Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Scratch that...

Weekend plans are cancelled. We'll be at home pretending we aren't at home. I doubt that'll be successful, but here's hoping!

A weekend away

We're headed to Saskatchewan on Friday for a weekend of fishing and golf (for Mike) and knitting and party planning (for me). Sixteen hours of driving means a lot of progress on the last two Harry Potter scarves, so maybe, just maybe, they'll all be done for the party! That would be fabulous, but I'm not going to kill myself to do it. At least three of them will be done though. I'm also going to bring Knitting Without Tears and a book by The Yarn Harlot if I can get one out from the library before Friday, as well as Harry Potter 7, for inspiration for Harry Potter activities. I also need to think about prizes for the winners of the activities, so if anyone has any suggestions, let me know! Yes, it will be a lot of driving, but I'm hoping for a relaxing away-weekend just the same.

In other news, I found this essay today, and while I don't have anything so serious as Lupus, it describes something I can't explain very well. The idea of borrowing spoons from tomorrow is something I'm very familiar with. But I need to stop doing it.

Friday, September 21, 2007

Random thought

It occurred to me yesterday, my mother's mother and my mother's mother's mother wove.

I'm not sure why this resonates right now. I know that it's something I didn't know about my grandmother until after she died. I know that, upon seeing something that she wove, that it was possible to do that kind of detail in cloth by hand and not by machine.

I don't know. It's just something that's in my head. My grandmother wove.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

End of an era

Today, we reach the end of an era. Today, we're witness to the passing on of the original fun fencing socks.



Aren't they lovely? They were the first fun fencing socks I bought, oh so many years ago. To this day, they are still the most fun fencing socks I've ever found. Just because I don't fence anymore doesn't mean I didn't wear them either. They were a hit when I presided last year, and are among the few thin socks I own that will fit in my good flat shoes, which I'm wearing full-time due to my sprained toe.

But this morning, as I put them on, I heard a noise. It was the noise of old, tired elastic, saying "Goodbye, world, the time has come for us to move on." You're all making that noise in your heads, I know it.

CHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHTTTTT!

So I am spending one more bittersweet day with my beloved socks, and then I shall bid them farewell. I will never find their like again (and I've been looking for years!).

Friday, September 14, 2007

WTB (Want to Buy)

...More time to knit, and learn new things about knitting.

...More time to sleep, and a hammer to knock me out again when I wake up at 2, 3, 4, and/or 5 am.

...More time to rest and gear my brain down.

...More time to plan my birthday party (FOUR WEEKS! AHHHHHHHHHHH!)

...More time to exercise. Stupid gym hours.

...More time to heal and make the pain go away.

...More time to cook and learn about food.

...More time to forget everything that is stressing me out.

...More time between events in far-off places, so I could maybe actually physically handle going to them all without having to decide between them.

...More time to figure things out.

I'm sensing a theme...

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Computers

As I run back and forth between the student's computer, where I am busy doing make-work and posting to my blog, and my laptop, which has just been restored to factory defaults in an effort to get rid of persistent adware nastiness, it occurs to me how dependent we've become on computers. I am doing make-work (granted, it needs to be done, but it's still make-work) until I'm done updating my laptop, reinstalling all the software, sure that the adware is completely gone, and have restored all my files from the external hard drive we just got for the association. This is a written-off day, and possibly two, depending on how long Windows update takes. Soon, I will be knitting in between the make-work, just to pass the time as my primary machine does its Windows updating, software installing, and the like. I can't get to the things I should be doing, but considering that I restarted my machine about seven times in half an hour this morning, and the adware still kept multiplying and couldn't be removed each time without a restart, I suppose it's a better use of my time than fighting with it.

I consider, then, the dependence. I have scrapped a lot of paper in the office over the last year in favour of scanned files. Was I wise to do that? The files take up a heck of a lot less physical room, but have I put the history at risk of being lost for good? On the other hand, paper is just as vulnerable to destruction. And at home. So much of my social life revolves around the computer. Email, instant messaging, websites, WoW... I really should do a back-up of all my files at home as well, for the day that something in my computer explodes (and it probably will). A purge of emails and files is probably in order first, since I'm in that mood, and the closets are done.

I remember being shocked that my uncle, when he was CEO of the family business in Denmark, didn't have a computer on his desk. Yet somehow, he made the paper work. As I sit here twiddling my thumbs, I wonder if he wasn't smarter than the rest of us to not get so dependent on a little machine.

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