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!!

Compare/Contrast

Thought I'd post a couple of side-by-side before-and-after shots of the landscaping...

Adventures in Landscaping, DONE!

Beautiful! Just like the other adults have! I especially like the way it smells now, with the bark all fresh and redwoody smelling. So here's what we got:

5 Japanese yew. These are along the far right fence and will eventually grow up to be great big strong windbreaks.

3 white birch. These are in the far right corner. Their role is to sway and bow gently in the breeze (wind) and look pretty.

5 non-tropical hibiscus. Four of them are in front of the white birch, one is behind those four, among the white birch.

13 oleander, the tall ones, a mix of pink and white. Four of these went towards the left, in front of the air conditioning units. We wanted something to protect them from the wind and give them some shade, and we also wanted to hide them onnacounta they're big and ugly. The remaining 9 are all in front of the Japanese yew, and will fill in below the leaf line.

7 cubic yards of bark (of which we had enough left over to fill in some holes we had in the front yard).

Purty!

Adventures in Landscaping, During

Some in-process shots of the work that was done. We had a total of 24 plants put into the ground . That means that these poor guys had to dig 24 holes into our awful, rocky, hard, rocky, clay, rocky, awful dirt... Eight 15 gallon-sized holes, and 5 gallon-sized holes for the rest. Plus trenching for the drip system and all the prep for the concrete. I felt sorry for the guy doing the bulk of the digging; I gave him a couple of bottles of water throughout the time he was here.

Adventures in Landscaping, Before

Yes, DH and I have decided to grow up. Well, at least as far as our home's landscaping is concerned. See, the month before we moved, in, DH lost his job (a high-risk mortgage company went under; great timing, huh?). We had enough to go for a while, but didn't want to deal with things we considered discretionary. Backyard landscaping fell into that category.

A few months after being in the house, and having been exposed to a very extreme Morgan Hill summer (incredible winds, temperatures over 100 degrees for two weeks in a row), when he got his next job, the first thing we did was put in some sod for most of the back yard. With such incredible winds, the house had continually full of dust and dirt. Yuck. We had hoped that the sod, in addition to looking nice, would cut down on the dirt factor.

Well, that worked; the amount of dust and dirt swirling around the house was cut 'way down. But we never felt comfortable enough financially to start to do anything 'fancy' with the rest of the landscaping. Oh, we put in those grapevines (8 went in, 6 are still alive; probably won't fruit this year), a blood orange tree (still doing okay), a Meyer lemon tree (ditto), and some jasmine bushes, but those were random acts of greenery, not a 'vision' of what we wanted the yard to look like.

Until now. We decided we had a few drachmas we could spend on the back yard and had gotten a good recommendation from a neighbor (hi, Suzy!). For comparison, we also invited another company to come and give us a quote, but not only was their quote higher, it was apparent that the owner didn't have quite the artistic vision that Le has. She listened to our woes ("oh, the wind!" "oh, the dirt!" "oh, how ugly!") and came up with a design that was simple, but elegant - and incredibly inexpensive, given the amount of work involved.

We opted to have her only do one side of the yard first, sort of a trial run (and to keep the costs down even more), so here are some of the sad before shots of the northeast side of our yard.