Sunday, July 1, 2012

PITA

Done with Blogger; thanks for nuthin', Google. Meet me over at megknits408.wordpress.com.
Bye!

Friday, May 4, 2012

This may be the end

Okay, so Blogger went to a Chrome-only interface. I don't have Chrome. I had it, it didn't work well for many of my most-used sites, so I dumped it. Now, with Blogger (a Google site) going to Chrome, how I post these things is all whacked up. Rather than screw up all the other sites I use, I will probably discontinue writing this one.

Sorry, folks - Google is usually my hero when it comes to usability and open use, but they screwed up with Google+ and now it looks like they've screwed up with this.

I'll leave with these thoughts:
- Thanks to Shalimar Yarns using it to advertise their attendance at Maryland Sheep and Wool, my Break It Up! pattern (http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/break-it-up) took a jump to 333 downloads. Whoo hoo!
- If I get another blog going somewhere else, I'll post its URL here.

Bye!

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

This one's for Lynn

Because she asked where the people were who were downloading the pattern (and it really hadn't occurred to me), this one's for Lynn...

I did a little research into who's doing the downloading of the new pattern (which, BTW, now has 238 downloads - wow). What I found out is that while you can see who marked it as a favorite and who put it in their queue, you can only see raw numbers of downloads, no individual user IDs.

However, I did take a look through the 'user activity' on the pattern. If you review the activity in chronological order, you can see it traveling through friends in different areas, much the way we do here... So Lynn will 'favorite' a beautiful pattern, then Roberta will, then Barbara will, then I will, then Peggy will... and so on.

Well, especially in the early hours of it being posted, I could see that happen with the 'favoriting' and 'queuing' of this pattern. Then, at some point, a friend who's outside the first area will see it, and all of a sudden, there's a new group in another location who's found it. Fascinating.

Because there's no way to get Ravelry generate a report, I jotted down just the two most recent pages of activity. Most of the Ravelers in these areas favorited the pattern; I've indicated with "Q" those that put it in their queue (and a reminder that Ravelry doesn't require you to put in where you're from; it's voluntary information and you can put in whatever you want):

Cambridge, Iowa
Sacramento, California
Portland, Oregon
La Quinta, California
Fayetteville, Arkansas
Victoria, Canada
Woolwich, Maine
Darmstadt, Germany
Lappeenranta, Finland (Q)
West Virginia (Q)
Manchester, New Hampshire
Lincoln
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Lake Forest Park, Washington
Morgantown
Krems, Austria
Osnabruck, Germany
Central Pennsylvania
Littleton, Colorado
Leeds, UK (Q)
Rome, New York
Reading, UK (Q)
Lund, Skane Lan, Sweden
Remscheid, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany (Q)
Niedersachsen, Germany
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
London, UK
Wolfenbuttel, Niedersachsen, Germany
Marburg, Germany
Torrance, California
Oslo, Norway
San Francisco, California (Q)
Heidek, Germany
Neidersachsen, Germany (you think all those folks here know each other??)
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany (Q)
Tasmania, Australia
Zweirducken

Pretty cool, huh? Thanks, Lynn, for nudging me to look at this. It was fun!

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

My first!




I published my first knitting pattern last night! (Sorry for any non-Ravelers out there who may not be able to see the pattern page on Ravelry...)




PS - I just checked: there are 195 downloads and 123 'likes' on Ravelry! Whoo hoo!

Sunday, April 8, 2012

The Flip Side of Travel

Much though I adore traveling, I seldom adore coming home. That's because I usually come down with some nasty cold or cough or other kind of creeping crud. This trip was no exception.

As it happened, we had already set up an appointment with our new GP (the previous GP is no longer in our insurance network... bummer) on Tuesday, so along with all the other info she asked for (last tetanus, last A1C result, last colonoscopy...), I also told her how crappy I was feeling. She looked down my throat and said, "Yep, I can see the drip," but wasn't overly concerned. I skipped knitting that night because while she wasn't concerned, I wasn't too sure why, and thought I must be contagious.

By Thursday morning, my scratchy throat had spread to include a mouth that felt like it was made of raw meat. I visited the urgent care center across the street and got some zithromycin for the infection and cough syrup with codeine so I could get some sleep. By Friday afternoon, I felt 92% better and by Saturday afternoon, felt I was well on my way to being alllll better. There was a small relapse Saturday night where I thought maybe the sore throat was coming back, but all day today, it's been behaving itself. I think I'm on the mend.

It doesn't matter where we go for the trip - cruise, Hawaii, Florida, Arizona - I always manage to catch some crud that lasts for about a week. I tried Airborne once, but you have to take that stuff every 3 hours and I would forget... sort of defeated the purpose. I suppose the other option would be to not travel. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I crack me up sometimes...

