That's All She Wove . . .

Count down with me, if you will:

Three:



Two:



One:



Done!

Well-- not really done.  I have well over 100 knots to tie, a wet-finishing bath to administer, and some sewing to do, but those are tasks for another day, and I now have four of them to work with. That's all for tonight, group.

Counting Down

So you can guess that I'm either very forgetful or very busy weaving. Or a little of both, I suppose. 

When we left off, I was on a quest to finish the tallit with plenty of time for tying knots and sewing things on it, etc. etc. That goal has been amended, and now I'm on a quest to finish at some point before Saturday.

Progress has been made, though.  As of November 7, the loom looked like this:




Two days later, it looked like this:



(we won't mention what my work pile looked like after I took better than half a work day to make the loom look like this).

Next we had the first pattern section in progress:




and now we are mired in the Eternal Sea of Plain Weave.





It is nearly impossible at this point to see how much is done and how much is left.  If you take a peek underneath the loom, you can see the woven cloth rolled onto the cloth beam.  You can also see that the beam prevents me from taking a ruler and measuring how much white I've got.





There are ways around this.  My chosen method is the String of a Certain Length, which is the grey line you can see in the last two pictures.  One end is anchored (temporarily) in the weaving at the beginning of the white and when I get to the far end of the string, I know I can stop weaving the plain stuff.  I have measured and remeasured this string and written notes to remind myself how much ES of PW I have to endure and which knot on the string (there is only one, what makes me think I'll get it wrong??) represents the point at which I quit weaving white and start weaving patterns. None of this  stops me from panicking that I have mis-measured or botched the math or that someone has mysteriously shortened my string and that I will weave a tallit that will be so short that it will look like a pocket handkerchief instead of a prayer shawl.  This is the part of the project in which I have to have faith that I'm not a total screw-up.  I can't measure and double check; I have to just believe that I'm doing this right.

It's driving me crazy.

It makes sense, though, that a prayer shawl should require a little faith. Right?

It's still driving me crazy.

A Follow Up

See how quickly I came back?  It hasn't even been two weeks, and here I am again to thrill you with my tales of derring-do.

First up is an epic battle between a wanna-be-weaver and her loom.

It all started with the idea of making my son a tallit for his bar mitzvah. I've made three of these things already, so it is not exactly the craziest idea I've ever come up with (although with two weeks left to go and no tallit on the loom, I might be forced to amend that position).

I decided to go with a fine wool




and a long color change knitting yarn




and a new-to-me structure called overshot, in which you basically weave a background cloth and a design at the same time.

Because both the materials and the structure were new to me, I did something wild and crazy:  I wove a sampler first.  Actually, I wove two samplers.  The first was dedicated to learning the basics of overshot so that I wouldn't eff the tallit up and the second was dedicated to testing the intended materials and colors so that I still wouldn't eff the tallit up.

Really, there is nothing crazy about this.  It is a completely rational way to design something and I learned all sorts of useful stuff.  What's crazy about weaving two samplers before weaving the tallit is that I am the world's most procrastinating-est wanna-be-weaver, and even though I started the first sampler in way back in the spring, I have still managed to get myself within two weeks of the absolute--drop dead--no possibility of an extension last date on which the tallit must be done and there is no tallit on my loom.

I told you it was getting exciting around here.

Here is what  learned from the sampler.

1. I like the general design.  Here you see it in white, but on the tallit it will be blue and red.




2. Did I mention white?  Not surprisingly, given the original cone of fine merino wool, the sample background fabric was VERY WHITE.  Blindingly so, in a way that made me fear for the safety of the congregation on the big day.

3. And so we sampled some more.  I pulled out some yarn left from the first tallit I made and tried again.




4. This was the Goldilocks part of the sampler.  The middle stripe is TOO WHITE.  The bottom section is too grey (I really didn't like what the silver thread did to the red and blue design).  But the top section is just right.  It has a slight warm glow, it plays nicely with the red and blue yarns, and, as an added bonus, because it is a tencel yarn, it adds a little bit of drape to the fabric.  All good.




