Still here

bags
I may be about ready to emerge from my dark place. Maybe just stick my head out and sniff around like a prairie dog or something.

So, anyhow-- here's some of the stuff that's gone on during my moment of silence.

1. Retail therapy. When miserable, shop. Sounds like a good adage, eh? I now own this bag and this digital camera. While they may not make me happy, I have a cool bag and a 12MP camera which is easy to use and takes some sweet pictures. As soon as I get the software loaded on the 'puter, I'll share. I've also bought fiber, yarn, and sheep earrings. And books. And maybe some pants. But the books and pants don't count. Books never count...kind of like sock yarn...and the pants, well, I'm in denial about the weight I've put on, but my jeans weren't working so well for me. So it was necessity and not therapy. I would much rather not have had to buy new pants.

2. Knitting. I've been working more or less diligently on the Beloved's Cobblestone pullover. I'm almost done with the second arm. But then I got distracted. I had to go to a Christian Ed workshop a couple of weeks ago and thought that bringing an entire sweater might be poor taste. Socks just seem more polite in their compactness. At the end of day 1 I was ready to start the toe on the Dublin Bay sock. And it was abundantly clear that I was not going to have enough yarn to finish it. So I started the Child's French Sock from Knitting Vintage Socks. So far, so good. The pattern is quick to pick up and I'm really happy with how it's coming along.

3. Spinning. Yeah. You read me right. I picked up my spindle again. My sister is in the process of theoretically moving her crap out of my house since she now has a job and an assignment to scenic Fort Hood, Texas. In this process, I don't have any suitable place to put my wheel (whine, bitch, moan), but I can use my spindle anywhere. I had forgotten how much fun it is. I bought some fiber at WEBS two weekends ago and am now torn--should I spin it on my wheel or my spindle? Oh, the decisions!

4. Watching TV. I don't watch real TV. Mostly Netflix on-demand (The Beloved and I have gone through a couple of seasons of Sliders and Bullsh!t) or TV series The Beloved has picked up on DVD. We just finished Season 1 of Supernatural. Jensen Ackles has started to grow on me. I might have to make the husbeast pick up Season 2. We picked up The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones vol. 3 this weekend and are working our way through that.

5. Playing Rock Band. Once you start, you start classifying tunes on the radio as Rock Band material. Sad, but true.

6. Grilling. The Beloved and I bought a gas grill a couple of weeks ago (he paid, so it doesn't count as retail therapy). I'm really into grilled pineapple. It's about the best. Thing. Ever. Seriously.

And that's about it. It's almost warm enough to start taking the moped out, and that makes me happy. And next week I'm taking off from work and driving to Texas with my mother. I may be in jail or a psych ward afterwards, so if you don't hear anything... Actually, it shouldn't be that bad. Particularly since my sister is flying out and not driving down with us. We're taking her car and then flying back home. High point of the trip? We're going to Graceland. I can hardly wait. Seriously.

One last bit before I check out and play with fire--I mean, put together a fine repast for my darling husband... If The Crafty Preppy and The Quintessential Procrastinator would be good enough to e-mail me re: Pay it Forward, I'd be grateful. I've procrastinated long enough and am ready to start making stuff again.

In which Saisquoi decides maturity is highly overrated

baby things
I've spent my Sunday doing very mature, adult things. I went to church this morning for Palm Sunday. I finally got the guest list for Easter dinner--we'll be having 17 or 18 guests for dinner. So The Beloved and I started to clean in earnest. Hopefully the house won't be appalling next week--I have high hopes, particularly if Resident Sibling pulls her weight. That, of course, is not a certainty, but I choose not to worry...yet.

So we cleaned. And I did laundry. Lots of laundry. And we cleaned some more. Wow. What a way to spend a Sunday.

Saturday was WAY preferable. My camera arrived, so here are some glimpses of The Beloved and I out on the town.

Here we are at The Home Depot. Our toilet seat broke. Naturally, the toilet in our house is gray. Behold the wall of toilet seats:


None are gray. We found we could special order a gray one if we really wanted, but that just seemed...well...silly. Particularly since we really didn't want to wait for a toilet seat to arrive. After much deliberation, we decided on an oak one. Nothing was going to match; oak seemed the most reasonable choice.

