Tag-Archive for ◊ blog ◊

15 Jul 2008 Why Do You Blog?
 |  Category: Life  | Tags: ,  | 6 Comments

I often ask myself that question. I know I started with the intention to keep a public journal, documenting (wow that’s a big word) parts of my life that I feel comfortable sharing. For a time I got caught up in the popularity game, which made me blog less. It became a chore when I started worrying about what to say to be OK with the crowd, if there’s one. :lol: I have been telling myself to get off that bandwagon, to write without worrying about popularity. I always try to be considerate, of course. But will attempt to stop worrying about if people will find me boring or not. This I remind myself often.

So… I would like to know… (You can select up to two reasons for each question.)

Why did you start blogging?

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Why do you continue to blog?

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By the way, The Opinionated Old Fart is back.

12 Oct 2007 Good Morning!
 |  Category: Knitting, Life  | Tags: , , , ,  | 7 Comments

It’s Friday! I don’t think I’ll be cooped up inside all weekend now that I am feeling better. Crossing my fingers.

Hey! My Spider Queen swatch made an appearance on Lime & Violet: The Daily Chum on Wednesday. Thanks Sassy! That particular picture makes the swatch look a bit like scary spider web, I think. :lol: At first I thought it was just Jerry coming over to my blog for a visit. He’s a super fan of Lime & Violet. :-)

And thanks to Camping Jason, I am now exposed to Kauni! I want to get my hands on some Kauni Effektgarn! Look what you can do with it! But it looks like the only way to get them is on www.wollsucht.de and it’s in German only. Maybe CB can help me with ordering.

Remember this?

Yep. That’s the “My So Called Scarf” that I don’t even remember when I started knitting. No. It’s not done yet. Only half done. But now that I’ve dug it out, I intend to finish it quickly. The weather is getting cool. A nice warm scarf would be nice. :-)

Added at 10:57am, how could I forget to mention this. Jane has been knitting some beautiful Niebling patterns. It’s driving me nuts! In a good way. His designs are AMAZINGLY beautiful. But, they are almost impossible to get! Well, maybe I am just too laid-back to fight for them on eBay. :lol:

07 Oct 2007 Sick As A Dog
 |  Category: Knitting, Life  | Tags: , , , ,  | 6 Comments

That’s how CB was describing me. How did that pharase come to be anyway? My illness developed into a serious case of sinus infection Wednesday afternoon. Running nose, coughs and all that yucky stuff. Other than getting up for a few must do projects, I pretty much stayed in bed for a couple of days.

Like the new look of the blog? I wanted to go with clean and simple. This is just that. I am also closing A Forest Blog, my Buddhist blog. Not going to stop talking about Buddhist practices. It’s just that there’s only one post entry on that blog EVER. I write about Buddhist thoughts on this blog more often anyway. I am just going to combine the two. I am keeping the Tarot Journey separate. It’s restarted after a long pause.

I made a terrible mistake on the Spider Queen. Terrible, terrible mistake. I knitted it while under a fever. I know, I know. Someone once told me not to. But I was so curious to see how the pattern worked. It was my first lace piece that has pattern knitted on every row. I just wanted to know. Blah blah blah. Anyway, I made a mistake and I didn’t even know how. Too sick to try to fix it. Luckily I only had 8 rows knitted. It wasn’t too difficult to let go and start over. This is what I will do. I am going to knit a swatch. That will satisfy my curiosity. I also want to see how Blackberry Ridge’s Thistledown singles work in this pattern. It is a little bit of “thick ‘n thin”. Plus sections of it have very little twist. This makes me nervous. Maybe Ted can elaborate on this a little? He knitted Rosebud with this yarn.

14 Apr 2007 Where To Begin

We had super strong wind in Southern California last Thursday. I had some Thai food delivered. The smell of burning fire was immediately noticeable as soon as I opened the door when the delivery guy showed up. I thought it was weird that someone had a fire going. The delivery guy commented, “strange that people are doing BBQ in this crazy condition.” BBQ? It turned out that the wind blew down a power line, started a brush fire and burned down a house in Beverly Hills. Yikes.

Few things I want to enter in this online journal before I forget them. First, I want to thank Ted for turning me on to the idea of a vertical swift. I wouldn’t have known about it if he didn’t send me all kinds of info on the various styles of swifts. He truly is a walking knitting encyclopedia. A fiber Guru.

I’ve been knitting quite a bit. I am doing the Four Corner Hat for mom. The crown is made up of four panels. The photo shows the first one that I completed.

You can work the panels separately then sew them together. Or join while you knit. I choose the second method of course. The brim for this style is a slip-stitch pattern, which is much easier than the fair isle pattern for the Nordic style. I am almost done with the third panel of the crown. Yay. Also, the yarn from Blackberry Ridge is very soft and stretchy. Quite enjoyable to knit.

I also started a simple lace project with KnitPicks’ lace weight, Gossamer. I know. I mentioned that I won’t blog about this one because it will be a gift. But this person doesn’t read my blog. So why not?

