It's Raining All Over SoCal

What a dismal gloomy day we're having. It started raining at about 0845 and it's still raining almost five hours later. It's not a hard rain, so there's a good chance a lot of it will soak in instead of running off. Fortunately the storm is coming up from the south and west, so there's no chance of snow for us down here, although it's snowing and sticking at the mountain resorts. The storm is dumping snow on the Four Corners area, in particular my birthplace, Durango, CO.

This is all supposed to go away by tomorrow and we'll have a pretty, if cool, day for the UCLA-USC game. If USC (boo, hiss) wins, they'll go to the Rose Bowl. If UCLA (go, Bruins) wins and if Arizona State later loses, then UCLA will go to the Rose Bowl. Since I bleed Bruin blue and gold, you can tell where my heart is. USC is my second favorite, though. (I'm somewhat less partisan about football than basketball.)

The weather may affect the game, though, because it's being played in an outdoor stadium with natural grass. They've gotten about a half-inch of rain down there, which shouldn't affect the field too much, but if it keeps raining the field may get soft. Neither team is very accustomed to soggy fields.

Speaking of soggy fields, did anyone else see this week's Monday Night Football game, where the field was all but under water? On one kick, the ball came down and stuck in the ground. It didn't bounce at all. It was just standing there, right where it hit, pointy end embedded in the glop. All the yard lines and hash marked were washed away, too. I love watching football games played in real weather, particularly pro games. There was a fairly recent game in a driving snow storm (at Lambeau Field, maybe?), so heavy you couldn't see the far side of the field, and another in such thick fog you couldn't even see that far. Now that's football.

Last night I washed and dried a rollerball pen with a load of medium-colored clothes, mostly cotton knits. What a mess! The dryer drum had a lot of black streaks and my clothes were almost all spotted and streaked and smudged with black ink. The dryer cleaned up pretty well, so that I could dry the load in the washer. I gave up about then and didn't even try to re-wash the stained load. I'm going to do that as soon as I post this. Fortunately, a lot of the load was nightgowns and briefs, so the world won't end if they end up with a few gray splotches. However, one of the victims was one of my favorite U-2 (airplane, not band) tees and I'm a little worried about it.

I've once again put aside my Bigfoot Shawl for another project. I got two balls of Suri Dream handpainted in Rose Quartz in my recent order from Knit Picks. The box showed up on Tuesday and I managed to resist until last night (Thursday), but I caved in and started a scarf. This yarn is just beautiful. It's really soft and so light, but still warm. The colors are very good, too. The scarf is just garter stitch with slipped-stitch selvages, 24 stitches on US 11 needles. It's about 8 in. wide and I've got about 24 in. knitted already. I've weighed the ball of yarn a couple of times and I think I'm getting about an inch of scarf per gram. I'm thinking that I should order another ball of yarn and make two six-foot scarves. I'll try to get a reasonable photo tomorrow if it's sunny enough.