an ent knits

I somehow forgot it was Friday last Friday, and I’ve been running around like a madwoman in my attempts to get ready to go out of town, so my snow post is half a draft. But my car service (my parents, who are nice enough to drive past & pick me up on their way south) will be here in half an hour and I’m not quite ready. So, in case I’m away from the internet for a week, have a lovely belated Solstice. There should be lots of pictures and such next week.

A few thoughts on the first real snow of the season:

• I really do love snow. Even when it’s a nuisance.

• The crunch of fresh snow under my boots is one of my favorite sounds.

• It is a very good thing that I can see without my glasses. Street signs might be fuzzy, but I can wrap a scarf around my face and not have to try to see through fog.

eta: Um….I think the WP app on my iPod posted this while I was posting my “oh, Today” post on Jan. 13.  All of these facts are still true, though.  Maybe the photos will appear soon, to sorta go with them.  (Though there’s one slight update–my new glasses, which I got right before going away, are more fog-resistant than my old ones.)

The fall jamming edition:

I’m calling it cranberry applesauce, though apple cranberry sauce would be similarly appropriate. It’s got a flavor much like cranberry sauce (with undertones of apples, scotch, and various baking spices), but the texture of mostly-homogenized applesauce. I cooked it for a really long time to get the apples to cook down that much. I don’t buy cooking apples, since my main use for apples is eating them whole (well, okay, biting pieces off, but not cutting with anything other than teeth)–I just cook with the squishiest of the generally crisp apples I like to eat. This means that jamlike things take longer.

In other appley news, I’ve gone through enough of the 20-pound bag of Gold Rush that I bought a month ago that I happily signed up to get another one a week from Sunday. Mmm, apples.

***

I’ve been doing a bit of fibery stuff, to try to stay sane for working a lot. The most recent spinning:

I decided I needed some plain wool to spin, of a breed I hadn’t spun before, and for which I didn’t have any particular project in mind. So I dug my Acadia out of the fiber pile (it’s a stack of bins, or it’d be spread all over the floor) and set out to spin a 3ply. The talk seems to have been right–Finn is quite nice to spin. That’s one ply all spun and the second one started.

I’ve also been knitting some; I’ve nearly finished turning the heel on that sock. Yes, it takes more than a week to turn a heel when I’m only knitting a row or half a row or something at a time. Maybe this weekend? Of course, I’m also planning to start a new pair of socks: I’ll need concert knitting, for someplace darker than World Cafe Live.

Sunset on Tuesday.

From Madison Square Park last Wednesday (the 25th)–this was intended for last Friday’s eye candy, but I didn’t have my computer with me and thus never quite managed to borrow enough computer time to post. I got a “look, someone’s taking a picture!” comment while I was stopped to take this. I was amused.

Also from my Thanksgiving trip to New York:

We went to see the Mapping the Hudson exhibit at the public library, and stopped first in the children’s room to see the original stuffed animals that were the basis of the Winnie the Pooh stories. They’re clearly well-loved… And Piglet is a lot smaller than I’d’ve guessed!

I haven’t done all that much fibery stuff lately, but I knit half a sock heel at the Paul and Storm/Jonathan Coulton show last night. They turned the (rest of the) lights off after the intermission, and I couldn’t see well enough to pick up the wraps as well as the stitches, so I’ll have to finish it either at lunch or this evening. (The concert was great, though.)