It happens

Shit happens, right?

I've learned, from keeping this blog if nothing else, that my life, or at least my health, tend to fall apart in the first half of January.  Fall apart as in mild fever, stuffed head, nasty, phlemmy cough and so on.

You would think I would be prepared for this.

Anyway, now that I have data for multiple years I'm going to do something about that.  Namely put up two weeks worth of whatever were eating next year in the freezer, make sure the house is clean, try to actually get the tree down in a timely manner, and not pledge to start anything until after MLK day.

Yes, my tree is still up.  And now the spousal unit is down with with the annual too, so who knows when it's coming down.  I love trees and even I'm getting tired of the dammed thing.  But hey, we have data, that has to count for something.

Moving on...

So while I was away/sick something happened in our little valley.  Namely this.

This was taken by a local drone operator, whom I will credit if he cares.  

That's our town.  I believe that big complex in the front is the medical center.  If that's the case then that's the Coast Range in the distance and the Cascades are behind the camera.  I know most people would look at it and go "Snow.  Okay, so?  It's winter."  Which is not entirely untrue, we usually get about 4 inches of snow, on average.  But this year we got 12 inches.  In two days.  And it took the rest of the week to warm past freezing.

This never happens here.

As in we shut down the schools for their first week back from winter break, shut down bus service, close the airport, begged Caltrans and ODOT for road salt, and started wondering why our town doesn't own a street sized plow, never happens.  As in the pass shut down for an entire day.  By "the pass" I mean the Siskiyou Pass, the highest elevation on I5, which is the major artery between LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver BC.  On most days it looks like this.

For a good 24 hours it looked like this.

That's in Redding, CA, 125 miles downhill.  I am not kidding.

So why does this matter to me?

Because it got fucking cold is what it did.  We went down into the teens, and never made it past 32° .  And I realized that I own neither a hat nor warm mittens.  I just never needed them before.

So, you know, plans change.

I am now the proud owner of a warm hat.

Made following the Top Down Plain Hat Recipe, with Patons Classic Wool in Natural Marl.  Made top down because I frogged my knee warmer (which never worked anyway) and wanted to use only what I had and no more.  And besides, they discontinued that color, although there's a Cascade 220 variant that's close.

As it turned out I had enough to make 2/3 of a pair of mittens, and enough of their natural mix and dark grey mix to finish them, so I'm making mittens.  I have one done, I'll post pictures when I'm done with them.  I also have enough scraps in shades of red to make a second pair, and will be frogging the Grandmother Shawl (which I dislike for multiple reasons) to make a scarf.  Eventually I will buy enough Patons in natural marl to make a scarf and some KnitPicks Wool of the Andies in Barn Door tweed to make a hat and I'll have two roughly matching sets of warm things in case global warming means we have colder winters with more snow.

Not that I am complaining about that.

You'll notice that none of that involves the Rainbow Wings I'm supposed to be working on this month.  I know, hush.  I'll pick those up after I finish this mitten, and then revamp the schedule slightly.  It'll all work out.  At least things are being made.

Plus side of it all?  We already have a full snow pack, and it's not even the end of January.  This is how you water an old growth forest well into the warm season and help prevent forest fires.  Go Mother Nature!

Where am I on the rest of it?  I haven't been sewing because the light has been grey and dismal for weeks, but that's okay.  I haven't been crocheting because I want to get this knitting done.  I haven't made my Sassy bag because I've been too sick to sit at a sewing machine and the Money Fairy hasn't brought me money for the material yet.  And I haven't been checking my blood glucose because both being sick and the meds that go with being sick make it artificially high.  Although I plan to start that back next week, or perhaps the week after, depending.

But I have been diligently stretching and as a result my left leg is working again.  By that I mean I still limp if I try to walk without one crutch, but with that one support I can get anywhere pain free.  I plan to start on a full chores schedule next week and full workouts the week after.  And I have been reading and am getting writing going again, now that I can sit at a computer without a massive headache.  Really, I spent a week on the couch knitting and watching the snow fall with wool in my head.

And I'm going to start a new feature around here.  I'll have that up in a bit.