with knitting.

I got through the back, the right front and the left front of the Fair Isle-y cardigan; I even managed to knit the first sleeve without throwing the damn thing into the wall and screaming, but now…

I’m a measly two inches, and hardly that, in to sleeve #2, and I’m sort of hating it. So far, I’ve managed not to tuck away all the green, white and mint yarn in a box somewhere far, far away together with the half-finished cardigan, but I’ve gotten very, very close to starting another project — I’ve even started drawing it, choosing the yarn, etc. etc. I’m a very, very bad knitter.

Also, fall semester is only two weeks away, and I can’t wait to start. Which means I really should get a lot of knitting done now, before the mayhem of scheduling studies and babies begins, but I just… can’t. I’m bored.

UPDATE: If you’re wondering how that picture got in there, I found the camera’s USB cable. Which reminds me, I keep forgetting to post the pictures of my last SP package. Aaargh!

Check it out.

Isn’t the red one just adorable?

Yes, I’m pretty late in posting this… but here goes, anyway.  I think the package reached me last week, when I was on vacation and unable to pick it up.

Anyway… I will post pictures very soon (when my camera has decided Fedora is a friendly system), but until then, let me just say that I was very pleasantly surprised (as always, dear Pal) when I opened the package and found a needlecase, and another case, and a bag full of seven CDs (that I absolutely must listen to; they looked really great) — all homemade by my Pal (I presume) in these absolutely madly patterned fabrics.  I love them.  The little cowboys are so cute!

(I think I’ll go off and look for a USB cable for my camera now.  I suspect my blog needs some pictures of cowboys.)

and since I can see this post, it means my silly Linux blogging client thingy is working. More later.

It’s been far too long since my last post. Again. You see, my computer crashed…

It really did! Last Monday there was a lovely bluescreen waiting for me when I got up to say good morning to my darling laptop, and it turned out the hard drive was, well, indisponiert. Then we went on a mini-vacation… and returned this Monday, at which time the hard drive decided to work again. I don’t get computers.

Anyway, to make a long story slightly shorter, there was something wrong with the hard drive, and some tech guy from Dell was here yesterday and replaced it. (I have a next business day warranty thing. They replace stuff for me.) I even got more storage space (well, 40Gb instead of 30, but what the heck).

There was only one thing left to do when the tech guy had left — reinstall Windows. That’s when I realized I have absolutely no idea where the Dell/XP restoration CD that came with the laptop is. It’s vanished. So, after trying out Debian for a while and not quite liking it, I am now running Fedora Core 5. (Everything works but the SD card reader, if anyone’s interested.)

Oh, and I didn’t knit one stitch during our tiny vacation, but instead managed to almost finish the left front of the green patterned thing as soon as I got home.

That’s when I realized I had misplaced the pattern by one stitch. One. Lousy. Stitch. I’m so glad the baby was asleep when I discovered it, or he would have gotten some very unwelcome additions to his vocabulary. (Not that he’s talking or anything, I just don’t want him to get the wrong idea of his Loving Mother.)

What this will become remains to be seen — so far it’s the back of a vest or a cardigan. It is very loosely based on something I found in an old Bernat knitting pattern book. The narrow border comes from Aran and Fair Isle Knitting. The diamond-ish pattern is my own design, based on a chart for a 1940s sweater I stumbled over while looking for the perfect Norwegian star (which I found, but it didn’t seem right for this project).

I love what you can do with stash/scrap yarn!

… is what this past week has been. Well, I think so, anyway, I mean:

Monday. Bought new DVD player #2 as #1, purchased Saturday, turned out to be defect.

Tuesday. Got baby lots of clothes on sale. Got myself slightly smaller pile of clothes on sale. Got my better half a jacket and a pair of pants on sale. Bought baby new, much needed, carseat. Found The Perfect Bookshelf at IKEA, half off.

Wednesday. Spent (almost) whole day with my family at their summerhouse. Picked (and ate) blueberries and redcurrants.

Thursday. Results of shopping: new ridiculously pink knitting notebook and practical boxes for storing knitting/sewing stuff. Made redcurrant/strawberry/raspberry pie.

Friday. Ordered new contact lenses, bought some yarn I needed; otherwise nothing, too hot.

Saturday (today). Spent (almost) whole day with my uncles and grandmother at their summerhouse.

