Monday, January 11, 2010

Adios, 2009!


Boy, am I glad that 2008 and 2009 are over. Those will be remembered as "the cancer years" here at chez Artz. I hope they're the last. I didn't make any New Year's Resolutions. I never do because I'm not good at following through on things like that.

We had a lot of snowy weather here over the holidays and it's been really cold and windy most of the time. I took the photo above Friday morning from the front of our house. There's a scientific term for that bar of light going straight up from the rising (in this case) or setting sun but it escapes me at the moment. I've seen several of them this winter so it must not be a truly rare phenomena.

The photo below shows our driveway on December 17th, the day after we received 16-18 inches of snow. We don't often get such large snow events here in Washington County. In fact we don't often get much precip at all. We refer to this area as the desert of Maryland. The rain and snow usually go east or west of us but seldom make into the Great Hagerstown Valley. Last summer was also an exception and I guess it just carried on into winter.


It was certainly beautiful, both while falling and the day after. This is a cedar along our driveway. I took lots of photos during the storm and the day after. You can see more on Flickr. Fortunately I don't have to go out and work in this kind of weather. I'm sure I'd sing a different song all together if that were the case.


Here's the snow piled on the shrubbery in front of our house the morning after. It was breathtaking. It was a very light and fluffy snow because of the extreme cold and therefore didn't cause any power outages in our area. And it shoveled easily. We don't do a lot of shoveling because we have all-wheel-drive Subarus and don't have much trouble making it up and down our driveway despite the little hill we have to go up to get to the house. So we only shovel paths to the cars.


In knitting news, I joined the 10 Shawls in 2010 group on Ravelry. My first shawl is the India Stole by Sylvie Beez. I'm using Perchance to Knit Lace in the Lagoon colorway.

I'm not going to obsess over getting all 10 done. My queue is pretty ambitious so I'll do what I can and be satisfied with what I get done. I've also been watching "Cranford" and "Return to Cranford" on PBS Masterpeice Classics and enjoying it immensely. What an amazing cast!

3 comments:

OYF said...

Might I request you check your feed to Google Reader to see why I am required to click on your blog entry and go to it to read, rather than have it scroll in the Reader? Or is it a setting of mine? A mystery.

OYF said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
ceilithe said...

The India stole is absolutely gorgeous. Love the color!!
I so related to your "adios, 2009!" entry, as I also battled breast cancer in 2008: I got a mastectomy on my 50th birthday in December :) Happy to say I'm also a survivor, and patiently got through my treatments thanks to lots of destressing knitting.
I wish you continued good health and happy knitting :)