When we moved to South Dakota in 2018, Tara decided to crochet a temperature blanket as a way to celebrate our first year in Rapid City. For the uninitiated – and unless you’re a pirate or a drug addict, you’re probably unfamiliar with hooks and needles – this involves knitting or crocheting a blanket using colored rows to indicate each day’s temperature.
She began this project on March 19, 2019…and finished today, which happens to be 810 days after we last actually lived in South Dakota.
Why did it take her 2,070 days? For starters, crocheting (“cro-shitting,” as Tara calls it, which always makes me laugh out loud because I have the humor of a 12-year-old boy) 365 rows is an extremely labor-intensive task that requires keen eyesight and a steady hand. Plus, it’s not like she was cro-shitting every single day for 5 years and 8 months. She took summers off, because who wants a heavy blanket on their lap when it’s hot out?
Other times, she’d put it aside because her fingers and wrists grew sore. Or she got bored. Or she wanted to garden or read a book. Then there was the whole moving-to-another-new-state thing. It’s been a busy few years! Even when she did work on it, there were occasional disruptions to contend with. Like cats who have zero respect for personal boundaries.
In other words, cats.
But my wife’s got moxie, and she never gave up. This morning, she finally – at long last – finished the blanket.
Just one problem: it’s roughly the size of a school bus…
“Guess I shouldn’t have used a double-chain stitch,” she said. I have no idea what a double-chain stitch is, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and agree with her anyway.
I guess we need to make friends with some NBA players and offer up the guest room.
Be that as it may, she’s proud of her accomplishment, as she should be. And guess what? Now she’s planning a temperature blanket to celebrate our first year in Wisconsin.
Presumably using a single-chain stitch this time.
And if it takes as long as the first one did, she should finish up just as we’re celebrating our two-year Michigan anniversary.
Now that the weather has cooled off and we’ve had some rain again, that can mean only one thing: Woody Debris is back!
Or the burning of, anyway.
We trimmed and/or chopped down a bunch of trees this year, so the wood pile had grown pretty big. (Hey, we could have covered it with Tara’s temperature blanket!). The only acceptable solution for country folk like us? Burn it, baby. This meant I finally got to break in the fire pit I built back in June. Honestly, I was hoping her maiden voyage would involve S’mores instead of heaps o’ dried-out branches, but the marshmallows will have to wait for another day.
I have to admit, it was a pretty satisfying feeling feeding those flames and watching our wood pile shrink a little. Maybe not as satisfying as cro-shitting a big-ass temperature blanket, but I also didn’t have to worry about double-chain stitching the wood, so no complaints here.
Mark My Words 
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