Yarnification

Okay, broken photos, thumbnails and links to gallery pages should all be 100% fixed now. So far it even looks like Bloglines didn’t read any of the edited posts as new—interesting, since it kept doing that before when I was fixing links and things.

The shawl is pretty close to done. I’ve got the main triangle done, just need to do the edging and fringe. Though I’m going to see what it looks like pre-fringe before I decide on that because fringing makes me crazy. If I do fringe it, I’ll probably do the twisty fringe like on Marlo’s Aran scarf that I made last winter, much easier to deal with…

If you’re using Bloglines, I’ve got old posts bobbing to the surface again while I fix things that I broke last week. Please disregard…

…why this quiz result has a picture of a squid/octopus in it? I can’t figure it out.

Your Animal Personality

Your Power Animal: Deer Animal You Were in a Past Life: Panda You are a fun-seeker - an adventurous risk-taker. While you are spontaneous, you are not very rational.

(I’m really not much of a spontaneous risk-taker in my opinion. But the squid…I had to post this because I was so baffled by the squid.)

Anyway. Crochet stuff.

I’ve been working on a shawl, and I think I’m about three quarters of the way through it. It’s all I’ve been working on lately because anything smaller than a K hook (which I’m using for the shawl) is aggravating my finger and wrist. Even with a K hook, I’ve been putting a pencil cushion on it as padding.

I’m really happy with how it’s working up (um, the shawl, not the K hook), can’t wait for it to be finished. It’s a shame I didn’t start on it a week earlier, because the low tomorrow night is supposed to be 37°—brrr! I suppose there’s an outside chance I might be done with it by the time I get out of work tomorrow at midnight, though.

Yesterday I had to see the doctor about my neck and back issues, and while I was there I asked his advice about the numb finger since it’s weirding me out that it’s still numb after all this time. He said, after I described how it happened and how my smaller crochet hooks sit right across the spot that’s still numb, that though it’s probably not related to the carpal tunnel, it probably isn’t helping things any that I’ve already got compromised nerve function in that hand. And something about nerves healing at a rate of 2 millimeters a week. (Or was that 2 millimeters a month? This brain, it’s like a sieve.) And that I should add a multivitamin (in addition to the B vitamins I’m already taking) on the off chance that it’ll help things heal faster. I’m also supposed leave my rings off for a while (it’s my left ring finger), which I’m not keen on, but I did take them off before bed last night and have been taking them off periodically during the day today. I feel naked without my rings.

Hmm. I was going to post an in-progress photo of the shawl, but I can’t find anyplace to lay it out where I can get the whole thing in. When it’s finished I’ll need to recruit some help to get a photo taken.

I meant to post about this sooner, but I only just downloaded pictures off the camera. Today is my day off from the store, but I am a dork and have no life (and also no internet access at home) so I’m here today catching up on reading everyone’s blog posts, actually leaving some comments for a change, and getting pictures off the camera.

The other day Don was poking around one of the antique stores downtown and found this gigantic spool of thread and bought it for me :-D He made me guess how much it cost, because really, it is huge. The spool is about eight inches high. It is virtually a lifetime supply of thread. Anyway, my guesses were way off; it turns out it was only $2.00! I have got to see this place. He said that was the only thread they had but there was some yarn there, too, not lots but definitely worth going back to have a look.

Anyway, it’s a really pretty autumn-leafy-gold. The photo doesn’t really do it justice since the table and the wall really wash out the color (I had to mess with the contrast settings just to get it to show up this well). I believe it’s size 20. I don’t have any size 20 to compare it to, but it’s thinner than size 10 and thicker than 30, ergo my brilliant guess.

Time to go home, reheat some leftover jambalaya, and snuggle with my critters. Can’t snuggle with Don because he’s away right now and won’t be back until tomorrow. I thought I’d have a really hard time falling asleep last night because I don’t usually sleep well by myself, but I let Loco sleep on the bed with me (generally we keep him off the bed during flea season). He was beside himself with joy at being allowed back on the bed, and I got to fall asleep easier, so win-win situation there…

Oh, and I wanted to say that the project pictures in my posts are kinda working again. If there’s a picture directly posted, it should work. But I haven’t fixed or gotten redirects working yet for any clickable thumbnails, so those are still broken. They are still clickable and should go to the right page, but the thumbnails are still not showing up.

