Just wonderin'

Anyone seen any good knitting pattern books lately? I love browsing Ravelry, but there's so much there it makes my head pop, lol.

Windows 7

Woot! Working for a place that sells and repairs computers has its perks! Windows 7, 64 bit Home Premium, release version, which is actually an upgrade for me as my computer runs 32 bit at the moment (really stupid, since my comp has 4 gigs of ram and 32 bit maxes at 3 gigs! WTF was Dell thinking??). Thank you, thank you, thank you, Boss Man!!!! I'm trying to decide if I should install it today or wait until I am off on Sunday.

I'm thinking Sunday, just in case anything goes wrong, so we will have more time to deal with it (hubby is raiding in WoW tonight, lol). The good thing is, coming off a fresh install of Vista, there's nothing to lose on this puter ;) At some point we will have to put 7 on our XP machine, but for now it's fine.

Anyhoo. I'm going to go check my laundry and get some breakfast. Ciao!

Things that make you say, "Really??"

Wildlife Detected!

While we were on vacation this year we drove through an area near Durango that kind of made us scratch our heads and say, "Really??" There's this stretch of road and as you enter it you see a sign warning you that it's a wildlife detection zone. And along the road are signs that light up when they detect wildlife.

So of course we had to look it up when we got home. (Ok, it took us a while to remember to look it up, we saw a lot of cool stuff on vacation and this one slipped our minds for a bit, lol). Apparently that is a stretch of highway where the majority of accidents that occur are car v. wildlife accidents. So they installed this system. But what they didn't do was provide any kind of explanation. A sign mentioning heavy wildlife migration at the start of the zone might have made us take the whole thing more seriously. So it may be dandy for the folks that live in the area and know the reasoning behind the zone, but to random tourists like us.... Especially when all the signs are lit because they are being worked on and there's not a glimpse of wildlife anywhere except for a few birds flying above, lol. We certainly didn't notice a big slow down in traffic through there.

Which makes the zone, in my opinion, a $1.2 million FAIL! But who knows, maybe their numbers will prove me wrong in a few years....

Another sleepless night

Ok, not completely sleepless, yet. It's only 11 PM, but I went to bed around 9:30. I turned out the lights a while later and immediately got the sensation that I was forgetting something. But I can't find anything. And then I noticed that Yahoo had tips for insomniacs and had to read them, lol.

Now I am wide awake again. Crap. I thought it was interesting that one of the tips I read was not to think of anything that required brain power. One of my favorite ways to fall asleep is to count backwards (Don't laugh, but 99 bottles of beer on the wall works really well, lol). Or I imagine myself walking down a steep flight of stairs, and count down from 100 that way.

Counting up in Spanish works well for me too. For me it's not as much about taxing my brain as it is about refocusing my brain. There are so many nights that I just can't turn my thoughts off. Thoughts of work wander through, along with so many other things. Things I did that day, could have done, wish I had done. Concentrating on the numbers gives me a focus and wears my little brain out enough that I can finally fall asleep, lol.

And of course, sometimes blogging about things that are bugging me helps ;)

Insomnia has been an issue off and on since my daughter was born. After a while I found myself sliding into depression. The lack of sleep made me grumpy and short with my child, which made me feel like a bad mom, which made my thoughts go 'round and 'round at bedtime. It was a vicious cycle.

I finally mentioned it to my doctor. He diagnosed depression and put me on a very low dose of anti-depressant. A bonus was that the anti-depressant he put me on had a sleep aid as well.

When I lost my long-time job due to location closure, with the company who shall not be named but is going down the toilet now, I also lost my insurance. And that meant good-bye to the "happy" pills. By that point I was down to one a few nights a week instead of every night, so it wasn't a total hardship. I do sleep much better now, once I fall asleep I pretty much am dead. It's the getting there that can be hard.

