Sweet 16

Or maybe not. We've had a bit of snow 'round here lately. Hubby just measured the snow on the car and there's 16 inches of snow on the roof. In the back yard there's a snow drift that is probably 4 feet deep! It started snowing Tuesday night, and snowed all day yesterday. Luckily, the main roads were mostly just wet, a little slushy in places, by the time I got off work. We shall see what they are like going into work later today.

The kiddo is happy though, because we decided to keep her home yesterday, rather than have to take a chance on crummy roads in the afternoon. She didn't get to play in it til later in the day tho. She's off school today and tomorrow too, so she will have plenty of snow time.

Windows 7 is here!

I installed Win 7 nearly two months ago, and I have to say I love it. My computer is snappier, it seems a lot more stable (*knock wood*) and it's got some cool new things without the weird and annoying things Vista had. And the good news is, if you have more than one user on your computer or if you let a guest log on, your data doesn't all disappear! Sorry, just my little dig at the holier than thou Mac users out there ;) There are a few ugly bugs on Mac's Snow Leopard, lol.

And with Microsoft offering a 3 computer version of 7 for only $149.99, it's a pretty good deal. Which is why no one can keep it in stock! Hopefully more will be coming soon, 'cause I want it for 3 more of my computers, too.

Snow!

Forget fall, we've headed straight into winter, lol. Tomorrow we're looking at a high of 34 degrees! And yet the analysts are saying we're going to have a milder than normal winter. Ski areas in Colorado are already opening.

I think they've last year's data mixed up with this year's, lol.

Update: It's snowing pretty good right now. Hubby asked if I thought we should cover my geraniums, and since we moved them right up close to the house under a covered porch I said no. But then I said, "Really they should just come in." So I went off to make room for them and when he brought them in they were literally covered in snow. Poor things, I hope they survive :(

Meanwhile I have to be at work at 8 tomorrow so I guess I'd best set my alarm a bit early just in case. It's sticking to the road out front, so I may need to leave a bit early.

Er, um, well...

Woot! It's Autumn! And wow things got hectic. We've lost our assistant manager at work, she's been given her own store now. Which is great for her, but boy it's weird at work. So our keyholder is picking up some of the slack, but there's still too much to do. So I've been made an internal keyholder now, along with one of the guys I work with. Our GM comes in, lets us in the building, hands out keys and goes home so he can mostly have a day off.

We'll be getting a replacement, but the person is coming from California, so needless to say it'll take a bit for him to get things worked out.

So anyhoo. I'll be around sporadically. I haven't even bothered much with WoW lately.

Take care y'all!

A touch of autumn

Fall is certainly in the air today. A cold front settled in over us last night so we turned on the heat before we went to bed. Just in case. And since the high today is only going to be 51, I'm glad we did. I love the cool weather, but the kiddo freezes at night so...

And this morning I went to search out my slippers (anyone seen the left one by any chance??) Instead I grabbed my lovely hand knit wool socks ;) Hmmm. Might be time to dig out the Monkey socks that have been languishing for over a year now and attempt to actually complete them, lol.

In other knitting news, I cast on for a new scarf in my lovely Brooks Farm Solo Silk. I'm going with Feather and Fan (this version).

Now I am going to go spend this rainy autumn day being a bum (waiting for FedEx to bring me my new phone. They picked the one half hour I was out on Friday to attempt to deliver, dammit). I see some WoW, reading and knitting in my future ;)

Getting into the spirit of things...

Since September 19th is once again International Talk Like a Pirate Day:

My pirate name is:

Bloody Morgan Vane

"Every pirate lives for something different. For some, it's the open sea. For others (the masochists), it's the food. For you, it's definitely the fighting. You tend to blend into the background occasionally, but that's okay, because it's much easier to sneak up on people and disembowel them that way. Arr!"

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
part of the fidius.org network.

Last year I was Pirate Val the Staggering Drunk. Umm. I like this one better, lol.

Remember the Dread Pirate Alas from last year? This year it'll be Morticia partying with the Cap'n in Booty Bay, lol.

This fall is packed with things to do if you're into WoW. The Harvest Festival is just around the corner, followed bu Brewfest, then Hallow's End and Day of the Dead. Then comes The Pilgrim's Bounty and finally Winter Veil. Lol.

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. ;)