Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Instructables

Ok, first off, to let you know, i'm a BzzAgent. That means i try things out, and sometimes get free stuff. Click here to get more information about it.

Meanwhile, I wanna tell you about Instructables. It's this really cool site where people can load instructions for just about anything. I clicked around on some of the food ones, and found some interesting recipes. They run the gamut, though. I saw one that would teach you to make a CD player from an old Gameboy!

They usually come with 5 steps, and each step has a series of photos to go with it. Prime example was the one i clicked on about making authentic Texan flour tortillas. The last pic in the series for one step shows you the texture of the dough! How cool is that!

I'll be scanning it for some fibery stuff, too, but, of course, the food stuff grabbed me first, lol.

Go check it out!

Monday, May 12, 2008

Lookee what i did!

While I'm a bit late to the party, Claudia is doing this BAT/KAT thing, where you replace car trips with walking or biking. Since my bike is out of commission right now (it needs brake work, sigh), I'm walking. I've never officially signed up for it, but definitely did my thing yesterday.


As many of you know, hubbie and i each own a house. Since there is no garage or shed at my house (and i've had one lawnmower stolen from the back yard already!), we keep the lawnmower over here, and transport it over there every week. Yesterday, I took Liam over, and got him started mowing. I needed to go get lawn bags, so i had planned on driving back over to Walgreens, when I realized it would be just as easy to walk to No Frills (local grocery chain) which was a little closer, and I could hunt for aluminum cans as well, as the Florence Days parade had been the day before. So, I toddled my fanny over to the store, bought lawn bags and mother's day cards (don't ask, i never remember until a day or two before, even though i KNOW i'll need cards whenever i'm near a cheaper source), and walked back. Net results? A nice walk on a nice, sunny day, a BAT/KAT, and 6 aluminum cans!

Now for a pet peeve, where the cans are concerned. People. There are better ways to deal with your cigarette butts than popping them in an almost empty can. And the culprit lives very near my house. I regularly find diet mountain dew cans with butts in them. this time it was one DMD and one pepsi can. i shake them out as best i can. hope the can recycling place doesn't mind, lol.

And, for Tikabelle, my review of the laminaria pattern i've been knitting, from knitty. Admittedly, i'm not even halfway done, but so far this pattern is INCREDIBLY EASY. i think the toughest part so far has been the 3into9 stars (go look at the pattern, lol), and the 2into9 stars. that and when i'm purling back, i have to pay special attention to those, because it's easy to catch 2 loops together (even the 2into3's and the 3into3's have that tendency, lol). and yes, i'm doing it in a variegated yarn. It's my birthday yarn from miss v and carin, who dyed it especiallyfor me, lol. while i think the pattern would have stood out more in a solid, i like how it's coming out in this. it makes me think of that iris painting (but i can't remember who painted it, lol. monet? van gogh? i'd have to look it up, lol)

and a pic!
Laminiaria! I'm tickled pink, that i got the texture to show. i'm all the way through the transition chart, and into the first blossom chart, but it's kinda hard to tell, as once you get so far, lace just looks like a bucket of boiled ass, to quote my favorite cuss-creator . Want a close up?





This shows a closeup of the beginning of the blossom chart. Doncha just love the colors? I think the one thing i would change about this if i did it again, would be the direction i did the 3into3's. i did them the same direction for both halves, but i think next time i would do mirror image. I don't do ssk, i do knit in front or back loop, and i get the same look. since i knit so differently from everyone else, i doubt anyone else could replicate it, lol, so don't do like i do, lol.



and, just because i told her i'd post this pic:



this is tara, who, besides miss v, is our local pusher fiber enabler purveyor. She had been reskeining some of her stuff, and we thought this skein of henrietta matched her bandana, so we made her model it. Wheeeee!

ok, i'm off to knit some more on my laminaria, just cuz i love it so much!

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

this is interesting

Go read this article. I am an unrepentant bare-footer. Even as a small child on the farm, I refused to wear shoes, much to the chagrin of my father. He had a cousin who had to have a large splinter surgically removed, because she went barefoot. Now, I find out that I was right. Being barefoot is better for you!

Mark's doctor told him he should probably never go barefoot again, after his surgery 2 years ago. However, I've noticed something. Mark, as most of you have noticed by now, is incredibly tall. As in, he's the same height as Michael Jordan. He's 6'8". That's standard door frame height. Yes, he barely misses doorways, and if he's not careful, he'll hit his head. The boots that the shoe doctor recommended add an additional 2" to his height, which means he's ducking through doorways.

But, he's awkward. Never played basketball, even though he was this tall at 16. He just has no grace. Unless he's not wearing shoes. He will wear socks non-stop (even when he sleeps; he has calluses that catch t he sheets, and drive him batty, and yes, we go through a lot of socks), but if he's in the house, the shoes come off. While he's still not Mikhail Barishnekov (and i know i didn't spell that right, lol), he's much more comfortable moving around the house. It's almost like watching long, leggy birds, like cranes or herons. A long, lean grace that's beautiful to watch (and trust me, i like watching, lol).

Any way, this has made me decide something. I'm going to walk barefoot much more (although i do a lot as it is!). the biggest hazard is broken glass. So i'm thinking about investing in some of those "barefoot" shoes you see. I was at parent-teacher conferences in march, and one of the band moms (who is a physical therapist) was wearing a pair. So I know where to get them. I think I may be checking them out tomorrow. And the thought of wearing them? Bliss.

I know, I know

It's been two weeks. And guess what? No real post, but i thought this meme was interesting!

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (have it at home, might read it)
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The IliadEmma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984 (although i read it for the 2nd time on my own!)
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

ok. i don't feel like such an airhead, after all. i've read some of the tuffies, and many of these (like watership down and 1984) i'd read on my own (we covered 1984 in school AFTER i'd read it the first time. gotta love a school librarian who keeps the classics in a school library)