect breakfast. Later on the rejected peanuts seemed to be perfectly acceptable to a couple of jays that didn't even fight over them. (With any luck, I will be able to figure out the problem I seem to be having getting photos, my computer, and blogger to all play well together.)

The other day

 I finished an excellent book, The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman.  It is primarily the stories of four different women, how they came to be at Masada around 70 CE,  and their lives there. The writing is excellent and well researched, so it is enjoyable from that standpoint alone, but there were some extra connecting points for me. In the spring of 1997 there was an exhibit at the BYU Museum of Art about Masada (which of course I went to!), with artifacts that

represent both the life and death of a group of Jews who rebelled against Roman rule, leading to the Roman's destruction of Jerusalem.

One of several other connecting points was Hoffman's descriptions of women gathering in the evenings to weave, and one of the characters designing a "new to them" pattern from a scrap of fabric she had.
I hadn't read this book before now, but had suggested it to our book group based on the recommend of several friends. I am very glad I have read it and would strongly endorse it to others to read. Now I just need to come up with a few discussion topics (in addition to the questions in the included "reader's guide").

Conversations

"You know, for something labeled 'Cardinal Blend' I haven't seen very many many eating it this week."
 "They heard they were needed in Rome. They will be back sometime in March or April after they release the white smoke."

Love

is often found best in the little things. Things like having the tire pressure checked for you, coffee brought to you every morning, being picked up at the door so you don't have to walk across the icy parking lot, having the one you love take your car out to fill the gas tank so you don't have to worry about it.

Cycles

The scree of "our" Red-tailed Hawks calling to each other, hooting of owls late at night into early mornings, calls of coyotes across the fields, a season of reflection, all lead to spring and the journey of cycles in all our lives.