Tuesday, March 04, 2014

Thunder! Thunder! Thundersleet!

(heh. 1980s cartoon flashback. I remember watching the first run of Thundercats some afternoons after sports, sitting in the dorm common room, while I waited for my mom to pick me up from prep school)

Anyway, that was my Sunday. Oh, the morning was fine - church attendance was down, I suppose because people were afraid of what might come, but I figured that since I live all of four blocks from church, even walking home would be no problem.

After services, I got home just fine. Put my car away, started fixing lunch. About 1/2 hour after I got home, it started. I had never experienced thundersleet before. It's not that exciting: just regular sleet with the addition of thunder and lightning.

Sleet itself is weird. I don't think I ever really dealt with it before moving here. The sleet we tend to get is tiny ice pellets - they look almost like tiny glass beads. Some are clear and others are opaque white. I'm sure there's a meteorological explanation for that that I don't know. It stings if it's coming down and you're outside in it. (I noticed that when I tried to scrape it off my front porch - I didn't want a repeat of getting sleeted in like happened in December).

Midafternoon, they started scrolling school closings. (Normally, I don't watch CBS on Sunday afternoons - it's pretty much always golf - but I flipped over there out of curiosity, the local CBS affiliate is the one that does the best job of covering school closings.) I kept flipping back to CBS to check to see who'd been added.

Eventually, my college popped up there. (Though given how slick my drive was when I tried to put the trash out, I'm not surprised they closed. Most of our students are commuters).

So I did what I had kind of promised to do: clean up my messy house. (Shades of the time my mother literally made me swear on a Bible I would clean my room. She knew the swearing on a Bible thing would get me to comply.) It had gotten really bad while I was sick - it wasn't great BEFORE, but when I had no energy to dust or even to bend down and wipe up spilled tea off the kitchen floor (well, when your sinuses are hurting and making you dizzy, bending over is not such a great idea).

So I took half the day (or actually, a bit more) and cleaned house. I even scrubbed (the real way, on hands and knees with a bucket of hot soapy water) the kitchen and bathroom floors (rather than using a "Swiffer Wet" and calling it good, which is what I do most of the time).

I'm much happier when my house is clean. Only part of that is my fear of "what if someone happens to drop by? I don't want them to see what a slob I am" even though my colleagues know I'm a slob based on my office.

Then I sat down and knit. I worked mostly on something I've had going since Christmas break but never really mentioned here - I started the Mizzle shawl, which I am making out of a dark greyish blue Smooshy yarn (“Dusky Aurora”). I decided to do the “bigger” shawl (the original pattern is for a shawlette that takes only one skein, but I have two, and decided I wanted a bigger shawl.


This photo isn’t great, but it also does show that lace doesn’t look like much until it’s blocked. This shawl doesn’t have a LOT of lace in the body – it’s really just rows of eyelets every eight rows or so – but still, it will look better when blocked.



This second photo shows more of the stitches, but the color is totally off. (Taken on a longer exposure):




They didn’t pick up the trash yesterday, even though I put it out and Monday is my trash day. I guess the roads were too slick. (I didn’t even try to retrieve the can Monday evening; my driveway was so slick I was sliding around wearing tennis shoes). I called this morning and they said they’d do a Wednesday pickup, so I’m just going to leave the can there now.


1 comment:

CGHill said...

Sleet requires two cold layers of air and a warm one between them: it starts out as snow, melts, and then freezes more or less randomly as it approaches the ground. (The British Commonwealth uses "sleet" to describe a rain/snow mix, which will not hurt if it falls on you. Usually.)