The Jag is Dwindling

I knew it couldn't go on for much longer.  Yesterday I was distracted by an assistant

demanding stories read and the lion's share of my attention so I didn't do any cooking, only reheated the second half of the Chicken (Turkey) & Rice casserole for supper.   But one of last weekend's writers shared a recipe from a past version of the plan for WW Turkey Breakfast Sausage.  I'd gotten ground turkey for it at the grocery, all the other ingredients we had, so this morning I made it.  It's not bad.  It'll never replace good old fatty pork sausage for taste but it's a darned adequate substitute--and better still, 2 patties are ZERO points.  ("zero" might be my new favorite word)



The outdoor deep freeze is back.  Thursday afternoon we had rain, by 6 o'clock PM it was snowing, it got down below zero in the night, and all that rain and melt water froze.  Ugh.  Happily we had warning that was going to happen so the city workers spent time prepping the roads for it so the main roads were essentially dry yesterday with only the side streets having a bit of ice.  As you can see the glacier is back in the birdbath.  Every morning I do yoga in front of the patio door looking out.  You can see that there won't be any patio yoga for the foreseeable future.  That right there is granite-hard compressed ice with a dusting of snow over the top for extra slickness.






Last night at knitting I finished the neck ribbing of the Black & Blue Shrug and when I got

home I slipped one of the sleeves' held stitches onto the needle, picked up the underarm stitches, and got a couple rows knitted on the first sleeve.  I'm making the sleeves longer than the mid-upper-arm short sleeves the pattern calls for--which means I need to take good notes of how many stitches I have, how many rows, and how many stitches I decrease when because I want to taper the sleeves a bit and I would like the sleeves to match.  Since the weather seems determined to flirt with zero degrees (that definition of "zero" I'm not such a fan of) I'm anxious to have another nice fuzzy woolly shrug/sweater to wear.  I'm wearing the first version of it right now, the green one made with super bulky yarn I bought in Goshen, IN.  I'm happy to say that the sweater's a bit big on me now that I've lost 18 lbs. but it's warm and I'm wearing it.

January 13--Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, Dynamic Suprematism.  Kale lay on the gallery floor and looked up at the painting.  "It looks like a town plan," he said.  His friend Petra lay beside him with her head toward the painting so she was looking at it from a different perspective.  "I think it's the design of a multi-level airport or maybe a space station."  Kale snorted.  "A space station?  Really?  Have you OD'd on Star Wars or turned into a Trekker?"  She looked over at him but all she saw were the two black holes of his nostrils.  "No, not Wars or Trek.  I just think it looks like a place for things to land."  As they lay there, head to feet, discussing the painting a security guard approached and asked them to get up off the floor.  He said that some patrons had said that a pair of bums were sleeping in the Abstract Gallery.

I had to go out to nab a library book on CD that was being held for me and I've gotta say that those few warmish days last week really spoiled me for this frigid stuff.  It's clear and sunny and windy as the dickens and cold cold cold.  Ah, January in Wisconsin.  You gotta love it.  No, you don't, you have to endure it.
--Barbara