in the bleak midwinter

schools remain-ed closed

roads were hard to drive on

frozen was my nose

snow had fallen snow on snow, snow on snow,

in the bleakmidwinter, not so long ago,

(with apologies to Christina Rosetti, who was not a whinger like me)

I'm fed up with this snow, I can't remember the last time the snow lasted this long. Usually we get a couple of inches and it's gone within days, but this stuff is tenacious, and, frankly, a bit boring now.

The kids should have been back at school today, but they may get back on Friday, maybe. The binmen haven't been able to empty the bins or the recycling boxes. Even the dog is fed up with it, cos it's so deep here ( about 18cm in places) that it chills her nether regions when she needs to do her business. Poor thing!

It's good knitting weather I suppose, but I can knit in almost any weather and need no encouragement. I'm making progress on the basic sock after untangling the yarn. I cast on from the rewound ball and "forgot" that I was knitting from the wrong end and wondered why the colour changes were upside down. But after a couple of centimetres I realised why(Doh!!), felt somewhat foolish, contemplated carrying on, realised that odd socks would drive me mad, and .....frogged it.

Thankfully it wasn't much.  Rewinding the yarn the right way didn't take long and I'm back on track now, the yarn is behaving itself and the sock is shaping up fine. I want to get this done so that I can work on more interesting/less frustrating stuff and so that I have more pairs of socks to keep my toes warm.

There's not much I can do to keep my nose warm, except have the occasional tot of whisky I suppose...and that's so difficult here in frozen Scotland.

ps that's not a picture of me being  foolish enough to go out in blizzard but a photo from the BBC