The above list is why I haven’t posted anything since Sunday. I consider myself excused. Now behold this picture:

Yes, I finished the acrylic vest. It doesn’t look acrylic at all (to me anyway), and best of all — it fits perfectly. Let me repeat that: It. Fits. Perfectly.

There are two reasons why this is quite astonishing. One, I didn’t swatch, even though I didn’t use the recommended yarn. Two, I didn’t cast on and bind off the way the pattern specified, but instead used a provisional caston and grafted. It still fits. I can’t believe it.

Well, it’s been a busy couple of days. Sort of. I got a little tired of Forecast getting practically nowhere, and due to a certain financial problem I was unable to buy myself the right size dpn’s for the sleeves, so… I did as I always do, and started something new.

I decided on this vest-thing. Also, I’m much better off knitting this right now, since I’ll be too big for regular cardigans in a couple of months and the vest is sort of bolero-length instead. It turns out the vest-thing makes wonderful TV knitting, especially after I got my contacts this Thursday and was actually able to make out the characters’ faces without squinting. (I love my contacts.)

Yup, that’s the Dallas season three DVD that’s peeking out from underneath the creepy acrylic piece of knitting (from this cheap acrylic stash yarn) that’s destined to one day become the (hopefully) quite lovely and very practical vest. I had just finished the Who Shot J.R.? episode and was about to replay the last ten minutes of it for my boyfriend, who had missed that crucial part of the intrigue (I keep him updated), when this evil, evil piece of equipment decided to develop a mind of its own:

(Doesn’t it look evil to you?)

It stopped working. It just stopped. It won’t play my Dallas DVDs anymore. (Well, it won’t play anything anymore, but I wouldn’t be nearly as upset had this happened during, say, uh, anything but my darling Dallas.)

I’m sure it’s the acrylic yarn that finally pushed the DVD over the edge. It probably would have survived much, much longer had I used the alpaca the vest pattern originally called for.

Fortunately, there’s a computer here that my boyfriend promises will play my precious little babies, but it’s just not the same. It doesn’t have a remote, for one. I think we’ll be getting a cheap new DVD player very, very soon.

I won’t tell you how much I dislike Wordpress right now. Suffice it to say that the last post took some time and a couple of hard words to recover.

I have three questions, basically, and since the chance of any of my (few) readers being a Wordpress developer is very slim (not to say nonexistent), they will have to be rhetorical.

- Why doesn’t the damn thing give any kind of notice when you click ‘Delete’ on the post managing page? What if you click it accidentally? (Yes, yes, I did, but it’s very close to the ‘Edit’ button.)

- When trying to post again, why is the damn thing unable to save and publish a new post with the same title as the old one (i.e. a completely identical post)?

- Why, when you’ve finally rediscovered the original post in your web browser cache (or similar) won’t the damn thing publish it in an edited form (i.e. not completely identical) until you’ve RELOADED the damn post-writing page? (It just pretends to save and publish, but really, laughs evilly and deletes all text from the screen)

Arrrgh.

Oh, and Wordpress? You know you’ll always be my baby, I just don’t like it when you eat my posts and then laugh evilly about it. Be nice, and I’ll keep you.

No pictures today because the camera is located a whopping three feet away from me, on the desk, and I’m too darn lazy to pick it up and supply the world with more pictorial knitting spam.

Anyway… I’m not usually the kind of person who has the patience to sit through entire movies and actually watch them. I’m more of a TV show girl — 45 minutes matches my attention span perfectly. But tonight, I was pleasantly surprised by Walk the Line, which my better half rented. I actually did nothing of the following during 2 hours and 13 minutes:

- knit obsessively;
- sneak out of the room and telephone a friend or family member;
- surf the Net with laptop in my lap (I actually shut it down!);
- read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (or any other book for that matter);
- scatter old knitting pattern books around the room and look for something to knit after I’ve finished 2781 WIPs;
- play extremely addictive Tetris-type online games while pretending to watch the movie; or
- fall asleep.

Notice, especially, the first and last items on this list. I’ve been a good girl tonight.

Oh, and the movie was really good; I liked it. Joaquin Phoenix’s (in the role of Johnny Cash) singing wasn’t too awful — nothing like the real thing, of course, and often quite out of tune — but tolerable.