25th is Silver,

and apparently 30th is pearl but is turns out 29th is hounds.

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!)