5. Or was it?  Tencel is a plant-derived fiber and here I was mixing it with wool.  There is a point of Jewish law, which comes up NEVER in a Reformed congregation like mine, that forbids the mixing of linen and wool in a garment, and I didn't know whether that law meant, by extrapolation, that it would be unkosher to mix wool with other plant-based fibers.  I have gone most of my life without any concern for this issue, but it seemed like a major cheat to make my kid a religious garment that violated religious law, and, for the first time in my life, I had to go get an opinion from the Rabbi to make sure I was not on the verge of making my son a Bacon Tallit.   Not to worry, said the Rabbi.  This is a requirement that comes with no explanation or reason (there are a bunch of Jewish laws that are like that) and, although I might be able to find a different opinion if I searched long enough, according to his research the provision was limited in application to the blending of linen and wool.

Good enough for me.


And now we're back to my usual set of problems:  so much work to do, so little time.  Here is what my loom looks like (so, so empty looking!!! I think I'm starting to panic) and you can imagine the task in front of me as I thread 558 bits of string through all that metal and begin speed-weaving.



The good news is that, like painting a room, all the actual labor is in the preparation.  Once that is done, the weaving can go very quickly, assuming I actually work on it.  So, into the fray I go!

Teasers

All blog-derived evidence to the contrary, I have not fled the country, been abducted by aliens, or otherwise been forced to stop posting.  I just keep forgetting.  And, to be truthful, topics were easy to come by when I had little kids at home doing weird things.  Now during the day it's just me and the animals and all this yarn. We don't do much and it doesn't look like that will change any time soon.  Still, there might be something interesting to say about the smaller details, so I'm offering up these pictures as a downpayment on some future posts.  Best case scenario:  you'll find something interesting here this week.  Worst case: I've developed a cure for insomnia.

See you soon.  Ish.

On the Careful Use of Language

Although my kids might disagree, I try not to spend too much time being a pain-in-the-butt grammar hawk.  Every once in a while, though, the internet offers up a magnificent blooper and I am unable to keep my trap shut.  Check out the following gem:

The origins of the photo are thus: in the middle of teaching his organizational behavior class, a student who could not find a babysitter’s kid began to cry. 

As I read it, this sentence asserts that a student could not find the babysitter's kid, which caused the student to cry during a class.  Due to the goofy placement and use of "his,"  it would appear that the student was a man and was, paradoxically, also teaching the class. 

The situation described is entertainingly absurd, but does not at all reflect what the writer meant to say.  If you read the full article (and you may have, as the photo that prompted the story went viral), it turns out that a young woman couldn't find a babysitter for her child and had to bring her infant to class.  The baby began to cry during the class and the professor picked the baby up to sooth him (or her--I'm a little fuzzy on the details) and continued to teach the class while holding the baby. Props to the teacher, but I think the writer needs a better editor.

On a completely different topic, I have no idea where I left off in my knitting saga and I don't have any good project photos to post anyway, so instead I present Rupert, the pet rock my daughter had to make for her science class.*  I am particularly fond of his smile.  And his hair.  And his eyes. He reminds me very much of my daughter. 





*No, I don't know why we are still making pet rocks in high school, but I also don't understand why the kids take written tests in PE (we used to call it by the hopelessly antiquated name "gym").  I guess my kids are right when they say I just don't understand anything about their lives.

