This is getting old!
Supposedly it will be spring soon. According to the calendar, it has to be. Yesterday we heard geese, which Grandpa Bill means there will be bud- break in six weeks. (That’s April 16, in case anyone’s counting). Really, there were a whole lot of geese – the sky was as full of honking as a parking lot in a bad traffic jam. It was so warm last night that we were tempted to leave the winter coats home when we went out to a movie. I woke up during the night and heard rain. Good, I thought, more melting.
When I got up this morning, it was still raining. I don’t mind driving in rain and I had to get my friend June who was coming for breakfast, a chat, serious tea-drinking and knitting. When she’s around, she lives about 4 miles away. It was snowing so hard, with so much ice and slush on the road, it took about 15 minutes to get to her place. They’re now saying 12 to 16 inches of total accumulation is expected. I’m planning to settle in with a batch of handwork and, of course, more tea. I'm working on another tatting book - I've already begun laying it out!

Here's the invisible cat with her owl-eyes look.

Not much is new because we’ve been flu-ish. People said, “Aren’t you enjoying this great sunny weather?” Ummm.. no. Grandpa Bill or I (and sometimes both of us at the same time) have been contagious with something or other since just after Christmas. It seems to take a lot of time to get anything useful done!
And when I did, it was sometimes overdue, so things had to go out the door fast. I made 14 quilts and someone else made two. They filled four big black plastic garbage bags. They’re now in Kansas City (look it up on a map. Hint: it’s not in Kansas!) and they’re going to make 16 people warmer when they get their very own blankies.

We had almost enough warm weather to melt the snow. Not quite enough. And then it turned around and snowed. Apparently we’re getting lake effect snow this time.
Here’s a terrible thing Grandpa Bill did. He told someone the temperature had dropped 80 degrees overnight, from 65 to 20. Oops! Fortunately, he made that observation to a fellow scientist. Unfortunately, we were all at a funeral when he said that. Fortunately, everyone else was too pre-occupied to figure out what was wrong with his mathematics. Unfortunately, the other scientist figured out that when you take 20 from 65 you have… a lot less than an 80 degree drop…. Right?

Invisible cat

When you've come to our house, you've seen the cat dishes and the cat box, but no cat, right? That's because Primrose is an invisible cat. We see her with her tail up and happy when she wants to eat, and she spends a lot of time with Grandpa Bill, but mostly she hides. She's getting a little bit better now - Aunt Meg Shoo-shoo has seen her and once almost touched her. And she somehow knows when Davy is here with Ausable. Those times she completely disappears.

When we first got her, we put her in the pantry, and after a few days she was totally gone. It's still weird to remember now that Grandpa Bill and I even unpacked the freezer (and defrosted it) looking for her. Luckily, she wasn't there. She wasn't anywhere. We looked for her for three weeks, then four. I called all the neighbors looking for her. Two people thought they'd seen her, but the SPCA person was sure Primrose had not run away.

And that turned out to be right. She had gone down to the cellar, looked around the shop and I guess she decided that she wasn't quite ready to learn how to knit, though she was apparently interested in the shop. Then she went into the downstairs bathroom, jumped on the sink and then the hot water heater, walked along the rafters and jumped down between the inside and outside walls. Five weeks to the day after she disappeared, she yowled. Grandpa Bill and I broke down the walls between the inside and outside of the house and we still couldn't catch her. We put out food and water, though, and caught her the next day. She spent three months in a hospital cage learning how to be a cat. She sort of knows now, but it's a long learning process.

I don't know whether I told you that when we came back from the wedding last year, we saw strange footprints around the house. Something had come out of the woods, run around the house, jumped up to Grandpa's study window and then run away. Uncle Andy said it was probably a cougar or bobcat. Miss Primrose was really upset! There was only one thing that made her feel better, and that was getting as close to Grandpa as she could, and staying there.



Don't try this yourselves - not that anyone other than Grandpa is likely to have the opportunity. Miss Primrose does not like to be noticed much - except to be told "What a pretty cat!" (from a distance). As I'm writing this, Grandpa is on the bed reading, and she is snuggled up next to him.

A non-Primrose note: we got a bunch more snow, then it got really warm and quite a bit of it melted. I forgot to call the snow-plow guy yesterday, and now I don't need to!

Tuesday morning, February 1. This means we're mid-way through winter... and our woodpile (the stuff at the left end has to season until next year, unless Bill feels very very cold - it's red pine). Guess this is the year we should have covered the top with a tarp?

Hello guys! This is for you, from me. I wanted to create a way to tell you stories and show you photos even when we're not in the same room. Some of you see a LOT more snow than I do, and some don't see any at all. I took this photo last week when it was snowing, out the living-room window The snow was falling so hard, the flash went off and made the light look strange - and it was so cold, the dragon rising off the lake filled the whole sky. Today it was snowing too, but it wasn't so cold. It was more like being on the inside of a snow globe. The weather report said "no significant accumulation." I thought this really meant, "not significant compared to how you're really going to get clobbered in February!"
Hope you're staying warm and happy!
Love,
Gramma