We've been having a crazy amount of snow this year. This is our side deck. Two weeks ago today it had absolutely no snow on it. Now I'm not even sure where the steps are. We've had even more snow since I took this picture. Thank heavens they ploughed our street on Sunday or we would never have gotten out of our driveway yesterday (as it was we still got stuck a few times getting home after work - a crew of 7 or 8 people who were walking by helped push us out). I've never seen this much snow so quickly here; our climate is normally pretty dry and it would take us half the year to collect this much snow.

It's bad for walking through too. I feel like I'm wading in rough water or something. You wouldn't think so but it's slippery too since under all that snow in most places (i.e. roads, sidewalks) there are just sheets of ice so even if you get all the way through the snow there is nothing for your boots (or wheels) to grip. It will actually be a relief when the temperature drops a little further and the snow firms up. Until then we're getting lots of exercise (shovelling, trying not to fall over).

At least everything looks very pretty. Even the scraggly pine trees at the back of our lot have a romantic charm with this much snow on them.

This was dinner on Tuesday night. It was so yummy. I'd just finished shovelling all the snow off our porch (it was clear Monday night and as deep as my hand by the time we got home on Tuesday!) and I wanted something warm and filling and really, really easy.

The bread is a one-hour French bread recipe I found here. It's not quite as fluffy as a true French loaf but it's very easy and really does only take an hour. I used roughly half and half whole wheat and white flour to give it a little more substance and flavour. It smells so good while it's rising and baking. I can never wait until the loaf is properly cool to cut it so the first few slices get a bit squished.

The soup was in the freezer. We made it on Sunday and it is fantastic. It was made of leftovers which makes me feel so thrifty and clever. We had more than we could eat on Sunday so we froze the leftover soup (leftover leftovers?) for sometime when we were feeling a bit lazy. The meat and vegetables in it were from dinner the previous Tuesday: roast beef and root vegetable fries. We'd already gotten three meals out of that roast (dinner on Tuesday and two days of sandwiches for lunch) and had just the bone and some of the fries left. Here's how we made our soup:

Leftover Soup

Ingredients(-ish):

1 can plain soup (beef broth, chicken both or whatever plain soup you find in your cupboard; we used onion soup)
half an onion cut up
leftover roast beef bone
leftover roast vegetables

Instructions (sort of):

Caramelize the onions in some butter and a bit of brown sugar until they look brown and yummy. Add your soup (and whatever water it may require). Cut up about a third of your vegetables and puree the rest (I like pureed vegetables in soup; skip this part if you don't).  Add them to your soup. Cut as much meat as you can off the bone. Cut the meat into bite site pieces. Add it to your pot and toss in the bone (might as well get as much out of it as you can). Add stuff like salt and pepper and any herbs or spices you like. Cook your soup until it's hot and you're hungry. Eat it with a nice slice of crusty bread or toast with cheese cooked on top (this is really good for soaking up the broth).


It took a while for the soup to warm up from frozen and every time I tried to help it I splashed myself so I found something else to do in the mean time.


I started spinning this yarn a while ago when I lent out my lace spindle and then immediately wanted to spin a lace weight. I decided to see how finely I could spin on my wheel. The wool is left over from a felting class I took a couple of years ago and is so soft and pretty. I had one piece of a very soft grey and another of the blue-purple colourway. I wanted to get as much yarn as possible so I decided to spin both into singles and then ply them together (you can see the bobbin of grey all ready and waiting on the kate).


I managed to spin some pretty fine yarn (probably a bit too fine in places since I had several breaks and spit-joins as I was plying) and love the result of the plying. The grey mutes the colours and makes everything look so soft and pretty. I'm calling it Whisper and I've got about 155 m (170 yards) of it. I'm not sure what it is destined for yet but I think it would look nice as a delicate cowl or a smoke ring.

No, it's not mould.

A while ago I put some cuttings from my African Violets in little pots of soil to see what would happen. I've been keeping an eye on them and giving them water whenever the pots felt dry. They seemed a little secure for leaves stuck in dirt and I was hopeful that something was happening but I didn't have any proof until last week.


One of the pots now sports itty-bitty leaves at the base of each cutting. I think they look so sweet.