Last updated May 06, 2008

Random projects:

• wedding scrapbook-currently collection quotes and memories from the day
• lye-based soap - render outside this summer?
• list does not reflect knitting projects

Once a week dinner with Granny was fabulous as usual. She served us pasta, salad, fruit, and bread. Usually the bread at Granny’s has butter on it or in it, so Jason suggested I could bring my fresh baked loaf of wheat bread, he would bring his spelt loaf and we’d all have yummy bread to eat. Warm bread with safe butter like product melting in to the air pockets.

day two

Mom and I were chatting about scrapbooking, hoping that next week we could find time. At nearly the same time, we started talking about the wedding in general and some of the stories we have from that day. Josh had a wonderfully creative idea-we could each share a few memories of the day on paper, like we did last year at Easter.

I’ve updated this blog to WordPress 2.5. The upgrade is mostly behind the scenes on the admin panel and back-end clunkiness. It will take a little time to get used to where things have moved to back here where I type, but that will come. I have some concern about the plug-ins I use to show various and sundry coolie things in the sidebars. Time will bear out whether I lose functionality. So far, the only oddity I have noticed is one preexisting draft, an unpublished post. The date on it flipped from sometime this year to 1969. I don’t know what controls that or interacts with it. I could disable all the plug-ins and see if it rights itself.

On one of my favorite yarny sites, Ravelry, I have been hunting various groups that deal with the topic of blogging and found several new ones to lurk. Among the groups I joined today are an organizing your blog one, and three that deal with photography.

My blog is not disorganized nor is it organized. Each week I seem to blog a new topic, add a new category and reorder old posts to accommodate the new plan. I’m afraid that it will take me some time to figure out when I will stop changing it because it finally fits my purpose.

I do not fool myself into thinking that I am professional. I don’t have that unique sense that tells me when I see a perfect picture from the perfect angle. Instead, I take pictures of what strikes me from odd, often misunderstood angle. One group encourages each of us to take a photo a day, similar to the blog post a day. The other group sets a color palette over a two month span and encourages us to knit, draw, create, stumble upon and group photos that fit the palette. I am thinking that I can combine the two, take photos every day for a year, and group the photos by colors in the spectrum. The decision to make is put photographs here or start a new one. I will contemplate it until morning and decide tomorrow what to do. The last is an abc-along, take one picture every two weeks that represents the required letter of the alphabet. I cannot officially join as sign-up is over for 2008, but it may fit in to my schedule of one picture every day of a given color group and of a letter once every two weeks. At the end of every month, the 365ers put all the photos together in one graphic, or mosaic, which looks incredibly cool. If I can remember the self-imposed boundaries I will derive some enjoyment from this task. If I am unable to keep up, I will modify the requirements as I go.

I received my order of photos on Thursday or Friday from winkflash. I have to say that so far I am impressed with quality and service. That being said, I am ready to start our wedding scrapbook.

Yesterday, we celebrated Easter with Jason’s family at Mom & Dad’s house. Late afternoon all energy escaped me and laid my head on the table. I think I fell asleep for a few minutes. As the family departed, I begged for a nap. When we got home, I slept for too long and woke up with a nasty sore throat several hours later. I stayed awake for a few hours, then went back to bed for the night. I awoke to my phone ringing around 7am and I did not answer it, anyone who actually wants to talk with me knows to wait a few hours. Around 10:30 the same call came through again, so I answered it. It was the delivery people wanting to bring my freezer to me. I still don’t feel real well, my throat hurts but I now have a really big freezer in the basement to put things into and keep very cold. As you can see, there are baskets to hold things that would otherwise get lost in the deep freeze, three baskets in total. We looked a several models with various organizational aids and I desperately wanted baskets and dividers. I knew the baskets were coming, but the ad was unclear on whether it came with dividers or not. When I exclaimed in excitement that it had dividers, the deliverymen offered to take them back for me, in case I didn’t really want them. As you can see, the dividers are slightly adjustable and there is a nice wall for the small compartment above the motor, which means I can put odd shaped things on that ledge as well as prismatic ones.

This afternoon, while not having enough energy to do much of anything, I decided to check on my photo order. I ordered and received photos earlier this month, but didn’t receive all of them. I’m not sure what happened, whether I didn’t select them correctly, but I found the pictures that were missing. I deleted the ones that printed correctly and resubmitted a new order. If last time is any indication, I should have them at the end of the week. I only ordered them because I stopped into the site to see if they had any deals for 4×6 pictures. They have dropped the price to 8¢ each permanently, normally 12¢.

Jason is working on his master’s degree, so I try to be considerate of his need to study. His Spring class just started, so I decided to go to GR on Thursday and hang out with friends. I scheduled a lunch with Sarah, a very close friend from Ada. She had the cubbie next to mine. Lunch was fantastic, but I hadn’t known how much time to allot.

