Catch-up

Wow, I knew this was out of date, but I didn't think it was quite that out of date. In early November, I had to have Munchie (seen in the two pictures below) put to sleep. She had a tumor growing around the base of her tongue and her windpipe, and at ten, the doctor didn't think her chances were very good of coming through a surgery.

I still miss my little brat cat. I did go out and adopt another little black kitty, but unfortunately she's scared to death of our other cat (who we really thought would love a little kitten to mother, as she's always grooming us), so they live in separate rooms. :
Currently stitching on Dragon Dreams' "Runekeeper Saga" I'm doing one block a month, and really need to get January's block posted. Hopefully I can manage that this week. *crosses fingers*

Now, this is much more my style! 

Munchie looks like she's thinking "Can you believe what she did to me? Ugh!" 

Futurecast is all done, yay! That makes three happy dances for the year. Slow, but it's progress. And he's my (counts on fingers) 4th ? finished TW. 

Blogger pictures made easy

Back when Google acquired Picasa, I downloaded it, and fell in love. If I had a Mac, I'd be using iPhoto. But the Mac is Sam's (though a second one is coming, it's still going to be his ;)).

Before Picasa, my normal photo routine was to use Windows' Camera Wizard interface to pull pictures off my digital camera. Then I'd use Paint Shop Pro to resize, crop, and ready files to be posted online.

Picasa streamlined those steps for me. I plug in my camera, let it import pictures, and it lets me view them, crop, resize, and export to a folder on my computer to upload to my webspace.

I kept seeing references on Picasa's page and documentation to "Hello" but couldn't find a link to it on their site. So today I was looking through the e-mail Picasa sent me recently, and there it was. A link to Hello. Yeah, look at the URL, it should have been obvious. <smacks forehead>

So I look at the page and am excited to see that hey, it can take your pictures from Picasa, and upload them (one at a time) as posts to your Blogger blog. Wow! Now if that's not convenient, I don't know what is!!! So, the two posts below this one were done by Hello.

Inside Hello, you select the BloggerBot as your active friend (it's automatically in your friends list when you install the program), then click the "Send pictures" button and it will open Picasa (assuming you have it) or Explorer. You drag pictures into the tray at the bottom of the Picasa window (I'm not sure how it works with Explorer, exactly, but Picasa is free), and there is a button to click to "Send to Hello". Go back to the Hello window, pick a picture, type a caption in the window at the bottom right, and click the "Publish to Blogger" button, and voila! I like it! And it makes for easy posting of progress pics.

My new ottoman for my stitching chair arrived Saturday. 

And it opens up for storage! Can fit two big project boxes in easily, plus a lot more miscellaneous stuff. Hurray!! 

Happy Dance 2004, volume two

And no, it's not Futurecast. He's getting close, though! :) Instead, I finally finished Blackwork Dragon, from Dragon Dreams. Yay! :)

*sigh*

From Slashdot:

"Netflix may also be feeling some economic pressure. It now forces all cancellations occur by phone, making it more difficult to cancel because of a long hold time."

This is one of those things that bugs me to no end. If you sign up for a service online, you should always, always be able to cancel it by the same method. The Sims Online did this to me, and of course talked me into a 'free month' which of course it took me longer than a month to get back to again and cancel. I really hate it! I guess it's a good thing that I have no intentions of cancelling NetFlix for a while.

Which reminds me,... I forgot to give DH the mail to go out this morning, so I need to get that run down. Finished Whale Rider last night, and almost finished Blackwork Dragon. Yay!

I'm back

I sort of put aside my stitching after I got back from my Seattle trip. Had company come, and then I got distracted with other things, like trying to put the apartment back in order, and playing more EverQuest, and reading, Wicked, by Gregory Maguire.

But I got to go to Needle in a Haystack last Sunday and pick up a couple things they were holding for me, as well as a lot of new stash, and I brought Blackwork Dragon and Futurecast along with me on our little trip down to So. Cal, to work on in the car, and while other people sleep. (Geeze, party people... wake up at ten or eleven and stay up till two or three... not me! I'm usually awake by 6:30 or so, and I can't make it much past Midnight.)

So I got a good chunk of blackwork done on the trip down, and BD is getting closer to completed. Yesterday morning, since the fiber for BD was still down in the car, I worked on FC instead, and got a lot of unfinished little bits done. Now all I have left are the darker of the secondary colors and the lighter of the accent colors, some more metallics on the knees, elbows, chin, tail and crest, the crystal ball, and then it's all backstitch and beading. Yay!!

The five way birthday party (mine included) was still going strong when Sam brought me back to the friend's whom we were staying with so I could crash, around midnight last night. I sort of woke up when they got in after the party had ended, but there were no clocks in sight to give me any idea of when that was. It's just turned 8 am, so I suspect they'll be sleeping another couple hours, at least. Time to stitch. The question is, on whom? I don't think I can finish either in 2 hours... but I think I've made up my mind. If I work some on BD now, I may just be able to finish him on the drive home tomorrow. Wish me luck!

I'm still alive

Despite missing the last Bay Area GTG, I am still alive. Fact is, I was over in Palo Alto, meeting this guy:



He happens to be Alton Brown of Food Network's Good Eats show. One of Sam's co-workers turned us on to GE about 9 months ago, and we were quickly hooked. Quirky humor, interesting food science info, and some darned good recipes.

Alton was signing his books (we have two) and doing a couple cooking demonstrations for the Simon Malls "Super Chefs Live" promotion they had going on. And being the dedicated fans that we are, we had to go, since it was all of 20 minutes from us.

We stood in line through the first demo, got him to sign our books and pose for the picture (thanks to our friend Suzy who took pictures for us), then stayed for a second cooking demo, where I took lots of pics and a few short movie clips with my new camera. I had a lot of fun, and I think we even turned Suzy on to the show, especially since we cooked up a couple of the recipes (Pan fried chicken, and puffy chocolate chip cookies) while she was here.

After Vegas, I ended up going to Seattle the next Sunday and staying 4 days with my mom, got home Thursday, and Friday we had company. Now I actually have a few days to relax and unwind before our next trip (a week from this Friday), where we're driving down to L.A. for a big birthday happening (four of us within about 4 days of each other), and then, maybe, my life will settle down. But heck, it's been fun. :)