Friday bullets, Jan. 24, 2020

And here we are at Friday again. I swear it was just Tuesday yesterday.

• I have come up with a terrific analogy for the different between saddling a horse and harnessing a horse. If you sew, this will make perfect sense to you. Saddling a horse is like threading your sewing machine. There are several different steps that you need to do in order for it to work, but pretty much every sewing machine follows the same basic principals, and once you have those down, it's not that difficult. Harnessing a horse is like threading your serger. There are so many different parts, you have to do them in the correct order, and skip or miss any single little tiny hook and you're doomed. The serger won't work. Plus, each one is just a little different, so switching back and forth is not so simple. 
• My back yard is filled with BB-8 snowmen. At least that is what I'm told they are. The funny thing about BB-8 droids from Star Wars is that they are exactly the same shape as a snowman, so I'm not sure how you would tell a snowman and a BB-8 apart.
• D. begins a weekly lecture class at Fermilab tomorrow. The lectures are for high schoolers and will be about particle physics. There is a tour after each lecture. He is pretty excited about it. (Fermilab, for those not in the area, is a particle accelerator nearby. Please don't ask me to explain that.)
• K. left this afternoon to go on the winter retreat for our church's junior high youth group. He was pretty excited about going.
• The hydrant in the barn finally thawed on Wednesday. It was very exciting. The hydrant had frozen last weekend during the super cold weather, which meant we were lugging buckets of water from the house for horses and chickens a few times a day. It is so much easier to fill buckets right there in the barn.
• Tomorrow I am going to do some paperwork that I've been putting off, then as a reward, I'm going to sit down with my seeds and seed catalogs and plan next spring's garden.
• H. has finished her first grade math book and is very excited to be moving into the next one. It's kind of a big deal.
• We are due to get more snow tonight and tomorrow. This is on top of the rain we've had off and on all day. That means once the temperature falls, everything will be covered in a nice coating of ice. This is the third weekend in a row with winter weather.
• This weekend is Tet and Chinese New Year. I'm not sure when we will be celebrating since K. is on his retreat and week days aren't not always conducive to celebrations.

It seems as though there was more I was going to share with you, but I can't think of anything. I'm going to have to write things down as I think of them so when Friday rolls around I have a chance of remembering. Clearly the relying-on-memory-thing didn't work so well this past week! Have a good weekend.

Oh, one more thing. J. and I will be doing a workshop on presenting poetry to children on February 13 in the morning. It will be at Kishwaukee Community College, and it's free! I'll have more details later, but for those in the area, I wanted to give you a chance of marking the date on the calendar.