Enemy of Entropy

New Year’s Eve

31 December 2008, 8:52 pm. 4 Comments. Filed under Family, Needlework.

I hate com­ing up with titles. Can you tell?

Happy New Year to all of you. I hope to see more of you in per­son this year!

I’m still not feel­ing well at all, so I haven’t been online much. Despite that, my wrists have been aching as if I were work­ing again. How does that happen?

Our Yule was qui­etly pleas­ant. I hope your win­ter hol­i­day was as good.

I did finally fin­ish stitch­ing the Fairy Tale Sam­pler for Sam. It didn’t take that much stitch­ing (so it can’t be blamed for the wrist pain), but I did have to re-​​purchase some Mill Hill beads. That gave me an excuse (like I needed it) to talk to Susan of Nease’s Needle­work, which is always lovely. But now it’s finished!

My cam­era bat­tery won’t recharge any­more, so I’ll have to con­vince the girl to take a photo of the piece for me.

I think I’m finally ready to do Deep Peace. It’s a gor­geous piece, and some peo­ple I love dearly got all the sup­plies for it as a gift for me a few years back. Unfor­tu­nately, we broke up right after that, and every time I started to work on it, I cried. I think there’s been enough time now that I can focus on the happy mem­o­ries instead of the hard stuff.

I think I need to start a smaller project, too, that I can carry around with me. Com­plex projects don’t lend them­selves to pro­duc­tiv­ity while doing any­thing else, any­way. Sam tends to get me so inter­ested in gam­ing that I can’t get much stitch­ing done. Multi-​​person games are bet­ter for needle­work, because I stitch while the focus is on some­one else.

I’m not really into New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions, and if I made them seri­ously, I’d be more likely to do so at Samhain than the end of January/​beginning of Decem­ber. Still, I’ve been real­iz­ing how much I’ve missed needle­work. My eyes are still giv­ing me trou­ble, but I got out an old, portable magnifier/​travel light and that helps. I think it may be worth­while to check into a mag­ni­fier attach­ment for my Ott Lite (after get­ting new glasses). I’m going to try stitch­ing more reg­u­larly, and I’d really like to learn needle­point and knit­ting and/​or cro­chet­ing. I think I can man­age the needle­point on my own, but not the yarn stuff. Hope­fully I can find some­one local who is will­ing to teach me. Appar­ently there’s a group meet­ing at a local library that may be a possibility.

I thought my DMC was get­ting too old for use or some­thing, because it kept fray­ing apart while I was stitch­ing. I finally real­ized (after buy­ing 3 new skeins of black floss) that I’d been using those nee­dles that doesn’t require thread­ing (which I love), and that they stress the floss (and the floss slips out eas­ily). I switched back to a reg­u­lar tapes­try nee­dle and presto! the prob­lem was gone. I can’t find those no-​​thread nee­dles any­where online, so I guess other folks fig­ured that out far more quickly than I did! I have a two-​​sided nee­dle that came with a mag­a­zine or some such, but I don’t know that I can quite fig­ure out how to use it.

Sam and I are stay­ing in this evening, avoid­ing all the obnox­ious drunks in favor of our own cel­e­bra­tion. The girl is here, too, because her beau is in Europe with his fam­ily and most of her other friends are also out of town (some­thing about a Flam­ing Lips concert?).

After get­ting caught up with all the shows I enjoy, I went look­ing for some­thing else to view. I enjoy Bones, but I find the sizist com­ments (and plots) highly offen­sive. I tried to watch the first episode of The Men­tal­ist online, but it keeps tim­ing out. Sam got the first disc of The Tudors from Net­flix, and it’s inter­est­ing at times. I tend to get annoyed with the lib­er­ties they’ve taken with his­tory, though.

Scattered

31 August 2008, 10:29 pm. 3 Comments. Filed under Family, Fun, Reading.

Any­body else using Live­Mocha? Espe­cially to learn French? I just joined (as Tech­noMom, of course) and would like to have “friends” there. I started with the begin­ner level, les­son one, and actu­ally learned a few new vocab­u­lary words. (My wee bit of for­eign lan­guage instruc­tion in high school sucked, to put it mildly.) You’re sup­posed to ask your “friends” for feed­back on your lessons, but I don’t have any and don’t really want to ask total strangers about how badly I did.

Sam and Katie have been at Dragon*Con for the past few days. We had a house guest, David, but I didn’t really “meet” him because of the late con hours and hav­ing a really bad pain flare. Sorry David! He went home this after­noon. I’m glad Sam has the day off tomor­row to recover. I’m glad Hope got to come to D*C, but pout­ing because I won’t get to see her while she’s in town. I know that she has bright­ened Sam’s weekend.

I fin­ished read­ing The Jen­nifer Morgue by Charles Stross last night, and started Phae­dra Weldon’s Wraith. I liked Morgue, but it wasn’t quite as strong as The Atroc­ity Archives. The short story at the end of the book, “Pimpf,” didn’t do too much for me, but I’m not a video gamer so that prob­a­bly has a lot to do with it.

I’m really lik­ing Wraith. A lot. The fact that it’s set in Atlanta is nice, because I can fol­low along the geog­ra­phy as the char­ac­ters move around. (Usu­ally, such things go right past me, even if there’s a map.) Thanks to Good Reads, I know that there’s a novella, “Out of the Dark,” on Weldon’s site that takes place between this book and Spec­tre.