A Little Bit of Spring

We're finally having a little bit of Spring around here.  It brings us flowers



(including true-to-life teenage flowers that like to take selfies:)



and showers



and along with the usual renewal, this year Spring has brought us a notable replacement.  Our faithful old van retired, to be replaced by this marvel of Japanese engineering:

It is sleek and sound and filled with modern gadgets (back up camera? check!  bluetooth integration with everyone's phones/music? check!  voice command calling? Holy smokes-- I can do that too!) and a host of clever little storage places and we already love it.  But you can't just dump a van that's been part of your life longer than half of your children without feeling the pain of separation, and I did not take the parting of the ways well.  A friend of mine captured the experience perfectly: it was like handing your dog over to the shelter and the sense of responsibilities abandoned was icky indeed. I have mostly stopped worrying that the car was lonely, scared, and confused over its fate, but every once in a while I'm zapped by a pang of regret and I wish there were a way to have a decent retirement party for our less animate companions and know that everyone was going happily on to the next phase.  Even if that phase is the scrap yard.

Hissyfit

I am trying my best to make good use of my rigid heddle loom, but this merciless wad of yellow yarn refuses to reveal its free end.



I begin to suspect that this particular skein of yarn was packaged by M.C. Escher and that I will never, ever find its beginning.

I have tried to resolve the problem through liberal application of bad words and phrases, but in the interest of setting a good example (or at least not setting a terrible one) for my children, I had to modify my language and, in so doing, I think I diluted it so much as to render it powerless.

At the peak of my frustration, I vented my feelings by dashing the miserable child of a female dog to the  floor with all my strength.  It sailed lightly through the air and landed at my feet, making no sound whatsoever.

Yarn is a most unsatisfying adversary.

All is not lost, however.  I own scissors and will momentarily return to the field of battle with them.  Thunk, they will go, onto the table, blades open and menacing. One of us will be going to pieces.

Once more into the fray!!!

For the Record . . .

I grow weary of this winter.

More particularly, I'm tired of getting stuck in snowbanks on my own damned driveway.




Really tired.

So tired, that words cannot express my tiredness.

That's a lie.  I know plenty of words designed to express the precise emotion I felt this morning upon getting caught in a snow drift for the fourth time in a week, but they are not very nice words.  Also, I'm pretty sure I used up my daily allotment of them when the car first got stuck, when I realized I was going to have to shovel my way out, when I got my legs tangled in the snowbank for the first, second, third, and fourth times, and then when the dog, who spent most of his time barking helpfully at the shovel, decided to bury the tire I had just shoveled out.





He's a bit of a moron sometimes.

To recover from the morning's excitement, I plan to make a giant pot of coffee, break out the Dove squares (or, to be strictly accurate, I will break out more of the Dove squares), and knit a few more stripes on my stripey socks.



These socks have been knit and worn and then had to be reknit so that they might actually fit my feet without making my toes curl under.  The second sock of version 2.0 is finally nearing completion and as much as this project has felt like a lingering plague on my knitting existence, the do-over came at a time when I was suddenly noticing the imminent failure of several other pairs of socks due to what can only be described as yarn fatigue at the ball of the foot. I'm hoping I have solved the problem (at least for future socks) with the knit-in patch that you can see in the finished stripey sock. Off we go!

Brrr!

We had some cold weather last week.  So cold that on the way down the driveway to drop my poor kid off for the bus the car thermometer looked like this:



On the way back up the driveway, it looked like this:



It was the kind of day when a fresh container of water for the chickens would start to freeze on the 60 foot walk between the house and the coop and when even the frost makes its way inside to warm up a bit:




So we did what any rational people would do with this kind of weather:  we boiled some water, threw it out the door, and watched it snow:



Today we are back to normal:  30F, snowy and blowy, with a treacherous layer of ice on all the walkways where the snow that softened in yesterday's 40F re-froze last night.  I am, of course, thrilled that I have (almost) nowhere to go today.   I will even try not to complain about the fact that my hot coffee and warm blanket time will be spent working rather than goofing around, because it's still nicer than dealing with the great outdoors right now.

Before I get on with the dreaded employment, I will leave you with a small and cheerful WIP to counteract any sympathetic shivers you might feel on my behalf.



It's the bottom half of the first of a pair of Fiddlehead mitten, which I am making to replace these sorely missed mittens, which vanished last year.