I called Julie a few days previous to see if we could scrapbook or something Thursday evening. I need to get our wedding scrapbook finished before our first anniversary, which by last count is approximately 5 months away and counting. I finished lunch earlier than planned, so headed to Julie’s about mid-afternoon.

For what I will say next, I feel as though I need to offer a defense. Julie and I talked at Granny’s house on Wednesday about knitting dishcloths. We discussed a yarn hunt to find white cotton and I would supply the needles. I wanted to be sure to bring needles and some general knitting guidelines, so I promptly forgot to grab what I considered to be my scrapbooking box. I was almost to the highway when I realized it, but I didn’t want to be late for lunch, so I decided to continue on rather than turn back to retrieve it. This meant that I was 20 minutes early to lunch. I fully understand that had I turned around to retrieve the forgotten box, I would have been 30 minutes late. There’s no middle ground for my estimating of time, there’s really early or extremely tardy. Needless to say, Julie scrapped a little, I knit a little, frogged, knit some more, frogged some more. It was totally productive, I have begun to experiment with entrelac patterns for my dishcloths.

Because there is a freezer scheduled for delivery on Monday and the office area needed to be straightened and organized a bit for optimal study effectiveness, I’ve steadily spent an hour or two in there every day this week. I’m happy to say that I only took 3 boxes to the basement to deal with later, one of which was mostly empty and have one more to deal with in the office. I want to rearrange a couple of the smaller items to optimize productivity in the office, but otherwise, Jason’s area is pretty much together. We even found the second switched outlet, so there are two lamps.

How does this relate to crafts? While dragging things to the basement, I decided to bring up my one scrapbook box and organize it a little. As it turns out, the box would have been more frustrating had I remembered it to Julie’s. Less than half the box was scrapbooking supplies for scrapbooks. The other things in there are for a votive candle project I will do eventually. I quickly emptied two smallish boxes and reorganized the supplies. I need to sort my stamping supplies because many of those are crossover products that can and will be used to complete the wedding scrapbook. I did this while I was watching the Simpson’s Movie with Jason and Nate. I also finally organized my music a little. The sad thing is that my nice neat papers are now puffy, smoshy and not very flat anymore. Have I mentioned that I have ADHD with OCD over and under-tones? I love being me, never a dull moment.

How many little boys with ADHD does it take to change a lightbulb? Wanna go ride bikes?

We had a wonderful time with our small group last night and this morning. Last night we met to celebrate a birthday and game night. This morning we continued our study in James, heavenly wisdom and had a time of games after the study and prayer. Jason and I only stayed a little while, we had left Daisy inside due to temperatures.

I decided we’re having calzones for dinner, so the dough is currently rising, it’s just about ready to roll, stuff and bake. I have also become increasingly frustrated with themes for this WordPress blog. I am enjoying the blog, the writing and changing up the look every now and again. I have blogged before about the plugins not working with all the themes. At first, I was positive the plugins were faulty, so I set about to prove it. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be the plugin, it seems to be the theme. I printed out the code behind the current brown, diary theme and discovered that rather than sticking with standard naming conventions, WordPress theme authors are using terms as they see fit, which causes other plugins to display poorly. I am setting out to fix this current theme and documenting as I go so that I can fix others I find. By the time I’m done fixing all the themes I like, it will be time to design one of my own, but I’m just not motivated to tackle that yet. Never mind, after spending several hours pouring over the code, I do not wish to rewrite the entire theme just for a few pretty graphics. I found a theme that is semi-cool and tweaked it to fit what I want layout-wise. I think I will use this one, eventually, as a jumping-off point for other things as I find or create graphics I like.

Hopefully, the weather will cooperate tomorrow. I have accumulated scrapbook pages, stickers and stamps to finally get a wedding scrapbook finished/started. I am downloading pictures from Ruth and Julie so that I can include some of them in the book. As for the weather, I’d like to sit down with Mom Proefrock and select some with her, since she’d like to make a book, too. Mom found a website that prints pictures for $0.06 plus shipping. It seems to be a current sale that may change with time, maybe a special for February.

A quick review of the last week - fun with craft stores in GR with Mom and Julie, I have scrapbooking supplies for the above mentioned project. I spend Thursday in GR catching up with Patty and Angela and drove home in more snow, again on a Thursday. I also upgraded/downgraded another Vista machine to XP. Acers are a challenge, but I’m improving on driver scavenger hunts.

I’ll try to get a few more posts up the early part of the week. Thursday, Jason and I leave for NY for my Grandma’s memorial service.

Projects to complete:

• R2D2 Hat
• Advent Calendar (not knitted)
• Glove-mittens for me
• Socks for me
• knitted grocery bags-yarn or plastic
• Noah’s Ark (must find pattern)
• Animal for adventures
• Traveling Gnome
• something knitted from video tape-because it sounds interesting. If you have an old VHS to donate to the cause, let me know.
• double knit scarf of old NY skyline
• circle/round loom knitting - find or design more patterns to use these, stitch equivalents as well
• youtube diy - watch episodes