Thirteen Geeky Knitting Projects, 20th

(I was going to write this last night while watching an hour of Friends reruns but a bizarre issue with the Bad Behavior Wordpress plugin and some blacklisting site kept me from uploading and then accessing my own account from my own computer. But it took me 4½ hours to figure out that because the error said that my computer had been sending out spam mail and that was why I was blacklisted and that if I had any questions I could email the web admin and gave my own email address to contact. So, I updated my McAffee and installed Google’s free Spy Doctor and ran both and came up clean, which I knew I would because I am an IT geek who obsesses about that sort of thing. Finally at 11:30pm a new link showed up in my Google search for answers. Someone had just posted an hour before on the Wordpress.org forum that they also couldn’t get into their site with the same error and someone had replied with a link to the Bad Behavior Blog which explained what happened. Grrrrrrrrr! Wasted my whole Wednesday night.

And then today after I spent forever writing this up, my server went down and I couldn’t save it…for over an hour.)

Whenever I start a new hobby, I go a little overboard searching for future possible projects. The nice thing about knitting as opposed to counted cross-stitch, which I did through my 20’s, is that there are a lot of free patterns out there on the Internet and a lot of people who are willing to share their ideas. Plus, as it turns out, there are also a lot of geeky guys and gals just like me who have merged the hobby with their eccentric personalities. Some of these made me laugh out loud. Some of them are just too fun to resist.

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Download Discontent

I finished listening to Salem’s Lot via audio-book on Thursday and since then I’ve been hunting for something to fill the void for my commute. I hate driving but discovering audio-books has made it bearable these last few months. In fact, the last two books — Land of Lincoln and Salem’s Lot — actually had me looking forward to the commute, anxious to find out what was going to happen next. So, now I’m ready for something new and I checked my “To Read” list.

That is where the frustration began. Ninety-five percent of the books on my list do not even have audio-book versions and the ones that do only have abridged versions. Why would anyone want an abridged version of a book? I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to get the whole story, wouldn’t want to relish every morsel the author has carefully chosen. To me, it’s like watching the Harry Potter movies that have been chopped up for time’s sake but in my opinion they’ve left out important information and clues that J. K. Rowling meant for us to dwell on. There wasn’t a single scene in her books that wasn’t carefully crafted to share something important about the story not just of that particular book but the entire story arc of the seven books. I hated that the movie version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire completely left out Dobby and the house elves, but particularly Dobby. To me, you lose something in an abridged version of a book so I can’t understand why anyone would want to read or listen to one.

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Eight Lessons From Harry Potter (**Possible Spoilers**)

1. Nice matters. It sounds cliché, I know, but did you ever notice how generally genuinely nice Harry himself was to pretty much everyone to start off with. He didn’t seem to judge anyone by their outward appearance — half-giants, house elves, big-eyed girls with crazy ideas, timid nerdy wizards who’d lost their frogs, and even beautiful witches were given the same level of courtesy. For Harry, it was deeds that made the man -er- being. He didn’t jump to judgment and he often went out of his way to be kind or helpful when it was the right thing to do even when he was slightly annoyed or frustrated. As a reward, those simple acts of nicety from Harry paid off tenfold throughout the books. It wasn’t just the legend of who Harry was supposed to be or what he might do that made people rally around him, it was loyalty for the things he had done, for the kindness and goodness he had shown to those he had encountered that made him the hero to follow.

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Saying Good-bye To Harry Potter

My friend KMcDougan wrote a post about feeling a sense of loss at finishing the Harry Potter series. Having finally come to the end of the 7th book myself, I can agree with him. It’s not that the ending wasn’t a good one, that J. K. Rowling didn’t leave you with a sense for the most part, the big questions had been answered, the loose ends had been tied. The real sadness comes in the thought that somehow you’ve spent years getting to know these people, they’ve become your friends and family, you’ve invested time watching them grow up and you’ve grown up with them.