I actually am working on a project or two, but everything’s going slowly enough for the time being that there’s not much to say about what I’ve gotten done.

Also, the gallery is working again, but the pictures in the posts probably aren’t because I haven’t gotten the redirects working (the new version uses a different URL format).

So on to the quiz results!

Just FYI, my gallery has been broken since yesterday. That’s because I started upgrading to the new Gallery 2, had a problem, got help at the Gallery forum (where there are very helpful people), ran out of time, and then forgot to undo the change I had to make to upgrade that also broke the gallery’s address.

The gallery being broken also has probably resulted in many/most of my project pics being broken, too, since I was uploading them to Gallery and then pulling them over here.

Right now I’ve got the new Gallery installed and I’m importing photos, so by the time you see this it might even be working! But if you try to visit it and see only a test album with a photo of a butter cow, it means I’m still working on things…

Will post more later if possible. Also I wanted to say I really appreciated everyone’s comments but have not had the chance to reply to everyone just yet.

Found via Lori…I’m a kitty! Yay! It says I was almost a groundhog, and I wouldn’t have minded that, either. We have a groundhog living near the store; there’s a creek next to the parking lot and he hangs out on the banks nibbling on things. He’s so dang cute I can hardly stand it. He was just born this year, I guess, because he was just a little bit of a thing when I first saw him, but he’s getting pretty big now.

Getting a bit better here, doing some crocheting but not for long periods of time just yet. I don’t want to push it and have things get worse instead of better—and I will not go through the extreme wrist pain game again if I can possibly help it.

I would ordinarily think it was too soon for the B vitamins to be helping, but I’m having a lot less nerve pain in my left wrist/hand. Even the Numb Finger is about 99% non-numb. The right wrist is actually a lot more painful than the left, even though I’m left-handed, and I think it’s also computer use that’s doing it on that count because I use the mouse right-handed.

So I’ve broken out the Fashion Statement of the Year, which has been stowed away for several years. Lovely, no?

It’s doing a lot of good; I feel a lot better since I started wearing it a few days ago. I pretty much wear it as much as I can stand to, then take it off for a while. Somehow I can even type and use the touchpad with it on, though it turns out that it’s entirely impossible to crochet while wearing it.

But it is, if such a thing is even possible, even more unattractive than the standard bent-wrist brace (those irritate my wrist a lot). Also those straps are a nuisance (and backed with neoprene—mmmm, sweaty!) and have to be readjusted all the time.

But whatever works, right? And it doubles as a weapon since it has a metal bar running through it!

I just looked at the weather forecast at Bloglines (did you know you can get the forecast there? you just go here and type in your location or ZIP code) and every day for the next five days the high is supposed to be in the mid-seventies. I know that’s not really fall weather per se, but not a single 80° day really drives home the season change. Where did the summer go, anyway?

And how come I never find myself saying, “Hey, that winter just flew by! Can you believe it’s spring already?” Wouldn’t that be nice?

Hey, I remember reading someone’s blog months ago who was having a really hard time with Bloglines and was looking for something different. It was long enough ago that I can’t remember where I read it. And I found this recently and thought I’d share. It turns out that NewsGator has pretty much the same service. And you can export your subscription list at Bloglines, then import it at NewsGator, so you don’t have to add all your subscriptions all over again. (To do that you click “Edit” on your blog list, scroll waaaay down to the bottom, and pick “Export subscriptions”. A window will open that’s all full of gibberish code. Go to “File”, “Save as”, and make sure the file extension is .xml which is the format NewsGator can import.)

When I registered at NewsGator, it was a little strange at first because it makes it sound like it’s a pay service only—but it isn’t. There’s a free version that does everything Bloglines does as far as I’ve seen, and while you’re registering there’s a page that lets you pick which version you want, free or pay.

I set up an account with them and I’m using both them and Bloglines right now to decide which I like better. So far I’m liking NewsGator a lot and it seems to pick up new posts in my feeds quicker than Bloglines does. But some things about them are weird, like when you go to add a feed and it tells you you can search or browse, then after staring at the page a while you see this link above all that that says “URL & Import”, which is where you add feeds the way you would at Bloglines. Also I think you have to click something to mark a feed read, but that might just be something I set wrong in my preferences. (I just checked on that, and there was a box I could check on the settings page to mark them read automatically after I look at them like what happens at Bloglines.)

