95 Days!

Yep; 95 days to our next cruise (Carnival Dream, to Nassau, St. Thomas, and St. Maarten).

But we're also incredibly incorrigible... I got an email from CruCon.com for their "Christmas in July" sale. We had just been talking about wanting to get away for the December holidays, when - poof! - this email popped into my inbox, like it was meant to be.

The email had a list of all the cruises that would be sailing over Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, and Christmas AND New Year's. Perfect way to sort it, but there were so many to choose from! So we took a look, and started highlighting those that seemed interesting.

To cut the list of potential options down (ah, the tyranny of choice!), we only looked at those ships sailing over Christmas (but also got us back home before New Year's). There were still too many choices, so we started crossing things off:

• No cruises to the Pacific coast of Mexico. It's really too chilly (we learned this on last year's 3-day cruise the week before Christmas).
• No Carnival cruises - not because of any problems we've had with them, but because we've been on them fairly often and wanted to give some other line a chance.
• Nothing longer than 14 days.
• Nothing shorter than 7 days.
• No sailing that actually embarked or debarked on 12/25.
• Finally, we tried to avoid those that went to places we'd already been (although when push comes to shove, we'd have gone back to Cozumel or Key West or just about any other Western or Eastern Caribbean port!).

Of the cruises that were left, two caught our eye, but one really caught our fancy. One was leaving from Miami on Norwegian Caribbean's Dawn. It was a 9-night Caribbean trip, leaving from Miami and stopping in at Samana, Tortola, Antigua, Barbados, and St. Kitts. This one was on the list because it was on NCL (a new cruise line for both of us) and all the Caribbean ports were those we haven't yet visited... definitely a possibility. The other cruise was leaving from Barcelona (Spain) on Royal Caribbean's Brilliance of the Seas. This one was 12 nights, stopping in Palermo (Italy), Piraeus and Rhodes (Greece), Alexandria (Egypt), and Valetta (on Malta).

Can you guess which one we booked? Oh yeah, we need to brush up on our Espanol, people - we're spending Christmas in Barcelona! Well, to be precise, we'll be boarding the ship in Barcelona on DH's birthday... for Christmas, we'll actually be docked at Alexandria - maybe that will be the day we'll be able to take a tour to the pyramids!

Yes, we're bad. But in such a fabulous way! So - 95 days to cruise #1 and 151 days to cruise #2! (Anyone want to come along, I definitely recommend checking out CruCon... I normally book through cruise.com, but CruCon had the bigger sale going on. Hurry!)

Cruise Fever

101 days until the October cruise (Carnival's Dream) but I have cruisin' fever and keep looking out for another one to put on the calendar. I'm incorrigible...

Gave Up

Yep. Very tempting to take a baseball bat to the machine, but it was only partially Dell's fault (for getting into bed so cozily with Microsoft). (And thanks, but no; not going to switch to a Mac. Too expensive and too many other issues for me.)

So, after KW and I spent easily 2 full days trying to make it work, and then the Geek Squad spent over 2 hours with it, we decided to return the new PC. The good news was that after all the angst and PITA-ness, Best Buy took it back with nary a blink. "Why are you returning it?" "Windows7 is not compatible with anything else in our office." "Okay, here's your return receipt." Done.

After returning it on a Thursday, on Friday, we found ourselves at Fry's. (Yes, we are "those people" - those who actually enjoy browsing through Fry's.) KW has been wanting a lighter smaller laptop to replace his 10+ pound brick that he's had for umpteen years. The more he travels, the heavier the damn thing gets, so we stumbled upon a great deal on a Lenovo ThinkPad x100e. It's actually a cross between a netbook and a notebook - it's pretty small, and weighs barely 3 pounds.

Yes, it came loaded with Windows7, but he doesn't have to hook it up to any of our home equipment, and his phone can sync to Outlook through Windows Mobile Device Center (my antique PDA - from 2005, fer Pete's sake! - can only sync using ActiveSync, which Windows, in it infinite wisdom, has discontinued using. Not just 'not supported,' but after Vista, it completely doesn't work). He's been playing with it, and his biggest issue is that it doesn't have a disc drive. On the other hand, he doesn't use one for much of anything these days. If he needs one, he can pick an external drive up for about $50.

On the knitting front, I found a post on making a 'rag hem' for the knitting machine. The machine comes with this plastic contraption with two slots running the length (to hold the weight bars), and lots of holes (to slide over the needles) and a fold in the middle (to bend over the ravel cord when it's loaded). It's a scary looking thing, and I wondered what it's life expectancy was, seeing as how it's made to be folded all the time. Well, on Ravelry, someone talked about a 'rag hem,' and when I investigated, I found a tutorial on how to make something that works the same way, but is much easier to handle.

Basically, you start to knit a flat piece, then pull up your cast-on stitches and knit them with your current stitches. In hand-knitting terms, you'd be making a folded or pocket hem. You then knit a bunch more rows and bind off. You use it by sliding your new knitted hem over the needles (you use the bind-off end), adding the weight bars into the pocket hem, knitting one row with the ravel cord, then start knitting with your main yarn. You can knit your rag hem as short or as wide as you need, but even if you knit it fairly wide, you can still use it on narrower pieces - just hang it over a smaller number of needles. Genius.

I am going to try using the new hem to make a log cabin style afghan or baby blanket. I have a feeling I'll run into trouble when I try to turn the knitting to add a new block, but I need to try it to see if/how I can make it work. Process knitting, that's my bag...

In the hand-knitting world, I finished the socks made from some Mini Mochi left over from making fingerless mitts. They're short socks, even for me, and I had to use some other yarn for the last half-inch plus picot bind-off. They're nice and soft and squishy on my feets, though. I also couldn't resist, and cast on for a new pair of socks; these made from Brooklyn Handspun in the "Blam" colorway.

Oh boy...

Got a new PC on Thursday. Please keep all baseball bats and sledgehammers away from me while I get it up and running and TRY to get the file structure set up the way I want it to be, not the way Microsoft THINKS I want it to be...

Oh, and 110 days until the next cruise!!