Wednesday, May 27, 2009

I have a little Ubuntu and a big afghan

Well, this Wednesday's post is even later than usual. I have early Wednesday mornings set aside for blogging (in a time slot that used to be a networking group but is now only a social get-together-for-breakfast-if-anybody-shows-up thing), and I take my little Dell 9" Inspiron to Central Market Cafe to do it. But in one of the endless, relentless stream of updates for Ubuntu (look it up), I think I wasn't paying attention and something got messed up. My Gnome menu bar was gone, and when I managed to get it back, selecting "Quit" to restart the machine made it disappear again. So I'm wrestling with it now. I'm sure I'll get it running again, but who knows how long it'll take. And what it'll do to my blood pressure in the meantime.

So anyway...I'm spending most of my knitting time lately on Holly's afghan. Holly is my sister's husband's brother's wife. My sister-in-law-in-law. A while back she decided to learn to knit by making an afghan. Note: Your very first knitting project should probably be something like, oh, a scarf. Not only flat and easy to handle, but small. Do-able in some reasonable amount of time. Unlike an afghan, which is acres and acres, and takes for freakin' ever to finish. Holly bought the yarn and got advice on a simple pattern from the fine people at the Yarn Barn in San Antonio. She worked stalwartly and finished about a foot (that's a lot on an afghan). Unfortunately, though, there were some problems and rather than being basically rectangular shaped it was, at best, a parallelogram. Bordering on "L" shaped. So she took it back to the Yarn Barn, they frogged it for her with their ball winder, and gave her a different simple pattern. She worked on that for a while, then realized she was sick of the whole thing.

Enter yours truly. We went to S.A. for a visit, and she said she had some yarn for me. She was giving up on the afghan, and asked if I wanted the yarn. Cool; sure. I went to pick it up and her husband (my brother-in-law-in-law) said, "You're just giving her the yarn? I thought you were going to get her to knit it for us." Ah-ha. I might have said no, but at that point Holly was starting the testing in preparation for a lung transplant. Seriously, how can you deny someone facing a lung transplant their own fuzzy warm afghan?

So I'm knitting an afghan. And knitting. And knitting. And knitting. It's a simple basketweave pattern, 20 stitches wide. It doesn't take much thought so it's easy to work on while I'm watching TV. It's very large, though, so progress is sloooow. I've set a quota of five rows a day, which will allow me to complete a row of squares in about five days, so the whole thing should only take...about two months.

A scarf. Seriously, start with a scarf.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

I have to allow more time!

Really, I have to start allowing more time for blogging. Net-Net isn't quite as dead as I thought, so when I show up at Central Market on Wednesday mornings there are actually people there to talk to and interact with. So I end up not starting writing until later than I've planned.

So today we're in the middle of an eventful week. On Friday, the Southlake Chamber morning Leads group will have its first guest speaker (arranged by yours truly). Charles Brown (www.dynamic-copyrwriting.net) will talk to us about using social networking sites for business. As a big FaceBook/Twitter fan, I'm looking forward to it. I also hope it goes well because this is our first guest speaker, and my co-facilitator and I have a bunch more arranged. If this event is a dud, it's going to be tough to convince people to speak at future ones. So I'll be a little tense 'til it's over and people are standing and cheering. Or at least looking pleased and well informed.

And the Chamber directory is finally, finally, FINALLY going to print on Friday, or that's the plan. There have been so many delays, I'm not going to count those chickens until they're walking around making peeping noises.

And most significantly of all, Rich's last day in the office is this week. Or the last day he can go into the office. After Thursday, he'll have to be escorted through the building like anybody else off the street. Though he and all his employees are still on the payroll for another month, he goes to the office tomorrow to be processed out. And starting Friday morning, he won't have anyplace he needs to go. So far he's been pretty positive about the whole thing. I know he'll find something else; I just hope he doesn't get discouraged by the search.

We're planning to go see the new Star Trek movie on Friday. That'll be a good finish to a pretty intense week. Wish us luck!

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

I have to say...

... that things do or do not work out, and that's just the way it goes. Sometimes the time you have set aside for blogging turns out to be really productive and you get lots written. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes other people actually show up to the networking meetings you're ostensibly attending, and you spend the time talking to them instead.

This would be an example of the latter.

Oh! I have one thing worth mentioning — I finished knitting my onion-and-garlic bag. I decided I really don't like the design of it, though, so I think I'll make another one with some modifications. And, frankly, the worsted weight cotton blend yarn makes it look a little like macrame, which I'm not crazy about. So I'm going to try it on bigger needles to see if that helps.

And I promised photos of our extreme homemade pizza a week and a half ago! More later about that, but here's what the pepperoni pizza looked like:



Homemade crust, homemade sauce, homemade pepperoni, homemade mozzerella. We'll be doing it again this Saturday, since Rich gets back from Helsinki this afternoon. I can't wait (both for him to get home and to try the pizza again)!

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

I have my reasons....

Now, then. Where was I?

Okay, so things have happened since we last spoke. Rich got word that his work group at Nokia Siemens Networks is being shut down in June, one of our dogs died, my sister is being forced to retire and her cat died, and my beloved Stars didn't make it into the Stanley Cup playoffs. I've been busy.

The most pressing thing –- well, of the ones that require action on our part -– is Rich losing his job. (Hard to have more impact than the dog dying, but there's nothing left to do about that.) Fortunately we were more or less prepared for at, at least financially. When we sold our house in San Antonio we put a chunk of money in a CD for this very situation. And he'll also get a generous separation package from NSN. So we don't have to worry about how we're going to pay the bills this week, thank goodness. What we're not prepared for is moving.

It's not the idea of relocating that's the problem. We're both fairly open to living somewhere else. But the fact is that home maintenance is lower on both our lists than it should be. Way lower. Way lower. We both almost always have better things to do than cleaning and repairs, and we tend to put them off until not doing them is no longer an option. (The last two fence repairs that Rich has done have involved replacing sections that were actually falling down.) And now is when we pay the price for that. There are tons of things that need doing around the house, and we may or may not have much time to get them done before we have to put it on the market.


So we're certainly hoping we can stay in the Metroplex, but we don't really know where we'll end up. And having to start over again with my business is a whole other story.

On a more positive note, I finished the Stars mittens!



Of course, if we end up moving, it's going to be expensive to fly back for games so I can wear them....