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?
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.