When we finished running errands, we decided to take advantage of the absolutely glorious day.

We went to the beach. As you can tell, we were the coolest kids there. From whence comes the burning desire to fly a kite? Who knows. But I had it. And The Beloved, being wonderful, agreed to humor me. In spite of the fact that neither of us have flown a kite in years, we didn't do half-bad if I do say so myself. It took off with ease and sailed like nobody's business.

Man, it was great. If you haven't flown a kite recently, I highly recommend it. You should be able to find one at a high-quality toy store, and while some are expensive, ours was under $20. Hours of fun.

Check out The Beloved in action:

He claims it was "OK," but I think he actually had fun. In fact, I think he may come out and do it again!

We had so much fun outside, that knitting "suffered." I'm plugging along with the baby cardi and it will be done eventually. Probably next week, particularly since I'm taking some time off. I'm also working on a "mystery project." My mother's birthday is coming up and so I'm trying to figure something out for that--something tells me the baby cardi isn't for her.

Tomorrow, I'll play with the camera some more, show you the progress on the baby cardi and give you a little yarn porn--the yarn for my cardigan arrived yesterday, and I'm considering just keeping it as is and carrying skeins around to pat during the day. The yarn is soooooo soft. But now I'm getting sleepy and have to get one more load of laundry in before calling it a day. I gotta tell you--the kite-flying was way more fun than the housework.

Moss Stitch Baby Blanket and Other Adventures in Yarn

blankets

See the nice, even, orderly balls of yarn? This is the current state of the moss stitch baby blanket. I decided to just pull the darned thing out and start over. I was knitting with two strands of yarn held together throughout and if I realized what an absolute pain in the ass it was going to be to rewind the yarn, I may have seen the wretched thing through. Frogging took no time at all. Untangling the yarn--that took me through a viewing of The Usual Suspects, a documentary on the History Channel, and two episodes of Law and Order: Criminal Intent on Bravo. Can you see a neck behind the yarn? Yeah--that's Gaius Octavian Caesar. Fortunately I was done tangling in time to watch this week's installation of Rome on HBO. Antony and Cleopatra met at the end of tonight's episode. The anticipation almost makes up for the yarn debacle. Almost. The bad news is there are only two episodes left--which is a shame, because this has been an excellent series.

This has actually been a weekend steeped in the ancient world. Well, sort of. Yesterday, The Beloved and I went and saw 300. It was excellent eye candy. Very stylized--if you didn't know it was based on a graphic novel going in, you could tell based solely on the cinematography. You could almost see the movement from frame to frame, the blood spatter hung in the air. It was unbelievable. The writing, however, brought us right back to Planet Earth. Holy cow. It was like a montage of every testosterone war flick ever. If you've read the review in The New York Times, they hit the nail square on the head. The Beloved was entranced. Must be a boy thing.

But enough of my weekend entertainment. Did you notice? A picture of yarn? My camera phone is finally sending pictures and so I can post them. The quality is a little lousy, but it works. For now. Until I can motivate enough to acquire a real camera. But that takes a lot of energy, and as you can see, I've got quite a bit of knitting to do...

My Karma ran over my Dogma

blankets
Or something like that. So, yesterday topped off my already interesting week--which is scary because it was only Wednesday.

To recap:

On Monday, I called Virgin Mobile about my phone and went through menu/holding hell whilst trying to discover why my phone refuses to transfer pictures. After following the directions given to me by the oh-so-not-helpful guy in the returns department, my phone still will not do what I want it to. I have since e-mailed the returns department to discover that, though you can send them e-mail, they do not handle returns in that fashion. Oh, and if I didn't buy my phone through them directly (I didn't), I can't return it through them. Great. Which means I now get to transfer my frustration to Best Buy. Naturally, they no longer carry the phone in question. This should be fun.