At the rate I'm going, they should be done and lined sometime in June. How very useful.


Stay warm!

A World Gone Mad

This was in my inbox this morning and I can only conclude that someone in the advertising profession has lost his or her mind. 

 Did you read it?  Let's summarize the theory here:  Never mind the live action outside, kids; it's time to ignore the great outdoors and  improve your understanding of nature by staying inside and playing with plastic bricks.

Well, there's a grand idea.

Who wouldn't want to trade all the colorful action outside for these utterly life-like models?

Not that the birds aren't cute, in their oddly modular way, but I have to say that I find the beaks a bit sinister.  They look strangely militaristic and I keep expecting them to fire little green laser blips. Which, of course, would please my boys immensely and send them running for the nearest Lego store  so they could add a new threat to their ongoing Lego battle.

Naturally.

Just Some Stuff

Some things just have to be done:



Some things are so much fun, they should be done again:



Baking is, of course, much more fun with my new friends.

Speaking of fun, some of us are back in third grade, the land of the Friday Letter.  In this week's missive, we learned that Matthew has apparently emigrated to Australia:








Can't read third grade-ese? He says:

Dear Mum and Dad,  

G'day and greetings from Australia or "the land down under." Did you know that Australia is both a country and a continent? Since Australia was once owned by Britain, it [is] still their chief of state.  That is why there are so many british expressions. And Mum, I really with Nate would nick off, he's always eating my cheese!  By the way, I will say ta later.  And by the way, can we have a barbie for tea?  Please write back.   

Love, Matt

So we did:

Caught in Her Own Trap

So my daughter is in the other room sorting through the many partial decks of cards we have accumulated.  The following conversation ensues.

Isa:  We're missing the 4 of spades.
Me: You're the 4 of spades.
Isa:  No I'm not.  I'm the Ace of spades, the awesomest card there is.

Silence for a bit while she sorts another deck.

Isa:  We're missing the Ace of spades.
Me:  You're the Ace of spades.
Isa:  No I'm not. (pause)  Well, yes I am.
Me:  Wow, you really are a contrarian today.
Isa:  Am not!

Does anyone else have conversations like this?

So that you won't think my life is made up entirely of oddball conversations with my kids, here is a picture of a snake that I stepped on this morning:



Isn't it cute?  It was sunning itself in the road while I was taking my walk today and I didn't see it until I had just barely set my foot on it.  It became very irate and opened its mouth as wide as it would go and lunged at me and flicked its red tongue,  all of which would have been impressive if the snake hadn't been miniscule. Unable to frighten me away, poor Snake had to avenge his disrupted  nap and near-squashing by refusing to let me catch a picture of it in its "enraged snake" pose.  Silly reptile.

The last picture today is the sample for the project I plan to start this weekend.



We will for now politely ignore the sweater that I absolutely had to start a few weeks ago and the pair of socks that would not be denied a chance at existence the week before that.  They remain very important to me, but this project, which at its full size will be a beaded merino-silk stole, has a deadline because I want it for a fancy dress party we're going to in December. Nothing like a deadline to help you prioritize, although it is very likely that my priorities will shift again when I decide that I'm cold and want a new sweater.

It turns out that it's next to impossible to take a good picture of clear beads with an iPhone, so you'll have to take my word for the fact that I will not be using the purple beads for this project (although I am hoping there will be enough left over yarn for a second project that will use the purple beads). Instead I will be using the invisible beads on the left, while ignoring the slightly visible beads in the middle, which are actually the kind of beads called for in the pattern.  Wish me luck!

Half-Mad

We had a little meltdown here the other day.

By "we" I mean those of us who are sixteen years old and passionately attached to our iPhones.  And by "meltdown" I mean a crisis of epic proportions.  A emotional event that, left unchecked, could level a city.

