February always feels like an absurdly busy month. The 5th is the anniversary of our first date back in 1994, which is now 18 years ago. Valentine’s Day is a mere three days before Hubby’s birthday, which is two weeks before my birthday. Then we get a break, event-wise, until the wedding anniversary in August.

I am still knitting hats. Windschief is going well, a second welted hat got ripped out after I got pattern gauge and realised the pattern was designed for an elephant. That’ll get a restart after some emergency gauge calculations and a new hem colour, making it a grey hat with a deep purple hem.

A piece of my chainmail made with rubber rings and aluminium took a very short turn in a tensile strength testing machine designed for testing steel. It did not survive, but it was fun seeing its first incarnation ripped apart with bare hands as a quick and dirty tensile test. Test #2 was supposed to be a more scientific test, but it broke under the pre-load (which for steel amounts to the machine saying "yep, I have something here I can hold on to, when do I start trying to break it?"). Rubber and aluminium are not the most durable of materials under extreme stress, but they are very good to fiddle with when you’re in a dull meeting.

With a week to go until the February meeting of Fictional Authors, our post-NaNoWriMo writing group, I finally have an idea for the writing exercise, which comes from Stephen King’s book On Writing. I have done this exercise before and it came out decently then, this time I’m taking a very different direction.