Sunday, June 22, 2008

Friday was a bad day!

I woke up Friday morning, wandered into the kitchen and turned on the computer then wandered to the coffee maker. A few minutes later, armed with my Cinnamon Dulce latte, I returned to the computer. The wireless network was having issues, so I went to restart. The big freeze. So shuddering as I did so (Premonition? Too much past experience? Both?) I hit the power button and held it until the computer shut down.

A few seconds later I started it up again. Did you know that on my computer the blue screen of death isn't actually blue? It's evil black. System error. Windows cannot load because a file is missing or corrupt. Please insert Windows start up disk to try to repair.

Now, years ago the lovely people at Dell stopped sending out system disks. In fact, my computer came with not one damned disk. Which means if a complete reformat is called for, I've no way to rebuild. Much hair was pulled out.

Finally it was 10 AM and the calls began. Geek Squad wanted over $300 to come out to my house and try to fix it, more if a backup and reformat was required.

The next repair place wanted $80 to come out, plus the labor charge to fix it and even more to back things up and reformat. At least $160.

All to stick in a Windows disk and repair (I've done that myself, takes just a few minutes, really. Not worth that much money.)

Third place we called said bring it on in. It would likely cost under $60. Ding, ding, ding!!! We have a winner! And so hubby disconnected everything and drove up the road to the shop. That left us with no computer for the day and major concerns about data that we may or may not get back. Luckily almost everything was backed up on our external hard drive so it wouldn't have been a major loss. The main concern was software. I don't know where all my disks are. In a box somewhere. And of course this computer never had disks for the software that came on it, so I'd be without Word Perfect or Word if it couldn't be fixed.

But by 4 PM they'd fixed it and sold us a Windows Sys disk ;) All for $40. A very good thing!!!

And everyone who worked there plays World of Warcraft, so that was kind of funny. They thought hubby was lame because he plays Alliance side, but apparently I am cool because I play Horde side ;)

PS: The moral of this story is that if y'all don't have Windows set up disks, look it up on the internet and create one!

Monday, June 16, 2008

Whew!

Sock the Second v. 2 is complete! I have a finished pair! No second sock syndrome for me.

The next pair, Broadripple from Knitty.com, was begun in time for the Estes Park Wool Market and Worldwide Knit in Public Day. (It was also frogged later the same day, but that's another story...) I'm excited about this pair, because it's more than just a plain Jane pattern, and really, if I could just pay attention, a simple pattern to memorize.

Unfortunately, my attention span seems to be shorter than a gnat's. On my first attempt, I was three repeats into the cuff when I lost it somewhere on the pattern line of the 4th. since then I've been unable to get any farther than one repeat and lose it in the second. Last night I couldn't even get the first row completed. Sigh. Hopefully I can get out of the house for a bit today and clear the cobwebs from my brain and get back on track. And today, there will be lifeline involved.

But anyhoo. You don't care about my sock trials and tribulations. You want to hear about the wool market! As in the past it was lovely. I do think the number of vendors was down this year, as were the number of animals being judged. Gas prices screw everyone

But the few vendors I wanted were there. Brooks Farm Yarn and Plain & Fancy Sheep & Wool Co. The lovely lady from Interlacements was also up from Colorado Springs.

So I bought the place out right? No. I did finally buy from Brooks Farm, I've drooled over their yarns for three years now, and this year I bought a lovely hank of Solo Silk in graduated blues, despite the fact that I went in wanting reds, lol. I liked the color changes on the blue, the red was a lot more subtle and while lovely just didn't grab my attention like the blues.

As for the other vendors, they have lovely things as always but I still have two skeins from Plain & Fancy from last year. And the lovely spiderweb from Interlacements as well. And being that I am still unemployed (and enjoying it for the moment) I just couldn't see spending a lot of wool.

I will say that the Yak yarn tempted me greatly. As did the Bison (especially since we just returned from South Dakota where we viewed many, many Bison in Custer State Park). As did the softness of the Angora (but the large price tag vs. the small quantity did this one in).

We also found a booth that carried needle felting things. The kiddo had a grand time making a pin. Those felting needles are SHARP. And they have barbed ends, so if you stab yourself with one it's going to hurt. But she did brilliantly.

All in all we had a fine time, although the kiddo started to get fussy when I wanted to go back into the yarn barn again. So instead we got into line for grub. I bought 2lbs of frozen ground lamb for $5.50 and had a nice lamb kabob as well. Last night we turned 1lb. into samosas to go with our Chicken Tikka Masala. Yum.

The next several days are going to be spent on crafts, I think. I finally got the spare room walkable, now I just need to clear off the craft table so the munchkin and I can scrapbook some of our many vacation pictures! And of curse, I intend to work on the Broadripple. Ciao for now!

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Minutiae

Sock the Second has gone the way of most knit projects in my life and been frogged. I cast on again last night, but I've only completed a few rows. Sock the Second was less than two inches from decreasing for the toe... I thought I had it made. *Sigh*

I dropped a stitch along the way and when I slowly tried to unknit down to it, I got fed up and decided unraveling would be faster so I did. And then could pick all the tiny little stitches back up. After unraveling way more than I'd planned due to losing stitches here and there, I finally lost patience when I got all the way to the last stitch and it unraveled before I could pick it up, destroying the last of my patience.

I was really angry, because I got some lovely new red sock yarn last week and I want to play with it So I unraveled StS and rewound the yarn. Then I pulled out the new sock yarn. My LYS has a brilliant selection of sock yarn, I was almost spoilt by choice. The people who work there are so friendly. BUT, they never offer to wind yarn.

I wish they would. I undid the band on my skein and proceeded to set up my winder, skein loosely draped over my knees as I did so. Things went fine, with me slowly unraveling the skein and winding the yarn. Until I dropped about a third of the loop and hopelessly tangled it up. Took me well over an hour to hand ball from the other end, weaving the yarn in and out until all the tangles were gone. And of course, the cat decided whilst I was untangling things, that was the best time ever to come sit in my lap.

But the lovely yarn is now rewound properly and no worse for wear. Of course, there's a second skein waiting to be wound...

For me.

It's been a long winter. Mentally, I feel even worse off than I was before, though things are finally looking up. I abandoned the gym. I...