Everything is still pretty much iced over out there, although we got some rain earlier that promoted a bit of meltage. Then the temps dropped again and we’re getting *checks window* overcast mainly, although there’s still water dripping from the eaves and Weather Underground is showing a wintry mix over us with a promise of 96% precipitation that will freeze. So that’s fun.

In the meantime I have this unexpected gift of a space heater going and keeping the office downright toasty, for which Jeremy was quite appreciative earlier in the day. Why is said space heater an unexpected gift? Allow me to explain.

Our upstairs heating is rather wonky where the craft room (and upstairs bathroom) gets the bulk of the heat and the rest of the rooms are left to do credible imitations of iceboxes. Lyndon’s office has three computers in it which helps with heat to a degree, but this situation has required us to purchase a space heater for our bedroom which lives in front of the window and does its best to hold back the cold.

The first space heater we ever got, however, seemed to stop working after a few years. Because I am who I am, I stuck it behind our bedroom door and got another space heater for the room, always thinking, “Yeah, I really should haul that downstairs and throw it out” when I cleaned.

Cut to yesterday when it was so cold in here it actually hurt to sit here and do anything, it occurred to me that it wouldn’t hurt to bring the supposedly dead space heater here, plug it in, and see if it might fire up again. So I did. Lo and behold, it’s heating up nicely (Lyndon came in and sniffed suspiciously but I reminded him that the damn thing was covered with dust and I was about to clean it off) Today it is decidedly cozy in here, so much so that I just turned down the space heater a tad.

Which is good because after I got my word quota done for the day and made dinner it was time to work on the Garden Path quilt. At left is a picture of what’s been put together so far, which is four columns out of a final five plus three inches of a border around the entire thing. Considering that I think I started on this sometime in 2009 it feels good to know that I’ll have the quilt top finished in a week or so.

Since this is going to be full size I think I may pay to have a woman who’s associated with my local quilt store quilt it for me on her long arm machine. I can just about get baby and twin quilts through my machine, but anything larger than that requires a long arm and I would really like to have a nice design on this quilt.

Once that’s done, I’ll have to figure out what my next closet project will be. I don’t want to do the black and silver dress just yet because that will scatter glitter everywhere, but I don’t want to immediately leap into yet another quilt. Maybe I’ll pull out the swing dress that’s been cut out and put that together (it’s probably too late to fix the issue with my freakishly long torso, but I’ll see what I can do to make it work).