Snow Day!

Ok. First I'll apologize for being away so long, but you know what time of year it is, and most of my knitting is secret stuff...I AM however trying to keep up over on Nana Sadie's Place with the Reverb10 challenge for the month, so if you're wondering where I am, you might stop by there to see where my head is at the moment!
:)
This morning I woke to this:

Remind you of anything? This is terribly reminiscent of last December. The snow became a recurrent nightmare as the winter wore on. We missed so many snow days at work, that January was almost a "no-show" month!

And we close when the Community College does for bad weather, so the only good thing about snow is - I don't have to get out it in to try to navigate with the other crazy drivers out there! Whew!

I'm so glad we managed to get our KnitIn group's Christmas party done on Sunday...last year it got snowed out, remember? As always, we brought gifts for Dirty Santa, and this was the package I chose:

Anne Hanson's Leafprint Shawlette pattern and a skein of Ultra Alpaca Fine in a scrumptious deep teal. I've never knit with Ultra Alpaca, but I have a feeling I will be from now on...it feels yummy!

Now last night was a mad dash to get to the client's to pick up her records so I could work on her books this weekend, stop at the post office to check the mail, and also to (shudder) stop at the grocery store (with the rest of the crazy shoppers terrified of getting snowed in). I rarely do that. I hate to go to the store before an impending storm. However, I'd stayed away from the news sources for a bit and didn't realize the storm was coming till it was virtually here, and I was out of milk. Steel cut oats without milk isn't my idea of a great breakfast, you know? So I had to go...oddly enough, the store I chose was nothing like the closest one to me usually is (jammed) and I had only one person in line ahead of me in check out!

When I stopped at the post office, Santa had been there...okay, not really. Santa is very busy at his shop in the North Pole, but the post office has folks who are recruited as Santa's helpers, and they'd been busy, filling my post office box!

Ruinwen sent me a Yule gift that literally took my breath away!

The colors are a bit better in this photo:

Ruinwen, this shawl is amazingly stunning! Thank you so much, but thank you more for your friendship! I've been thinking about my knitting plans for 2011 and this just got moved to the top few on the list! (More on my plans in another post.) Isn't it beautiful? The graduated colors run from a pale butter thru coral to a deep purple. It's such yummy laceweight. Ruinwen phoned last night and told me she'd seen this at MD Sheep & Wool and immediately thought of me. I'm overwhelmed by her generousity and more than just a little glad that she told me the gift I sent her arrived yesterday, as well!

At the post office, there was a second box (a BIG one!) from Kim in my Chronic Stitchers group on Ravelry. She's packing up and shedding much of her stuff in a life-changing move and had emailed that she was sending me a bunch of her fabric in a RAK:

Wow, it's all so lovely...I'm looking forward to playing with this to come up with interesting things! Thank you so much, Kim!

Inside the box, was a special little ornament, a wood-burned gourd that has just fascinated me ever since I opened it:
One little meezer...
two little meezers
chasing yarn from a yarn basket!

I can't tell you how much I love this little ornament. Everytime I look at it I find something new. The detail is magnificent and my photos do not do it justice.

Thank you Kim and Ruinwen (and my Dirty Santa gifter!) The holidays are off to a bright start...

But, I wouldn't mind if we didn't get quite so much snow as last year...must put in my request with Santa!