Coming home today I had my first strange encounter on the path. I guess the weirdos have other places they prefer to go when it’s minus 20° outside. This afternoon it was more like 12°; I’m walking down the goat trail (steep side path, not pictured above) and I’m trying to stay on the rocky parts near the bottom because the path is muddy and I’m wearing my favourite red shoes. Down at the bottom where the goat trail meets up with the paved path there’s a large outcropping of rocks that the path diverges around, and the whole thing gets pretty steep right at that spot. Today there’s a man, about 55, with shoulder length white hair, a biker jacket and well-worn cowboy boots, and he’s lying down on the big rock and smoking a cigarette. So I grudgingly walk around, gingerly stepping on the small rocks and piles of last year’s newly revealed fallen leaves in order not to muddy my shoes. I’m also carrying an orange plastic bag full of solvent-soaked garbage (to throw away at home so that it didn’t stink up the studio at school, where my students are used to dealing with less toxic methods of printing than the ones I use). The bag of garbage may or may not have inspired the weirdness that followed.

So I’ve passed the guy, and I’m about to step down the last two steep rocks to the ground and he says, “It’s slippery”. “Yup”, I say, and keep walking. Then he says (from behind me, now) “If you slipped you’d get your ass all muddy”. “I won’t slip” I say, speeding up a little.

Then he says, “You should have brought your bag of diapers, you might need them”.

Seriously. BAG OF DIAPERS?

Not all that keen on having a confrontation with a stranger out in the woods, I just said “I’m sure I’ll be fine” and hightailed it outta there. What I wanted to say? Dude, there are thousands of pictures on the internet of women falling in mud and getting their bums all dirty. Surely there are quicker ways to satisfy your muddy diaper fetish than lying in wait in the woods hoping for someone to take a tumble. And on a Saturday, too, when the traffic out there slows to a trickle. Sheesh.

Here are some pictures of graffiti on the path that’s slowly being revealed by the retreating snow. I’m really hoping that the last one will turn out to say “Pocky”.

When the ice has melted just enough to allow the shrinking snow person to slip into the pond and away, it will be spring.

For a woodcut.

Time to set it aside and start the other foot.

The pattern is Ha’Penny Loop by Staceyjoy Elkin (again; she’s one of my favourite designers, can you tell?). Yarn is Berroco Cuzco, same stuff I used for the legwarmers.

So here's something new, started this morning with the handspun I got from Stacie recently. There’s no pattern, just a bog standard toe-up construction with a simple diagonal lace that will spiral up the leg. I’m using 2.75mm needles for these rather than the usual 2.25mm, and marveling at the difference half a millimetre makes to the speed of a project.

What’s that other knit in the background, you ask? Why, that would be the warm and cozy and gigantic cowl I finished just in time for the temperatures to rise above freezing. Typical. I’m counting on the end of March to provide me with some opportunity to wear it. Pictures tomorrow.

Because we have no bindery equipment here, I brought up this somewhat primitive trimming apparatus that my dad made for me back in the 1990s when I was doing a lot of bookbinding but didn’t have any money or any tools. Propped up on one end (the end you can see here, with blocks under it to keep it steady) a pair of backing boards can be slid inside and the book clamped for rounding the spine. At the other end it’s got a nice high smooth wooden wall that’s used for a guide to keep the blade nice and straight for trimming the clamped book; it uses an old blade from a plane with leather wrapped around it, and back when I was trimming twenty textblocks a day with this thing I’d wrap my hand in leather and fabric as well and still get blisters in two lines across all four fingers. It’s a grueling job, but it does the trick.

Using this old trimmer again has me really looking forward to getting the new (to me) Chandler & Price paper trimmer up and running once I’m back home (remember how I was going to get the base sanded and painted over the February break? Didn’t happen). Did I mention that I’m planning to spend my whole summer down in the basement just cutting up books all day? Any books I can get my hands on. Because I can, that’s why.

Across the road the carnage was worse, and the steep, rocky little goat trail that the students walk (us middle aged old coots whose best years of cardiac health are behind us take the longer, more gently sloping path) is now a clearing big enough for a game day tailgate party. I can’t imagine what they might be building in such a spot, although there is a sewer at the top of the path. Where the path used to be, that is.

Phrases I need to work on saying less often, all of which show up here in my video narration, include:

1) adding “right now” onto the end of an otherwise perfectly finished sentence;

2) “. . . I tell you what” (picked up while living in Georgia, reinforced by a recent King of the Hill binge);

3) “Jesus Murphy”.

I’m clearly some kind of hayseed. At least I didn’t swear. Wait, is one of those a swear?