Another Warm Day

It started out frosty this morning. You can see the frost on the bare grass behind the platform feeder with the Cardinal on it. I love that he's basking in the morning sunshine. It stayed sunny all day and got up to 57 degrees. In February. In Wisconsin. But there's a cold front sagging down from Canada tonight so the next couple days are going to be in the 30s. I hate to say it but that's more seasonally appropriate. After that we're supposed to have three more warm days with Tuesday a predicted high of 64 degrees. And then it's going to cool down again. What a yo-yo winter we're having. Yikes!

Mark making today involved drawing an owl. Not just any owl but an owl with marks on it instead of feathers. Soon this torture will be over and I can find or go back to a drawing or painting class that lets me make "real" stuff. I may just re-watch one of the painting classes I did last year and see if I can learn anything new from it. I've got a stash of empty watercolor sketchbooks that I can dive right into.

A Downy Woodpecker showed up on the suet pellets this afternoon. At least I think it's a Downy. The more I look at it the more I think that it's a Hairy Woodpecker instead of a Downy. It just looks too big to be a little Downy but it didn't stay long and never got around to the front of the feeder.

I spent part of the afternoon on the computer looking at watercolor classes on Domestika but I didn't find anything new. Instead I dozed off and spent a nice half hour snoozing away. That little nap was one of the items I put on my gratitude journal page today, along with the blue sky and sunshine, my Zoom visit with LL who is the leader of the Novel Writing group, and I'm happy to say that at least one squirrel found the peanut wreath and has made off with almost all of the peanuts over the last couple days.

 

I spent the evening finishing the heel flap of the Sockeye Salmon Hermione sock, turning the heel, and picking up the gusset stitches. And I did it all with a Magic Loop circular needle. Usually I drag out my US3 double point needles and transfer the stitches onto them when I get to that point so I can see what I'm doing better. I'm trying to figure how to not have to switch. We'll see how frustrated I get tomorrow night and if I fall back to the DPNs. It was a good thing that I stopped knitting the heel flap the other night because tonight it occurred to me that I'd cast on fewer stitches than the pattern called for and I'm using a bigger needle so I had to adjust how many heel flap rows I knitted and how many stitches to knit to start turning the heel. But I did it and it turned out. Yay, me!

LL encouraged me to take a break from the manuscript to do an outline of the story to get my thoughts straight. I've never outlined a novel before and I'm not sure how to do it. I googled "plot outline" and found a couple websites and a few examples of ways to outline a plot. I printed out one template but can't bend my mind around to fill in the spaces. So I went on Amazon and ordered a book that I have on Audible but I've never been able to visualize what the author is telling me to do so I thought maybe a paper copy would help. I could have gotten it immediately on Kindle but the paperback was only fifty cents more so I decided to have a real book. Maybe that will jog something loose in my old and feeble brain and help me figure this thing out. Maybe I'll put this story in timeout until it agrees to behave.

--Barbara