A Little Yarn On The Side

A lot of people have asked why I didn't march yesterday because I have been so politically active, and I've been a speaker at marches in the past.  When people asked if I was joining the local march, I said "sure," but when it came down to it, I just couldn't go.  Even I didn't understand why I didn't march until today. I didn't march yesterday because for years I have been trying to get people to be politically involved, and have heard over and over "I don't follow politics" or "I don't follow local politics." Trump didn't happen overnight or this year. He started with Newt Gingrich's Contract With America. He started with the No Child Lef t Behind Act. He started with Reagan repealing the Fairness Doctrine. He started with big money being poured into judicial races. He started with low voter turnout and voter apathy. He started with people preferring to follow celebrity news over actual journal...

And for the first time since our winter-from-hell began, it was snowman snow.  So, of course: but the ensemble was 100% courtesy of my husband, Andy.  Besides loving his sense of humor, he's a staunch supporter of human rights--not to mention those of snowpeople. 

We used to be a nation that expected a free press to question our leaders. We used to be a nation where presidential candidates of both parties released tax returns to assure the public they had no conflicts of interest. We used to be a nation where presidents put their financial affairs in a blind trust, or in Jimmy Carter's case, sold their peanut farm because Americans understood how dangerous financial conflicts for a president could be. We used to be a nation where marital infidelity and multiple wives would have been the end of a campaign, especially for the party of "family values." We used to be a nation where bragging about groping women was wrong. And as of today, we aren't.

So in the interest of wearing more of my me-mades, this year I decided that every Monday didn't have to be a different me-made item.  Last year I found myself wearing fewer hand-made items the rest of the week to try to "save" them for Mondays (which probably says sad things about my enthusiasm for doing laundry).  Yesterday I had a doctor's appointment, and since we have been housebound quite a bit this winter, I celebrated being out by wearing the blue microsuede ensemble AND a blue bowknot scarf that has apparently never gotten a "finished" picture.  It felt so festive! And I learned a very important lesson: If you are trapped in a waiting room for an hour with some "Discovery" Channel show about hillbillies making moonshine (and boasting about not knowing what they're doing), the actual exam is NOT the worst part of the annual "woman's wellness" exam.  Heavens.  I like my doctor, who is a very educated man who probably s...

We have managed to not lose power, but other parts of the state haven't been so lucky.  Now we've had 3 days of heavy rain here, which melted off much of our snow but has led to flooding, rock slides, and avalanches.  In one of the weirdest twists of fate, one of the nearby ski resorts is closing tomorrow because of TOO MUCH snow .  I've never seen that.  With everything going on with our crazy winter, I was a bit unenthusiastic about putting these up and my hip/back was even less so as I did something and threw it out, landing myself in bed for the last day and a half.  I'm better today, and I keep trying to remind myself that winter justifies knitting lots and lots of sweaters.  To emphasize this, for Me Made Monday I wore the first wearable sweater I ever knit: Sure, it was supposed to be in cotton and I made it in some bizarre acrylic that Red Heart no longer even makes, but compared to my earlier sweater attempts, that was only a mildly wrong...

The second Santa stripe table runner is done, and aside from not realizing the lines wouldn't line up once I stitched the seams, I'm pleased with them.  And I've started two MORE table runners with fabric strips cut from my college fabric prints: and now that we can take a break from Snowmageddon, I'm hoping to clear off my craft table enough to maybe cut out this, which is one of my "allowed" purchases which just arrived.  It's a nicer flannel in a very dark hunter green.  Andy has been wearing the flannel shirt I made him so much that I wanted one for myself.  And this, is a Polartec fleece that I'll be using to make Andy a shirt for Valentine's Day.  I found this fabric in 2015, I think, so not deep stash, but stash all the same.  And they're both Warm Things.  Honestly, my hometown has at least twice as much snow as we do right now, so it's not like I didn't grow up with bad winters, but potential power outages with no n...

This morning our "togetherness" activity was to remove the snow from the roof of the patio, because while we're pretty confident about the rest of the roof holding, the patio was questionable since freezing rain is predicted for today.  This is our backyard today: That's easily 2 feet of snow on the ground, and heavy rain just started.  The storm drains have been dug out, but so many of them are frozen over that when the rain melts this snow, there is going to be trouble.  We live at the top of a hill, so aside from the voles who built their tunnels at the bottom of the slope in our backyard about to be drown, we won't see much flooding, but things could get very ugly for the people at the bottom of the hill and in the valley.  Now they're saying this storm will be with us through Wednesday and we're still in a state of emergency. Ugh. We cleared off as much ice as we could earlier, and with the rain now, we can finally take a break from storm ...