Monday night I returned home to find a sick cat. The Beloved and I went to the vet where we dropped a pretty penny on the visit, burn cream, and amoxicillin. Each morning and evening, the two of us give Polly her treatment. This involves The Beloved putting her into a sleeper hold while I clean the affected area (yuck), apply burn cream, and then move to the other end of the cat in order to force a dose of liquid amoxicillin down her throat. It's the same stuff kids take for ear infections and the like--pink, bubblegum-scented, sticky goodness--and the cat is as fond of it as most kids are. Perhaps someone should look at creating special cat flavors. I'm sure she'd like it more if it smelled like duck liver or chicken.

Since my experience is that this sort of garbage manifests in threes, I assumed that my third misery-causing experience is the continued absence of a reimbursement check for which I've waited two weeks (turnaround time for these reimbursements has generally been under five days). I'd gotten down to the "dangerously low" level of funds in my checking account where the bank sends me balance notifications every 12 hours or so, possibly in hopes that I will rectify the situation. Unfortunately, as I found out yesterday, absence of funds--while distressing--does not qualify as catastrophic enough to knock one's karmic balance out of decline.

The Beloved and I have our phone service through Vonage. One of the great perks of this is that I get an e-mail every time someone leaves us a voicemail message. Yesterday I find a 3 minute message from "Anonymous." Hmmm--unusual. "Anonymous" generally signifies someone trying to sell us something we don't want. They never leave messages that long. So I listen to the message at work. This turned out to be a gigantic mistake, as the message is from my Library School Adviser.

The gist of the message is: They have lost paperwork I sent in at the start of fall semester. My program of study form does not match my transcript. Because these two pieces of paper don't match, I haven't actually graduated. I may have to pay a continuing registration fee for this semester. Oh, and what was your internship about again, because I can't find any of that information either.

This sends me into a panic on, oh, any of a number of levels--from the fact that I'm all done giving the Library School money, to the horrifying realization that if the places I've applied to work call to confirm my completion of the program in December 2006, I have no idea what the registrar's office will tell them. This is not good. Because I am sane and rational and together, I shut my office door before bursting into tears and e-mailing something absolutely incoherent and rife with swearwords to The Beloved. Because The Beloved is an amazing man who can occasionally reply with just the right thing, he tells me that this is not my fault and we will not have to pay for it, because if the Library School screws me over with either another bill or by creating problems for a potential employer, well, that's why God created lawyers. (The Beloved used to be an attorney, so I have confidence in his assessment of what is and is not a potentially litigious situation.)

The hyperventilating ends long enough for me to e-mail Adviser (complete with concerns), fill out required form (again), get to second job, and fax the document. Adviser admits that this is their fault and not mine, that my records will state a graduation date of December 2006 since I did complete all the requirements, and that I shouldn't be charged any extra fees. Adviser also says that if potential employers have any questions, I should have them contact him. Theoretically, crisis has been averted, but man-oh-man--I just want to be done with Library School!

Needless to say, I finished off the ballband dishcloth last night. It's stunning. Well, for a dishcloth. I didn't even try to kill anyone with my knitting needles. Impressive, eh? Tonight I start the March dishcloth KAL and this weekend I'm going to attempt to make some progress on my unfinished projects. Last weekend, I actually wove in all of the ends on the Blue Lagoon Baby Blanket, which means I have no excuse for not picking it up and working on it while watching TV. Except for the watermelon hat I really want to make for a friend's baby....

Virgin Mobile

camera
Generally speaking, I don't like the telephone. If I'm going to interact with someone, I prefer to do it face-to-face or in writing. I don't know why, but I've always been this way.

E-mail is a godsend. I can communicate quickly and effectively, and have a record of the conversation or information conveyed so if anyone needs to refer to what I said last week about printer cartridges at the library, it's right there. Perfect. Beautiful. Not so with phone conversations, which take place and are forgotten.

Anyway. Last week, I mentioned problems with my phone--a Kyocera Slider Sonic powered by my good friends at Virgin Mobile. Theoretically, this phone is great. Not only can I program The Beloved's number at work so that I can call and ask him to pick up orange juice on his way home, but I can also take pictures with this crazy thing. And listen to MP3s on it. This is way more than I need, but, hey, a girl has got to have her toys, right? And, while I wait for my paycheck to come in so that I can justify even looking at digital cameras, I figured I could experiment with the photo and video capabilities I paid for when I bought the toy. Er. Phone.