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Thirteen Things You Also Might Not Know About Me, 2nd

I used to be a Gamer Girl. We’re talking “Old School” here, not that new-fangled Xbox and Playstation stuff. No, I’m talking pen-and-paper table-top gaming with dice and rule books — you know, D&D, GURPS, Star Wars, and World of Darkness Role Playing. Oh, I so loved stretching the imagination and good storytelling with friends. We used to do it all weekend long, back in the good ole days. I remember once I played a pyrokinetic, pyrophobic amnesiatic witch. I currently have the title of “Integration Systems Specialist” which is a fancy way of saying that I am a programmer analyst specializing in interface programming. I worked for a government subcontractor once on some decoding software for Navy submarines, but I didn’t have security clearance for the codes; so when I was ready to test it, I would give the program on a diskette to a co-worker who would take it to the Navy’s research lab and he or she would come back and tell me if it worked. It was a very long, frustrating process. I did eventually have “Secret” clearance. I never saw or heard anything in the research lab worth telling anyone about. Plus, it was all published in the paper several years later. I once convinced a co-worker years after having left government work that The X-Files were based on true stories and that I should know because I worked there. I just have one of those faces, I guess. I really did want to work for the FBI or the CIA as an analyst when I was in high school and college, but I’m convinced that my associations with certain “questionable” people which have led me to have “questionable” theories have kept my applications from serious consideration. I wanted to be one of Charlie’s Angels when I grew up. What pre-teen/teen of the 70’s didn’t? I mean, they wore the hottest fashions, drove the best cars, kissed the cutest guys, had the best hair, and they kicked ass while wearing high heels and looking good! I’ve seen every episode of Roseanne and the last episode where she does her monologue about how things really are and how Dan died makes me cry every time. My favorite foods are tuna sushi, Mexican, and Twizzlers. Though not together. I wrote a novel in high school. It’s terrible. My mother thinks it’s fabulous. The last chapter won some literary award for young creative writers. At the time, I wanted to go to college and study to be a writer but my parents said there was no money in that so now I’m a programmer analyst and I just don’t have the creativity in me to write long stories. Now my mother asks me all the time about whatever happened with my writing and why don’t I get back into it. I still would like to publish a book. I thought about publishing a cookbook a few years ago, but now I’m thinking about a coffee table book of photo or something. J. K. Rowling is the only author in some 15 years who’s been able to surprise me with the mystery parts of her stories. Most of my friends don’t like to go to mystery movies with me because I figure them out before the end — I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut, but it still annoys them. I was already good at mystery solving, but in college I took a mini-semester course on the mystery novel and not only did I blow the curve and get all of the extra credit, but since then I recognize the formulas. I’m only 140 pages into Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I’m savoring it. I have my suspicions about things that have happened already and clues that have been laid out before the book and in the book so far. I’m sure I’ll be wrong, because as I’ve mentioned, J. K. Rowling still manages to surprise me every time I think I’ve got her figured out. Links to other Thursday Thirteens! Vixen Holly Nicole Exhausted Intern Christine Linda at 2nd Cup jeanjeanie CJHill Annie tommiea

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Busy Bee

I have totally been extremely busy and not procrastinating writing posts.

Saturday, after getting my hair cut, Pugly and I headed over to the Yarmouth Clam Festival. I wanted to work on both of our social skills. I really don’t like crowds and he’s a bit unpredictable. Pugly nearly pulled my arms off tugging on the leash but clearly he loved it and it was a beautiful afternoon, though the morning had been overcast and had threatened to rain out the whole thing.

Although he got quite a bit of attention from kids and adults alike asking to pet him, Pugly’s absolute favorite part of the festival was the food court. Even though I only bought a root beer float because I refused to pay $6-$10 for tiny amounts of over-fried food, Pugly drug me around the whole food court twice. He was doggedly hunting the treasure trove that was the sidewalk for any possible droppings. Oh, wonderful, trampled fried droppings of anything — fried dough, fried potatoes, fried seafood, anything. It was all so wonderful and the dirtier and more trampled, the more treasured and wonderful! What a great and fantastic treat! What a magical place indeed!

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