Found Things

I was excited when I pulled out of the garage yesterday morning to see that our neighbors had taken down their Christmas tree and tossed it out onto their front snowdrift.  I immediately went over, grabbed it (oh, it smelled so good and piney) and dragged it over to the drift by our front porch.  When we got home I got out my snowshoes and poles and tromped around the house dragging the tree and leaned it against the bare honeysuckle in back.  I like to give the birds an evergreen to hide in when they come for a drink or a little splash in the birdbath, and it also gives them shelter out of the wind since we don't have any evergreens planted anywhere in our yard.  I sprinkle a scoop of birdseed on the branches every once in a while to give them something to nibble on while they're sheltering too.  Thanks, neighbors.


Last Friday I looked all over hell and half of Georgia for my little portable light.  Sometimes it's just too dim to knit in the winter so I like to have this little light helping me.  Do you think I could find it?  No, I could not.  I searched through every knitting bag I could lay hands on and even went through a few random drawers (you know how you stash things when company is imminent...) but I didn't find it.  This morning I carried the tote of ornaments and the folded up Christmas tree downstairs and had to be careful at the foot of the stairs not to knock a basket down.  After putting the ornaments and tree away I took a good squint at that basket, realizing that for a time it lived beside the couch where I always knit.  I looked inside and VOILA! there was the light.  I need to stop making messes and organize this stuff.  It should take me, oh, six months or so if I work constantly, 24/7, on it.  Sorry, Mrs. Boss, I'll be in around July 27th.  Not really, but wouldn't it be fun to just have time to do something like that without all the external demands and distractions?  I feel like I speed through life trying to get ALL the things done TODAY, forgetting to enjoy the moment I'm standing in the middle of.  I should work on that.

Durwood subscribes to a bunch of cooking magazines and recently one of them had a recipe for curried chickpeas with cauliflower and spinach that looked really good to me so I made it for supper last night.  I halved the curry powder but should have put it all in, otherwise it was pretty darned good and filling.  I think it's a keeper.

January 3--James Kay, RC-1827.  The sheer red rock wall reflected the westering sun and turned Gabriel's joints to jelly.  He had been climbing since before dawn  and had intended to have topped the cliff wall long before the sun became a problem.  It's funny how one small broken link in a well-planned chain could throw off the whole exercise.  He hadn't thought that losing one attachment point when he was halfway up would make much of a difference but it had forced him over to a different, more challenging route.  He had also lost his footing, slipped and wrenched his shoulder which slowed him way down.  The heat reflecting off the rock face made his hands slick on the ropes and played tricks on his head.  For the last hour his old friend, Stan, who had died on K2 six years earlier, had been keeping him company, helping him find good holds and traverse a tricky lead that took him around a jutting boulder.

That was one of the ones that comes screaming out of the end of my pencil just as fast as I can scratch it across the page.  Takes all the tired right out of me and makes it a bit challenging to fall asleep but I thought about my novel, about what I'll print out for the roundtable on Saturday, and eventually I fell asleep.  Probably took me all of five minutes.  I'm a very good sleeper.  Going to make bread dough today so I can bake it later in the week; that's my part of the weekend's food.
--Barbara