I do all the wrong things. I watch TV in bed, I knit in bed, I surf the web in bed. All the things that sleep specialists tell you not to do if you have trouble falling asleep. The bed is supposed to be about sleep. But our house is little. There's no where else to stretch out and relax, if the kiddo or the hubby is watching TV in the living room. So the bedroom is it. And I pay the price for it at bedtime. But there's just no alternative.

Anyhoo. I guess I am off to count steps ;) Good night!

*YAWN*

I foolishly offered to go in to work at 6 AM today. The alternative was staying until 8 last night and I was tired. And 2 hours before we open is not a bad thing. No one to deal with, just do my thing.

But that doesn't make me any less tired right now, lol. I had a very rough night last night, couldn't fall asleep until late, and then tossed and turned and woke up every hour or so. I think I finally fell into a sound sleep around 3 AM, 'cause when that alarm went off at 5 it startled the heck outta me.

And it doesn't help that I was supposed to have the day off, so when I ran out of breakfast food yesterday it was no big deal. Until this morning when I went to grab breakfast and remembered. *Sigh*

Anyhoo. Off to work. Have a lovely day. I'll be counting down the hours until nap time ;)

Colorado Vacation

Click on all pictures to see them at 100%

Four Corners National Monument

We started out by going to the Four Corners National Monument. This is the only place in the U.S. where four states meet: Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. The kiddo thought (and ok, let's be honest, I thought so too!) it was cool that you could be in four places at once. The monument is on the Navajo reservation, and around the edges you can buy goods from Navajo sellers. It was very cool, because while they all spoke to us in English, when they conversed with each other, they spoke their native language. It's neat to hear, since so many Native American languages are on the brink of dying out.

Cliff Dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park

Next we headed into Mesa Verde National Park. Very cool place. Totally mind-boggling as to why anyone would settle there though! The thought of having to climb down the cliff face for water and game, etc. just amazes me. And there is clear evidence that the Ancestral Puebloans farmed as well. Where they farmed is unclear to me, since I don't like to look over the edge so I didn't see what was in the valley, and the mesas didn't look real fertile to me.

One interesting thing I learned was that these peoples used to used human hair to make knotless netting, using a looping technique. This technique was later replaced by knitting and crochet. ;)

Durango Silverton Railroad

After spending a few days in the Four Corners region, we headed to Durango, Colorado. Durango was founded by the Denver & Rio Grande Railway in 1880 and initially existed as something of a base camp to the gold and silver mines of the San Juan Mountains. It's still a lovely town and the steam train is very cool to see. Next time we go we are riding the train from Durango to Silverton, which is supposed to be a fantastic scenic ride.

I really liked Durango (part of that had to do with the fact that they had a Starbucks and I'd had horrid coffee that morning, lol) it was a nice, pretty town. Very obviously a tourist destination, but it didn't have the junky stores a lot of tourist traps have. And some of the buildings are absolutely gorgeous!

Great Sand Dunes National Park

From Durango we headed to Alamosa, CO. Just outside of Alamosa is Great Sand Dunes National Park, one of the weirdest things I have ever seen. Sand dunes is like a desert in the middle of Colorado. To suddenly see this sandy beach-like stretch and then huge dunes at the base of the mountains is very amazing. The tallest dune rises 750 feet from the plains below.

I must say, I could never live out there. It is so incredibly desolate. You go for miles and miles seeing only scrub. The amount of work it must have taken the few farmers to clear enough land to grow crops on is astounding. Even cattle would have a hard time living out there.

There's no place like home

We are heading home today and I am ready to be home. I've had a great time, seen some cool stuff, and some stuff that makes you shake your head and say, "WHY??" I'll post pics later, once I am home and at the good computer, rather than this pokey laptop with a sticky spacebar, lol.

Seriously, I miss home already. I miss my bed, I miss my down comforter, I miss air conditioning that keeps everything a steady temp instead of freezing my arse in the middle of the night, lol. And I really miss my espresso maker, lol.

And my poor old cat is probably missing me terribly. He will yowl for a day straight when we get home, yelling at us for leaving him.

Free sheep??

