Snow time like the present

We live in a medium-sized city in Western Kansas, so of course we were affected by "Winter Storm Q" in the past couple of days.   It began to snow before eight o'clock in the morning on Wednesday, and before it was over some time last night, we had at least eighteen inches piled in the yard.  The official weather people said it was more like sixteen inches, but they weren't the ones that had to clear my driveway.  At about three o'clock the snow stopped for a while, so The Emperor and I went out to see what we could do.  Our college president had already cancelled classes for Thursday but by that afternoon had not made a decision about Friday, so I needed to dig enough of a channel through the drifts that I could take the car out in the morning.  I cleared about half of the driveway, but there was still an unbroken ocean of snow from my cleared space at the sidewalk to about the middle of the street.

 

Here's Yoshi and Baby in mid-storm, pretty much buried:



Luckily, the college president cancelled classes for Friday as well (thus initiating "The Miracle of Winter Storm Q") and coincidentally making it possible for me to finish the job.  Happily, the city had done a rudimentary plow job so the acres of oceans of unbroken snow ended about eight feet from where I had stopped digging on Thursday.  Later, I sat down with a calculator and figured that in two days I had moved about six hundred cubic yards of snow, and my shoulders and arms are telling me about it!  We tried our luck and took the car out to the grocery store this afternoon, and got out of the driveway all right. The roads, however, were pretty dicey.  Hopefully my fellow town residents will drive around and groom the streets for the next two days so that I can get to school on Monday morning.

Along with all of that shoveling, I did a little bit of knitting.  I've been working on what I call "Distraction Cowl," a project that I started because I had about two balls of Noro Sakura that I dragged out of the stash earlier this year, and didn't want to put them away.  Right now cowls are the new necklace, and I could use one to wear to work, so I tinked around on Ravelry to find out what cowlish things others had done with Sakura.

Based on something another Raveler had done with her yarn, I cast on 120 stitches and then did about two inches of 1x1 ribbing.  I switched to stockinette stitch, did ten rows, then launched into a 5x5 basket weave section.  That's what you see in this picture:

 

 

Then, I did ten more rounds of stockinette, and now have begun a lace pattern consisting of yo k2tog k3 alternating with a plain round.  I'm offsetting each new yo by one stitch, so when this part is finished I'll have a line of right-leaning diagonals.  When I've finished with that part, I might do a section of seed stitch before ending with some more 1x1 ribbing.  Or, I might just end it with seed stitch, I don't know yet.  This cowl has a lot of texture and color, and will be fun to wear with whatever I put it over.

Here's the first baby snuggy for S--'s twins.  I'll start the second one when I can face another week or so of unbroken green stockinette knitting.  Beginning with a snuggy pattern from Ravelry, I used the highly-recommended Judy's Magic Cast On and basically started a giant toe-up sock.  After the increase section, I knit 60 rounds, then formed the top flap.

 

It's hard to imagine putting a baby in one of these sacks, but I understand that both babies and the moms who snuggle them really like them.  It's probably easier to hold a baby in one of these, rather than to have them just wrapped in a blanket.  This snuggy is washable, too.