To get your very own wall o' snow:

Step 1: Have the weatherman predict snow, then hastily at the last minute upgrade it to 1 or 2 inches, no, 3 or 6 inches, what the heck, lets go for 8 or more!
Step 2: Have your neighbor move all his cars out of the driveway so he can have a furniture delivery made at 8 pm at night.  This will give him a good reason to forget that he's left his car in the street.
Step 3: Get 8 inches snow overnight and have the snowplow come down the street a couple of times before your neighbor gets dug out.  3 feet of snow piled up on all sides will give him lots to work with.
Step 4: Once you've help push your neighbor over that last barrier to freedom, wait for the snowplow to come back down the street to shove all that lovely pile of snow across the end of your drive.

Enjoy!

Antique words

I got a word-a-day calendar for Christmas - Forgotten Words.   It's been a lot of fun - mostly words that are oddities, sounding strange and referring to times and situations we no longer need, unless writing or reading an historical novel.  Haven't had a use for Quintain or Gabriel's Hounds recently.

On the other hand, every now and then there's a word I want to bring back into fashion.  We need these words, we just don't know it.  Yesterday's word:  Afterwrath.

Afterwrath is that anger you feel post facto - something that slipped past at the time, but the more you think about it the madder you get.  You weren't mad on the spot - you were focused on something else, you were busy, but afterwards when you think about what happened?  you know you should have been mad, you would have been mad had you given it your attention at the time.  Now, you're suffering from afterwrath.  Afterwrath is almost worse than wrath, because just like that feeling of coming up with the correct retort five hours later in the middle of the night when you were dumbstruck at the time, I find it harder to deal with the wrath that comes from "what-ifs" than I do with actually dealing with a situation on the spot.

I have a need for this word - I dunno why it fell out of use, wasn't widespread and became forgotten, was isolated to a small portion of the world originally and never moved on elsewhere.  No internet with its Urban Dictionary in the late 1800s?  How many other cool words are there that exactly describe things we don't give specific labels to any more?  Do you suppose the Internet may preserve these words for us in future?

3.8.2014 Merino laceweight, part the first

I spent quite a while spinning the purple merino laceweight.  I wound up with two unequal skeins - this is the first one wound into a ball.  315 yards - the other skein should be approximately twice that much.  At some point I'll figure out grist as well.  The whole started as 100 grams of fibery goodness from Freyalyn.

I had to go back and see when I last blogged about it  - ummm, that would be here.

3.5.2014 And some knitting too...

I've also been getting some knitting done - Rock Island by Jared Flood.  I was worried about running out of yarn, but so far it's looking fairly promising.  The problem with starting at the bottom and working to the shorter rows rather than the other way round is that by the time the edging and lace sections are done, there doesn't look like much yarn left.

3.1.2014 Spinning this week

Someone in my guild poked people to spin more this week.  So I did.  And actually took pictures.

Grey corriedale again.

And some of this pink silk top

turned out like this - short draft.  This can only be spun for a short period of time in a row because my hands get tired easily.  Nice to be able to switch back and forth between two wheels now!