Poor KW, too... while we were gone, Northern California was having a nice wet set of 2 weeks. Great that it happened while we were gone (and having lovely weather, BTW), but boy, once his sinuses hit the California air, the pollens found their way in and he had an even worse couple of days than I did. He normally has problems with allergies, but every 4 or 5 years it's really bad. These few days were one of those years. He's still medicating, but at least he's not sneezing 10 or 12 times an hour any more.

For those of you trying to follow our travels, at the end of April, we'll take a trip up to Sonoma County for a wine event (yes, I'll be the designated driver), and in May, I'm kidnapping a friend for a long weekend. Then there's a retreat at a friend's house over another weekend, and finally I'm being kidnapped for another weekend. Little travels like that (2 or 3 days) don't seem to wreak havoc on my system like the longer ones do, so I have no trepidation for them at all.

That's it for now.

Friday, March 30, 2012

How long?

Just lost about a half-hour of blog... which sucks. The only thing I have from what I had written was the "Things I Learned By Driving I-5 from 152 to Long Beach Three Times in 24 Hours" which I copied from the post I wrote in Facebook:
1.) Listening to celtic rock can keep you from nodding off (so can being really angry at yourself for being such a stoooopidhead). 1a.) I have enough celtic rock loaded on my iPod to last the 3 trips. 1ai.) I have more celtic rock at home that isn't loaded on my iPod. I'm oddly proud of this.
2.) In the Sunday night / ...Monday morning 10:00 PM to 7:00 AM window, more trucks travel north than south on I-5.
3.) Some parts of I-5 smell like Morgan Hill on a ripe August afternoon, some parts smell like dead skunk. Both are effective at keeping both driver and passenger awake.
4.) Driving I-5 during those hours was not as desolate as I was expecting, but driving 152 from 101 to I-5 was.
5.) Truck drivers on the open road are very courteous, it's the jerks in cars trying to go 92 mph who are assholes.
After that, I wrote about the cruise we took in January (the cruise of the "passport incident") and the cruise we just took on the Oasis of the Seas, but all that pithy writing is gone now. Maybe that means it's time to post some pictures...
Half of the Royal Promenade, deck 5 (and at either end, deck 6 as well).
Kelly coming in on the zip line. What... your cruise ship doesn't have a zip line? Doesn't every ship have one?
The view from our balcony. We had an inside room, which actually looked out on the Central Park area on deck 8 (which was the rooftop to the Royal Promenade). Those are real trees, not silk and plastic.
It was a lovely ship and we had a terrific time.

Friday, January 13, 2012

World traveler... NOT!

Dumbest thing I've done in a very, very, VERY long time...

Get up early and hit the road about 9:00 AM last Sunday. Made good time down I-5, the 405 and the 710 to Long Beach and checked into the Queen Mary around 3:30 PM.

Took an audio tour of the ship/hotel, imagining what it might have been like to cruise on something like that. Had a few drinks in one of the bars, then moved into the dining room for a quiet dinner. Back in the room, admiring the tons of wood in the stateroom, sat down and began knitting, while KW read his book.

Around 8:45 PM, as I was mentally walking through the next day's cruise check-in activities, I suddenly went cold and ashen, and frantically started tearing through my purse and luggage. Nope, no such luck - I had left my passport home.

Home. 345 miles and 6 hours away. Or, because we'd have to drive up and then back down again, 690 miles and 12 hours away. Boarding for the cruise starts at 12:30 PM; we can't check in any later than 3:30 PM. It's now almost 9:00 PM, we're tired from the drive down earlier in the day, and had already started that part of the evening when you allow yourself to wind down and relax after the day. Crap. What a stupidhead. Idiot. Stooopid. Asshole. Jerk.

I called Carnival Cruise lines to see if I could still get on the ship with either my driver's license or my military ID. Again, no such luck. Even as I was talking with her, I was remembering that they changed the rules around 2 years ago - you need a passport to travel into and out of both Mexico and Canada. Fucking stupidhead idiot who calls herself a "traveler."

Into the car we go, on the road by 9:02 PM. It's dark. We're on I-5 with large trucks and fast cars. KW and I swapped off, with him taking the L.A. portion and my taking the bulk of the I-5 and 152 portions. We'd nap (or try to) when we weren't driving. Made it home by 2:30 or so AM, got the passport, and after a stretch and potty stop and a gasoline fill-up, were back in the car and on the road by 3:00 AM. Another swap or two along the way, with truckers to keep us company, and we hit the 405 around 8:00 AM, whereupon it took us around and hour-and-a-half to make it the last 35 miles or so to the Queen Mary.

We staggered into the room 9:30 AM, set our alarms for 11:00 AM, and put heads to pillow a bit before 10:00, ready to get about an hour's worth of 'sleep.' We made it to the cruise check-in by 1:00 and managed to stay awake and alert until 8:00 PM or so, until we both hit a wall head-on. Crashed, we were asleep by 8:30 PM.

I'll post my "Things I Learned While Driving I-5 Three Times in 24 Hours" in the future. In the meantime, I'm still looking for other names to call myself for being such an idiot, but I seem to come back to 'stupidhead.'