If you see the book I am reading, you will note that I am not reading Outlander any more. I haven't finished it, either, which is my usual reason for not reading something any more. I just lost interest in it.

It is not that this is a dull book. There has already been blood and gore and smelly men and horses and magic and ghosts and mystic rituals, and I'd hardly gotten started. It is not as though my life is so thrilling that I found myself thinking, "Oh, yeah, pagan dancing in bed sheets followed by eruption of historic battle... did that last Tuesday myself, what a yawn." It just didn't hold my interest for some reason. Perhaps I wasn't in the right mood. I'll try again some time in the future.

Since I have been under the weather this week and skipped the gym and both my rehearsals, my life has been even less eventful than usual. I scrubbed the kitchen and the bathrooms and swept the front porch yesterday, met a new friend of #2 daughter's, gave in and listened to gossip, and had a spirited discussion with my husband over whether he could roast chicken under the broiler in a pair of pyrex pans or whether he might not be better off just fixing the blasted oven -- that was about the thrill level for the week.

Don't think I am complaining. I've had enough excitement in my life to be able to appreciate the quiet life.

Having more free time than usual, though, I checked out the sewing blogs, and even followed the links to the fashion blogs. I know you have been wondering what the new spring trends are going to be. I've already admitted that I dress for work every day in something like a boy's school uniform or the sports kit of Prince Edward in the 1920s, so you would not be expecting to hear it from me. But since I have gained this knowledge, I will gladly share it with you.

The spring collections are showing lots of neutrals. You will recall that the Wall Street Journal explained last year that they were doing spring in beige because they were afraid that there was no other way to get people to buy new clothes, than to make their sherbet shades from previous years completely outmoded. Well, if you got into beige last year, then you are good for this year. There is also a lot of white, and white on cream, and the occasional daring foray into fawn and tobacco or gray. The colors are being described as "watercolor" shades -- clear pastels, mostly, with some saffron or cinnabar in the Asian- and African-influenced stuff.

"Ethnic influences," they continue to say, as though Asia were ethnic and Europe was not.

Anyway, the basic shapes are simple, but there is a lot of interesting seaming going on. Pleats, tucks, draping, fabric origami, interesting bindings and edgings... Stand-up collars and no collars at all are being seen, and kimono sleeves, lots of T shapes. Lapels are simplified or lacking. There is still a good deal of romance and a little bit of the military look, with Empire waists continuing to show up alongside the Napoleonic jackets. Sometimes even under the Napoleonic jackets. There are soft wide pants and teeny narrow pants, but last year's odd formal shorts seem to be gone. This year's weird look appears to be the trapeze dress with bubble hem, in case you want to be sure to sport the season's weird look.

If you were seeking weird knitting, look no further than the new issue of The Anti-Craft, which is specializing this season in knitted replicas of the reproductive system. Not looking for weird? How about this very charming baby sweater? Note the wrap front and interesting edgings livening up the simple Asian-influenced shape. I'd say this was right in fashion.

I've been thinking about the concept of common knowledge. The topic was thrust upon me by three events.

On Monday, as I tidied up the store, I did the usual Monday moving of the books about Mexico. I have mentioned my colleague JJ before. She works on Saturdays and I usually don't, so I haven't worked with her in some time, but we have a little unspoken interaction every week. She moves the books on Mexico to the South America shelf on Saturdays, and on Mondays I move them back to North America. I once mentioned, in the course of a contrived conversation, that Mexico was actually in North America and wasn't that surprising, but she persists in thinking that Mexico is in South America, and so we move the books back and forth.

On Tuesday, in my evening class, we were discussing the difference between "attain" and "obtain." It was in the homework, so we had thought about this ahead of time, and someone asked me what dictionary I used. "Oh, I don't use a dictionary," I said. My classmates stared at me, and I thought of my unabridged dictionary at home, which I love. "Well, I clarified, "not for words like that." The staring continued, as it was borne in upon me that for these intelligent women, "attain" and "obtain" were not ordinary everyday words that no one would bother using a dictionary for.

"I'm feeling really bad about this," I mumbled, "so maybe we could move on."
"Are you running for President?" asked a soft-spoken lady to my right.

Then yesterday evening a customer asked for a poster on mathematical terms. "Like there's the addend and the sum," she said, "but what do you call it for subtraction?"

