Good-bye Stay-cation!
All last week I was on stay-cation. "Stay-cation" is a term borrowed from the show Corner Gas and it refers to a vacation where you don't go anywhere; you stay home. I had a lovely stay-cation and now that I'm back at work I'm very sad to see it gone. I spent a lot of time on the couch, playing Sims 2 on my new Mac (the game runs like a dream!). I also made sure that I didn't waste my stay-cation and I got a lot of housework done, including cleaning the garage! I mean it, it's actually clean. We even swept the floor (for the first time in 2 years). For those of you who have never been to my house (which is pretty much all of you) my garage became not just the repository of my stuff and Nyron's stuff, but my great-grandmother's stuff when she moved into the nursing home, so it was very full of stuff. You had to be carefully when opening the car door that it didn't hit any of the miscellaneous stuff piled up next to it. Now, things have been carted off to the Salvation Army, sorted onto storage shelves or brought inside for more thorough sorting (mostly boxes of old clothes). I'm still a little shocked each time I'm go into the garage to see all the open space. :)
I've received word from my darling Secret Pal that she's sent my parcel to Lettuce Knit. What fun! That way, I get an excuse to poke around a yarn store and I can walk out with goodies without even spending any money! Sadly, I won't be able to get there until Thursday, but I now have something to look forward to Thursday after work. Pictures to follow once I've brought it home (maybe I'll video tape opening it and post it as a video blog. We shall see).
Until next we knit!
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Knit like a chef, or cook like a knitter?
A recent series of articles for Interweave's Knitting Daily newsletter has been about using your stitch dictionairy like a cookbook. It's meant to empower knitters to design, or at least personalize patterns, in their knitting. For me, however, I've been trying to teach myself how to use a cookbook like my stitch dictionairy. I have no problems designing on the fly, opening a stitch dictionary and putting together a project without using a published pattern, but for a long time I've been wishing I had that kind of confidence in my cooking. I've spent so long cooking only frozen meals, like fish and chips or chiken strips, that I'm like a knitter who has never strayed from a pattern. The idea of cooking something real, of poking my head in my fridge and making dinner out of whatever's there, is something that Nyron seems to do with ease but that I regard as some kind of magic. Until I realized the similarity between what I want to do in cooking and what I already do for knitting.
So that's what I'm working on right now, along with my actual knitting, of course. I'm reading through Cooking Basics for Dummies and trying to make it make sense, so that I can view my kitchen the same why I view my yarn closet, as a place of possibility instead of a place of intimidation. Wish me luck.
Until next we knit!
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A new member of the family
This weekend, we had a little bundle of joy arrive at our house. Yes, that's right; we got a new computer! Hurray! I've had my current computer since second year university so I'm definitely due for a new one. It's a Macbook Pro. I haven't used a Mac since grade school so it's a whole new world for me. Nyron spent all weekend uploading a software that will allow me to run Microsoft programs on the Macbook. Now why, I hear the Mac-heads crying, would you ever want to run a Microsoft program on a Mac? So I can play Sims 2, silly! My old computer is so old that it didn't run it properly, even when the game was brand new, and I ended up letting it collect dust because I couldn't stand how slow and choppy it was. So Nyron installed this program and, voila! Sims runs like it was meant to, and for the first time ever I can see what it's like to really play the game. *sigh*
But that's not the only reason I bought a new computer. Nyron and I love road trips (well, we would if our car could handle it!) and we want to start making travel videos when we take breaks from Smog Town. Mac's have great editing software for film, video and music (even if we can't afford the $800 Final Cut Pro). I didn't have a lot of time to play around with it this weekend because we spent all of our time between turkey dinners getting the computer set up the way we want it (Happy Thanksgiving, by the way!). But I plan to teach myself video editing by making a video blog entry this weekend. I'm pretty excited about it. If people like it, I may make more (maybe even enter the world of video podcasting? We'll see). So you can look forward to that this weekend.
Until next we knit!
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