Not spring here yet

I got a card from my sister today (because, in fact, it is my birthday), in which she hopes the snow is gone... It's not. It was supposed to get above zero today, but so far, no luck. We have some sun, but no actual warmth yet!

This is our slushy lane from my roof.

You can see the snow has come off most of the roofs. The CN Tower in the distance has been causing a bit of trouble lately, as you can read at the bottom of the history part of that article. And of course, it's on You Tube. I think we're safe now, but it's only mid-March; there's lots of winter left!

That same sister asked about the amaryllis seeds. The stalk of the plant has fallen over, exhausted and depleted, but the papery little seeds have been put into some dirt. We shall see. But this is what she told me:

I had an amaryllis that produced seeds once. I planted a few of them in pots and ended up with 2 baby amaryllis plants, one of which I gave away. The other I kept for many years. I watered it little and often. (I lost a big amaryllis plant when I put it out in the garden one spring and it rained and rained and the amaryllis bulb rotted).

It would put out a set of leaves which would stay green for quite a while, then turn yellow and die down. Then it would put out another set of leaves, a little bigger than the previous set. This went on for approximately 15 years.

[Fifteen years, folks!]

Then the large leaves died down and a new set did not appear, but the top of the bulb was green. So I put it in a dim corner and didn't water it for a couple of weeks or so. Then it put out a flower stalk and bloomed. That was about 3 years ago and it hasn't bloomed again. It didn't set seed either. But it's still making leaves.

That's my story, for what it's worth.

Well, it's off to a dark corner for this guy for a while.

Today is the last day of school till the 19th. Plans here include hanging around, watching cartoons, and maybe even going shopping tomorrow! I have the urge to use my Get out of Jail card (rule 2b), but have no idea what to buy. So maybe I'll just go look and stay out of jail.

It's snowing again

You wouldn't think a little snow would be so noteworthy at this time of year, here in Toronto. But this is a lot of snow, all at once, and just at coming-home time. I quickly dug out the sidewalk and went off with the sled to get the kids at school, and when we got back, the sidewalk was again under several inches. Since we haven't got around to taking down our Xmas lights, we turn them on in the snow, to melt little pits!

Tomorrow, as part of Freedom to Read week, I am reading something or other to my kids' classes at school. I wanted to read something they wouldn't otherwise hear, and I have letters written by my grandfather on his way to WWI; I have the story of my dad and the oranges in the Milan train station in 1965 (it's a classic, involving the train starting out of the station without him); and I have a story of smuggling jewels through Nazi border points in 1938. But, I think I might just read Katy and the Big Snow, and something from Winter Holiday. If we can dig ourselves out in the morning...

Oh, and I'll tell you about my sock yarn from the previous post. It's Regia, Canadian Color, number 4737. Lovely! I got it at the Mary Maxim store at Yonge and Eglinton when it first opened.

Thunder and snow

Once I was in a Latin class, reading Ovid, and the prof looked out at the falling snow when we heard thunder, and said, "Someone's been feeding the gods raw meat." And they've been at it again, since we woke up to huge flakes of snow, and thunder. That last time we emerged from class to find that the university had been closed and classes cancelled, but I don't think we're getting that much this time.

And for fun: My brother is a physicist who does things with foams sometimes. And he was looking around for images of foam, and came up with this little experiment. Looks like snow towards the end, there!

Snow and little hats

I can now show you the pictures we took yesterday before Stephen took the camera off for the day. Here we have the phenomenon known as Mommy-is-a-sucker. That's about 120 pounds of cargo there...

It's fine once one gets going, but it only works right after the snow falls, because if people start shovelling the snow off their walks, we grind to a halt. I made the mistake of taking the sled after school when I went to pick them up, and they had to keep hopping off and on.


Someone at our school told us about this campaign by Save the Children, to provide little wee hats for newborn babies, to keep them warm in those crucial first hours. (The e-mail sent around started with, "For some reason I think of you all as being knitters..." which is, I think, a reflection of my haranguing people to make blanket squares.)

So, to keep up the appearance that we are a school full of knitters, I made a hat.

One takes about an hour or two to make, and it uses up tiny bits of pretty stash yarn, and so these little hats are my new quicky project to work on while ignoring any other responsibilities I might have.

Hard to imagine little heads quite that little, but they say they want them 9-11 inches around! I think I can get another 3 or 4 out of one particular bag of bits. If one knitter can make 125 blankets and set her next task as 250 pairs of socks, I can knit up a half-dozen little hats...