Saw this sign in Cortez, CO and just had to share it, lol.

Goin' down to Southpark....

Gonna have ourselves a time!

Wow. Southpark, the real Southpark is absolutely lovely. It's this wonderful bowl-like valley that surprises the heck outta you as you come 'round a bend in the road. One minute you are on the mountain in the trees and the next... Whoa!

We were actually on our way to Durango, and Mesa Verde National Park. Tomorrow we head into the park, tonight we played in the pool, lol.

Blah, Blah, Blah

The hubby is on the phone with Dell tech support at the moment. I took the big comp, affectionately known as The Beast, into work the other day after it started being seriously slow to respond. Big monster machine, 4 gigs of ram, quad-core processor, SLI graphics cards. Not supposed to be slow. In fact, at one point it was too fast and we had to dumb down the SLI settings, lol.

So The Beast sat at work from Monday until today, with our awesome techs trying to figure out what was going on. We'd already ruled out virus (I'd run scans with Trend Micro, Malware Bytes and Super-Anti Spyware before I even took it in), so the first thing we did was test the hard drive. It passed all the tests. So then we looked at graphics cards. WOW. They were toasting. But then, just to check, they stuck a different graphics card in and it was toasting too.

So then they installed my SLI on a different drive and they were fine. Hmmm. It was stump the tech week, lol. So then we waffled back to hard drive. Woot, warranty has 37 days left on it. So last night the bossman left it running the in depth diagnostic and 13 hours later it failed. YAY! This is a good thing, lol. Because now we have an error code to take to Dell. It's memory issue, though whether it's ram or the graphics card memory, the code didn't tell us.

And this is why hubby has been on the phone with them for an hour. I'm pretty sure they are going to reformat as he came out a few minutes ago asking if we had operating system disks. But that's ok. Everything is backed up to an external hard drive.

Although, reinstalling WoW will take an entire damned day, lol.

UH-OH. Apparently the phone went dead or he lost the tech, 'cause hubby is pissed now. And trying to call again. Yikes.

Son of...!

I have shit luck with phones :( I just went to put my laundry in the dryer and saw my keys peaking out at the bottom and immediately thought, "Oh crap, my phone's in there too." Sure 'nuff. So I am trying the rice trick that worked for Iron Needles. I don't hold out that much hope though, since the thing went thru the entire cycle instead of being quickly fished out. I haven't even had this phone a month now, dammit.

I'm thinking someone is trying to tell me something...

And on top of that we played in the pool today and I didn't even think to suncreen my legs. So now they are fried. Huh. Just like my phone.

On a funnier note, this is spoof is better than the original, lol.

Crap!

A while back at the Estes Wool Market we bought a needle felting kit. My idea was to make the flowers to give the never ending knitting bag some pizazz. I thought the kiddo and I could do it together but the kiddo decided to try it all by herself, messing the entire lot off and pissing me off royally.

I took what I thought were the remains of the kit away from her and stuck it away in the hopes of salvaging something. Well come to find out, the kiddo had dropped a needle and it never made it back to the kit. Apparently hubby had asked her several times to put the needle away, picking it up from the floor and putting it on the coffee table each time.

You know where I am going with this don't you?

Yeah. Tonight as we were putting the kiddo to bed hubby went to grab something for her and stepped on the damned thing. Luckily he had a tetanus shot fairly recently so that's good but crap! He's lucky it didn't go straight thru his foot!

Too cool!

When I was a teenager I loved Converse All-Star high top tennis shoes. "Chucks" came in so many different colors that you could always find a pair that appealed. My two best friends and I had them. Karleen had green, Janet had red and mine were bright yellow. I truly loved those shoes, lol.

I see Chucks all over the place now. Some are fun, but I missed being able to get them in every color of the rainbow (and then some!). And they certainly aren't the cheap shoes they once were. (Though they are still incredibly cheap compared to regular name-brand shoes now). A basic pair will cost you about $50.

