'Night 'Night

Here is a worthy use of time and resources you might just have sitting around in your house: Project Night Night. Recycle nearly new children's books and stuffed animals and either make or purchase a blanket to add to the Night Night Bag. The bag is donated to children's shelters accross the country and is the first thing that greets the rescued child when they enter. Many times this is all the children have if they have to be rescued quickly, or come from homes that were destroyed. You can also start your own local version of this by purchasing their bags:
Home page: http://projectnightnight.org
Short video - scroll to second one: http://projectnightnight.org/video.html


A just got back from CO, via a business trip to CA. He enjoyed visiting with out daughters and granddaughter and returned with a calendar. All the pictures are from DGD C and it was created by DD#1. It certainly warms a grandmother's heart...and a grandfather's too! I flipped through them over and over....and I'm sure I will look through all the months again and again...

Round and round

Just found an excellent knitting tip for stranded work in the round on Ravelry: knit it inside out!


The BBerry came back to life after some work and now I have a new problem, double screens when I turn it on. Apparently it reacts slowly and I move fast! I have discovered the red phone button can cure many ills, at least temporarily. I do enjoy using the Storm 2's built-in camera and being able to email, message or send photos directly to Flickr. But using my Bberry seems to be a case of what's going to happen next? I do feel as if I go round and round with it, get one thing figured out or fixed and have another issue....start again....of and the inevitable once a week re-boot, that means you take the battery out. I suppose this clear the cache and whatever else it needs to do to 'think' clearly! :D 


Meanwhile I'm thinking of putting all my FO's into a pile along with the WIP's and trying to finish them all off by entering them into an event in Ravelympics2010. This so I can stop moving them from here to there and around and around, while starting new projects. Which just frustrates me and leaves them unfinished. 


Holy Mackeral....this Oatmeal Cookie Neckwarmer from Mod Cloth is very cool! It really would not be that hard to knit. Or you can buy it from them at $49.99.

Grafting made new.

OMG from a knitting standpoint this is a fabulous new technique for grafting: 
http://www.jonquilmom.com/JonquilMom/Easy_Graft.html

Not So User Friendly After All!

Due to my vast inexperience and after only one week of trying to learn how to use it I've managed to screw up my BBerry. There is a nasty little screen stuck on top of my Main Menu that will NOT go A.W.A.Y! Yerk! I was trying to load the Verizon Music app and managed that without a hitch. I was trying to find the downloaded phone ring tone that'd disappeared and refused show itself no matter what and that set off some sort of nasty aberration that landed this little box in my face.

Soooo, the world as I know it has now come to a temporary end. 

I discovered the BBerry can still be used as a phone, despite the evil box. That fact alone is saving it's life! Although for some insane unknown reason it only vibrates, the _______(fill in your own fave expletive) ring tone has now disappeared too! I may SCREAM!

New technology!

Another year has gone by, I'm back in FL after spending July to Nov. in Colorado and it's time for some updating. 


Here "C" is at the Denver Science Museum, picking up "moon" rocks. A good time was had by all!


DGD "C" is four and what a delight! Full of fun, personality and determination wrapped up in the charm that usually gets her what she wants.


I still love my Mac Laptop. Apparently I loved it so much during the past year we had to run out and buy an external hard drive. "Why?" you might ask. Oh, wait, could it be??? I managed to load up so many photos and knitting patterns rich with pictures that I ran clear out of memory! Oh yes, indeedy! Even with using Ravelry to store many of my patterns I have too many on my laptop! While I may be able to cut down the number of patterns I store on my laptop I certainly will have more photos coming down the pike. So, thank you iomega external hard drive. They're small, look nifty and do the job!


I now have a hand held device that I hope will enable more blogging. We took advantage of a Verizon offered twofer on BlackBerry's. I got the new Storm 2 9550 Touch Screen and A got the BlackBerry Tour. We are both very happy, huh, and just how often does that happen? 

Although it took two hours in the Verizon store and two defunct phones before we got devices that functioned properly and we got out we were able to leave. People were pacing around and around. An annoyed man was overheard, saying to anyone nearby: "It took less time to buy my car and was a lot less confusing!" 


I have to give a lot of kudos to "David" who was super patient with his slow and what seemed like overly complicated system and the problems he encountered along the way. He finally got us taken care of and out the door with two working devices.

The infamous "crackberry" site opts in with info, an in depth review and a video

This is a much shorter review with pics and an "unboxing" video!

Wowza...this is a fabulous touch screen, in either direction! It has a real click feel to it which you can watch for yourself if you look at the video at either link I provided! And the device is fun and yes, somewhat confusing as the entire concept is brand new to me and I'm still learning how to use it. I am happy to see it is fairly user friendly. Many things work the way I expect them to. And when it comes to technology, THAT always surprises me! 


