Yarnification

I haven’t been able to spend a lot of time this week on either crochet or blogging (or much of anything besides work, it seems like!), but I did manage to finish the afghan a few days ago. I still don’t have a picture of it, unfortunately. Well, not quite true. I took a bunch of pictures, but none of them turned out decent. Some were too dark, and some of them showcased a little more of the clutter in my room than I’m comfortable showing off. In general it was really hard to get a good angle in there, too, because of the way the bed is situated and whatnot—it’s hard to explain, other than that our house is tiny (850 square feet) and has a lot of furniture in it.

I’m going to try again tomorrow after work. Don doesn’t know yet, but I’m going to rope him into holding it up for me while standing on the stairs so I can drape it over the kitchen table (again, you’d probably have to see my house to see how that’s even possible), because I don’t think I can get any kind of a decent picture with it on the bed. And lying it out on the floor to take a picture isn’t possible; even if it weren’t for all my shedding animals leaving tufts of fur for me wherever they go, there just isn’t that much open floor space anywhere :p

So with a bit of luck I’ll have a photo Saturday.

Saturday evening we need to go to the city for supplies (heh, that makes it sound like I live a hundred miles from anywhere) and while I’m there I’m hoping to get a couple more pounds of flax seed since I love the comfort pack I made so much that I want to make a couple more, one for a birthday present for my sister and a more rectangular one (a little longer than the one I already made, but only about half as wide) for my neck.

This pack has been a lifesaver since I hurt my back last week, let me tell you. Once the first couple of days had passed and I figured it was safe to start using heat I started bringing it to work with me—my desk chair holds it perfectly against the part of my back that hurts. That reminds me, maybe I should go reheat it and put it on my back for a while longer…

I’ve been a little under the weather lately. I put my back out around Tuesday or so, and by Thursday it was bad enough that I had to go to the doctor. (I have a history of back problems, but this hasn’t happened—not like this, anyway—for a couple of years.) Judging by the fact that I could barely walk or stand without the pain getting so intense that I just had to sit/lie down and also by the fact that my muscle relaxers weren’t helping at all, I knew from past experience that I wasn’t going to start getting better without a round of steroids, so off I went. They gave me a shot at the doctor’s office and a course of steroid to take. I’m doing better now, but for a few days hobbling around was using up all my energy. Also I kept alternating between tearful and half-starved due to the steroids. That’s still going on, but now that I’m tapering off them not so much.

Sigh…I need to make a more reasonable effort at working out. This half-assed once or twice a week thing isn’t cutting it. (I didn’t hurt myself exercising, though—I woke up hurting way more than usual one morning and it kept getting worse. I think I’d lifted a box wrong the day before.) But first it’s going to be a week or two of just stretching until I’m past the risk of this happening again.

Anyway, I’m not all better yet, but well enough to tote the assembled afghan around with me so I can finish working in the ends (yes, it was too heavy to carry a couple of days ago!) and well enough to concentrate on crochet. I think I’ve got about 25 ends to go, then it’ll be done and I can work on some of the many, many negleged WIPs I have going on…

Ever since I got out the sewing machine to make the comfort pack, I’ve been itching to do some more sewing. I’ve also been thinking that I could really use some new curtains in the bedroom. The ones in there don’t quite fit the windows; they’re an odd size and it’s really not possible to find ones that aren’t either too short to too long. Between the two, I’ve decided that I need to make some curtains.

Until last night this was a vague, maybe if I see the right fabric for cheap idea, but last night I measured the windows, figured out casing and hem allowances and whatnot, and realized that I only need about 5 yards of fabric. If I get a good coupon or find a good sale, I could get that much fabric for pretty cheap. So it looks like this is definitely going to happen sooner or later, just a matter of when I find fabric I like for a good price.

I’m more than two thirds of the way through assembling the afghan. I’m trying to figure out how to get a photo of it since the only place I can think of to spread the whole thing out is the bed, but the lighting in my room isn’t the greatest for taking pictures. I’ll figure something out. The photos can’t possibly come out worse than the ones of the cable strip afghan (I have got to take new photos of that one sometime).

I’m pretty happy with how it’s coming out, and the assembly is going along pretty quickly. This flat braid method is making me not hate joining squares anymore. This way is so much easier and faster than whipstitching!

