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.

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!

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)!

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....

I have to stop this!

Not the blog, the title. When I started this, I happened to give the first couple of posts titles that began with, "I Have...," and I thought I'd continue it. The TV show Friends did that. If you recall, their episode titles were all, "The One...." "The One With the Ring," "The One Where No One's Ready," and like that. Since I started out, "I Have...," I thought I'd keep it going. But it's hard. And kind of stupid. So maybe not — stay tuned to find out.

Anyway...I'll try to post something of substance later, but for right now I wanted to mention these great ties I happened to come across. Yes, really, ties! The company is Sine Die. Do you live in Texas? If not, you might not be so impressed, or get the 'in' jokes, but their ties are pretty anyway. If you are from Texas, you'll love it. Be sure to read the 'About Us,' as well as browsing the subtle and very cool tie designs.

More later, hopefully with knitting photos. Stitch and Bitch is tonight!

I have a problem with (most of) the Stars

This should have been dated 2/28/09, last Saturday. If you're not a hockey fan, you can skip this post — you won't care.

I'm a Dallas Stars fan. Saturday night my boy, Steve Ott, got the stuffing beat out of him by Travis Moen of the Anaheim Ducks. At the game's final buzzer, the Anaheim netminder, Jean-Sebastien Giguere, grabbed Ott, got him in a headlock and took his helmet off. Giguere let him go and a whole flock of Ducks descended on Ott. It ended up being Moen who latched on and kept punching him in the head (the reason the helmet had to be removed). This is all fairly standard hockey stuff, except that Ott badly broke his hand last fall and can't fight; everyone in the league knows this. From what I've read, Anaheim fans are pretty proud of Moen whomping up on someone who couldn't fight back. But, really, that's not my point. (And to be fair, when Moen finally tripped and fell to the ice, Ott did a WWF body slam on him and inflicted what damage he could. I'm not claiming he's an innocent bystander.)

My point here is that Ott's team mates were nowhere to be found. No one helped him. That is not standard hockey stuff. This is a serious team sport; that's a very big part of why there are fights in the first place. When hits are a little too hard, or when a valuable team member is targeted too often, the 'enforcers' on the team start to hold their opponents accountable. Except not the Stars, not Saturday night. No one came to help.

I'm so disappointed in the whole team! (And I'm not the only one.) I keep trying to figure out why on earth it happened. Ott's been important to the team this season — why would the rest of the team just ignore a beat down? This is coloring our whole attitude towards the Stars. It's season ticket renewal time, and my husband and I are actually having serious second thoughts.

We'll see how that works out. Maybe we'll get past it. Ott played last night; assuming he doesn't start looking to be traded, maybe the bewilderment and disgust will fade. In any case, here's what I have to say:

Dear Remaining Stars,

There is no 'I' in 'team.' Apparently there's also no 'you.'

Signed,
A Steve Ott fan

I have no idea!

Okay, so I'm cruising along, barely keeping up with work, scrambling with housework, but thinking I'm doing okay, then I realize I haven't posted anything here in, like, a year and a half. [sigh] I really didn't realize!

The cousins' visit was fine. They seemed to have a good time. Their bedroom and bathroom were clean, which was all I promised! I did discover a (literal) chink in the new shower door's caulking when I cleaned it prior to their arrival. There was a gap in the bottom caulking, and after running the shower for a minute, we had a little fountain over the edge of the tub. It was up against the wall beside the toilet, in the same place that, a couple of years ago, a leaky fill line sent water under the wall into my office. For days. Maybe weeks. Until I stepped in exactly the right spot and felt the squish.

There was water inside the closet, too. It was not fun.

Fortunately, this time I heard the water running and saw the leak before it spread. It was too late to do anything about it before the cousins got here, but after they left and it dried out, I caulked the heck out of it. As you can see above, I've had all I need of ripping out moldy carpet and soggy padding.

So the only water problem I have to deal with is in the pool, which is empty right now. We had a chemical imbalance that couldn't be fixed, so yesterday we drained the pool (all 20,000 gallons) and today we're refilling. And in a few weeks, we'll be paying the water bill. And paying and paying and paying. An empty pool is kind of cool-looking, though!