Winter in Montana — Janet Szabo

Someone at Squarespace responded to my trouble ticket and verified that my current RSS feed link was correct. I then tried each of the versions he gave me (there were three) and got the same “invalid RSS link” message from MailChimp each time, so this appears to be a MailChimp issue. I’ll let you know when it’s resolved, hopefully soon.

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We are still in the midst of winter and snow continues to fall. The husband designed our house with a very simple 12-12 pitch metal roof (ask him how he feels about dormers) which is great from the standpoint that we don’t have to worry about snow piling up on the upper roof. It gets to a certain depth and avalanches down under its own weight. The downside is that when that happens, it sounds like our house is being bombed. If the temps are warm enough, the snow will slide off the porch roof, too; if not, we may have to get out there with roof rakes and pull it down.

[We got a huge snowstorm one year the week after Christmas. The husband and I strapped on our snowshoes and went out to rake the snow off the porch roof. I was still learning the finer points of being on snowshoes and at one point, I tried to turn around and instead fell straight onto my back into a soft, fluffy pile of snow. DD#2 loves to tell this story. She says that one moment I was there and the next I was gone. I was stuck like a turtle on my back and couldn’t get up, and the only way they all found me was by following the sound of me laughing. What else could I do?]

When I came home from Tera’s on Wednesday, the husband was clearing the driveway. I thought I would help him by shoveling the snow off the porch. It tends to accumulate there when we have those big windstorms. Thirty seconds after I finished cleaning the porch, this happened:

The porch roof took the clean porch as a challenge and promptly dumped a load of snow onto it.

A meme has been making the rounds of Facebook lately that says, “If you choose not to find joy in the snow, you will have less joy in your life, but still the same amount of snow.” That’s rather how you have to approach winter in Montana. I don’t mind the snow, actually—it’s the ice that inevitably follows it in March that is so annoying, and I haven’t yet figured out how to find joy in ice.

The husband doesn’t find much joy in snow. I can’t blame him—he has to move it around.

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We have some forward progress on the new shop space:

A load of lumber was delivered yesterday afternoon. I’m not quite sure what the construction schedule is yet—the husband poured a concrete wall yesterday morning, so concrete work hasn’t shut down completely—but this is a good sign. (He noted that I should have taken the picture right away instead of after 8” of snow had accumulated on it.)

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I made the mistake of looking at the scrap bag yesterday. That was a dumb move. Looking at the scrap bag reminded me that I had a pile of scrappy half log cabin blocks (pattern in Sunday Morning Quilts) that were destined to be a quilt for our bed. We have that very quilt on our bed right now, but it’s a version made up of thirty-six 12” blocks that sits on top of the duvet cover and I want a larger one made up of 48 blocks. I counted the pile of finished blocks; there were 36. Bed Quilt 2.0 is a project I’ve worked on in the evenings when I don’t have brainpower for anything else, because it doesn’t require any measuring. You simply sew “logs” onto two sides of a block and continue mindlessly until the block is big enough to trim down to 12-1/2”.

Because I only needed 12 more blocks to finish this top, and because I had this overflowing pile of scraps staring at me, I decided to power through and just make the remaining 12 blocks. They lend themselves very well to chaining through the machine: Sew logs onto one side of the blocks, separate and press them, trim if necessary, then add blocks to the next side. It’s an alternating combination of sitting and sewing and getting up and pressing and picking out the next set of logs. Still, it took me most of yesterday to get all the blocks done, although I was also doing laundry and cleaning and a few other tasks.

If you give a mouse a cookie, she will end up making quilt blocks.