Whip Your Weatherman!

I've never actually been a 'spanker'. I had this crazy idea whist rearing Things 1,2, and 3 that love, honesty, and enough consistency to prevent major injury or worse would be about enough to encourage a fast-moving, temperamental, diaper-wearing tidal wave to become a reasonable, considerate human being. Over time, I have had to re-evaluate some 'loose' aspects of my philosophy (okay, maybe more than I'd like to think as we move into the lovely years of hormones and and infusion of terrible two's trapped in the same body and beginning to infect multiple bodies but this is my illusion so if you want the truth - you know it will be considerably sweetened here) but for the most part this has proved true. I sometimes like to imagine myself as a great, scary mother beast who can send children scurrying away in terror at her frightening ways. Truth is, there's not much I can do to scare the things as I have proven time and again that I am a harmless wimp and I despise punishing almost as much as they despise being punished.

A commercial break for some handspun yarn pr0n. These are the 'sari' batts that Aija was so nice as to blog about a bit ago. I will definitely be stocking this colorway for a while as I love, love, love it. Next door is some merino roving I had in the shop called , "Johnny Jump-Ups". I plied it with a 50/50 tencel/silk superfine lace that I'd dyed in a lighter shade than the Jump-ups. I like the spongey softness of it but wanted it to be strong enough to be a sock yarn. Since posting yarns with coinage seems all the rage these days, I dressed mine up with a penny each but things quickly got out of hand....we return to the regularly scheduled rant.

I am wholly reconsidering this in regards to the weatherman, though. I know, I know, there is not one holier than thou spirit in the sky called a weatherman who, like Santa and God, can singularly be accounted for by an act or deed. Chock it up to my southern simplicity, but I still group all these smiling, happy faces and voices (love my public radio - need multiple daily doses) into one ethereal being I refer to as 'the weatherman'. On a day such as this day, I am sure that every man and woman who dons the suit, the pageant winning smile, and the little clicker thingie is grateful to know that I think of them as more like mall Santas than as the 'real weatherman'. Just as a child's love for Santa can turn, with time and age, to a fervent distrust and maybe worse (why, why did I get a bb gun for my 9th x-mas instead of the hot barbie furniture and car that everyone else got?), it would seem that I've finally given up on the weatherman and, instead of listening to him every day with the face of concentration and 'sshhhh-ing' everyone in the house to hear him - I have begun to consider hunting the weatherman and, when I find him, whippin' him for all those times I sat whilst a toddler screamed and cried and told me 'no' and I practiced deep breathing and multiple patience building tactics and reminded myself that this cub was mine and that when they stopped this horrid fit, I would find them endearingly cute and perfect again. I mean, when you've had 3 huge snowstorms in two weeks and record cold earlier in the year than ever in our ten years in Maine - it just isn't funny when said liarweatherman promises that we will, at last, be out of the single digits and into the balmy 20's before the day ends - giving us an afternoon of warm reprieve before the next 0 and below patch of weather heads in tomorrow and we get out of the single digits (meaning it is now 13 degrees instead of 5) for a whopping hour before sunset and the wind howls mean and cold at our door. Dude, NOT FUNNY. The sheep are holding up well, the woodstove groans with the constant hot, hot, hot burning - and hubster and I drafted up a rotational sleep/work schedule because, in this weather, and burning only wood - we can't afford to snuggle up next to each other and not wake up in a few hours to load the stove.

And despite our woes and challenges - the holidays approach. Finished thing 2's sweater and was promptly sideswiped with a head cold that made me whimper. Got out of the fuzzy wuzzy brain torment and started working on the birch leaves socks with some real enthusiasm. Since I will be sleeping in four to six hour 'sessions', I presume the knitting will pick up. I'm really liking the way the darker variegated hand-painted yarn is looking in the lace pattern. This was a batch called 'vixen' from my shop. Hey, is that ice I hear falling on the roof, now? Whee hee - the party grows wilder! Oh, that is nothing to the 10 inches of driving snow and harsh, bitter, single digit wind that blows today...Paintball, anyone? I did decide, after much bantering with myself, not to continue the lace pattern into the foot. The recipient of this gift knit loves lace and beautiful hand-knit things but I also know her to be a person that loathes it when an article of clothing 'rubs' in any place. I was a little worried that the lace on her ankles where her boots cling might be one of those spots. Also, she loves to walk around the house in socks and I think a fully covered foot is maybe more practical for what seems to me a real message of disapproval from the Mudder Nature lady. A note of interest - until it warms up to a balmy, I don't know, 20 plus degrees - we're not saying the word 'winter' in our house. Winter has become Voldemort. The more you say it....the fiercer it becomes!

A recap - we may be stuck on the homestead until we can dig ourselves out. It is so cold that even saying cold makes you frown. We have given up on sleep in trade for trying to entertain our snowbound children and keep all the house warm and the barn closely tended. I will leave to the level of however voyeuristic and twisted your mind may be to deduce all the other things that may not happen again in our house until peace and warmth prevails over all. In trying to keep us from freezing to death, hubster and I failed to get the tree up this weekend so it looks like that and all my knitting, and managing the shop, and the farm, and the stove, and and and will have to be tomorrow a.m. I'll have to check the sleep calendar but my pessimistic self has already assumed that I'll be the one who is on the shift prior to this patience-requiring family time spent squabbling over who gets to put what ornament on a limb in the back of the tree. There is chocolate and 3 beers in the cold spot of the kitchen. All this sleeping and waking is making hubster feel the need to bake his famous hip thickening cookies so I'll likely gain 100 pounds and he'll eat a dozen or more. So, what did the 'sari' skein say to the pansy skein next to it? "Hey, let's put our two pennies a little closer to one another and....."