That Man had just arrived, and he is an accountant, so I deferred to him on that question. He came up with "subtracand," which sounds like a mysterious far-off land, but that didn't seem quite right. I sprang to the computer and googled it, and sure enough, it wasn't right. Our next thought was "subtractand," which turns out to mean something altogether different. The answer, it turns out, is "subtrahend" for the thing you subtract and "minuend" for the bit you subtract it from. There were cries of "Of course!" because that is something that at least some of us had learned at some point.

Now, the thing about Mexico is understandable to me. When JJ and I were kids, we were never taught that Mexico was part of North America. North America consisted of Canada and the U.S. Mexico was in Central America or Latin America, and Greenland was never even mentioned. The solar system changed its order since then, too, and then its number of planets. The number and content of the food groups has changed. The Periodic Table of the Elements is different. Things have been proven and disproven. The names and borders of countries are different. So a lot of common knowledge, if you are old enough, has changed.

The thing about attaining and obtaining also makes sense. I find words interesting, and think about them. There are lots of things on which I am woefully ignorant. I was, apparently, the last person on the planet to find out about Paris Hilton's underpants. We tend to think that things we find interesting are common knowledge, things everyone should know, while things we don't care about are arcane. The comment about presidents, after all, relied on our all knowing that Biden had put his foot in his mouth while kicking off his presidential campaign. Apolitical people might not know that.

And the subtrahend issue also makes sense. We may have learned that sometime in the past, but it doesn't come up in conversation often enough for us to keep it in the forefront of our minds. Plenty of things fall into the category of stuff that is common knowledge, but most of us would still have to look it up.

And yet we continue to behave as though there were a pool of common knowledge that we all ought to have. Otherwise, of course, we couldn't talk to one another at all. But we draw conclusions about people based on our assumptions about common knowledge. I remember, when I was a grad student, one of the profs coming in with a sigh of disgust. He had given his students a test of general knowledge and they didn't know anything! He gave a couple of examples: they didn't know who Paul Newman and Gypsy Rose Lee were!

Paul Newman, boys and girls, was a movie star a long time ago, and Gypsy Rose Lee was a stripper. So this guy was basing his judgement of the ignorance of his students on their knowledge of the celebrities of his youth. In fifty years, will you consider people well-informed only if they know who Paris Hilton was?

There is a position in the education community that says that there is no longer any point in teaching facts. There is so much information, this point of view says, that the only thing worth teaching is how to look things up. I can't agree with that. I think there still is a shared body of common knowledge, or at least that there ought to be. We argue about this a lot in education circles, in the context of what should be taught.

But in daily life, courtesy demands some decision about whether or not a thing is common knowledge. It is not courteous to use words like "subtrahend" to people who don't know them. I don't use "rodomontade" in daily conversation, myself, though I would not have had any qualms about "attain." It isn't courteous to correct people who think Mexico is in South America -- though obviously I can't leave the books in the wrong section. It's bad enough that our Saturday shoppers think we don't know any better than that.

Our assumptions about what is common knowledge may actually divide us. We are more relaxed in speaking with people when we do not have to worry that a word choice or an allusion will be missed -- or, worse, seem to be intended to make the hearer feel lessened. People who know for sure what SIMMs and DIMMs are end up talking to one another, and those who are clear on SKPssos and K2togs talk to one another.

Speaking of K2togs, Pipes is down to one sleeve's ribbing and the collar. #2 daughter is coming down next weekend for an optometrist's appointment, and I hope to have it finished by then.

Although it is possible that she will not be down next weekend. I hear from #1 son, who saw it on Facebook, that someone called the eye doctor and mentioned that he needed contact solution. I had done just that, but I spoke to the optometrist herself, who was not the one who mentioned it on Facebook. Still, I had mentioned all this to #2 daughter via IM that morning, so she may have called back later to change the appointment -- there was concern, apparently, that Chinese New Year was a bad time for her to be away from the office -- or, indeed the optometrist might have told the person who posted it on Facebook.

At the very least, we can be assured that modern technology gives us the opportunity to turn rumor into common knowledge faster than ever before.

I have come back here, even though I should be starting those huevos rancheros for the boys, because I simply must share some cool knowledge via the internet. If you click right here, you will find free Burda sewing patterns to print out.

