Yup, still have power. But we're accumulating ice fast and I'm looking nervously at my tree branches. Here are some scenes from an ice day:

The ice started yesterday. I first noticed it on my Abelia bush.


But there are also little icicles off of my eaves.


And here's a shot of the icicles on my porch railing. At this point, there was maybe an eighth of an inch of ice (I took these photos yesterday afternoon). There's more now.


Here's a picture I took just a few minutes ago, of ice that had formed on my holly bush. I tried to photograph the icicles coming off the branches of my pecan tree but they would not show up in a photo.


So, during this time, what did I do?

Well, I watched a lot of weather on the television. And I wore my warm pink hoodie:


I have it close by in case the power goes out, it's one of the warmer "indoor" garments I have. (It's the Circus hooded pullover - I made it using the pattern Artful Yarns put out [I think it was a Norah Gaughan design].) The color I used is called "Sideshow" - this was a super-good deal back when KnitPicks was selling other companies' yarn and I couldn't get what would have been my first choice color, but I wanted to make the hoodie badly enough that I took a color I might not have otherwise.

I also baked a chocolate cake with coconut icing. This was the cake that used up some of the last bits of sugar I had in the house. I hope it gets warm enough on Tuesday (and the grocery stores haven't been stripped totally bare) so I can go out and restock. (I forgot to replenish the sugar after my pre-Christmas baking).



I also knit some on the latest sock. This is the Miranda-patterned sock from Nancy Bush's most recent sock book. I'm using Invicta Sheepjes for this, it's in a burgundy color.


I didn't knit more on the sock because I started watching the dvd of The Ladykillers (the original, 1955 version - the one with Alec Guinness and Herbert Lom and Peter Sellers. It was Peter Seller's first film role...). It's a startlingly good movie. It's a comedy - a very dark comedy. (If you saw the 2004 remake with Tom Hanks, it's a similar storyline, except that the original is set in London. And it's better. And it's an armored-car robbery. And there isn't the "gross" humor in it, or even any cursing. The big "shocking" line is when the little-old-lady tells the police constable to "buzz off." And the lady they rent from is a little-old-lady, a sea captain's widow, and I have to say it's tremendously satisfying how this frail-looking old lady gets the best of the criminals in the end). Most of the acting is very much "character" acting - Guinness is wearing a set of false teeth that give him an extreme overbite, and his hair is all long and stringy in the front, like a comb-back that won't stay in place, and he wears some horribly ugly sweater that looks like a smaller sweater that was taken to bits and had gussets inserted in it to fit a larger person. And Peter Sellers is a "Teddy Boy" who kind of falls over his own feet. And there's a fake Colonel who's a con artist, and the stereotypical Big Dumb Guy. My one complaint is that Lom, who played a gangster-type, seems to keep switching accents - I could not tell if he was supposed to be American, or British, or Eastern European. (I know the actor was really from Hungary so it may have simply been an accent problem).

Anyway, I found myself watching more and more intently, and knitting less and less, as the movie went on.

I have another Ealing comedy to watch some time - Kind Hearts and Coronets, another Guinness movie.

I've come to the conclusion that I like older movies better, and I tend to like movies where most of the characters are "character" types rather than "pretty people" types - the character types are more interesting to me.

It's also interesting how the scriptwriters of The Ladykillers managed to make the criminals somewhat sympathetic characters. One even feels a bit sorry for the cowardly "Colonel" and for Peter Seller's character....