Drum Roll Please

Oh wait, the drum head has broken under the weight of all the ice. hmmm. More on that later.


Randomly chosen as the first Very Merry Blogiversary Contest Happy Holidays mystery yarn winner is: Yakiduk

Congratulations!!!

Now if you will send me your particulars (address especially) to eric-hallett at cox dot net, I will send you your prize. Wheeee!

As some of you may know, Tulsa and much of Oklahoma has been under attack from the Ice Queen. We lost power, we lost trees, we lost a lot of food, we lost our minds, but mostly it was just depressing. Not knowing how long it would take to get power back was the worst part. And I can't complain because there are still 10s of thousands without power. Our power stayed on longer than most. We lost our's at 2:30 pm on Monday. A lot of people went out on Sunday night. We got power back on Thursday around 5:30 pm. 75 hours could have been much worse.

We were also fortunate to not lose our gas service. We have a gas stove and hot water heater so we were able to take hot showers and cook -- and I may have used the cook top to heat the kitchen even though that is so dangerous. Plus we have plenty of blankets and wool socks. Combine those with the power of cuddling and the nights were cozy.

And thankfully, the cats and dog and all our human friends made it out unharmed -- physically at least. We did lose a few fish and a bamboo shrimp.

Sunday night was really scary. All night long you could hear trees snapping like gun shots.

Monday morning, after the first blast, this tree in the back yard was already a total loss. And it landed on a wire.

In the front yard, this tree is also a total loss and it landed on our old work truck. The truck is fine -- I think.

In its own way, the ice was beautiful.

This is just some random tree in the neighborhood. I thought it looked kinda cool in a frozen Halloween kinda way.

Oklahoma doesn't usually have freezing rain or snow til January. In this last week we've had freezing rain, thaw, and then snow. Stupid global climate change. For more pictures of the carnage, you can check my Flickr! page.

In other news:

I did have plenty of quality knitting time. So I spent some time with Ms Zimmermann -- always time well spent -- and made a few hats. First is the Watchcap from Knitting Without Tears. I seamed and re-seamed this 4 or 5 times and will probably do it again after further anaysis with the ladies at knit night. Brioche stitch is fun! And this hat only took a few hours.

Then I set to work on a Ganomy from Knitter's Almanac. I knew I didn't want a stocking cap so I modified it to speed up the decreasing, but ended up with a fin on top. hmmm.

So I ripped back and added some additional decreasing. It was still a bit finny, but with a bit of creative folding, I found a result that I like -- for now anyway. And this hat also only took a few hours.

We did other knitting -- mostly holiday stuff. We discovered that worsted weight socks take no time. I shared my new knowledge of magic loop knitting with Tony who is turning out socks like a machine.

Speaking of holiday knitting, we're almost out of time so I'm getting back to it.

Later,

Eric