Latitude 61...Land of the Midnight Sun

The Lunar and Solar Event of My Lifetime...

    Actually, it was the event of 5 centuries since the last time a total lunar eclipse coincided with the winter solsice was 1538.  The eclipse began here at 9:30 Alaska time and I watched the entire thing by 15 minute increments.  It was too cold to stand outdoors to watch it... 0 degrees F.  I waited and waited to see the "red" phase, but somehow I missed that.  I was probably looking in the wrong place... sounds silly I know, but the moon completely disappeared from view for quite a while, and there are many tall spruce trees around our house.  That made it really hard to predict its path ... it must have been behind some trees.  I did see it begin to reappear, at least.  Here is a link to our local news video shot...  

I had one "close call" while walking in and out our door with all the yard lights turned off.  Our house had an unexpected visitor. If I had opened the door at precisely the right moment, I would have had a big surprise as would the small moose that was standing almost on our welcome mat! Only one hoof print shows in this photo, near the left corner of the welcome mat, but you can get the idea.

Tonight in our time zone is the actual winter solstice and I'm sure looking forward to gaining daylight again! Since the sun is at such a low angle, and my house is located at the bottom of a hill, that means no sunlight is "touching" our house anymore... only the tops of our trees.  We have been reduced to 5 hours and 28 minutes with the sun rising at 10:15 and setting at 3:43.  This is sure not my favorite time of year, even with Christmas coming.

The short days and the very long nights does mean that I am getting lot of knitting done.  I thought I would have Fulmar finished by now, but the stitches in the collar are so small and tight, that I had to take a break to let my sore fingers heal.  I picked up my hibernating Keava and have been having so much fun with that, that I ended up ignoring my Fulmar and my Cauchy socks.  Not much to show for a weeks worth of knitting, (from the bottom of the pink stripe up), but it's been so much fun working on stranded knitting again, since it's my favorite type of knitting.

Happy winter Solstice everyone!

Henry the VIII... crowned and coronated!

Just in time to wear for the holiday season... I finished knitting Henry VIII on Tuesday.  I haven't washed and blocked it yet though. The colors just glow in direct sunlight, so yesterday when the sun was actually shining... during our 6 hours of weak daylight, I threw it on and rushed outside to get my picture taken.  The sun only shines on that one place in our yard now because it's so low in the sky that it just hits the roofs and tree tops, but our deck is on the second story, so there is one sunbeam there every sunny day... that lasts for about 10 minutes.  Now I wish I had planned ahead, so I could have combed my hair and put a little make-up on my colorless eyelashes.  Oh well... just admire the sweater!

The other small project that I have on the needles is a pair of Cauchy socks by Cookie A.  That is a fun project and is based on the mathematical inequality sign by French mathematician Augustin Cauchy.  I really enjoy mathematical patterns and designs which is quite ironic since I'm not very skilled with math. This isn't an accurate photo of the sock color, since it's taken in such weak sunlight, but I turned the flash off so the pattern would show.