Enemy of Entropy

Graphics. Gah!

4 May 2008, 10:36 am. 1 Comment. Filed under Art, Geekery, Needlework.

There are times when being graphic-​​impaired really does annoy me.

I’m finally mov­ing for­ward with port­ing the Heart­song Hand­i­crafts site to Word­Press. It shouldn’t be a big deal. I’ve done the same many times before with other sites.

Unfor­tu­nately, I don’t have a logo. I mean, I have a sim­ple logo, but it isn’t very good. It doesn’t sing, that’s for sure. I just want a nice, sim­ple logo that isn’t ter­ri­bly busy, but that doesn’t look (like the first attempt) as if I made it from clip-​​art and stan­dard fonts. My utter and com­plete lack of draw­ing abil­ity is a seri­ous hand­i­cap in this endeavor.

I did sorta cus­tomize a WP theme to match the crappy logo, but that part is easy. The harder part is hav­ing some­thing to give the site visual inter­est, and that doesn’t exist right now.

On the other hand, the cross-​​stitch pat­terns them­selves involve graph­ics, so I don’t want things to get too busy. It’s a bal­anc­ing act.

I may have to throw myself on Katie’s mercy, or some­thing. She’s pretty busy, though, and prefers to draw what­ever she feels like draw­ing rather than cre­at­ing some­thing to suit a par­tic­u­lar theme.

SBQ: What do you do with completed patterns?

6 March 2008, 11:13 pm. 1 Comment. Filed under Blogging, Needlework, SBQ.

This week’s ques­tion is the first of some recy­cled ques­tions. It was first asked back in 2005, and I don’t think I even knew about SBQ then, so I doubt that I’ve answered it before.

After you stitch a pat­tern or kit, what do you do with it?

I’ve done so few kits that they hardly count. I think I have just about every pat­tern I’ve ever stitch, though. I wish I had pho­tos of all the items I’ve stitched from those pat­terns! I guess hang­ing on to the pat­tern is a mem­oir, of sorts, as I’m very unlikely to stitch most things more than once.
Read on…

Bookcase Bedroom!

5 March 2008, 11:32 pm. 5 Comments. Filed under Home, Reading.



New tiles for the Uroko house

Orig­i­nally uploaded by akamé

I sup­pose it could be called a Book­case Tree, because of its iasic deis­ngn. It wouldn’t be the best choice of design for sleep­ing quar­ters for a claus­tro­phone lke me, and pro­crati­na­tors wpuld find it even harder to quit read­ing and go to sleep. I would love to have this for a lit­tle one

SBQ: Other crafts?

6 February 2008, 11:56 pm. 4 Comments. Filed under Needlework.

Melange by Calico Crossroads
This weekend’s Stitch­ing Blog­gers Ques­tion:

Are there other crafts that you have tried and aban­doned? Why do you like stitch­ing better?

Short ver­sion: Because it’s one of the few visually-​​beautiful things I’ve ever been good at.
Read on…

Further Prof of Insanity: Blog365

1 January 2008, 11:45 am. 1 Comment. Filed under Blogging, Family, Fun, Geekery, Health, Holidays, Home, Homeschooling, Music, RPGs, Reading, Writing.

I got through NaBloPoMo, as ridicu­lous as it was to com­mit to post­ing at least once a day for a month. So of course that small suc­cess has led me, in a moment of more-​​than-​​usual-​​lunacy, to sign up for Blog365 (oth­er­wise known as “Out of the Fry­ing Pan, Into the Fire”).
Blog365
The pur­pose is fairly clear: to post at least once every day of 2008. Feb­ru­ary 29 is a “rest day.” Posts may be writ­ten on any site, rather than stick­ing to just one blog, so I’ll try to spread them around on mine/​ours. If I can’t get some­thing on the actual site on a par­tic­u­lar day due to net con­nec­tion issues or what­ever, I have to write (yes, write! like, cuneiform or some­thing!) a jour­nal entry and trans­fer it to a blog as that day’s entry.

It would be far sim­pler to have a sys­tem of some sort. Maybe I’ll cre­ate a rotation:

Hope­fully there will be new pod­casts up soon. There will def­i­nitely be more music, as we have that lovely con­cert piano we received via freecy­cle all repaired and put together. It’s beau­ti­ful and sounds great! Not at all bad for one drive to pick it up and less than $200 in repair fees! (Sam wanted to just take it to the near­est autho­rized repair cen­ter rather than doing it ourselves.)

2007 wasn’t a stel­lar year, but nei­ther was it ter­ri­ble. Sam has a steady, secure job that he enjoys, in an orga­ni­za­tion that’s allow­ing him to advance. , Katie had a lot of health prob­lems, but I’m hop­ing that we’re on the right path to resolv­ing them. Shel­ley passed away a lit­tle shy of her 18th birth­day, but since we’d been told in 1999 that she only had a year (at most) left, we felt that we’d got­ten an “extra” 8 years with her any­way. Kioshi has grown into a nice com­pan­ion, too.

We really kept to our­selves a lot through the past two years. When you’ve been betrayed and hurt as deeply as we were by our for­mer housemate’s sud­den crazi­ness in 2006, there’s a lot of heal­ing to be done. I don’t know if I’ll ever approach Thanks­giv­ing with­out trep­i­da­tion again, but we had a good one any­way. The stress did con­tribute to the dete­ri­o­ra­tion of my health, and that does make it harder to get out. We’re work­ing on it, though. We cer­tainly learned who our true friends were, and we’ll never for­get that.

So on to 2008, which we hope to be full of more time with friends, bet­ter health, much more music, Katie spent last night and almost all day today with friends from the school she was attend­ing as well as her new beau. Sam and I spent the day gam­ing, upgrad­ing some web sites, eat­ing good food and watch­ing movies. If it’s true that what­ever you do on Jan­u­ary 1 indi­cates how your year will go, we should be just fine.

 

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