Not Any Warmer

I stayed inside today except for sneaking out to fill the birdbath. I'm afraid when it gets low that the heater will burn out or something so I try to top it up every day. You can tell how cold it has stayed because there seems to be a permanent ice floe in the birdbath.

These are the Christmas cactus buds that show the most promise. There's the one that's almost blooming and then three more that I hope will continue to grow and bloom too.

I didn't find anything writer-y to take a picture of today but I managed to get 1800 words down. I'm still struggling with getting enough conflict in there but I figure if I keep going I'll eventually figure it out. Right now I'm just happy to be writing every day.

The next pages in Sketching were still about fears. Evidently the author of this book is afraid of flying because these two pages were filled with airplanes. They were fun to draw and I think they turned out well.

Then I got out Drawing Cute (which I keep forgetting about) to find a hippo and an elephant on the next page. Part of me wishes that I would have colored them more realistically instead of copying the way she colored them but the other part of me thinks that two gray creatures would have been slightly boring--and not as cute. So a purple hippo and a sky blue elephant is what we have.

Tonight I sat and watched TV and knitted on the Rainbow Sophie Scarf. I got to the middle last night so tonight I started the decreases. If you look carefully at the left side of the widest part you can see the little peak where the increasing stops and the decreasing begins.

I almost made today a pajama day but then I got cold and realized that I would be warmer in regular clothes and I still had to put on a wool shrug over my shirt and wool sweater to get warm. I'm glad that I didn't get rid of the old humidifier last winter when I had the humidifier put on the furnace because I filled the water bottles in the old one last night and turned it on. Humidified air is warmer than dry air. I need all the warmth I can get. I'm sorry that I keep harping on how cold I am but it is unseasonably cold right now and I don't like it, not one little bit.

--Barbara