It started when PhoneGirl tried to update the operating system on her beloved companion and ended up with an unresponsive black screen instead of than the highly anticipated iOS8.  This was followed by the usual ranting and raving, and panicked plugging in of phones to this computer and that, all to no avail.  In the depths of her despair, PhoneGirl seems to have tried to comfort herself by hearkening back to the halcyon days of her youth ("Enjoy it now," she loves to tell poor Matthew, who is all of 8 years old, "pretty soon you'll be in High School and its all SUFFERING there!").  That is to say, she found this



and this



and went to work.


Observe now, if you will, the shocking evidence of one teenager's descent into iPhone madness:
























Clearly, the suffering was overwhelming.  And, fortunately, fairly short lived.  By the time our damsel in distress was eyeing the activities on page 56, the cherished phone beeped back into consciousness.  It's memory had been wiped, but it had clearly returned from the land of the lost and all was on the way to being well again.

Until the next Teen Drama.

Half-Truths

I'm back, which I suppose is an unnecessarily obvious thing to point out.

I still have nothing to say about where my summer went, but before I put on my audiobook and crank out the rest of the rigid heddle table runner that I still have not freaking finished (and let's not even mention the Socks of Eternal Knitting and the Scarf That Refuses to End), here are a few pictures from this past week that I just can't not share.

First, apples and honey for a sweet new year.



 My kids scarfed them down during dinner the other night, even though I had imagined I was serving them for dessert. That's how much I know, right?

Second, it would appear that Freddy and the Gang are either hot on the trail of the next masked creeper or desperately in need of Scooby Snacks, because this is what Isabel and I found in the Target parking lot Tuesday when we did our last minute shop to make sure she and the boys had something decent to wear to Temple on Thursday.




We were neither the sole nor the boldest photographers on the scene:





And last, we have our Wildlife Update. We've been seeing an awful lot of teeny tiny snakes.


 

This one had the good fortune to still be alive. The others have mostly been lying flattened in the road. Their elders do not seem to have done an effective job of teaching survival skills, such as Not Getting Run Over by Cars.

 That's all, except to wish you all a  Happy Friday!

Lies!

Ahem.

Well, I, uh, was supposed to show up last Monday with marvelously entertaining tales from the summer that just sped by us.  Since it is, as far as I can tell, no longer Monday, perhaps we are gaining a small understanding of why it is that I think a summer vacation that was fully 10 weeks long (well, minus a day, if you want to be strictly accurate) passed in the blink of an eye. That is to say-- as my eldest and most infuriatingly punctual child is regularly tempted to point out-- I occasionally demonstrate a faulty understanding of time.  I prefer to think that I have such an advanced concept of the matter that I have evolved beyond the need for clocks and calendars. Unlike certain persons of limited imagination and understanding that I could mention. So far I have found very few people who see things my way, which often happens to those of us who seek to enlighten the world with such mind-blowing explanations.

To distract us all from this unfortunate topic, here is a picture of some yarn.



"Oh no!"  I hear you groan.  "Not more knitting!"

And you will be relieved to hear that all this fluff is instead destined for the loom.  Not all in the same project, of course.  I may (or may not, depending on enrollment) be teaching an introductory class in rigid heddle weaving.  The yarn is intended for a sample of the first class project, a scarf.  If I am super-speedy, I will make more than one scarf in order to demonstrate different fabrics and color effects etc. etc., and if I am as slow as usual, I will put the extra yarn away in the drawer and pull up some useful project pictures from Ravelry.

And that's all I have to say for today.  I will be back on Monday at some date in the not too distant future and maybe I will have a finished table runner to show (that's the blue thing underneath all my yarn). Or a new door for the chicken coop.  Or some totally unnecessary goodies from the fiber festival I'm going to tomorrow. At this point, I'm making no promises.

Questions

Two months (almost) since my last zucchini-infested post and you might have been wondering where the bleep I've been since then.  That is not, however, the true question.  The true question is where the  bleep my summer has gone, a question that I have no intention of answering right now for the very good reason that today is the last official day of my personal vacation and, in the same way that I refused to stop and blog while summer was available, I refuse to give up the last minutes of my personal time answering questions.

