Snowmageddon 2022, Knitting, and Darning Socks

We got a big dump of snow Sunday night into Monday morning. It basically crippled this part of central Ontario. It's been 2 decades since we had so much in one snowfall. Here in Whitby, we had the greatest snowfall of anywhere in Ontario. That's about 20" in one snowfall for those of you living in Liberia, Myanmar, or the USA.

Schools were supposed to go back to in-class learning for the first time since the Christmas holidays but in most regions, elementary schools stayed closed and secondary schools pivoted to online learning. Yesterday was the same. In all my years teaching in this region, I only remember one day that our school closed and that wasn't until about 10am when the central office realized enough staff and teachers couldn't make it in to supervise kids that had been dropped off or who could still walk to school. Otherwise, on a big snow day, buses don't run but schools normally stay open to receive students whose parents can't keep them at home.

Skip and I shovelled for almost 3 hours on Monday morning. A neighbour had used his snowblower on our sidewalk but we still had to clear our front porch, walkway, double driveway, walkway to the back yard, paved area in the back yard between the gate and our laundry room door and a bit of our deck off the kitchen from the sliding door to the steps down to the lawn. This is my laundry room door and the gate in the centre. Our little woodpile against the fence had about 40cm (15") of snow. There are two steps down to the ground.

The snow was not really wet as temps stayed below freezing but it the accumulation made it very heavy. We whittled away at it with our little snowblower, scrapers, and shovels. The snowplough had come by early that morning so there was deep heavy stuff at the bottom of the driveway. That almost killed us.

I had to quit after about 2 hours and Skip finished up the bottom of the driveway. I took a Tylenol before going to bed and was surprised that I wasn't a wreck the next day.  It was beautiful and sunny and just above freezing. 

But the damned plough had come by again early Tuesday morning so we were tasked with removing all the ice and snow at the bottom of the driveway again.

I did as much as I could and again, Skip finished up. Any bits that had exposure to the sun dried right up but made the snow quite crusty and harder to remove. My back was really sore in the afternoon and has been since then. 

I had a nice FaceTime chat with long-time friend, Francey, in Colorado in the afternoon. We email and message back and forth but it was nice to FaceTime with her.

We had about an inch of snow last night so of course the plough came by again and, of course, Skip is out there cleaning out the bottom of the driveway. 

With all the COVID restrictions, we've been cocooning at home. Skip got a bunch of groceries yesterday so we're good for several days without having to run too many errands. It's supposed to get really cold so all the nicely melting snow will freeze and make skating rinks out of all our streets. 

We are investigating getting a bigger and more powerful snowblower. A local place still has several in stock.

I didn't do a lot yesterday except finish darning some socks. Yes, I darn my hand-knitted socks. When i spend 16 - 20 hours knitting a pair, I'll be damned if I'll throw them away just because I've worn holes in the bottoms of them.

Katwijker socks are one of my favourites and I've knit at least 3 pairs of socks in that pattern.

On the most recent pair I knit, I continued the Eye of Partridge, slipped stitch pattern onto the bottom of the  heel and added nylon reinforcing yarn.

However the previous ones had worn right through. 

I picked up stitches below the worn part, and knit an eye of partridge flap beyond the worn part then grafted the flap to that area and then tacked the flap down both sides with whip stitches. It's not pretty but it did the job.

I still had remnants of a similar yarn so it actually blends in quite well.

It took me all afternoon to do both socks but I'm happy to be able to wear them again.

Knitting wise, I started the Hydrangea cowl with the KnitPicks CityTweed DK yarn. I started the project during the Bills playoff game and had to do a lot of tinking because getting the lace pattern established  required my 100% concentration and I was making a lot of mistakes. I quickly marked each pattern repeat with stitch markers which made aligning the lace pattern much easier and also easier to find mistakes. 

Unfortunately there is a mistake in the chart and written instructions which confused me for a while but I checked the errata online and figured out how to fix the problem. I got one repeat of the lace pattern done and will have to figure out how to correctly align the second repeat.