Embellishments

So starting last night I got in another kick of making these embellished flipflops. Okay, so I had inspiration in the form of someone who saw me wearing a pair I'd made last year and asked very sweetly if I'd make her a pair (for commission, of course). I think she'll probably pick the black on black pair.

When I was at church for an auction to benefit the school, several people saw me working on them and got interested -- so it looks like I may be back in the business of making them. Especially as I got a possible future order for quite a few pair waiting in the wings. Time to get back to work. :)

Things that make you smile

It's always fun when you're out somewhere and get a nice compliment. It's even nicer when you're not out on the town all dressed to the nines. I was at the store today and a kinda cute guy came up to the shelf I was looking at and asked me if anyone had ever told me what beautiful legs I had. It's the kind of ego boost that will keep you grinning silly all day.

Nothing to see...

Ok, that's not entirely true. I've gotten to almost the halfway point on my latest project, which is the sweater featured on the back cover of the latest SnB book: The Happy Hooker. True, I am less than amused by the double entendre of the title, as but it contains a lot of good crochet projects and the price isn't bad. However, I am working it in a black boucle yarn and I just don't think it will photograph well.

The title of the post really refers, however, to the changes I am working on in my blog template. I've grown tired of the old one and spent a couple hours working on the new one, only to have Blogger crash when I saved my changes. Sigh. So now I am working on it more - feel free to chime in with suggestions if you have them. Hopefully I can get my Haloscan comments added back in in short order.

Edit: well, maybe we'll try Blogger comments for a while. Then again, you might be seeing Haloscan back soon. We'll see.

A fan notes...

To my boys in burnt orange:

STOP with the giving me heart attacks already! 5 minutes in OT to go - can they pull it off?

EDITED to add: A valiant effort by my UT Longhorns - but it looks like we're not going to the Final Four this year. I am very sad, but the games were good. There were several missed calls by the refs early on in the game -- to be fair these happened on both sides, but I think the refs really overlooks some dirty play by the LSU team. The game cleaned up a lot in the end, but LSU managed to dominate the heck out of the overtime. Sigh.

Frustration

Funny - I've lived in this city for close to 14 years now and I still managed to forget one of the major tenets of the city. Before you go anywhere - ANYWHERE - near downtown or Zilker, make absolutely certain to check what activities are being held. It will save you quite a lot of grief.

Long story (sort of) short, I drove down to the Botanical Gardens to take pictures today, only to find out that the Garden Festival was going on this weekend. The two-lane road through the park became one very slow lane that you couldn't get around. Since the Gardens were obviously crowded, I decided to go to the nearby sculpture gardens instead. ...to find that they were closed for a wedding. Argh, argh, argh. So, no pics and no walking for me.

Well, at least the basketball game this afternoon should be good. Off to knit. Or crochet. Or do anything that doesn't involve the car, traffic, and/or large crowds.

GO TEXAS!!!!

4 seconds to go, and TEXAS WINS!!! YES!!! We are in the Elite 8 versus LSU. 3 more games to go before we get to see the Tower lit up again. Woot!

Socks and more

So here, finally, is the picture of the socks I knit for Becky and finished a few weeks ago. Becky is the proud model. :) These socks were knit on size 2 needles using slightly more than one skein of Lion Brand sock yarn. Yup, slightly more than one. Sigh. If I'd realized when I started how much yarn would be needed, I would have made the legs longer -- since I started top down it wasn't an option to change that unless I really wanted to pick up from both cast on edges.

I just finished watching Fight Club. Disturbing movie - and the clipped in porn scenes were...um...over the top. I'm actually paying better attention to the basketball games tonight in an attempt to fix my frame of mind. I totally need to find something odd in my DVD collection to get my boss back with for making me finish watching this movie. At the very least, he owes me a recording of the World Figure Skating Championships.

...and just to change the subject again, JenLa asked some interesting questions. The rules are here.

