Trials and Tribulations

Good golly, miss Molly, it really shouldn't be this hard. Every time I try to do something new with the new beastie, there's yet another problem. The latest PITA is that for some reason, some file klonking went on and the PC thought that the boot drive was on my external (data only) drive. Not gonna find it there.

So KW manages to resucutate the thing back to a recovery point last week (the data's okay, though.... I think... I suppose I should go check). He did that fine, then I tried to access my email on AOL. It's just a browser, www.aol.com. I can see my email in the in-box but when I click on a note, I get the spinning hamster wheel. Forever. Great. He managed to fix that by opening the email in the existing window, but why won't it work the other way now? I like having a separate window open with the email in it; what the hell heppened that it won't do it now?

On the plus side, I installed Adobe Acrobat 9.0 and it hasn't exploded itself or the machine yet.

On to better things... The Tomato socks are almost done; I started the cuff ribbing yesterday and will go until I've had enough. The Tulip socks are coming along slowly (primarily because I haven't been knitting them... don't suppose that has anything to do with their slow progress, do you?). Haven't really touched any lace in a couple of months. Good god, has it really been that long? I hope I remember.

Went to see some shows in the TheatreWorks New Works Festival this weekend. They were all terrific. "Variations on a Theme," "How to Write a New Book for the Bible," "Great Wall," and "Fly by Night." I cried. (Yes, I'm a mushball.) Next weekend we go see the last one, "Red Clay." If you have any spare time whatsoever, go see one. Or two, or three. Fantastic.

Now, let's see if I can attache pictures this time...

Sock Summit Memories

Ah yes... it was a year ago that the first Sock Summit was held, Sock Summit 2009. A sock knitter's Woodstock, without the brown acid. (Well, there may have been some brown acid, but it was probably acid dyes for someone's homespun.)

Next one in slightly less than a year, July 28-31. Unfortunately, most airlines won't let you book flights that far in advance. I have 5 trips between now and the end of the year, and still find myself like women in the old Mervyn's ads... "Open, open, open..."

SS09 was so awesome, so huge, so ... indescribable. To be among your sock-knitting peeps, to understand why everyone was looking at your feet, to learn from people you revered, to hear a panel discussion with people you thought were dead, to be part of breaking a Guiness world record... No words, just a big pack of happy when I think back upon it.

(Great, another thing to add to the stupid computer problem list - I can't add photos to blogspot, either on the 64-bit version or the non-64-bit version. This is going to turn into a very blah looking blog soon if I can't get pictures uploaded!)

The Price of Modernity

Ugh. So after the new Dell PC fiasco of early July (Windows 7 incompatibility issues), we decided to see how long the old PC would last before replacing it. As luck would have it, that was exactly 4 days. Not that it completely crapped out, mind you, but the noises started again (whirrrrrrring very loudly when you turn it on or restart it) and everything on the machine was S-L-O-W and my C: drive had run out of space.

So, we got a new machine. It, too, has Windows 7, and after our experience with the Dell (3 days of trying to get it to work with ... well, just about everything ... including about an hour with the Geek Squad - to no avail), we thought we were prepared for the big changeover. This one's an HP Pavilion, and we've had good luck with HPs before.

Yeah, that was *before.* As in "before Windows 7." Good golly, I'm very glad DH is heading off to Ottawa tomorrow; I swear, one more 'issue' with this freakin' thing and I'm going to kill someone. I'd rather it not be him, so I"m glad he'll be out of town.

Here's what we've had to replace (or will have to):

• Laser printer (no driver upgrade available for the old one)
• Inkjet printer (ditto)
• Adobe Acrobat Professional (no driver upgrade available for 7.0)
• My beloved PDA (double ditto)
• Speakers (no power source on new machine)
• My old AOL email account (because I thought I couldn't send emails from new machine)

I'm planning to replace my old (2005!) PDA with an iPod Touch, but now I'm reading all sorts of forum posts on how it's not compatible with Win7, only Vista and XP. Great.

I'm sure there's more; when I tried to launch Pandora a few hours ago, nothing happened. As it turns out, there is now a 'regular' MSIE 8.0 and a 64-bit MSIE 8.0. Some things work on one but not the other (like sending AOL webmail), or vice versa, and some things work on both. Luckily, I haven't found anything that doesn't work on either.

Except gmail. Now I can't load gmail up on either browser. Oh, and here on blogger? I can't cut and paste. In 'regular' browser mode. Maybe I can on the other one. What a PITA. And I can hear my wireless mouse through my new speakers. *sigh*

Yeah, we're keeping the old PC alive on the other desk. I have a feeling I'll be using it a lot in the next few days. Weeks?

If you see me in the near future, steer clear and try not to piss me off. It's a very short leap from where I am now to manslaughter.

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!!