Drinking from a firehose

One thing I'm very happy about is my strategy of needle-felting a t-shirt to a cat bed appears to work:

( Click here to see the experiment's results )

When I went into the living room to fetch my eyeglasses, phone, and thumb drive this morning, I found Hamish on the couch occupying two cat beds:

( Click here )

ETA: After adding the two additional cat beds I began last night plus one extra to Ravelry, I'm up to 201 projects since 2009. Not that the count is accurate because some of the projects were for multiples of an item.

Last Thursday we drove to Port Huron after work, to see An Dro play at Lynch's Irish Tavern. The band was every bit as good as I expected, but I'm getting too old to stay out that late on a work night. Getting up and to work the next morning was exceedingly difficult.

After work on Friday we drove to Ionia to spend the weekend with my mom. I hadn't seen her since Christmas, so the visit was long overdue. On Saturday the three of went to Lansing to shop at Sticks and Strings, the yarn shop owned by one of my mom's friends. I picked out yarn for the dress I'm going to knit for my newly born niece, and my mom picked out some very nice bamboo yarn for a shawl. Elderly Instruments, one of jebra's favorite stores is located right across the street, so we went over there too. We found a handful of CDs and jebra) bought a bodhran to replace the cheap import he's been using. After that we had a very yummy lunch at the Embassy Grill, then went shopping for an eReader for my mom. She came home with a new Nook tablet and I'm still thinking about getting one myself.

We returned home on Sunday, stopping in Grand Ledge to have lunch with jebra's sister and her husband, then continued to work so that we could run billing.

Monday went by in a blur and I don't remember a thing about it. Yesterday, on the other hand, I was a sleepy mess. If I got anything done at work it was a miracle as I couldn't keep my eyes open. I didn't even go to Nia, instead I went home after work and went directly to bed.

Today I feel a whole lot better, and a lot more productive too. I finished the scarf I've been working on and I finally got around to taking photos of the clutch I made to hold my knitting & crochet accessories. I had the bad habit of putting the stitch holders and markers down wherever I was when it was time to remove them and then not recall where I'd put them.

Click to embiggen

A few minutes ago I put down my yarn needle and scissors, having just finished the ninth of the nine hats in the current batch of Jayne Hats for the Austin Browncoats. This brings my 2011 Jayne Hat count to 46 -- I was aiming to misbehave for 52 hats this year. If more yarn arrives before the 15th of December, I think I'll be able to make my goal.

The scarf count is holding steady at 55 for the National World War II Museum, 3 for the Red Scarf Project, and 1 on the needles for a friend.

As for the Fancy Filigree Bookmark I'm supposed to be crocheting for a friend's Secret Sister, well, that's going with me to Knitting Club on Saturday. Hopefully there'll be someone there who can help me make sense of the pattern. I figured out how to make a Chubby Cluster, but Round 1's turn work 90 degrees and... defeated me. I have no idea where I'm supposed to stick my crochet hook after the turn.

Saturday's Nia may be interesting as well. The Detroit Nia teachers are being filmed for a video and the videographer is supposed to be at class again on Saturday. I met him two Tuesdays ago, when he filmed us for the first time. I thought I was dancing well that day, so I didn't mind being filmed, but I was very glad for what I was wearing as I thought I looked less tubby than usual. Amazing what wearing light sweatpants in my actual size does for my figure.

We went to Makers Faire both Saturday and Sunday. Saturday we spent exploring (and in my case, doing a bit of experimental crochet followed by knitting about twelve inches for the Purl Street Scarf Project). Sunday Jebra did whatever while I hung out with the knitters and one particular woman who was spinning yarn while helping me learn to recognize and perform a wrap-and-turn.

This week has gone by in blur. I haven't had time to process the photos I took on Saturday (nor have I looked at the ones I took while were in Elkhart for the Jazz Festival). I don't know what the heck I've been doing other than trying to stay cool and wishing I were more awake.

I am fighting off a cold, one which so far has taken over only the left side of my head. My left nostril is keeping me busy reaching for yet another new tissue while the one on the right side feels perfectly clear and normal. How does that happen?

Friday night after work we went home after a wee bit of shopping and tried to get to bed at a reasonable hour.

