F-f-f-f-frosty

It got cold last night.  Cold enough to freeze the birdbath to ice.  The rising sun was defrosting it but I was a nice person and put a half-gallon of hot water in it to hurry things along so none of the birdies froze their toes.  It feels too early in the season to get the birdbath heater hooked up so I'll be ferrying warm water out there as need be until it's frozen so solid that I can lever the "water" out to be replaced by liquid water.

I didn't get to cut out another shirt yesterday after all.  Turned out that there wasn't enough fabric to make the whole shirt out of the single length I had with me (and I suspected that as I prewashed and hung it on the line to dry) so my plan is to dig around to see what I might have to coordinate with it.  I see another "design element" shirt on my horizon.



That meant that I had plenty of time to binge-watch episodes of Grace and Frankie, a Netflix series about two couples of 70-year-olds whose husbands have been law partners for decades.  The men (Sam Waterson and Martin Sheen) come out, divorce their wives (Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda), and move in together before marrying.  It's very funny because, of course, both the women are total opposites but end up being each others' best friend.  The men aren't as funny because, well, who could complete with Lily and Jane?  Or just Lily?  It also gave me time to knit a lot on the Inside Outside scarf. Look at how little the balls of yarn are now.  If I can concentrate on the pattern well enough tonight at Friday Night Knitting I might get it done, otherwise I'll knuckle down over the weekend and finish it.  I'm ready to be done with it.






After supper I whipped up a batch of Curried Butternut Squash soup.  I doctored up a 1 point per serving WW recipe, adding chickpeas for protein and sauteed mushrooms for extra flavor.  I made a tactical error and put the chickpeas in the oven to roast with the onions and squash so ended up having to puree them too, which wasn't in my plan, but it's good soup.  I'll work out making some oven-toasted pita chip/cracker/bread things to have with it for next week's work lunches sometime this weekend.

October 14--James Kay, BEC--122.  Ann lay on her back on the white sandy seafloor watching the sun sparkle on the little wavelets far above.  She watched her bubbles stream toward the surface like strings of mercury beads.  People thought that it was quiet underwater but it wasn't.  Even down there at 90 feet she could hear the pieces of broken coral rolling together in the mild surf, it sounded like wind chimes.  Parrotfish crunched bites of coral to eat the algae-rich polyps, then they pooped a bit of sand as they swam away.  Shrimp snapped their claws to drive predators away, it sounded like popping corn.  Ann loved knowing things no everyone knew.  She smiled to herself as she watched a speedboat plow a foamy white furrow overhead, then she turned to find her buddy, Cecelia.  It was time to swim back to shore.

It's a bright sunny day and the lawn mowing guys just arrived.  I'm off to gather up some knitting because Durwood and I scheduled all our diagnostic scans back to back so we'll only have to spend a few hours at the hospital instead of doing them one at a time.  Better to just wipe one day out totally than do an hour here and an hour there, screwing up more than one day.  When you get old-er, you get to be a smarter planner.  More selfish about your time too.
--Barbara