I am so far behind on reading everyone’s blogs! I’ve been pretty swamped at work. Every month I have to file/pay an absolute minimum of two tax returns/payments, but there are months when it’s a lot more than that, and this month I’ve got (besides the usual payroll tax deposit and sales tax return) a bunch of quarterly and yearly returns to do—use tax, personal property tax (where the county shakes us down for a tax on equipment the business owns, which fortunately we are exempt from because our property doesn’t exceed a certain value, or at least we always were before—I still have to calculate it for this year), state unemployment tax, federal income tax (I filed for an extension on this and the city income tax—ugh), state and city income tax withholding for the first quarter, federal payroll tax reconciliation for the first quarter, and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my head. Maybe our worker’s comp payroll reports, too? Or did I do that last month? I’ll need to check. Then the state corporate tax form is due at the end of next month.

In case you glazed over during that paragraph (and I don’t blame you one bit), let me summarize: I am frazzled. Frazzled, I tell you.

Look what a fairy godmother sent me. Isn’t he adorable?

Elephants are my favorite critters, and this guy is just too sweet for words. He’s hanging out on top of my monitor right now. (I tried for a bigger photo, but this was the clearest one).

Thanks very much—you know who you are… Getting a surprise in the mail totally made my day :)

One final word about feeds: I finally got the redirects working for the blog feeds. You should not have to change your Bloglines subscription now because Bloglines will try to check the feed and will be fooled into thinking it’s in the same place it always was. I checked this morning and the exclamation points they put next to broken feeds are gone, so theoretically there are no worries there.

Something about crochet, for once: I have about one and a third squares left to make, then it’s on to edging/joinging the afghan. And weaving in the ends—in the beginning I was determined to do that as I went along but as usual, I started putting it off. It shouldn’t be too bad, four ends for each square (including the ends made when I edge and join them) times 36 squares…144 ends, minus probably 20 or 30 that I’ve already done. Not half as bad as that throw rug where I saved them all to the end and found out there were something like 400 of them. (Yes, I really do figure up how many ends there are to do. I know that’s dorky but it makes me feel like I’m getting somewhere once I get started.) Almost there!

I will be back shortly with a photo of a surprise I got in the mail :) but right now I’m still working on my coffee, and my minimal photography skills just aren’t at their best this early in the day…

Oh, and look! I got to the bottom of the category list on the right not nesting properly. Turns out I needed to download a new file to fix a bug that was in the release I installed. Oops! Guess I should’ve checked the support forums before I spent all that time searching the documentation for info on how to sort the list!

It turns out that the feed addresses changed with the upgrade. The new addresses are:

RSS feed: http://daisywreath.net/crochet/feed/
Atom feed: http://daisywreath.net/crochet/feed/atom/
Bloglines subscribe URL: Subscribe with Bloglines

I hope Bloglines updates things automatically, because I checked and both my old feeds show up with the exclamation point, and no posts show up after I did the upgrade. I put some server-side redirects in, so with any luck the old Bloglines feeds will stop being broken because they automatically forward to the new addresses now. In theory, anyway—I’ll have to check later at Bloglines and see if that’s what actually happens…

Now if only I can get the list of categories fixed so it’s not such a jumbled-up mess!

Hey, look, the comments aren’t broken anymore!

As far as I’m aware, the only things that are still broken are one of my feeds and the messed-up category nesting over in the sidebar.

If you use Bloglines or some service like that and it says my feed is broken, try using this one instead: http://daisywreath.net/crochet/feed/. I’ll try to get the other feed working again, too. I’ve read what’s involved in getting it un-broken but haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet…

Found at Deneen’s. This is what comes of growing up in Boston, moving to southern Ohio, and living with a kid who lived mostly in the South until she was twelve or thirteen:

My list of categories is a mess—it used to be sorted with yarn-related stuff all indented underneath yarn and thread-related stuff indented under thread, but it doesn’t seem to want to do that now. Hmmph.

And, erm, the comments are here but also not here at the same time. I can still see them all in the administration area, but they’re missing when you click on a comments link. Double hmmph. This one is probably my fault. I renamed the comments files a while ago to help foil spammers, and I don’t think I’ve made sure yet that it’s looking for the comments in the right place.

Other than that I think things are under control. If anyone notices anything that seems broken other than the categories and comments, I’d be super grateful if you’d let me know— yarnification@daisywreath.net since the comments are down right now…

I’m planning to upgrade to the new version of WordPress today, so if things look all haywire for a while that’s the reason.