So I took pictures. Of the cats. Of The Beloved. Of my knitting projects. Of myself. And there they sit. On my phone. Because I can't upload the foolish pictures to Virgin Mobile's "My Pix" wonderland, or e-mail them to myself, or transfer them using a USB cable or the flash card. Now, I'm perfectly willing to admit that some things that are intuitive to everyone else in the free world seem to be to be written in Coptic or some other foreign and obscure language. So I gave the phone to The Beloved. He's a software engineer. He couldn't make the foolish thing work either. We decided there was one thing left to do before calling the help line--RTFM. So I did. It was painful. And not helpful at all.

Last week I think I glossed over my visit to Virgin Mobile's website and its not-entirely-helpful help page which resulted in my e-mailing customer service with a query (It's broken. Fix it. Please.) and their response (Bummer. Call us.). So this morning I had to pick up the phone--the land line, naturally, in case I had to try anything with the phone in question. My experience largely confirmed my avoidance of the infernal piece of communication equipment.

As with many customer service lines, this was fraught with menus. My menu guide was "Simone." She sounded young and hip, which fits VM's image wonderfully, but was not really what I wanted this morning before my second cup of coffee. What I wanted was someone knowledgeable who could maybe help me. After 4 minutes and 23 seconds on hold, I got Myron--who almost fit the bill.

Myron sounded like he was overwhelmed by screens--which may be endemic in his job as mobile phone troubleshooter, but almost sounded as though it was caused by a switchover to Windows Vista. Poor guy. The Beloved has dealt with that at home and it hasn't been any fun at all. But back to Myron. He walked me through all sorts of photo-sending troubleshooting tips--all of which I had already tried. He put me on hold (6 minutes and 17 seconds) while he asked his boss for what I can only assume was the "secret knowledge" not yet passed on in the help files. Myron's boss said it sounded like a software glitch and that since my phone is less than a year old and still under warranty, the best thing to do would be to exchange it for one that works. Well, OK. I'm not thrilled with that answer, but it works. The end result is that I will have a phone with all the capabilities for which I shelled out the big bucks back in July.

So they transferred me to Returns. But Returns was busy. So I hung out on hold with Simone for 10 minutes and 48 seconds. Not only was Simone not helpful--she was downright irritating. Every 45 seconds or so, she would interrupt the music (which really wasn't to my liking, but it was better than listening to her recorded voice) to let me know that someone was still on the other line, but that I should hold on 'cause someone would be here soon. I really wanted to hang up--I don't like waiting on hold. But, I wanted to follow Myron's instructions in order to cross this problem off of my to do list. He told me to wait and talk to someone in Returns and so that was what I was going to do.

Someone finally picked up. I don't think he gave me his name--or if he did, he mumbled it. I'm just going to call him Nimrod. Anyway. Nimrod asked for my name, phone number and secret key. He then decided to do his own round of troubleshooting. He was not impressed that I had done all of these things a) on my own and b) with Myron. In fact, the tone of his voice suggested that he thought I was not only a dumb girl, but an exceptionally dumb girl. Whatever. I ran through everything again. Still cannot upload pictures. It's like they're stuck in the Phantom Zone or something. Nimrod then asked me to reprogram my phone and then just leave it alone for four hours while it resets. He must have told me four times not to touch it while it's recalibrating. Just leave it alone. It's sitting on the corner of my desk. I hope looking at it occasionally is OK.

He grudgingly allowed that I could call back if it still didn't work (I didn't have the heart to tell him that resetting the phone was one of the first things I tried before calling Myron. Why burst his little bubble like that?). But that I should try the help page first. I hung up before Simone could come back to add any more enjoyment to my phone experience.

This made for a really long morning. And a rather unhappy customer (me)--particularly if in four hours I find that my phone still doesn't work and I've got to call them again in order to maybe have someone in the Returns department listen to me. I'm thinking, if wax tablets and styli worked for Julius Caesar, maybe they can work for me, too.

Like us on Facebook

Flickr Images