Saturday was SEMGS and we had such a good time we were among the last to leave. When I climbed into the car I thought it was only around ten or eleven, and I was so surprised by the time showing on the dashboard clock that I had to ask Jebra if it was malfunctioning. It wasn't; it really was after 1:00 in the morning and it was after 2:00 by the time we got home. I still had to take my night-time medicines and take a quick spin through email, so it was somewhere between 3:00 and 4:00 before I got to bed.

I'd hoped to check out flintHANDMADE on Sunday, but I knew that wasn't going to happen, especially when we were expected at an early St. Patrick's Day celebration later in the day. We'll have to try again next month.

Much tea was consumed while waiting for dinner to come out of the oven (corned beef, greens, boiled cabbage, turnips, and potatoes). Jebra made soda bread before we went over and that was really good too.

I brought my needle crafts with me, both to SEMGS and to Sunday dinner. On Saturday I finished yet another Jayne Hat, and crocheted a cute hat from the pattern Jean gave me. She also provided yarn, but I didn't want to risk messing up her good yarn until I was sure I could follow the instructions. My sample hat passed muster, so on Sunday I crocheted two more, one in red and another in blue using Jean's nice Borroco alpaca.

Last night I began work on a ripple afghan. Although I remembered how to do a double crochet stitch, I suck at understanding crochet patterns. It took four tries to get the thing started, which is not a minor inconvenience when the thing begins with chain 178 and I don't detect the problem until the second row.

It probably didn't help that I'd been to the eye doctor earlier in the day and my pupils were still dilated. I have a new prescription and should have new lenses in a week and a half. This will be good as you know that big 'E' at the top of the eye chart? Well, that was the only letter I could make out with the old prescription.

While we were in Indiana for New Year's Eve, jebra and I watched Trapeze with our nephew Collin. Good gravy was Tony Curtis a tasty morsel in those days. As was Burt Lancaster. I've always liked Curtis, but Lancaster was a surprise. I looked him up on imdb and it seems the only other movie of his I've seen is Run Silent, Run Deep. And that was long enough ago that I don't remember anything about it other than the title.

The UPS man just drove off. Today's deliveries were (1) a case of wine (for the boss), (2) four cases of Stash Lemon-Ginger tea (for me), and (3) a Fender Passport PD-250 Plus Portable Sound System (for jebra).

Last Sunday, jebra, mbumby, and I went to the zoo. The sky was overcast when we arrived, but I got a really good shot of one of the tigers anyway. And a number of eh photos of spring flowers. Somehow jebra managed to gain possession of the camera when we reached the giraffe and zebra enclosures, so he was the one who managed to photograph the giraffes running around. In real life, running giraffes look really neat. On a still photograph, not so much.

It started to rain while we were watching the giraffes, so jebra made me put the camera away. I know he was right, but I wanted to keep it out because I kept spotting things that would either make nice photos or that were far enough away that I could have used the lens to get a good look. Like the unidentified birds nesting in one of the trees. Whatever they were, they were obviously large and social. There had to be at least a half dozen nests in the branches of the same tree.

On Saturday, I spent the early afternoon watching the FIRST Robotics Competition on the NASA channel and trying out gnucash. gnucash seems to be a fairly reasonable substitute for Quicken, however it lacks supercategories, which is a feature we use extensively. (Supercategories allow expenditures in multiple budget categories to be added together. For example, how much does a trip to Minicon really cost once the gasoline, restaurant meals, hotel bill, con memberships, memorial t-shirts and incidental costs are figured in?)
The other problem I have with gnucash is a problem I have with Quicken, namely the inability to close out records at end of a fiscal year. It annoys me to see accounts that were closed five or even ten years ago listed among the active accounts. I also discovered that I cannot delete voided transactions from gnucash and that accounts containing voided entries may not be removed. So if we were to switch to gnucash, I'd have to choose between (A) starting fresh and manually re-entering the information we wanted to keep and (B) maintaining obsolete accounts. After three or four hours of horsing around with gnucash and several more thinking about what I'd learned, I concluded that for the moment my best bet would be getting jebra to install wine or some other sort of virtual machine and moving Quicken from the laptop I want to retire to my desktop computer.

