New Shoes

Today I went to a favorite resell store, Something Olde Something New, with a friend. I hadn't been there in a long time, and I hadn't gone out anywhere since the end of September. I really didn't want to buy anything, but I found a pair of shoes. I needed shoes. The stitching was wearing off the top seams and the soles seriously wearing down on my old leather shoes, and the soles wore down on my favorite sneakers so badly they made my knee hurt. I found a pair of SAS ankle boots in my size. I like ankle boots. I don't like the way the cold can leak in through the throat of lace-up shoes. I saved about $150 on the boots and they have never been worn. The same friend had given me tie-dyed shoe strings that I still had in my handbag.  They made the shoes.

I also finished my legwarmers tonight, using a variation of the Easy Peasy Legwarmers from the Knit All The Things! blog. I needed more stretch to the body shoe I knit the entire piece in k3, p1 ribbing. It suited the Plymouth Galway Chunky Paint yarn better and they go easily over jeans now.

I got them done just in time for the first snowstorm of the year. I had better remember to mend my shearling boots tomorrow. Emily has a bad habit of attacking them and putting holes in them. She got both pairs when I forgot to put them away from her. I'll cut a patch of deerskin and glue it on the hole in one boot.  The other is trickier. The leather pulled away from the seam. I have to use super glue to put the edges together. I should sew over it as well.  It's a good thing my older cat has developed a sweet personality.

I'd like to find some kind of cabinet with a drawer on the top and doors on the bottom to store hats and gloves in the drawer and I can close my boots inside.  I think I'll still make the doors cat-proof.

Save the Permafrost

Last night I started listening to Woolly by Ben Mezrich.  Ostensibly it is about the implications of recreating the woolly mammoth using DNA, but the true message is much more important. I don't know why more people and the media aren't talking about it. In creating Pleistocene Park, a wildlife preserve in Siberia, father and son research team Sergey and Nikita Zimov discovered that the carbon stored in the permafrost would holds twice as much carbon dioxide as is currently released into the atmosphere. The destruction of the permafrost would dramatically alter the earth's atmosphere.  The Zimovs also discovered that repopulating the tundra with animals closest to the ones who used to live there to bring back the grasslands and the permafrost captured by them would help stabilize the climate. 

The woolly mammoths were part of the fauna of the Pleistocene grasslands. It turns out the most recent mammoths died only 3,000 years ago making the recreation of DNA much more possible.

By Mauricio Antón - from Caitlin Sedwick (1 April 2008). "What Killed the Woolly Mammoth?". PLoS Biology 6 (4): e99. DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060099., CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11781070

To be completed.  This is too important not to be on the web.