When It Freezes Over...

Yesterday was rotten. I left for the grocery store at about 11 because the forecast called for more snow; when I got back at about 11:30, the power company was very kindly blocking the street. Our street is never more than one and a half lanes under the best of conditions due to parked cars taking up the other half of the other lane, so with the remaining snow having been pushed into huge heaps by the plow, we're reduced to one lane--Gods forbid that you should meet a car coming in the opposite direction when it's like this, because one or the other of you will end up having to back allllll the way to the nearest intersection in order to let the other pass. And Gods forbid that any emergency services should need to get through..
"Twenty minutes," said the young man who was directing traffic at the intersection.
I thought I'd go get a cup of coffee, linger for twenty minutes, and come home. I was wrong. Got back to the entrance to our street and saw a blue VW Beetle on the other side of the power company truck; some poor college student was trying to get home or to work or to someplace other than a one-lane-dead-end street. The young man who was directing traffic said the Blue Beetle had been waiting for about twenty minutes, and when he asked his colleagues if they would let me by, the response was a snappish "No!"
So off I went again, but not for another cup of coffee. I called all my friends who lived locally and all of them were either at work or not at home, so I couldn't seek refuge. I could have gone to the university library, but since I don't have a parking sticker, I wouldn't have been able to park on campus--forget metered parking! With the snow, it's nearly impossible to find a spot, and I didn't feel like jousting for one with a student desperate to get to class. I could also have gone to any of the shops or restaurants in the business district, but again, I probably wouldn't have been able to find a place to park. So for the next twenty minutes, I drove aimlessly around the town and when I finally felt like making another attempt to reach my domicile, I was surprised to see a police cruiser commanding the power company truck to move.
When I got home, mom was in quite a state and told me that she needed to be taken to the doctor PDQ. So off we went...
The moral of the story is this: The municipal government is utterly unprepared and ill-equipped to cope with emergencies of any kind. The administrators seem incapable of coordinating with emergency services or the utility companies to even prepare for any possible disasters, which is the exact opposite of the way it should be. Of course, if you're a merchant who has a shop in the business district, chances are the ambulance will be able to get to you even if hell freezes over, never mind that the little people who actually live here might have fallen off the cliff into the frigid waters of the Potomac River, or fallen down the stairs and broken both legs, or suffered a coronary or a stroke due to the frustration and powerlessness that results from the inadequacies of the town's administrators.
/RANT

On to happier topics, sort of. Since I spent part of my day yesterday waiting for mom to come out of the doctor's office, I got a fair bit done on one of my Ravelympics projects. Strangling Vines is a nice, easily memorized pattern of yarn-overs and decreases, so I didn't actually have to take the pattern with me. It's a nice pattern, but the yarn I chose probably wasn't the best option among all the things I had in my stash. Earthly Hues does gorgeous work with plant dyes, and I hoped that the pattern would do the yarn justice--and the other way around. The Foxfire colorway is a mix of autumnal browns and reds that are knitting up into a lazily zig-zagging pooled effect that everyone seems to like but me!
Silly me. I decided to spin a bunch of white yarn, ply it, dye it, then knit it for my second project. So far I've plied about half the yarn using the Navajo plying technique in the second video I posted; the spindle shaft is filled to the point that the combined weight of the yarn and spindle keeps pulling the yarn through the hook so the spindle slides down. After I get the yarn plied, then I get to skein it. And then I get to dye it. And then I get to wait until it dries... and then either reskein it or just wind it into a ball before I use it. *sigh!* At least I've picked a pattern and have a vague idea of what colors I want to use, so I'm heading in the right direction. I think...