Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

It's been snowing for the last six hours and there's about 4 inches of snow lying at the moment. The girls are convinced that the school will be closed tomorrow and they'll get a day off, but I'm not so sure.

Work
A so-so week at work. Unfortunately the most talked-about event of the week was the murder of a homeless immigrant who had been living in the disused office block next door. A power failure meant that - tragically - we all had to go home at 3.30pm on Friday.

Where I've been
Went to a truly excellent exhibition on Saturday at the Women's Library (in London, near Aldgate) about the history of women's magazines over the last two hundred years. I now know why the writing on the cover is so important, and why most magazines use a picture of a women looking straight ahead on the cover. The exhibition is on until April - more details if you click the link below.

http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/thewomenslibrary/

Went to the London Bead Fair at Kempton Park racecourse today. The economic downturn must be beginning to bite because it was a lot emptier this year. My first visit two years ago was like a descent into hell. I hadn't been to a bead show before and, given the nature of the people who do beadwork and jewellery making, I thought that it would be quite a civilised affair. Well, I was wrong. I walked into a melee of white, middle-aged middle-class women quite literally fighting each other to get to see the stalls and buy stuff, with a few dazed looking husbands standing about. This year was very different, and the minor injuries I sustained will have cleared up by the end of the week. I also got home before it really started snowing in earnest, which was a bonus.

What I've made
I continued work on the cross-stitch picture of Jane Austen's house. I didn't make a great deal of progress with the mohair scarf I've been knitting on the way to work because it's just been too damn cold for me to be bothered getting the needles out. The lattice crocheted scarf had another four inches added to it. It's made with some gorgeous sock yarn I bought from Babylonglegs's shop on Folksy - see link below:-
http://www.folksy.com/shops/babylonglegs
I also plugged away with my Floral Filigree Beaded Scarf. This is a mammoth project which, based on how much I've done so far, will take about four months to complete, and will need about 150g of size 15 seed beads and 400 4mm crystal bicones. I've completed 16 "rows" so far, and I started it on 3 January. Once I've completed 20 rows I'll take a short break and bead something else, to make sure I don't get bored. I had the third lesson (of 11) of my precious metal clay course, which was devoted to finishing the pieces we made last week and designing our next piece using polymer clay (before replicating it in sliver clay). My first piece was a tiny flower-shaped pendant which I have since made into a necklace - photo to follow.

What I read
One of my New Year's resolutions was to read more widely, so this week I've been reading "The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer" by Brian Masters. (Jeffrey Dahmer killed 17 men in Milwaukee in the late 1980s and early 1990s before he was caught in 1991). All tribute to Mr Masters for taking a serious rather than sensational approach to the subject, but it was nevertheless a disturbing read and I didn't feel I knew very much more at the end of the book about why Dahmer murdered all those men than I did at the beginning.

I also plan, during the course of 2009, to read all the national daily newspapers published in in UK. So last Friday I started by reading the Daily Mail. I have never in my life read an entire copy of the Daily Mail before. My impression of the paper before I read it was that it was aimed at and reflected the views of middle-class Conservative voters living in the South of England, and I wasn't wrong. "What kind of monsters would steal children from their grandparents and give them to two gay men?" ranted columnist Richard Littlejohn. His story about two children, who couldn't be left in the care of their recovering heroin addict mother and who were being taken away from their sick grandparents to be forcibly adopted by two gay men, tended to make the reader think that there was lots of information that Richard wasn't giving us because it didn't quite fit with what he wanted to say.

What I learned this week
Gas-fired blowtorches - perhaps unsurprisingly - can get very, very hot.