But why go basic when you can now CUSTOMIZE your own pair of Chucks?? In just two to four weeks you could have a pair of Chuck's in whatever color you want, patterned, solid, multi color.... So the purple shoes I've wanted for years are now within my reach. And not only are they purple, they are now mostly white and black animal print, with a purple tongue and heel stripe, with lighter purple laces. The inside of the shoes is Sweet Lavendar. Woot!

My daughter created a pair of multi-pink ones, with blue heel stripe and laces, lol. And did I mention you can can your name on them?? She loves them so much she's actually willing to pay for them herself. I told her we need to go try some on in store so we know what size first and so she can find out for herself that the main drawback to Chucks is that they aren't really comfy.

Laugh out loud

Now I grew up in the 70s, with an older sister who danced professionally (get yer mind outta the gutter, lol), she taught jazz and tap for a local studio and being a dancer, she totally loved disco. The very first 8 Track I ever owned was Abba. I still love Abba, (the rest of disco on the other hand can go away forever, lol) even though I came of age in the 80s and love that music as well.

So when I saw the adverts for Mamma Mia I really wanted to see it. So when I found it at the library the other day I snatched it quickly. I didn't expect to giggle my butt off, lol. All three men were thick as a whale omelet! Hahaha. Pierce Brosnan can not sing, but it was funny as heck. Part of it was the music, but it all was too cute. About halfway through the kiddo decided to sit and watch as well. Now she wants to watch the whole movie too.

Even the hubby was in the other room singing along, utterly horrified to realize just how many words he knew to the songs ;)

I've dug out my Abba Gold CD and we're having a sing-a-long, lol. ;)

Over-rated?

A recent survey by a travel site found Paris to be the most over-rated city in Europe. And tourism has fallen drastically this year due to the economy. So now Paris is trying to win back tourists with a smile.

It's been years since we went to Paris. My overall impression of Paris then was that it was a beautiful but dirty city. People take their dogs every where but don't clean up after them. (And so far everything I've seen about the city leads me to believe that it's still this way in 2009). I found that absolutely disgusting. It's quite hard to enjoy the view when you have to constantly watch where you step! London was that way the first few times I visited, but since then people have learned to pick up after their pets and it's much nicer.

But it is truly a beautiful city. The Louvre is absolutely a splendid building from the exterior (well, except for the garish glass pyramid out by the entrance, lol) and spectacular on the inside. It's been many things through the years, once a fortress protecting the city and most notably the palace of Louis XIV. After the French Revolution the Louvre was dedicated to becoming a monument to the arts and science and the museum was born. I could have wandered there all day, between looking at the art on display and the architectural details of the building itself (Unfortunately we were with my in-laws and my f-i-l had a bad hip at the time so our trip was much shorter than I'd have preferred).

As to the French themselves, I honestly didn't get the rude vibe that so many people associate with the French. Well, except maybe at the chemists when I stopped in for cold tablets. But the restaurants and the hotel we stayed at had friendly people. One little restaurant all but dragged us in off the street they were so happy to see us, lol. We didn't do a lot of shopping, so I can't speak for most of the shops ;)

And oh my, but the bakeries are to die for! Everywhere we went there was a bakery on the corner with mouth-watering treats in the windows. The pastries we were offered for breakfast were absolutely lovely and the bread! Yum! Strangely though, I think other than the bread and cheese, none of us ate a "typical" French meal. Picky eaters all us of, so no snails for us, lol.

Would I go again? Yes, someday I would love to go with my daughter. I'll be the one on the ground holding my breath as she gets too close to the railing on the Eiffel Tower, and waves at me lol.

So much drama

Once again I am fed up with WoW. This time it's got nothing to do with the game and everything to do with the people who play. I'm in a large guild. Most of the time, that's a good thing, but there are a few members who are inconsiderate and only interested in themselves. Such was the case last week when we were scheduled to raid. It's always a pain in the ass getting 25 people together and takes forever, but most of the time the fun out-weighs the hassle.