Last year when I was reading The Time Traveler's Wife for Book Club and Knit the Classics, I read a rather agitated post by someone who felt we should all read Gabaldon's Outlander first, because she had "done it first."

I took this to mean that The Time Traveler's Wife was a takeoff on Outlander in some way. Having read a few chapters, I can assure you that this is not the case. There is no more reason to be agitated on behalf of Gabaldon than on behalf of Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, Michael Crichton, Connie Willis, or anyone else who has ever incorporated time travel into his or her books.

Maybe the agitated one meant that Gabaldon had kicked off the fashion for time travel romances. There was a spell when half the romance novels in the Advance notices were time travel stories. Then vampire romances came into fashion. It looks as thought the next big thing will be stories including mythological figures. Aphrodite taking a hand in the romance.  That sort of thing. Will we all get agitated on behalf of Thornton Wilder or Peter David? I think not.

At my last SWAP report I said I intended to stick to my original plan even though it meant completing 14 pieces before I could count success, doing things beyond my current level of skill, and finishing my fall-and-winter wardrobe in May.

I have come to my senses.

I made this nice simple top from TNT pattern McCall's 4261. I will be making one more top that is within my abilities, and then I will be finished. 

My first SWAP was intended to allow me to go to church and to parties without looking like a bag lady. It has accomplished this already, and will be all the better once I finish it up.

However, I still attend work looking like ... well, not a bag lady. Maybe a zookeeper?  A clerk at Best Buy? I wear khakis every day. In the summer, I wear polo shirts or maybe a camp shirt, and in the winter, I add a sweater. Not, generally, one of my lovely handmade sweaters, but a machine washable pullover from Lands End. I am essentially wearing a uniform.

At my work, I may find myself climbing ladders, unloading a truck, carrying a baby around, cleaning up nasty dog and child messes, or sitting on the floor.

It makes sense that I would dress like a zookeeper.

But I do not think that this reflects my Essence. My working wardrobe does not Express my Inner Self.

So I intend to make a spring/summer SWAP that will coordinate well with my fall-winter SWAP, and be made of things I can wear while rearranging the math wall.

This seems implausible at the moment. However, I still have one more top to make for the first SWAP. In the course of making it, I will muse on SWAP Stage II, and come up with a clever plan.

Yesterday, I ran into a sewing blogger who is taking part in the 2007 SWAP contest and blogging about it in a really impressively organized way. She has numbered the 11 pieces of her SWAP and color coordinates the type when she writes about them, and lists "What Went Wrong" for each piece, with all the challenges she met and how she overcame them, and I was just so impressed I can't tell you. I also cannot find her again to link you to her. If I encounter her again someday I will let you know, but for the moment it is enough to know that she is out there, doing such a good job.

   I've been feeling a bit under the weather. I have been trying to reject this false claim from Satan --

I should explain. I now belong to a gym frequented primarily by weightlifters, but some years back I went to aerobics class at a more distinctly coed place, where we often had lively conversations in the changing room. One day, a lady was telling us about her interaction with a doctor at the hospital.

"He told me my little ol' husband had had a heart attack, and I told him, 'That is a LIE from SATAN, and I do not accept it!""

The story went on to say that her husband had further tests and there was no damage to his heart. Since that time, I have always taken that as my first line of defense against any hints of feeling puny: I just refuse to accept that lie from Satan.

It doesn't always work. However, I already had a sort of irritating little upper respiratory thing last month and I don't feel that I deserve another, so I am rejecting it as hard as I can.

I stayed home from church and took it very easy on Sunday, and went to bed early last night, and am generally doing my best to stave off whatever virus is attacking me.

And this is why, even though it is Front Porch Week on the Grand Plan, I have not been out there scrubbing the railings and pruning the shrubs. People have, in the past, complained that having Front Porch Week in the first week of February is inconvenient, but we are expecting it to go up to 50 degrees this week, before snowing again next week, so I should be able to get it done. Not today, though.

I did take some pictures, figuring that I could do the planning.  My porch is so long and narrow that it hardly counts as a porch, but it is lovely to sit on in the spring and fall, so we made a nice long bench a couple of years back during Front Porch week, and we keep a citronella candle out there. I don't believe I will do anything but clean it this year.

The one thing I would like to do is to build a smaller version of the bench for folks to put their feet up on. Last year's attempt to build the chaise from pallets has discouraged me, but I may try to see if I can get the guys to rally round and help. Hitherto, we have just been putting our feet up on the porch rail, but you can see that this gives us rather an acute angle. You wouldn't want to do it in a skirt.

