Category Archives: General Ramblings

World’s Biggest Sook

So my weekend plans included a 30th birthday party, and a trip to Mum’s to see my sister for her birthday. And fitting some stitching around those things, with any luck to finish my seasonal exchange piece. We ended up going shopping Friday night and Saturday morning, so no stitching there. Saturday morning, I also noticed a tickle in my throat. By Saturday afternoon, it had morphed into a full blown flu-ey, cold-y thing. I rested a while, dosed up on paracetamol, and then we went to the 30th birthday party. Not such a good idea, in hindsight. Sunday I spent most of the day in bed, feverish, drifting in and out of sleep, and just being generally miserable. I don’t deal well with being sick – before Finn was born, I rarely caught a cold. I don’t believe I ever had a day off work for anything other than the occasional migraine. Now, we collectively seem to catch everything going :ouch: Anyway, happily, this lurgy seems to be going as quickly as it arrived. I’m still a bit of a misery guts, and have done little more than sit on the couch doing puzzles with Finn. He seems to have a milder dose of the same, so he’s not demanding we go to the playground, thankfully, but he’s pretty happy as long as I wipe his nose every few minutes!

I did also finally take some time this morning to learn how to do the Colonial knot. The piece I’m doing for the seasonal exchange calls for quite a few French knots, and while they don’t generally bother me, getting a bunch of them to be uniform size is not my forte. I’ve heard the Colonial knot is easier to do, and easier to reproduce. And now I can do it. It wasn’t as easy to pick up as I thought it would be though. Probably a left-handed v right-handed thing. If I’d had real problems, I could have mirror imaged the diagrams, but I did eventually get it. Now, on to finish the piece, and get it made into something before Friday (eek)!

Stash of a Different Variety

Aaaah… feeling better today. I went into the city, ostensibly to study at uni, but I got up to some retail therapy as well (forget now everything I said about saving money the other day ๐Ÿ˜† ). Prompted by my answer to the gift certificate question on The Wagon, and encouraged by OtherHalf, I went to Lush. I bought:

  • Dreamtime ~ for tomorrow night ๐Ÿ™‚
  • Double Bubble ~ for sometime when I feel like being… pink and glittery!
  • Black Magic ~ clary sage, geranium, ylang ylang… yum! I think I could become addicted to their massage bars yes-indeedy
  • Little Monkey ~ for Finn. He had some in his bath tonight. It turns the water a disconcerting shade of yellow ๐Ÿ˜ฏ but it smells great

plus I was given a sample of:

  • Demon in the Dark ~ which smells glorious (big mint fan here), and I think I’ll shower with it pre-exam tomorrow, to give me the edge ๐Ÿ˜†

But wait, there’s more. I recently (like in the last 24 hours) discovered that there’s a new Borders open in the CBD… just across the road from uni. Well, we all know where I’ll be spending my ‘study time’ now, don’t we! I popped in there – it’s a bit smaller than the other two Melbourne stores, but still a great sized book shop. I picked up

Hmmm… seems Finn scored more today than I did! Never mind. I had fun. Notice how all those books are about Wild, Energetic, Loud young children? I wonder if there’s something in that? :giggle:

Progress Bars

I’ve seen a few stitchers’ blogs with nifty little ‘progress bars’ on, for showing how far along each WIP is. I’m considering setting them up on my site too, once I have a page setup for all my WIPs. I know many are created using CSS or Flash, but even being the CSS fan I am, it seems like just a bit too much code and hassle for a little percentage bar. Besides, I wanted smaller, funkier ones! So tonight I created some little gifs for them, lookie:










I stuck to multiples of 5% as I didn’t want to make 100 of these buggers. Besides – how exactly can you differentiate between 23% done and 24% done?!

You are more than welcome to pinch these if you like them, throw a link my way if you like, but it’s not necessary.

Edit: You can find some more colour sets here. If you have a request for a custom colour, email me at the address shown on that page.

Not in the News

I can’t comment over at Susan’s blog, not having a Blogger account. But I have to admit, I’m beginning to wonder the same thing. Why has the Ezboard hack not made news? I don’t know if I’d go so far as to suspect misrepresentation by Ezboard, but I do think it’s… odd. I’ve been plugging variations of ‘ezboard hack’ into Google News each day, and turning up very little. All I’ve found so far are two articles on Halifaxlive.com. And a smattering of postings in various newsgroups – mostly owners of BBs mentioning their own boards, I’ve found no real discussion. Or maybe I just don’t know where to look?

Anyway, I’m looking at it as somewhat of a blessing in disguise. With an exam coming up on Saturday, I can certainly do with a bit less distraction!