The pattern is the Candle Flame Shawl that I bought this yarn for. I thought about doing a more challenging pattern. But decided, heck, go with the original plan.

I am also knitting Afghan squares for Marianne’s friend Julie. I am not liking the yarn that I am using. Time to make a trip to A Mano to get something else. Any excuse to make a trip to the LYS, right? :-) But seriously, I also need to get some cotton blend for the next hat project for mom.

Speaking of A Mano, remember the taping of the Men’s night TV segment at A Mano? Yeah. That aired some time ago. And to my horror they used part of my interview. I sounded like Miyagisan in The Karate Kid. Eek. Anyway. A Mano wants to continue Men’s night. Please let them know if you are interested.

Mac users, have you heard of Quicksilver? I discovered it recently. I absolutely love it. It’s an amazing launcher app. Go take a look.

Next topic. I made some changes/improvements to my blogs. First. I decided to end My Project 356 blog. With all the things that have been going on, I stopped taking photos regularly. Keeping a 365 project just doesn’t make sense at this point. I will just keep my Flickr account and make that my photo blog. It is also subscribable if anyone is interested to see my less than amateurish photos. :-)

Speaking of subscribing. I was able to find a way to combine all my blogs plus the Flickr account into one feed. So, if you are interested to read EVERYTHING I post, like my tarot journey, Buddhist practice, and of course, knitting, you can subscribe to this feed. It doesn’t necessary mean that you will get a lot of reading material though. :lol:

I also added a feature called “Subscribe to Comment”. I always wonder if anyone who asks a question on my blog would return to look for a response, or would they expect an email instead? This will solve the dilemma. If you expect a response or want to be notified of new comments, just select to be notified by email. As long as you provide a valid email address, you will receive an email for any future comment to that post.

Do you see that new section in my sidebar that’s powered by Twitter? It’s a social networking thingie that I discovered yesterday. I don’t know if it will be useful or not. But definitely fun to try. It lets you use web, IM or mobile phone to send an update of your status, which gets posted on the network and sent to everyone that you consider a friend. The idea is to let friends follow what each other is doing, strengthening the relationships. It’s also used to send updates like news, etc. Go check it out. Read the TIME article. :-) Let me know if you sign up!

A little update on my mom. Her condition is stable. But she is not able to walk around much. She uses a wheelchair most of the time. And her hair is mostly gone. Thank goodness that I finished the first hat. I was going to post more about the ridiculous things that my sisters did. Yes. Sisters. I don’t just have one wacky sister. I have two. And I don’t mean the one that I am working with to find help for mom. I have another one that’s making the matter more difficult. But I am just too tired of talking about them. I’ll just focus on the positive things for my mother and hope that she gets back some strength so she can have better quality of life.

25 Dec 2006 Photo Diary
 |  Category: Misc.  | Tags: ,  | One Comment

I discovered this little idea of a photo diary called Project 365 on Crazy Aunt Purl’s blog. I immediately thought, “I could do this.” So I did, and you can find it here. But I am not sticking with the rule of taking only one photo a day. I want more pictures and less words. So, my Project 365 will just be what it will be. I will say that the only rule that I am giving myself is to take at least one photo a day. This doesn’t mean that there will be a post everyday though.

04 Dec 2006 Apologies
 |  Category: What the?  | Tags: , ,  | 3 Comments

My apologies to Jane and Micah. Due to my over zealous effort in customizing my new blog home, my “comments” page displayed some strange behavior. All the comments made to my previous post prior to this went to the very last post at the bottom of the main blog page. Don’t ask me why. I only customized the side bar with some widgets. I took the customization away and it seems OK now. Jane and Micah, you must’ve thought that the comments just went away, huh? My bad.

22 Nov 2006 Flock
 |  Category: Misc.  | Tags: ,  | 2 Comments

This is no news to Flickr users, I don’t think. I downloaded a new web browser recommended, Flock, on the Flickr site. Recommended for it’s ease of use in the areas of blogging, photo sharing and news/blog reading. I was immediately impressed when I opened the browser. It started with a quick setup process. You enter your photo and blog account and voila, you are ready to manage your photos and blog with the ease of “drag and drop”. It works with Flickr, Photobucket, WordPress, Blogger and TypePad. Your photos from your online photo sharing account are ready for you to drag & drop into your blog post without worrying about the code. You can even save snippets of text or images when browsing and use them later for your blog posts. How cool. I haven’t tried news/blog reading. I am sure that’s nice too.

Because they advertise it as a photo/blog (social) browser, I thought it would be a slimmed down version of other browsers. I thought there would be limited tools to do other stuff. Not true. I quickly looked at the preferences that you can set for your browsing experience. Everything seems to be there. Maybe even nicer than some of the others. But of course, it is new and there are things to be looked at still. But so far I give two thumbs up for Flock!

OK, time to go clean my “desk” area.

Blogged with Flock