Mid-month

 Well, progress report for mid-month Chookshed Challenge has me completing seven squares on Elizabeth's Baltimore Album quilt, which surprised even me.  I'm doing a cross hatch quilting on it so it's easy, uniform, and goes relatively well with the open blocks.  I can do close to a whole square in an evening before my hands tell me to stop.  Can't show a picture yet.

The Temperature Tree cross stitch is more difficult than I thought.  I haven't done cross stitch for probably 45 years and my eyes are 45 years older and the technique cross stitchers must use is long gone from memory or supplies. With this craft I am just out of practice.  So I have been spending these very cold and somewhat snowy afternoons watching A Town Like Alice and old movies while I struggle along.  It's coming but just not fast enough.  I want the tree done completely because I see that as the hardest and I don't want to have to come back to it.  I want to just add leaves as the rest of the year goes by.  Probably all of January's calendar squares will be noted with a number on them signifying the temperature that day.  I'll get caught up.  I will.

Yesterday was reading day at school and I didn't decide to go till the very last minute.  It was snowy and I wasn't sure of the driveway.  We have a very steep, long and curvy driveway and it doesn't behave well in the snow. We've already had two driveway adventures this winter and I'm not eager for another.  At the very last minute (the school is about 15 minutes into the countryside with open fields and blowing snow)  I was comfortable it was ok to go.

I always ask the kids what the word "terrible" might mean here.  Is he very good at being scary terrible or is he so bad at it he is a terrible monster?  Well, for Leonardo, he just isn't good at it.  He can't scare anyone.  He decides to remedy this by finding the most scaredy cat kid and scaring him.  

The first thing this book says is "I had the idea to staple my brother's hair to his pillow" and then goes on to list 16 other things that she tries and is told she can never do again.  There was one little girl listening who couldn't see how the child in the book was so wrong.  Oh, Dear. That child's mom might need a bottle of wine with a ribbon on it. Maybe a spa day.

It's below normal cold and we've been getting snow just about every day so when I passed a display of hyacinths at the store I had to bring a pot home.  These are my all time favorite flower because the aroma fills the house.  In the middle of January it's good to smell something.   When our daughter was a toddler she came running in the house one day and said, 'the hycynthias are blooming!"  so for us they have ever more been hycyinthias.