Stamping & Computer Hell

I mentioned stamping in yesterday's post, and said I would take a picture of the things we made when I could get to them (couldn't get to them at the time because M was napping in the same room where they were sitting). Well, I don't have to anymore, cuz V took pictures and put them on her blog. That works out perfectly cuz she is a much better photographer. Click on the picture to see a larger image. The little gift card on the lower right is cute; the 6-sided (kinda house shaped) "Make Merry" piece actually slips out of its pocket! The purple on on the lower left is a gift card holder. The blue one is a "latch" card design, you pull the grey flap out to open the card. It's not obvious in the photo, but on the green card on the left, the red "celebrate" flap opens downwards. The box was fun to make, but also a challenge. But you can do so much with those! You can also decorate the inside, stamp words on the inside bottom too, add ribbon or something else to the top.

When I went over to V's place, I had brought over 15 little jars of stage 3 baby food, which I had leftover after M transitioned into solid food. Can you guess for who? For her babies! Well, they're 3 babies of the feline persuasion. :-) Have you ever heard of such a thing? Cats who like to eat baby food? I couldn't believe it when she told me about that. I don't think the converse would apply, I just don't see M wanting to eat cat food. She is such a picky eater these days.

Well, I have been doing very little knitting, and spending too much time futzing with my "new" laptop computer, a Sony Vaio PCG-GRV680. It's actually a "pre-owned" laptop (to use Mercedes' marketing lingo). I "upgraded" to a big heavy brick... it's 8.1 lbs! The AC adapter is literally a big brick. I can't believe how big & heavy this laptop & AC adapter is, especially for something that is newer than my old laptop. It's larger than my old laptop, has a 16" LCD, has a 2.60 Ghz Pentium 4 processor, and 1 Gb of memory. It is much faster than the old laptop, yay! But it's certainly not a laptop. It's more like a small desktop that looks like a laptop. Anyways, it used to have the Sony OEM Windows software, then it had Ubuntu (linux), then the Sony software got slapped back on it (using the Sony provided Recovery CDs), then we installed Windows XP Pro (the regular store bought version). Installed some apps, migrated data (oh boy, now that's another story!), and now I'm tweaking it. I wanted to get the Fn key to work ... so I can press Fn + F5 to adjust the LCD brightness, but I apparently need to install the Hotkey Utility which is not available for download from the Sony website, did online chat with their Support staff where they said I could install the Sony Shared Library and Sony Notebook Utility from the Application Recovery CDs (which I have), but they were not on my CDs. Then he told me I would have to use the System Recovery CDs to slap on the Sony image (and basically wipe everything off my hard drive). Eeks! That was not quite what I wanted to do. He said that the Sony Shared Library and Sony Notebook Utility were not available for download from the Sony website. How frustrating. You'd think this would be a simple thing to do...

Teatime ... today I am drinking Pink Grapefruit Green Tea from The Republic of Tea.

I'm thinking of starting a cable scarf in red Highland Silk (which is shown above). I've got some ideas to try out. I've never knitted with this yarn before so I will have to play around with it to see how many stitches I would need to make get the right width. I guess I would also need to play around with needle sizes too. Good thing it probably won't need US7 or US8 needles cuz mine are all accounted for on WIPs or UFOs. I'm going to start with US6, and maybe try US5.

Someone had suggested that I enter the Lily Sugar & Cream design contest. I've known about this for quite a while, it was mentioned on the MDKAL. Call me weird, but I'm really not interested in it. I enjoy sharing my patterns free of charge and don't want people to have to buy them (which I'm assuming they would have to do for the published winning designs). I consider this my way of giving back to the "knitting community" which has helped me so much; I couldn't have gotten this far otherwise. Still have lots to learn though ...

Time to go make M some lunch, her Wiggles show is almost done and she will be wanting food afterwards...


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