On clement evenings, though, it is very nice to sit out here with a glass of iced tea, chatting or reading or working the crossword.

And it now occurs to me that a hanging planter would be nice, too. I do usually put a pot of shade tolerant plants on the bench, but there is no point to planting anything at the moment.

The front garden is also not at its best just now.

It is hard even to plan a garden when it is under the snow. Is that where the hosta lives? you ask yourself. I know there's some lamastria over by that azalea...

I know that this garden tends to look gorgeous in May and otherwise not as gorgeous, so I am thinking that I should ask the nursery folks what annuals I should plant to go with the spring-flowering perennials.

 It is so shady, though, that the answer is likely to be "impatiens." So in May I have columbines, violets, pinks, phlox, and other stuff in rich profusion, and all the rest of the warm season I have impatiens and greens.

And then of course I have snow and prickly twigs.

It is nice to remember how it looks in May, though.

Here is the first completed sleeve for Pipes. I ended up doing a very conventional sleeve. After all, there are reasons that a particular type of sleeve becomes conventional: comfort, ease of movement, attractiveness.

Whether #2 daughter will be able to wear this soon, even if I complete it soon, is another question. She has injured her shoulder. There is talk of an MRI. A doctor incautiously mentioned surgery.

Following the resultant frantic phone call, my husband told us a story.

"Speaking of pain," he said, "I once fell out of a tree."

When he was a boy, he fell out of a tree. The gestures accompanying the story suggest a tall tree. He couldn't stand or walk, or even crawl. So he dragged himself -- he demonstrated this for us on the living room carpet -- under the house and stayed there for a couple of hours.

This is what houses are like in his country. They are up on legs like Baba Yaga's house, so there is plenty of room for a hurt child to hang out under the house.

Later, #1 son said the great part about this story was the matter-of-fact way his dad told it.

"It's as though I told you I had a rock in my shoe and you asked what I did, and I said I took the rock out of my shoe," he said.

Naturally, a child who had seriously hurt himself and was possibly paralyzed would hide for a couple of hours under the house.

At last, his mother came and found him. She put him in front of a fire for several more hours, and he was fine after that.

This last bit of the story was told in a QED sort of voice. The boys and I were silent. Was this meant to reassure us that #2 daughter's injury would be okay? Perhaps it was to show the folly of seeing a doctor and having an MRI? Maybe she ought to sit in front of a fire for awhile?

My husband had already asked #2 daughter how old the doctor was. He was in his thirties, she thought. He advised her not to allow this doctor to perform any surgery, since he would just be practicing on her.

We still don't know the moral of the story. I hope #2 daughter will be able to put on a sweater by the time I finish Pipes.

We needed soap chez fibermom, so I made some yesterday. This is melt and pour soap, the soapmaking equivalent of cake mix -- all the chemistry is done for you, so you just get to determine the scent, color, shape, and so on. In other words, the fun stuff.

I made wintry jewel tones with warming scents composed of ginger, white tea, sandalwood, oakmoss, and lily in varying quantities and combinations.

Assuming that you have a good collection of tools on hand, this is about $3 worth of first-quality all-vegetable soap. That is, one bar of ordinary store-bought. It is cheaper to make the stuff yourself from lye and oil, but that is a very tedious process, and not easy, either.

I intend to send some of this to my xangaland secret pal.

Another thing that I did yesterday was to get my craft cupboard into some semblance of order.

The plastic bins there -- green, blue, and clear -- hold all my yarn. While this is not the kind of stash that will impress anyone in the knitting blogs, it is enough to cover my knitting needs for the year.

The clear boxes hold Peruvian wool for Erin and there should be enough left over for some good small projects when I finish. One of them also has some lovely laceweight for a shawl.

The green bins hold cotton, enough for the Bijoux Blouse and a red blouse as well. The blue bins have Telemark -- the rest of Pipes's yarn, plus. Actually, Pipes is near enough to completion that I clearly bought too much of that navy yarn for it. Like, enough for another sweater.

I also have half a dozen skeins of sock yarn.

I should get me one of those "Knit From Your Stash 2007" buttons.

Have I ever shown you how I sort my needles?