So there.

Here is evidence of what I have been doing for the last week and a half while the kids were at school:





It's not nearly as much as I thought I was going to do, but I suspect now that my original plans, which pretty much amounted to finishing any outstanding project I have ever started, were a teeny little bit optimistic.

My spinning wheel is now empty and my next goals are to:

1. clear off the rigid heddle loom, which looks like this


(ew!  I just realized that I'm not crazy about how this project looks, which is not a lot of incentive to keep working on it.)

2. clear off my floor loom, which looks like this

(boring! no wonder it's been on the loom since December)

3. clear off my in-progress spindles, which look like this


(much cooler picture--maybe I'll work on those next)

4. finish my knitting WIPs, which look like this


(okay--that's just the dumbest picture ever; please ignore it)


and

5. finish all my quilts, which I can't even show you because they've been in deep storage since I stopped quilting 8 years ago. Just imagine a very large pile of blankets and blankets-to-be.

Numbers 4 and 5 might be problems, particularly as they probably amount to 6 months of full time work and I'm headed back to work next week and will, most likely, have to put in a little overtime to make up for the time I just took off.  Then again,  why plan if you're not willing to plan big, right?

In the mean time, enjoy the weekend and I expect to be back here Monday morning, at about the time the first work-avoidance urge hits.  Then we can talk about where the bleep my summer went.

Tip of the Day

Today's helpful garden tip:

Never turn your back on the Zucchini plants.




Those buggers are summa cum laude graduates of the Give-em-an-inch-they'll-take-a-mile school.




First class overachievers.




Workaholics with a breath-taking inability to perceive that size isn't everything.

 I think it's time for some good zucchini recipes.

The Hurrier I Go . . .

You know the rest.  Spring is a madhouse in my world and I have, as you may have noticed, begun to neglect certain things.  Which is about all I'm going to say to explain the three month gap in blog posts around here.

Also, tonight is one of the first nights I've had without something on the schedule, and you can bet your buttons that I'm not about to spend it futzing around with a long and newsy blog post. No Sir, not me.  Instead, I will spend it working, which I failed entirely to do during normal work hours, hence the unfortunate schedule.

Before I go, though, I have to let you know that I am now a world famous knitter of hats.

Hat,  really, not hats.

And I suppose that, strictly speaking, I'm not actually world famous.  Or any kind of famous, if you insist on using the word in it's traditional, dictionary-definition sense.

But I did get to knit a hat for a book that is about to take the knitting world by storm, which is just about the same and totally counts as a way cool experience, right?

Here is my hat:

I got the gig two years ago through the lovely people at my local yarn shop, which sponsored a weekend  get-together for members of the Ravelry group associated with its on-line persona, Dizzy Sheep (check out my bumper-crop of links-- I am so tech-savvy!).  Master knitter Anne Berk joined us at the weekend and gave an introductory seminar on her technique for knitting intarsia motifs in the round.  This blew our minds.  Those of us who managed to recover from the shock of what she was teaching us (I almost didn't make it--I'm pretty sure I spent a while unable to do anything other than shake my head and blibber "that is sooooo cool") got to choose a pattern and some yarn and knit a project that would -- get this -- BE INCLUDED IN THE BOOK.  An actual real printed book with pages and everything. This doesn't happen to me very often, so I hopped on the yarnwagon and now my little hat, along with a number of other items knit by real live regular knitters, is going to make an appearance in  Annetarsia Knits (that's the Amazon link; if you really want to have fun, try this one, which goes to Ravelry and lets you take a peek at the different patterns).

