One Crazy Fiber Lady

We’ve hit yet another mile marker in the development of my youngins.  They finally entered public school!

I can’t believe my babies are now first graders.  They looked so small standing with their new classmates this morning outside the elementary school.  The school is, incidentally, where I went K-6.  It was odd being back at that place.  

Beyond being in public school (can I get a YAY for no more weekly checks to Tutor Time!), they are in separate classes for the very first time.  They are quite happy about it.  Their KG teacher was also very supportive of the decision (which the school made for me) to split them as they’ve been bickering in her class.  Logistically it is a bit tougher but no more so than two other siblings in different classes.  At least they’ll both be at the same building!  Will make Back-To-School night a tad difficult.  I’ll probably have to draft the grandparents to attend as well.  Will be a bit of a flashback for them   Alex’s teacher is someone *I* went to school with!

Oh yeah, I’ve been knitting and spinning   Hopefully a post on that stuff soon.

Craft on!

I’ve been meaning to show this picture for a couple of days now.  We hit yet another milestone last week…

We’ve lost those little bottom teeth, but this is our first big chopper front tooth!  Its neighbor is quite wiggly and will be out shortly.  Figures.  Alex had a cavity a while ago that the dentist has been having a dickens of a time getting the filing to stay.  We sort of gave up as the enamel on baby teeth is very brittle and won’t hold the filling for long enough to count.  As a result, he’s got this visible drill hole that bugs most of us, dentist included.  Not surprised that those teeth are hanging on!

Tooth fairy is going to get very busy around here!

In other news, I’ve never had much of a green thumb.  Yes, I’ve done okay with growing things like basil or oregano, but they are essentially nice tasting weeds.  We have a garden each year, tomatoes being the primary crop.  This year, thanks to encouragement by Ina, I planted soybeans.  Its a small garden, so I only sowed a few seeds.  I have 3 plants, one of which has twisted itself around its neighboring tomato plant and is climbing it like a fence.

I have pods growing!  You can just make out that one in the center of the picture, near the tomato plant leaves.  And no, I didn’t notice this picture was sideways  I’m looking forward to having edamame!

Time to get the monkeys into bed so I can relax with the knitting, sims and the sox.

Craft on!

I had a wonderful Weekend Out On the Lake, as usual.  I could have skipped the 5 hour drive home which should have taken a little over 3.  I hate the NY Thruway.  Killed some of my rest and relaxation buzz It was a beautiful weekend with wool, old friends and new friends.

I spun:

This is 452 yards/4oz of Polwarth in the Calico Blue colorway from one of my favorite crack dealers indie dyers, ITW. I must admit to emitting a loud SQUEE when I heard she had polwarth fiber.  I lurve that fiber and this was just a joy to spin.  It wasn’t the only skein I spun either.  Then again, I wasn’t the only one spinning. This was the view out front of the Lake House this morning before we left with all the new yarn drying in the sun.  Mine is the purple/green one in the middle (or so).  I have not measured it yet, but it is also 4oz of Polwarth from Cris, but this is the Rainbow Dash colorway that I spun on the Road Bug while sitting on the dock on Friday.

I made sure my wheel was safe during our 200 mile drive…

Thank you ladies for another wonderful year at WOOL!.  And now, to relax before full re-entry tomorrow.

Craft on!

Hello from WOOL!

Have a lovely weekend.

Craft on!

There’s been another cast change for the portable toys.  HTC Incredible is out.  The battery life was dismal.  With mininal use I still had to recharge at the office by 3pm.  Unacceptable.

So now I have the Motorola Droid with actual tactile keyboard.  We’ll see if this helps my dismal texting

Picture included for camera test.

Craft on!

I know its been a bit since I last posted.  It goes without saying that I’ve been busy.  I’ve been knitting and spinning, as well as reading and working.  Not to mention, hot and sweaty.  Been a very decent summer so far.  This July girl does not complain about heat.. well too often that is.  Summer is my season and I don’t wish it gone, at all.  Even though September brings the end of paid for schooling, I’m in no rush to see it come.

A couple of weeks ago, I started knitting Featherweight Cardigan in 100purewool sock weight in a gorgeous blue.  I’m really enjoying working with this yarn.

This has been the perfect commuter project.  A lightweight cardigan that is stockinette makes for excellent reading work.  It has also been good for playing the Sims (which I’m back at for a change), especially during the 10 day west coast Red Sox swing recently.  10PM starts are way too late for me these days.  I just can’t stay up that late anymore :*(  I’m a bit further along on this than the picture indicates.  I’m about a half inch of finishing the bottom ribbing.  I need to dig out the longer needle to do the sleeves.

What’s that under the Featherweight you ask?  I know it came as no surprise when I bought the iPad, so maybe this might.  I loved the iPad, but unfortunately, it did not meet my needs in for portable computing. I found myself having to also carry my netbook (acer aspire one 10”).  Put the iPad together with the netbook and I had a bag that was a big heavier than I really wanted to carry.  I pulled out the druggy scale and discovered that the pair were actually heavier than my MacBook.   Might as well carry that for an all-in-one tech toy. 