I stick them into pencil bags and put them in a binder. I put them in numerical order and write the size on the pocket with a Sharpie. I have been doing this for a decade or two, and haven't had to replace my pencil bags yet. I got them for a quarter apiece in a back to school sale back in the dim past.

This method works very well, allowing you to keep all the needles of the same size together. So when you need  the sleeve needles for your sweater, you can just pull them out and replace the 32" needles, and if you need to switch to dpns, you have them handy as well.

I once won a prize for sharing this idea.

The craft cupboard was getting pretty heinous. #2 son had remarked on it, and it takes a lot of mess to get #2 son to remark on it. I did not take any "before" pictures for you, I'm afraid, but here you can see the Heinous Knitting Basket, which gives you an idea.

It is now tamed as well.

#1 son said, "We are just a messy family. We've always been a messy family."

I assured him that I would work on it.

"I'm messy, too," he said in a forgiving sort of voice. I did not contradict him.

I had to take scissors to this basket, I am sorry to say.

In addition to cleaning things, I worked on Erin and Pipes. Erin has gotten a bit longer, but doesn't look very different from yesterday. Pipes is really at the point at which I need some decisions on the sleeves. You can see it below, reposing in the now no longer heinous knitting basket.

Assuming that there is word from #2 daughter on the length she wants for her sleeves, this sweater could be finished in the next couple of weeks.

Depending, of course, on how much time I spend on Erin.

Today is Super Bowl Sunday, of course. An excellent opportunity for knitting. A knitter who does not care at all about football can sit companionably with many shouting and grunting guys, and get her knitting done, and not feel cross that she is having to spend her whole day with football.

Southern Living is showing deviled eggs cunningly decorated to look like footballs. I will not be doing that, as there are no girls coming today. Guys are happy with carryout pizza and hot wings, and that is all they will be getting.

Back when there were girls here on Super Bowl Sunday, I used to make cute food. Football-field cakes with little M&M football players. 7-layer dip with nicely-arranged vegetables. This sort of thing is wasted on boys.

Here is what Fiona did yesterday.

Toby, the other dog, joined her in doing this.

Here is what the boys did yesterday.

They are playing with their sister and brother-in-law. Son-in-law has a character named Okra, which I find extremely funny.

I did chivvy the boys into helping me tidy the living room.Just enough, I said, that we wouldn't be embarrassed if someone came over.

They wordlessly surveyed the snowy landscape.

It could happen, said I.

They put in the five minutes needed. And the Schwan's man surprised us by appearing. I bought ice cream from him, since my husband had been advised to eat it during his last doctor visit. Weren't they glad we had tidied up? I asked the boys as they put away the ice cream. It had spared us the humiliation of having the Schwan's man find us with sports equipment all over the floor.

I think the boys grunted a little bit.

Enjoy your Super Bowl Sunday. I am told that we are supporting some bears in this conflict. I hope to make some good progress with my knitting.

In the store yesterday, there was a customer who was filled with outrage. She was outraged about NCLB, and after all, who isn't? She was also outraged that she had been "Highly Qualified" in Illinois but would have to take more tests to reach that designation in our state.

I was commiserating with her. So often people are expressing outrage over things that I can't agree with them on for fear of offending other customers. It was nice to be able to agree and sympathize.

The Empress had a customer the other day who -- having heard the end of some of those Are We Related? pleasantries she often shares with customers, being from here -- started off his talk with her by saying, "Speaking of genealogy, do you know what 'Caucasian' really means?"

It could have been worse. He went on to tell her about the Lost Tribes of Israel and how Jesus was rich, what with having traveled the world with Joseph of Arithmea, built a house for Mary in England, and cleaned out the copper mines of New York.

She was glad when he left.

My outraged customer, however, moved on to express outrage that she had seen, in a workshop she had attended, a fellow teacher sitting and ---

At this point she mimed knitting. Not very well. But well enough that I was prepared when the word burst forth; "Knitting! The whole time!"

A teacher over at the laminator chimed in that she had seen someone knitting in church!

I had to defend knitters.

The thing is, people who don't knit think that the knitting means we are not paying attention. This might be true with Erin (at right), or any other project that requires close attention to a chart, but a nice long spell of stockinette? We can pay rapt attention while our hands are busy. Didn't Miss Marple and Miss Silver catch all those little discrepancies and clues while knitting endless quantities of matinee coats and wooly fascinators?

