Can't breathe, too busy...

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.