But I really didn’t want to carry that much.  So for a bit, I replaced the iPad in the bag with my Kindle 2.  The solution was lighter, however, I was still not happy with the reading of the PDFs.  The netbook screen is too small to read it well and the Kindle 2 does a half hearted job at the PDF with lots of embedded images (and charts) that make up the majority of my tech books.  Which is why I replaced the Kindle with the iPad to begin with as it does the tech pdf very well.  Solution?  The Kindle DX!  Its a great compromise between the weight of the ebook reader with the PDF ability of the iPad.  No games, but I have my phone for that…

Which brings me to the new phone you see.  That is the HTC Incredible from Verizon.  I did go with the Android phone instead of getting a new iPhone.  I’m loving it!  Been a bit of a learning curve as it is an entirely new OS for me, but it is intuitive enough that it hasn’t been overly problematic.  I’ve kept my iPhone to use as a Touch as for some odd reason I don’t like using my phone as an iPod.  Before I got the Incredible, I carried around a separate iPod to listen to.  Amazing how long the battery is now lasting on the iPhone.  I’m impressed with the specs on this new phone and I can’t complain about having an 8MP camera with FLASH on me at all times.  As for developing apps for it?  I’m working towards that.  I’ve got my netbook set up as a development station for it and picked up a book on the subject, which I’ve been reading on the DX   Now to figure out what to do with the old iPods and the Kindle 2.

Yesterday Kat and I visited a new to us yarn store:  Yarn Diva.  I wanted some Malabrigo to knit Adrift in and didn’t have enough of anything in stash.  I’d never been to this store, but had meant to.  I’m sorry I didn’t make the trip earlier.  I loved it!  I do believe I have a new LYS.  They are so friendly and very helpful.  There’s a great selection of what I would consider basic yarns (lace, sock), as well as some of the more designer yarns that appeal to others.  I’m definitely going back there again.

Time to finish the laundry, balance the checkbook and make the necessary lists before heading off to WOOL this week!

Craft on! 

At 8:09am this is not a good sign…

Stay cool!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

A happy holiday to all those celebrating today. We are having a perfect day. My sister is here with her two little ones who are entertaining my pair. Dad pitched the pup tent in the backyard for their amusement.

Craft on!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

As I approach the end of my two year contract with AT&T, naturally I’m considering the next cellphone.  Do I get the new iPhone 4 or do I try something else?  While I love my iPhone and will keep this 3g around at the end of the contract and use it like a iPod Touch (handy for handing to a bored kid), I’m not sure if I want to replace it with the new iPhone.  I’m not that much of a fangirl that I HAVE to replace the old iPhone with a new one.  Yes it has been a fave tech toy since I bought it almost two years ago.

What am I considering?  The Motorola Droid X.

I read an excellent review of it here.  As a developer, this phone has two advantages for me over the iPhone:

1. Apps are written in Java – which as a C# developer I pretty much already know as opposed to Objective-C which has some similarities but is far more different and is a far bigger learning curve.  While learning yet another language is not a bad thing, I could be up and developing Android apps far faster.
2. The distribution of Droid apps is an open market – not closed like Apple.   I don’t believe I would have to pay $100 to even get the SDK let alone distribute any application I do happen to eventually turn out.
3. Since the language is Java, I could develop apps either on my Macs or a PC, depending on how the mood was flowing and which computer I actually felt like carrying around.  With the iPhone, I was locked into a Mac.  Now this is not necessarily a bad thing as I do heart my Macs, but my netbook is far lighter to schlep carry than my MacBook.

That’s the short list.  I’m sure, given enough time, I can come up with a few more reasons.  On the other hand, I’ve invested a bunch in iPhone apps.  Fortunately, that won’t go to waste as I’m still holding onto the 3G and I’ve got the beloved iPad that can take advantage of all. 

Anyone have an android phone and can offer up advice either way?  I have some time to do further research as my contract ends in early August and the X ships finally in mid-July.  I don’t want to be paying early termination like I did when I made the jump from Sprint to AT&T (though it was worth it for the iPhone).  I wonder if I could get a temporary number from Verizon and then port the old number from AT&T when that contract ends… hmmmm. 

Oh and since the iOS4 update, my battery indicator is flaky.  Unless I reboot the phone, the indicator is pretty much stuck.  Awesome.  Hope that patch fix is soon.

Wait, what is that you’re saying?  This is a crafty blog?  Hmm.  I better show some crafty pictures then post haste!  Would a picture of two different crafts make up for the geektalk above? 

The sock is the Roundabout Socks (rav).  I finished the first one on Saturday and started the second yesterday during my morning commute.  The yarn is mmMalabrigo Sock in Stonechat colorway.

The spinning is ITW Merino-Silk in the Autumn in Burgundy colorway.  I’ve moved to the high speed whorl and bobbins on my Matchless.  I’m going to two ply this stuff and hopefully get enough yardage for a decent lace project.

Okay, that’s all for today.

Craft on!

…{tap} {tap}.. is this thing on?

For someone unknown and unexplainable reason, I’m trying out Windows Live Writer to post.  I know.  Seriously crazy!  What with my undying devotion to my Apple products, not to mention my perfectly good admin interface in Wordpress. 

But there it was, suggestion by a google search this morning on how to better paste code into a textbox on Sharepoint.  I installed it so i could format the script I need to run tomorrow evening changing a bunch of site urls for a customer to make it actually legible for the Operations group to either bless or deny my change request

Who knew it worked with Wordpress.  But then again, I haven’t a clue how well it works.  It seems to be pretty decent, but time will tell.

Since I can’t leave with another text only post, here’s a picture I took of the monkeys last week on the train heading towards Hoboken.

Thursday was my annual office company picnic.  This year it was held in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.  Rather than driving the kids to the picnic as I’ve done in years past, I took them on the train to the office (had a meeting that I had to attend anyway) .  We then left the office with my group and headed to the park via subway.  A long afternoon, followed by two subways and two NJ Transit trains, we made it home by 7:30.  An enjoyable day was had by all.

{I have to admit to being somewhat impressed by this software…but it is only the first post after all.  I reserve the right to hates it down the road.  }

Craft on!