I also discovered our checkbook is out of balance. After work last night I spent a good three hours trying to figure out what went wrong but am no closer toward getting it to balance. If anything, the difference between what Quicken thinks and what my physical checkbook reports has more than doubled. Annoying, that.

Two other annoyances involve crochet. I started a simple chevron striped afghan, but the pattern is giving me fits. I'm never sure where I'm supposed to be in the pattern and, as a result, the rows aren't lining up exactly the way they should. I set the project aside last night and started working another pattern. This time everything lines up the way it should, only when I my initial chain the afghan seemed too small (I want an adult-size afghan and I could hold the entire chain across my body without having to stretch). So I doubled the size and went to work. This morning I discovered the the afghan is now so long that it not only reaches from one side of the futon to the other, there's enough to drape over the edges. I suppose it might make a nice bedspread, but that wasn't really what I was after. I thought this would be another of my afghans to go up for auction (for charity, not to make money for me), but I'm concerned the pool of potential buyers will be too small. Opinions, anyone?

The UPS man just drove off. Today's deliveries were (1) a case of wine (for the boss), (2) four cases of Stash Lemon-Ginger tea (for me), and (3) a Fender Passport PD-250 Plus Portable Sound System (for jebra).

Last Sunday, jebra, mbumby, and I went to the zoo. The sky was overcast when we arrived, but I got a really good shot of one of the tigers anyway. And a number of eh photos of spring flowers. Somehow jebra managed to gain possession of the camera when we reached the giraffe and zebra enclosures, so he was the one who managed to photograph the giraffes running around. In real life, running giraffes look really neat. On a still photograph, not so much.

It started to rain while we were watching the giraffes, so jebra made me put the camera away. I know he was right, but I wanted to keep it out because I kept spotting things that would either make nice photos or that were far enough away that I could have used the lens to get a good look. Like the unidentified birds nesting in one of the trees. Whatever they were, they were obviously large and social. There had to be at least a half dozen nests in the branches of the same tree.

On Saturday, I spent the early afternoon watching the FIRST Robotics Competition on the NASA channel and trying out gnucash. gnucash seems to be a fairly reasonable substitute for Quicken, however it lacks supercategories, which is a feature we use extensively. (Supercategories allow expenditures in multiple budget categories to be added together. For example, how much does a trip to Minicon really cost once the gasoline, restaurant meals, hotel bill, con memberships, memorial t-shirts and incidental costs are figured in?)
The other problem I have with gnucash is a problem I have with Quicken, namely the inability to close out records at end of a fiscal year. It annoys me to see accounts that were closed five or even ten years ago listed among the active accounts. I also discovered that I cannot delete voided transactions from gnucash and that accounts containing voided entries may not be removed. So if we were to switch to gnucash, I'd have to choose between (A) starting fresh and manually re-entering the information we wanted to keep and (B) maintaining obsolete accounts. After three or four hours of horsing around with gnucash and several more thinking about what I'd learned, I concluded that for the moment my best bet would be getting jebra to install wine or some other sort of virtual machine and moving Quicken from the laptop I want to retire to my desktop computer.

I also discovered our checkbook is out of balance. After work last night I spent a good three hours trying to figure out what went wrong but am no closer toward getting it to balance. If anything, the difference between what Quicken thinks and what my physical checkbook reports has more than doubled. Annoying, that.

Two other annoyances involve crochet. I started a simple chevron striped afghan, but the pattern is giving me fits. I'm never sure where I'm supposed to be in the pattern and, as a result, the rows aren't lining up exactly the way they should. I set the project aside last night and started working another pattern. This time everything lines up the way it should, only when I my initial chain the afghan seemed too small (I want an adult-size afghan and I could hold the entire chain across my body without having to stretch). So I doubled the size and went to work. This morning I discovered the the afghan is now so long that it not only reaches from one side of the futon to the other, there's enough to drape over the edges. I suppose it might make a nice bedspread, but that wasn't really what I was after. I thought this would be another of my afghans to go up for auction (for charity, not to make money for me), but I'm concerned the pool of potential buyers will be too small. Opinions, anyone?