The camera is easy to use. So far, amazingly, I haven't figured out how get it to take quite as good a picture as well as my old LG camphone! I'm still working on that. The idea of being able to blog and send pics right from the BlackBerry is exciting. Assuming I can figure out how to do it, it sounds easy -- we.will.see!


And why the paragraphs on this post look so far apart I do not know....

Lost in Time

First of all every time I try to edit this I end up with more problems, with the layout and font type and font size. So, please forgive the odd spaces. And why it changes the font to a random huge size, or back to it after it has been edited and saved, I have no idea. Grr. I am loosing so much time just trying to get this to line up properly. I.Give.Up.

Which is a nice segway to my post "Lost in time":

I'm really getting a handle on how and what to do with my photos and the Flickr account. Hopefully I can start blogging about some of my projects.

I've spent most of today falling into the bottomless pit that is Ravelry! I was supposedly loading up my old projects and one thing lead to another. Laughable or maybe downright scary is just how lost in time one can get. It was a good way to learn more about what the site has to offer. And it was alarming how much I learned about my "friends" knitting habits and interests...I didn't realize that every time one marks a favorite pattern, for instance, that "fave" can be looked at by all one's friends. Hmm, feeling a draft, perchance?

Finally finished the scarf my Dad requested. He moved from FL to GA and then to WI. This from a man who had said, very emphatically, when he moved from Massachusetts to FL, "I never want to wear anything but shorts and a T-shirt ever again!" He'd complain when it was 50 and he had to put on a jacket!

My Dad's already impatient and had muttered, during our last phone call: "I'd like it sometime before Spring!" No problem Dad. But I've got bad news, in WI Spring can be very 'late'. Then there are those days in Spring it snows...Plenty of time to use the scarf and the surprise hat. Both in Encore.

I'd serendipitously found the hat pattern when I wasn't even looking for a matching one. So,even though my Dad has not requested a hat, instead of mailing the scarf when I'd said, I took a few more days to knit one. I hope he likes it. And yes, I'm holding my breath.

Patterns: Cap Karma Hat by SmarieK --A Free pattern on Ravelry.

Scarf is mine, just happened to pick the same st. pattern 99 St Patterns by Leisure Arts.

In the box I included a pretty scarf knit in Dune that I'd made a few years ago using a simple K2tog, YO eyelet pattern combined with garter st rows. Part of an experiment to see just how little yarn could produce a hat [89 yards] it had sit quietly in my project drawer waiting for the right person. I hope B likes Mohair.

I've also been thinking about what my next lace piece will be...so many delicious patterns around online both free and for purchase. And a huge number of those patterns I already own. Not that that stopped me from acquiring more. I have, after all, something of an obsession with lace.

Uh oh, does that mean I have to get back on Ravelry?

New Adventures

Today was filled with little adventures.

I decided to try to get pictures from my phone-cam into iPhoto and then set up a Flickr account and load the knitting pictures in there so I can put them in the projects lists at Ravelry. Instead of banging my head every two minutes wanting to throw the PC across the room, I was confounded by just how easy it all was. Wow. Love my MAC. Some of it was so easy I found myself sitting staring blankly at the screen waiting for some other instruction. It was all finished and I hadn't even realized it. Had to look back at the Ravelry project page to find the pictures were already there, no fanfare, just efficiency. Gotta love that. Disconcertingly easy. I guess I'm too used to screens or pop-ups that tell me what to do at every step. 

One thing I could not manage to do was put a Ravelry button on this blog. Sometimes the help screens do not speak my language because I don't know proper computerese. That project will have to wait...

In today's other adventure I was used as a pincushion. I was in the Allergy Clinic getting a prick test. I'm trying to get a handle on my allergens. It's very difficult to knit black socks on tiny needles when your eyes are running tears all the time. Try driving at night...whooo. Lights do crazy things when they shine through water. With red and watering eyes I look like I'm crying, hung over or crazed. I'm also tired much of the time when I have no reason to be. I suppose my body is busy fighting off the allergens.

After my fun at the clinic I wasn't feeling great. I had some hits on the test and I guess all of that was making my immune system very unhappy. When I got home I threw in an anti-histamine and was really shocked at how hard it hit me. I went down like a ton of bricks and had to get horizontal pretty quick. Had to miss knitting night. Oof. N.O.T a happy camper.

Next adventure will be figuring out what to do about all this. After being on antihistamines every day for years I took myself off them...now I feel the affects each time I try even one.