Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Weather Photography in January: Cold Seat and Golden Rays

Welcome to the first of my (I hope monthly) weather photography posts for this year.

No, this is not Seattle. I took this photo at a rest stop on the road to Duluth for the annual Knitajourney retreat. It was cold, snowing, and the roads were terrible, but we made a quick stop and I took this photo out the window. While the view was quiet and beautiful, I wouldn't want to sit on that bench!

This isn't Seattle, either. It is a lot closer to home, however. Last week, we went with friends to the Washington coast for two days at Pacific Beach. I was lucky to catch the last rays of the sun as it disappeared behind the clouds. Spectacular!

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

A Word and Weather

January is almost over, and here I am, writing my first post of the not-so-new year. No excuses; I just didn't get around to it until now.

In previous years, I've started the year with a list of goals for the year, many of which were forgotten almost as soon as I wrote them. Last year, I said I wasn't setting goals for the year, other than to blog more than the previous year. and I did manage to follow through on that, writing 19 posts, compared to 14 in 2016.

This year, while I certainly would like to increase the number of blog posts again, I am not going to promise that it will happen. I'm also not going to come up with a list of goals, either. Instead, I have come up with a word that I want to represent my year, and that word is Adventure. So what do I mean when I say adventure? It is a broad enough word that it can cover a lot of different areas of my life—adventure in knitting, photography, travel, reading, hiking, and so on. I'm not sure how the word adventure will play out in my life this year, but not knowing is an adventure in itself.

There is one knitting adventure that should start happening later this winter:
That's a canvas bag crammed full of six shawl projects, hidden in identical brown paper bags. When I finish my current shawl project—sometime in February, I hope—I'll pick one of these bags, discover which yarn and pattern are inside, and cast on immediately. I got the idea for this from the many knitters that have brown-bagged their sock projects to randomly pick throughout the year. While you probably know by now that I love knitting socks, I chose shawls because I have so many shawls that are already queued and linked to stash yarns, and I'd like to get some of them actually knitted. Stay tuned to the blog this year to watch it happen.

The other year-long project that I want to focus on relates to my photography. This past year, I blogged about a photo each month, either a favorite photo or one that represented an activity from that month that I wanted to highlight. I enjoy doing a monthly photo post, but this year, I want to focus on photographs depicting the weather. My father was a meteorologist, and he brought me up to appreciate all kinds of weather phenomena. In addition, I often use my camera to document the very changeable weather conditions that we experience here in Seattle, as well as weather events that I observe during my travels. If you are a weather geek like me, you know this will be fun!