The Heathen Housewife

Since yesterday morning, we have gotten another foot or more of snow on the ground here. That’s good and bad news in several ways. Most notably bad is that Joe had a lot of work to do, and the poor guy is exhausted. And our crummy old snowblower finally gave up the ghost, which although bad for our bank account as we’ll have to buy a new one, is good for poor Joe who has been fighting with it for something like five years now. Oh, and my class at the store was canceled last night, which was disappointing because I was all prepared and excited to go.

There is plenty of good to balance off those small negatives, though. Joe’s office closed early yesterday and stayed closed today, so he gets an unexpected long weekend. Today felt a lot like Saturday, only we were all home together instead of me off teaching classes. I got to spend some time outside one-on-one with Julie making snow castles. We tried for snowmen, but the snow still wasn’t sticky enough. It was perfect snow for filling up buckets and making bricks out of, though. It’s hard to get a good picture of all the white-on-white, but as a girl who grew up in the relative south, it is amazing to me to have this much snow stacked up all over the place. We only have about two feet on the ground on average, but when you clear the streets and the driveways and the walks, it creates these giant piles that are like mountains for little kids to climb on.

I remain thoroughly impressed with the St. Louis Park snow removal crew. They had our streets clear before I even woke up this morning! Also, big snows like this make me really appreciate having a garage. It was so nice not to have to dig our cars out of the mess the way we used to when we lived in an apartment and parked on the street.

I had to share this random cute kid pic. Julie made this headband in school. I’m not sure what it’s all about, but it made me laugh like crazy. I remember being a little kid not much bigger than her and making construction-paper headbands as art projects at school. I loved it.

I attempted to make wheat-free chocolate chip cookies yesterday, and ended up with this:

They tasted pretty good, but were butt ugly. I ended up throwing them out because although you can’t see it here, they were leaving pools of butter where they sat, and that was just grossing me out. We’ll be trying another recipe soon! Suggestions welcome. Remember, though, we can’t do wheat or soy.

Finally, what you’ve all been waiting for, the blankie update. I do have one little administrative admonition first. I think it’s awesome when people want to talk about my blanket on their blogs. In fact, I love to see that other people are excited about my little project or to hear that they enjoy reading my blog. So thanks to anyone and everyone who’s done that. What I really don’t want to see is people putting pictures of my blankie on their blogs. It’s not okay to hotlink to my pictures (using an IMG HTML tag). There are two reasons for that. One is that you’re then stealing my bandwidth because your readers are downloading pictures from my site. The other is that I’d rather you send your readers over here to take a look at the blankie in the context of my blog. Who knows – some of them might want to learn more about it or stick around and read about all the other blather that goes on here. My pictures are copyrighted. They are mine. I have given permission in the past for people to use them as desktop images on their computers, and I stand by that. I know that people make honest mistakes, and if you’ve done what I just described, I know that it was with only good intentions. No harm, no foul, just let’s try not to let it happen again. Mwa!

This week’s total is fourteen squares. It’s still way behind my goal, but not all that bad considering how much time I’ve wasted on knitting and ripping sweater backs.

That’s a cat butt at the bottom of the picture. I was trying to honor the requests for visual scale items in the pictures. I’m not putting up a full-res picture tonight because I’m tired and don’t want to waste the brain power. You’ll have to go back to last week and savor the old ones if you’re that desperate. Hey, Erika! Look at the top row there – see the big square and the smaller squares on either side of it? That’s all you, baby! Thanks again!

Here’s the elusive Harry Cat taking a little stroll across the blankie.

Tomorrow is going to be a busy day. I’m teaching two back-to-back classes at the store. I’m subbing in the morning for one of the other teachers and then teaching my own class in the afternoon. I’m looking forward to it, but I feel a little sorry for Joe, who will be home with the girls for hours and hours by himself. I’m sure they’ll survive.

Oh! and one last thing! I just watched Little Miss Sunshine the other night. Hilarious! Whoever commented about the tiger hat and the scene with the grandfather – I thought of you when I watched it and laughed myself silly. Thanks. Creepy, but thanks.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 3rd, 2007 at 3:30 am and is filed under Blankie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.