1. A blog which you think people have not discovered.

Probably this one. Perhaps if enough of us visit, we'll convince Timothy to post more often. :) purls of wisdom indeed - and geek code to boot.

2. A blog whose author lives close to you physically. Just get as close as you can, it’s all relative.

Well, there are a few who live in the same town as me...some good friends in that list, too. To pick one at random, Becky the Twentysomething keeps me laughing quite a bit when she posts.

3. An unusual or weird animal picture.

Anything Dooce posts of stuff on Chuck. :D

4. An entry that made you laugh and got you strange looks from family or co-workers.

Mighty Girl has a few good examples.

5. An idea you wish you’d thought of.

Pixel Ads.

6. Something you’d like to knit.

I really want to knit these lace stockings from White Lies Designs. Her patterns kick tail.

7. A picture of something you consider beautiful.

How about the sunset on the Gulf of Mexico? This is one of a series I snapped while on a cruise last fall.



It's unbelieveable how long a sunset lasts and yet how quickly it passes.

8. A blog whose author you’d like to one day meet in person

I think it would be cool to meet most of the bloggers I read regularly, but Franklin is definitely somewhere at the top of the list.

9. A blog of someone you have already met in person.

She of the Small Hands, who shall soon be local.


Wow -- that all took much longer than I thought. Of course, getting continually dragged back into the NCAA tourney might have something to do with it. I know I picked Duke to win, but go LSU -- because I think Texas has better chance of beating you. :D

Weightlifting

Today I carried 15 old phonebooks that had been in a stack by the door down to the recyclin bin. How many pounds of curls would that equal, do you think (not to mention the reps on the stairs)?

Nothing like needing the maintenance man to come over to get you motivated to clean out the entry way of your apartment. Thankfully the work I'd already been doing helped the place to not look like a total disaster, but I still really wish I had Mary Poppins fingers.

I also found out (something that I already knew) that I have WAY too many pairs of shoes. On the other hand, I am really hard on shoes generally, so there are a few here that are going to get tossed out. ...and now, I really need to turn my AC back on or go stick my head in the fountain outside. That was hot work! :D

Taking pictures

Well, one of these days I will get off my keester and post all the great photos that I've been taking with my E-Volt...not to mention my poor little Fujifilm A210 that gets knocked around in my purse. I did dig up a more recent archived photo and posted it over at Rediscovering Austin. My entire purpose for starting that blog was to take more pics, not less.

So hey, if you wanna see more, remind me once in a while! :D

Shawl

So here's the shawl - vitals: pattern - upside-down shawl, size 15 needles, approx 400yds Lorna's Laces Lion & Lamb in colorway Watercolor. The pattern makes a nice, quick shawl -- and you can use just about any size yarn and needles to do it. This one took me less than 10 hours of total knitting time all told. Started on 3/14 (I think) and completed on 3/18/2006.

Watching Ball

I love March Madness. To be completely truthful, this is the first year I've been able to watch most of the first 32 games, and I've finally remembered why I loved playing basketball years ago -- now I wonder what took me so long to rediscover it.

Does anyone else find it amusing that the score board for the Bradley - Pittsburgh game is abbreviated Brad Pitt?

I've gotten quite a bit of knitting and crocheting done this week (while not getting much of anything else done since the games started). I started and finished an upside-down shawl from Lorna's Laces Lion and Lamb, and finished a hat I'd started for the crochet class I teach. To keep my penchant for having way too many WIPs going, I started both a cabled shrug and a crocheted sweater - both for me - in the last couple days as well, and I still have a pair of socks on the needle. Well, the first of a pair, anyway. The shrug and sweater need to be finished before the end of June --- and I REALLY need to get the apt completely cleaned up before then as well.

To that end, I reorganized my closet and cleaned up part of my bedroom today. Granted, there is still a ways to go, but I did accomplish something. :D

Weekend fun and a Meme

Well, I went down to Mom's this weekend for a short holiday. All in all, things went well - we walked the Riverwalk on Saturday (with a margarita or two for fortification, of course) and went to Mt. Olive this morning for church. This is the church I grew up in, but in a different location and with only a small number of the members I remember from my youth. The new location is nice, and the current pastor is as well - don't know that I would attend there full time if I did live down there, but it is certainly worth visiting from time to time.