So we’ll see who I like better in the end, I guess. I suppose it’s mostly a matter of getting used to the changes in interface from Bloglines. I don’t have a really compelling reason to switch apart from Bloglines seeming to take a long time to register that a blog has new posts, but I figure it’s worth checking out and keeping my subscriptions listed there in case Bloglines has problems.

I’m doing a test here, going to check after I post this to try to see how long it take each of them to pick up the new post.

[Update: After posting this, I hit reload on my Bloglines and Newsgator pages about every fifteen minutes or so. Results:
Posted at: 3:30 (I know it says 3:10 or so but that’s when I started writing it, not when I posted.
Bloglines: picked up the post sometime between 5:15 and 5:30 (so upwards of two hours)
Newsgator: picked up the post sometime between 4:00 and 4:15 (somewhere between a half hour and 45 minutes)
Very interesting…]

I haven’t crocheted in a few days. Aside from the Numb Finger (and I am taking B-vitamins more regularly now, including an extra B-6, thanks to Deneen’s tip that it doesn’t seem to be the one of the B vitamins that invites Captain Heartburn to the party), remember how I mentioned a few days or so ago that I had this twingy thing that I’ve come to associate with early signs of carpal tunnel? I had almost no sooner posted that than both my wrists went south on me. One of them I have a brace for from back when I had problems with it, and I’m wearing while I use the computer (which is difficult, but not impossible since it’s a straight brace, not the bent kind, which my doctor said was inflaming the tendons in my wrist), but the other one, my left wrist, and I’m left-handed, is feeling pretty bad.

So I guess I need to not stress my wrists out while I let the B vitamins do their magic trick. And that means all my thready projects definitely need to be put off for a while. After another day or two of no crochet, hopefully I’ll be feeling enough better to be able to tell whether crocheting with bigger hooks is aggravating the problem.

In any case, I’m hoping it gets better soon…

I’m catching up on reading everyone’s blogs, and I seem to have been tagged by Kari in a roundabout way.

Five Things

Ten Years Ago: I was in Boston, going technical school and looking for an apartment for Don and me to move into since he would be moving there from North Carolina in early October.

Five Years Ago: Five years ago was a bad time for me. Don and I nearly got divorced. It was largely my fault. Also I was pretty much out of my mind at the time. Nuff said there.

One Year Ago: More or less where I am now—trying to keep my head above water with this business.

Five Snacks: Kit-Kats, lemon cream sandwich cookies, chocolate chip cookies (am I cheating by listing different kinds of cookies? It’s an entirely separate craving from the lemon ones), Lindt’s truffles, white cheddar cheese popcorn (I’m not supposed to eat cheese but it’s soooo good)

Five Songs I know all the words to: Although I can’t sing worth a damn, I know all the words to tons of old folky songs. Off the top of my head: Pretty Boy Floyd, Wabash Cannonball, Blackleg Miner, Bedlam Boys, Run Come See Jerusalem. Also, though I can’t count it as knowing all the words because there are about a zillion verses floating around out there, I know about ten verses of the paganized version of Old Time Religion.

Five Things I would do with $100 Million: Pay off all our debts. Make sure Sara has enough money for college without having to start out her working life tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Buy some land in the county and build a house (we live in a small town, the kind where you have no privacy, which has its good points and its bad points). Give money to charities that I’d like to help out but can’t afford to these days. Invest it safely.

Five places to run away to: Monongahela National Forest (West Virginia), the White Mountains (New Hampshire), South Harper Creek Falls (Pisgah National Forest, North Carolina). I’m detecting a mountainous theme here…and I’m also drawing a blank for two more places.

Five Things I would never wear: High heels (I made an exception for my wedding and wore two-inch heels, but I can’t walk in anything higher than that), an argyle sweater vest like the one I had when I was twelve and which seems to have come back into style based on things I’ve seen on TV, anything that makes me look pregnant (I unfortunately keep most of my extra weight in my belly), baseball caps, body jewelry (only because I’m allergic to various metals).

Five Favorite shows: ER. Battlestar Galactica (the new one). Sex and the City (I’m pretty much the antithesis of those women but it’s strangely compelling. Like crack.) Joan of Arcadia. Dogs with Jobs (I think it’s on the National Geographic channel. Hi, I’m a dork!)

Five Biggest Joys: spending time with Don, reading, camping/hiking, crocheting, road trips.

Five Favorite Toys: You do not want to hear about my favorite toys, trust me.