Thoughts for 03/22/07

Sorry, haven't posted in a while. Have been busy on this end, and unfortunately it has nothing to do with knitting. :-( I've given up knitting in the car. It just isn't happening anymore. M is getting more nap resistant. I end up spending my time driving, but little time parked knitting. Limited time for knitting in the evenings. And weekends are go go go with getting M to her Musical Lapsit, catching up with house chores or errands, driving an hour away to look at Open Houses (which tires us out by the time we get home, and requires slightly more planning with a toddler in tow), and driving an hour away to visit the inlaws. Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

I'm currently in the (heinously slow) process of converting patterns to PDF. Despite being a relatively simple task, things move slowly in this house and I have a whole process for this which takes me several sittings to get one done. On the upside, this switch will allow many people to print just the pattern without all the extra "fluff" that appears on the blog. I understand that printer ink is very expensive, and that many printers are ink thirsty. Of course it could help to print in plain black & white too, in order to save color ink for when you absolutely need color printouts.

I just finished a 2-color hat so I could free up my needles when I go visit the knitting ladies at the San Francisco International Airport tomorrow. These are the ladies who knit chemo caps for Cap Karma. I think some of them are interested in learning how to knit hats in the round using 2 circular needles. This will be an interesting visit with little M in tow... she's not much interested in knitting at 2 yrs of age, other than pulling on my needles or yarn. Then she'll say, "mabm mabm," which is (what I think is) her way of saying, "this is OK to do," or, "I'm wanting this to be OK to do."

I have been disillusioned about posting free patterns on the internet. It's not such a long story, but I won't post the gory details here. However the result of this is that I am having antithetical thoughts about posting new patterns on my blog.

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Has this ever happened to you?

I was taking some photos of little M one day and noticed that I could only take a limited number of photos because the memory card was running out of space. So I went back through some photos, saw some knitting photos, thought I had already downloaded them, so I proceeded to delete them to free up space. Then I continued taking photos of little M.

Much later, when I finally got around to downloading pictures ... I noticed that there was a gap in the numerical sequence of my photos. Hmm. Hmmm! It made me wonder whether I deleted knitting photos which I hadn't yet downloaded. And due to Mommy Brain, I haven't the foggiest idea what it was I deleted that day. Grrr...

Oh well, I guess it wasn't all that important then...

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Mary wrote: did you ever get a knit-in-the-round version of this hat pattern? ... Are the "LT" and "RT" stitches what make the zig-zag border around the seed stitch?

(This is referring to The Claudia Hat) Yep, you got it! That's exactly what the LT & RT stitches do. Sorry, I haven't played around with converting this pattern for knitting in the round. I know what you mean about seams though. After working that hat, I know I will try to avoid flat knitting a hat.

Madeline wrote: Personally I am having other Reader issues-- specifically the document downloaded fine and suddenly the text warped into something unreadable. It's not the first time for me and I'm trying to figure out what's up.

Don't know what to tell you about trying to view PDF files. In the process of PDFing the files, I punted the blog text into a Word document, tweaked the format (funny how copying/pasting from one place to another will invariable screw up how something looks) & rearranged things, then saved it as a PDF file. Would it help if I offered the Word document version?

I've been playing around with offering the PDF files as downloads from Quicksharing.com (Thanks Hakucho! ... for pointing me to this site). It seems to do what it advertises. I suppose I could upload the Word documents there as well. Another thing I had in mind is to do what many other people do for sharing their files, viz. using Yahoo Groups. Although I have played around with creating a Yahoo Group, I haven't yet decided whether I really want to go that route.

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I finally caught up with American Idol which we recorded on Tivo. I'm usually a day or two behind. We watched the first half of Tuesday show on Tuesday night, and the second half on Wednesday night. And we got to the results tonight (Thurs). Stephanie Edwards and Chris Richardson were in the bottom 2. I was surprised to find Stephanie Edwards there, as I can think of some other people who could better fill that slot. And then I was really shocked to see Chris Richardson stay. I think Stephanie is way better than Chris, however I think Stephanie is just slightly weaker than Melinda, LaKisha, and Jordin. I like the other Chris (Sligh) more than this one...

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