Oh, the meme! Got this one in email but I've seen it being passed around the blogs as well, so here's my take on it, since I was tagged.

Four Jobs I've had:
1. Steve. Just kidding - I think my first official job title was babysitter. :)
2. Emergency Desk Specialist for Sears
3. Phone-based tech support (did this at least 4 different places)
4. Data monkey

Four movies I'd watch over and over:
1. Princess Bride
2. Summer Magic
3. Elephant Parts
4. most Monty Python

Four places I have lived:
1. San Antonio
2. dorms at UT
3. Austin - west campus
4. NW Austin

Four TV shows you love to watch:
1. The Monkees
2. Firefly
3. Joan of Arcadia
4. Veronica Mars

Four places you have been on vacation:
1. The Caribbean
2. Florida
3. Grand Tour (if you're one of my sisters, you remember these trips every summer?)
4. Grand Canyon

Four of my favorite foods:
1. Lasagna
2. Ice Cream
3. Monte Cristo
4. Prime Rib

Four websites I visit daily:
1. Woot.com
2. my work website (ha - thought you'd get a peek, eh?)
3. Bloglines
4. Google

Four places I would rather be right now:
1. Western Europe
2. the swimming pool
3. Disney World
4. Actually on vacation

I am so weak

I certainly don't need to add yet more sock yarn to my stash, and yet I couldn't resist picking up some Socks That Rock. I admit it, I am weak.

Chalk it up to the scale saying I was 50 lbs lighter today -- it was the brain, it completely fell out.

EDITED to add later: Well, maybe the brains didn't fall out, but I fixed my scale, and I've at least lost 4 lbs in te last week or so. Woohoo!

Important Things to Remember...

Mental note - watching movies that require a lot of paying attention is probably not a good co-activity for knitting something with complicated cabling in the pattern. Case in point: I just started the Kitt Shrug from the Mission Falls East + West book last night while watching (or trying to watch) Fight Club for the first time. This afternoon I picked it back up while watching another movie (The Whole Ten Yards) and just now I noticed not one tiny mistake that I saw earlier but decided to overlook - I knit some stitches I should have purled and ended up with a bit of garter stitch instead of reverse stockingette -- but two very huge glaring mistakes in the cabling patterns. The first was not starting a cable where it should have started - so that it looks like a cable starts in mid-air rather than at the edge of the piece with the rest of the cables. The second was much more grievous. I am supposed to have matching braided cables on both edges of the back. Instead I had a beautiful braided cable on one side, and a thinner cable with a column of knit next to it on the other. I checked and rechecked the pattern charts, and the only thing I can think of is that I somehow overlooked the cross where it should have been down a few rows.

Argh. Well, to the frog pond we go, and we're viewing it as a "learning opportunity".

In other news, and a bit more interesting at that: blog-world's own Dooce was interviewed by one of the local papers for a SXSW feature piece. Very cool! I started reading Heather's blog via one of the knitbloggers (yeah, we rule Bloglines, baybee) and I've enjoyed her living biography ever since. How often do you get that real a look into someone else's life? I admire her and her husband for doing what they want and being gutsy enough to tell the rest of us about it. For her detractors: you're just mad you didn't think of it first.

9810

So we have a goal in my department at work to walk 10,000 steps a day. That's approximately 5 miles. So far, I've averaged 9810 steps a day, in the six days that I've been logging my progress. Now if I could just get the weight-loss part started...

Happy Texas Independence Day!

It's time to Celebrate Texas!

A Time of Remembrance

Wow, how did Ash Wednesday get here so fast? Today Christians all over the world take time to remember Christ's sacrifice for us as we enter the Lenten season - time to remember, time to repent.

I had a few other things to say, but I'll save them for later.