I’ve also been brows­ing through the archives at Two Lumps, thanks to a link from . I had a pair of Russ­ian Blues who were entirely too much like Ebenezer and Snooch! If you’re a vet­eran of cat cohab­i­ta­tion, be care­ful when read­ing. I rec­om­mend not hav­ing a drink in hand (or in mouth) and being care­ful to empty your blad­der before you start reading.

Kyoshi is busy telling me that he still doesn’t want to cud­dle with any­body but Katie, but he wants her home NOW! RIGHT NOW! And that we really have to stop let­ting the kit­ten out of the house with­out his per­sonal supervision.

Good Reads Migration Finished!

17 August 2008, 11:50 pm. Comments Off. Filed under Family, Geekery, Health, RPGs, Reading.

That was not pain­less at all. The import fea­ture is tetchy, at best. I had to go through the entire list of 1300+ books and fix their “book­shelf” assign­ments, and add some that just didn’t import at all. I had over 1400 books in Now Read­ing, and I haven’t quite fig­ured out why there are fewer books in Good Reads. Oh well. It’s pretty much done!

The dates I’d read books, my rat­ings, and my reviews did NOT trans­fer to Good Reads, which is highly annoying.

I was able to go through and update a bunch of books that I’ve read since NR stopped work­ing, and use the to-​​read cat­e­gory to request books from the library. As a result, there are 33 books await­ing pickup now, and another 61 pend­ing (mostly books that are really new or not yet avail­able). That doesn’t include the inter-​​library loan items I requested.1

Sam and I had bonus gam­ing time tonight. He’s stor­ing up brownie points before Dragon*Con. Katie, unfor­tu­nately, couldn’t sleep last night, then slept all day until about 11:30. Now she’s re-​​hydrating and get­ting some food now. I hope she can go back to sleep. She’s def­i­nitely hav­ing a fibro flare. :-(

1 I’m so tick­led that the library added a way to put in ILL requests online!

Sleepy!

13 August 2008, 11:36 pm. 2 Comments. Filed under Family, Geekery, Health, Reading.

I didn’t sleep very well last night, although I man­aged to stay up all day yes­ter­day (unusual lately). Unfor­tu­nately, I ended up sleep­ing most of the day, today, and I’m still sleepy! So I hope I can sleep well again, tonight.

I have a fever, too, so appar­ently push­ing myself to not nap was a bad idea. Doctor’s orders are still to lay down 15 min­utes of every hour, which makes it dif­fi­cult to get much done at a time. Oh well. It’s bet­ter than a fever.

The girl got home safely, but didn’t go out with her friends tonight as planned due to a threat­en­ing migraine. They didn’t really see much of the meteor shower, because the skies were too cloudy, but they did have fun.

I fin­ished read­ing the sec­ond of Kat Richardson’s Grey­walker books today, Pol­ter­geist. Very good stuff, and a nice change from some of the too-​​common urban fan­tasy themes. The library is hold­ing Under­ground for me, which I hope to pick up tomorrow.

The mail brought an O’Reilly JavaScript book to review for TCM, so I’ll be work­ing on that dur­ing my more coher­ent wak­ing hours for a bit.

Sweet Saturday

2 August 2008, 12:55 am. 4 Comments. Filed under Family, Fun, Movies.

Sam took Katie up to Repub­li­can land to pick up her new glasses lenses today – she went to the eye doc­tor while she was with my par­ents, because they were out dri­ving and real­ized that she was squint­ing to read the road signs. Her eyes hadn’t changed much at her last few yearly check-​​ups, but they did this time. She says every­thing is very nice and clear. I need to go get my own checked, but glasses are so dan­ged expensive!

We had a nice date and a deli­cious steak din­ner. Sam’s been promis­ing that he’ll make chicken fet­tucine alfredo since last week­end, but the girl was gone, then he had a pretty tir­ing week. That’s quite a meal to cook after a day at work. So I’m hop­ing he’ll feel up to it tomor­row. The steak was really good, though!

Katie got a long let­ter from her friend Josh, who left for Air Force basic train­ing recently. Then she even got a phone call from him! Appar­ently his group1 is doing really well, so they got access to a sort of recre­ation area with vend­ing machines and pay phones after just two weeks of train­ing. Another friend of theirs who just got out of train­ing said they didn’t get that until after five weeks, which is appar­ently pretty standard.

I worry about Josh – this just isn’t a good time to be going into any branch of the mil­i­tary, as far as I’m con­cerned. But I’m sure he’ll be a good air­man, and it’s what he wanted to do.

Thanks to Eliz­a­beth Bear (), I now know that, Ohs noes! Franz Kafka read pron! I can’t quite fig­ure out why it’s such a big deal to any­one, but I’m cer­tainly not a Kafka scholar. Is there any healthy adult in the world who, given the oppor­tu­nity, has not read/​viewed porn at some point in his or her life?

The girl saw Mamma Mia with my mother, and said she thinks we’ll enjoy watch­ing it together. I don’t pay much atten­tion to what’s in the the­aters, so other than think­ing it might have some con­nec­tion to Abba I was clue­less. Bear also posted a link to an inter­est­ing review that finally gave me a clue as to why Katie liked it so much.

1 It isn’t a pla­toon – what do they call them in the AF?

 

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