Not so that night. There were other issues and we were late getting started. Then a few people who were signed up to go showed up 20 minutes late and still expected to go. After arguing about that and deciding who could go and who couldn't I lost all patience, burst into tears and begged my hubby to sub me out.

He had been arguing with one of the late people because he thought it was rude of them to be late and expect everyone to wait. So I left, obviously upset, and he then left to calm me down. So a bitchy post ended up on the message board about people "logging out when shit doesn't go their way." Obviously directed at hubby, since he was the one openly opposed to letting the late person go. Good-fucking-grief! I started to write a bitchy mail to the poster, someone I used to like. But what's the freakin' point?

The whole experience has soured me on raiding now. Hell, honestly it's soured me on the guild in general. There are a few people in there I like and if it wasn't for them I'd have left that night. So from now on I shall chat with the people I like and ignore everyone else. Who needs a freakin' game that stresses you out enough to bawl your head off?

Anyhoo. I am having a massive bout of insomnia tonight, so I'm going to go surf the web for a bit.

Crappy news

Just got the crappiest news. My friend, A from the previous post, got notice today that he's being let go. I think he has two months and then a month of severance. If in the next two months our other assistant manager leaves, he gets to stay. I'm holding on to a bit of hope that that happens. See, the other assistant has been in a different store running it while the manager's been sick. And from the sounds of things, he may not be ready to come back right now (which is probably why A gets to stay for 2 months instead of being let go now).

Dammit. Yesterday we were all happy about the fact that the other assistant would be coming back soon so everything would go back to normal and everyone could relax a bit. Instead we are losing two people that I genuinely like, A. and another guy who always has a smile on his face and is truly a nice person.

And of course, corporate timing sucks, since just 4 days ago A. and his wife were all excited and happy because they've just bought a house and are moving in soon. They rented all this time because they weren't sure where they would stay until A. got transferred to our location :( I hurt for them, I really do, because I remember the kick to the head it was when I was told that my previous employer was closing.

And you know what the worst thing was? They told him and then expected him to be fine with working the rest of the day. Arseholes.

Oh rats!

Remember this post? (Read more to get actual link, lol). It was a bit over a month ago when I posted about my dead phone. Well, last night the display on my new phone (a month exactly to the day I got it!) just died. I tried to answer it and I had a blank white screen and I couldn't answer it when I pushed the talk button. I can send and receive calls with it now, but no texting again.

So I called customer service, in non-English speaking country of course, and after 20 minutes of, "Can you at this time turn your phone off then back on, please?" and "At this time I am entering more information into my system." I was promised a new phone and more minutes. I can continue to use (lol) my phone until the new one comes and I don't have to return it. I can expect to receive my new phone in 5 - 10 days (!!). At that time I must call the customer service center to activate my new phone and transfer my minutes. I also plan on asking for a credit for the ringtone I purchased a month ago and will now lose :(

And a good time was had by all

For a bit there it seemed the 4th of July was going to be washed out. It rained like crazy for ages and all I could think was" Ewwww, I don't want go sit out in the rain." Of course, the kiddo hated the idea of missing the fireworks and around 8 PM the rain finally stopped. But it was still wet, lol. Then a friend from work invited us over to his house to watch the fireworks. So off we trooped, and we had a great time. We walked a bit up to the lake and watched the fireworks, then went back to his family's house and the kids all played with sparklers and Pop-its, while the neighbors shot off more fireworks.

It was a lot of fun, and the hubby got to meet A and his wife, so that was cool. Now he really knows who I am talking about when I mention A, or when we are playing WoW and A does something silly ('cause he is a silly man, lol) that makes me grumble and call him a doof ;)

Surprise!

As Neil says in my favorite The Young Ones episode, "Well Mike, it's my birthday."

Of course then Mike says, "Now you knew that already, and we don't care, so where's the surprise?"

But someone does care that it's my birthday. My LYS offers 15% off anything during my birthday week, so guess where I am going tomorrow?! My mother sent me money so I think I shall head there to spend it ;)