Years ago I had an unfortunate experience with intarsia in the form of an afghan featuring little scottie dogs. I thought it had ruined intarsia for me, but it turns out there is a lot to be done with the technique that doesn't involve excessively cute animals and a bajillion bobbins of yarn tangling up your needles.  Such as a multi-color lace hat that does not need to be seamed and involves no gauge-restricting stranding.  In addition to the hat and the instructions for the techniques, the book contains patterns for socks, shawls, and a host of other goodies. Not all the patterns in the book are worked in the round and they range in size from coaster-sized things to --no lie-- an entire skirt/top affair.

And now I had better get back to work.  To tide you over until the next post, I'll leave you with a picture of my almost-but-not-quite finished Color Affection.



When people tell you that the end of this shawl takes forever, you should believe them and possibly choose a different project and save yourself years of garter stitch.  Saturday morning I owed 2.5 repeats (30 rows) and two inches of border on this shawl.  15 hours of knitting later, I still owe 3 rows and a bind-off.  I can only hope to have this finished by the end of the week, in which case I might just celebrate by writing a second blog post for this month.  Wahoo.

fyi:  these are not my pictures.  You can tell from the clarity and beauty of them-- and also from the fact that they are labeled with the book name and feature a person I have never before seen in my life, but who is clearly a real live model--that they were professionally taken for the purpose of the book. The photographer is Bill Berk, and I'm pretty sure that he didn't just pop a hat on one of his kids and fire away with his iPhone, as some of us are wont to do.

Spring Chickens

It's been quite a week for the chickens.

It started off with a lovely thaw.  The daytime temperatures -- all 40 degrees of them -- were positively beach-like compared to what we've seen since Thanksgiving and the birds took full advantage.
   

Unfortunately, the warm temperatures melted the snow and brought on the mud, which is always worst in the coop with its slower drainage and ground that is constantly being churned up by chicken feet.

Poor Mike here looks like she could use a pair of chicken boots.




And now she and Shirley (or is it LaVerne?  I can't tell them apart) look like they were pretending to be Lucy and Ethel stomping grapes.



Except that it's mud, of course, not grapes.

The birds spent a lot of time standing on top of their play house, like a little chicken convention.



This pair doesn't know from mud.  They and their three confederates continue to be indoor chickens.



That changed, for a grand total of 3.5 minutes, when I freshened up the shavings in their apartment, which, due to their complete failure to step outside and their indiscriminate bathroom habits, were in a disgraceful state.

When I toss clean shavings into the coop, the new birds panic like I'm lobbing grenades at them. Last time, they all backed into the same corner and hopped up and down and trampled each other until I went away.  This time, they headed for the opposite corner, which lets onto the exit ramp.    At this point, I may or may not have pushed the lot of them out the hatch--defenestrated them, as it were-- and followed it up by throwing more shavings at them.

Thus they experienced the glories of nature for a second time.
 


I don't think they cared for it all that much.
 

They flapped and ran for a bit and were completely stupefied to find themselves on the opposite side of the fence. They could see the mini-coop, but they couldn't figure out how to get back to it.

Eventually they found the cutout in the fence and, barely pausing to snatch up a few grains of the cracked corn I had put out to teach them to love the great outdoors, made their way back inside.
 

The next day it snowed. A lot.
 

So much that we got two snow days from school.

My birds don't do snow, but today's temperatures, which were back at a very vernal 42 degrees, were too much to resist.  So they pushed a bunch of shavings out and stood on that.  All of them in one little spot.



I guarantee that they will go no further until the ground is back to its muddy glory.

A Little Encouragement

This was our sunrise some time last week.  As the temperatures plummet (again) and the snow falls fast and furious here today (we're expected to get 12-20 inches and the rumor is that even the nice folks at The Weather Channel have made their way into town to spotlight the anticipated blizzard) and Spring becomes an exercise in memory, it is good to see photographic proof that the sun is still out there.  Somewhere.

My second favorite thing about this picture (that big yellow thing in the middle is my favorite, you know) is the little pink flare that has landed smack in our fire pit and is doing its best to pretend it's an actual bonfire. Nicely done, Nature.