Thursday, October 22, 2009

So how the heck have I been .....

... some of you may have noticed that we here in Central PA had a "bit" of snow last week. If you watched the Weather Channel, you were led to believe that the most pressing problem was that PSU banned tailgating around the stadium and it was homecoming weekend. (The grassy areas were muddy, and there aren't enough paved areas to allow the huge RV's to set up their tailgates.) Never mind that there were folks who were without electricity from Thursday evening until Saturday evening (in some cases). My boss told me he came to work on Friday just so he could have electricity. I mention TWC because that's how we found out how nasty it really got. You see we were supposed to be hiking in the Laurel Highlands. I say supposed to be, because we really didn't get to hike.

I'm no shrinking violet. I've hiked in rain, I've hiked in cold, but on Wednesday afternoon, when I went outside to decide whether to wear a down vest, and realized that it was not just cold, but raining and sleeting, I gave up.




Cold AND rainy, means I'm not going anywhere. Add heavy duty fog to the mix, and well, you get the drift.












We heard about the snow in Centre County when I got a PSU text message on Friday morning informing me that classes were running on time, but that the snow was continuing to fall. Huh? Snow?



A look out the deck doors showed me unrelenting rain and fog, but snow? PSU began an emergency text messaging program not long after the VA Tech tragedy. They text message emergency announcements from water line breaks to panels blowing off the scoreboards and closing roads, to class delays.







An odd manifestation of the system is that my phone interprets the P in PSU as



Poetic, no?

So after getting the message I turned on TWC and by golly, one of the weather weenies was in a parka standing in a driving snow storm in front of the stadium. He was telling us that the University had prohibited parking in the grassy lots, and what were the homecoming tailgaters to do? It was surreal. Especially since here I was at a ski resort in the "mountains" and THERE WAS NO SNOW! (Not that I wanted any, mind you.)

So here's what I did instead....



Meet Ishbel and Ishbel meet Handmaiden Cashbah, no idea what colorway. It was the first yarn in the 2009 Loopy Ewe Sock club. It is so lovely...the color is no where near as lovely as it is in person, that I couldn't bare to put it on my stinky feet. Ishbel is a lovely pattern. Lovely, if you're smart enough to pay attention. I, apparently, am not nearly smart enough and have spent about 20% of my time tinking. First in the stockinette portion of the program I somehow added an extra stitch on one side and pulled it out 3 or 4 times, until I figured it out. Then, I can't seem to "read" the lace pattern, and make silly errors, on a regular basis, that I can only fix by tinking. The one thing I can tell you, is that if you have the time to put into it, it is a fast knit. I really should have been concentrating on my Christmas knitting, however, I have been itching to start this forever! I blew through the first three charts and stockinette in no time, and since I've been home, have knit two (count'em 2) rows. This job just really cuts into my knitting time.



So we missed the catastrophic snow storm. Here's what I saw on Sunday morning.








Sad part is that on the way down, there were still a lot of green trees. With all the "weather", it seems that many trees dropped their leaves without ever getting a chance to turn. The pelting rain, and heavy snow, just pulled leaves right off the trees (and in the case of Centre County knocked large branches down all over the place). We ended up extending our stay by one day, because, wouldn't you know....Monday, the day we originally planned to leave dawned bright and sunny -- cool, but dry and bright. The past two days it has been in the 60's.

Timing is everything.

2 comments:

Bezzie said...

Oh the weather outside is frightful! But think how pretty all those barren trees will hopefully be soon covered in snow! ;-)

kemtee said...

Um… all's well that ends well?