The Prairie Rollercoaster

Get ready to roll

This is what I call the weather craziness we experience from time to time here in the part of the midwest. It usually happens in the fall or spring and we have been riding one for the past 2 weeks. It started with sunny days that had climbed into the 80's (in March! the 80's!) followed by a rapid plunge into the teens. We languished in the high 40's in the daytime all during this dreary, rainy week and then took another plunge below freezing the last several nights. This happened to coincide with even more rain so of course we got about 2" of snow. By midnight the ground was completely covered. By mid-morning it was half gone. At 6pm, with temps in the low 50's, it looked like this:

Now I know that my friends who live in places like Louisiana, Texas, Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts and New Hampshire have been slammed with much worse weather this week, and I hope that they are all okay. But here on the prairie, it's the extremes that can occur literally within a few hours that makes it so crazy. However, I have great reason to hope that this last minute attack by winter is over and done with. Not only did I see large flocks of robins all around today, but one of these guys was in my yard for quite a long time, singing his little heart out for a wife:



(I didn't have my camera handy so I had to borrow this picture.) I immediately set Mr. Criquette to work making the bluebird house I was promised last year. I think we have a good site for it and hopefully we will have a bluebird family move in. The day we decided on this particular lot to build our home on, we saw a bluebird perched on the sign! It was the first time I had ever seen one and he was gorgeous! We had a small flock at our bird bath early one morning a couple of years ago right after we moved in and that is when I became determined to entice them to live in our yard. I am even willing to put nasty meal worms out for them if it will get them to stay.

Because the weather has been yucky, I have begun tackling 2 projects I have dreaded. First, cleaning out this mess (aka "my office closet")

to make room for this (aka "the stash")



Second, making room on my computer's hard drive before it crashes. Apparently photo and music files eat up lots of hard drive real estate. Since I can't afford a new media-friendly computer, I bought an external hard drive to store these greedy little files on. Since I am a certified techno-idiot, I am approaching this operation slowly and cautiously, praying to my computer's guardian angel (of course computers have guardian angels! so does luggage when it's at the mercy of the airlines) that I do not cause a bigger problem than I already have. Wish me luck!

And in between these adventures, I am knitting away on the herringbone scarf and a little moss stitch cowl. The herringbone is for our office manager but there is no reason for knitting the cowl except that I wanted to get used to knitting in the round again and practice swatching in order to prepare for the surprise project involving the Cadenza yarn. I hope to knit a swatch of it and then cast on in the next few days. Here's a hint: it will involve a little voodoo!

These projects are Criquette-approved