I wouldn't knit in church, at work, or in any other situation where someone might be offended by the possibility that I wasn't paying attention. A workshop? Could be. Not if I were presenting it, but if it were the kind where you sit still and listen for several hours, why not?

(I've come back adfter Ozarque's comment to point out that plain knitting doesn't have to be looked at, so I can make normal eye contact. If that weren't true, I would feel differently about it.)

I don't generally hesitate to work on a zombie project when I have guests, and my only problem with knitting in the movies is that it can be too dark to catch a dropped stitch.

Miss Manners says it is okay to knit during conversations, as long as you don't explain that you are doing it so as not to waste time.

But there it is. A harmless knitter unwittingly adding to the overall level of outrage in the world. Perhaps you and I have done the same.

Craftymommavt claims that they are having a heatwave of 20 degrees up there in The Frozen North where she lives, and she probably wouldn't even call this snow, but this is real winter weather to us.

She actually specified "20 degrees above zero" as though 20 degrees below zero were a possibility, and some of us might be confused. I thought temperatures like that were found on other planets, mostly.

Here is my backyard. Isn't it pretty with its blanket of snow?

But, see, here is the front. That is supposed to be a road out there, not a blanket of snow.

I did some serious bundling up. Thoroughly encased in wool and denim and #1 son's old running shoes, I headed off to work.

I won't say I enjoyed it, and my face still hurts (windburn, maybe?), but it wasn't that bad.

Fiona wanted to come with me. As you see, she is dressed in fur, and therefore doesn't mind the cold at all.

This is the cemetery, the middle part of my walk to work. As you can see, the whole blanket of snow thing was going on here, too, so the paths were gone.

Someone had been there before me, though.

The cemetery is the hub of the neighborhood, and all the kids can go there and then back out to the other streets without going on any busy roads.

But these particular footprints went down to the goosepond, so it was apparently someone out for a contemplative walk in the snow, not a person trying to get somewhere.

The main road was all brown mucky slush. This was good for the drivers, but much less picturesque.

Yes, actually, this is a main road where I live. It is a highway. See it over there to the left? The little line of brown mucky slush with a car on it?

You know it's pretty rural here.

I spent the workday in solitude, except for Miss Thelma and her husband, who came in for a Black History Month bulletin board. If it seems odd to you that Miss Thelma has a husband, then you are not from around here.

Some older ladies get to be Miss First Name, and it doesn't matter at all whether they have husbands.

I came home early and got back to work on Erin. This is a sweater that I put down last May in order to make some cotton sweaters, and then some kitchen gear, and some hats, and then some other wool sweaters, and what with one thing and another I never picked it up again till last night.

I think it is a mistake to do this, as so often your gauge is a bit different after the break, or you have lost some of the details of the directions, or forgotten what size needles you used for the ribbing, or what have you.

However, I got about an inch of it done, and it looks fine.

I did not spend the night at the store.

Along about 4:00, I got a call from the northern branch saying that they were going to shut down and go home. My husband (and possible ride-giver) hadn't made it home yet and had his phone turned off, so I decided to walk home, in spite of the cold and snow.

I tried to enjoy being the first to step in the new-fallen, and indeed still-falling snow as I walked past the hulks of cars that had slid off the road and into the walls and ditches. Trudging up the hill, I reminded myself that it wasn't even a hill compared to Sighkey's town. At the crest of the hill, there were children sledding, to remind me that people go out in that stuff on purpose, to play. A carful of young men stopped and offered me a ride. You know how you look at people and try to decide whether they are dangerous, based on absolutely no reliable evidence? Well, it is all the more difficult when you are simultaneously trying to determine whether they are good at driving in snow. I thanked them but declined. Heading down the hill, I was thankful that I wasn't having to drive down a snowy hill. Then I cut through the cemetery and along my road, and made it home before my husband.

#2 son made me a cup of tea and suggested that not having to walk home in the snow was one of the points of cars.

We settled in to watch the snow falling, something which is quite lovely when you don't have to go out in it.

My husband was delayed by a car ahead of him. It had made it halfway up the hill and gotten stuck. He explained carefully about all the reasons that the driver had gotten stuck, and by then I was too tired of the story to ask how they had all gotten free.

School is canceled today. I will be bundling up and walking -- with more suitable shoes -- to work.

That's my 30 minutes. For both days.