Stop Her She's Knitting!: 7 Quick Takes (Vol 183)

Well, despite my best attempts at magical thinking, Fall has arrived. And yet another week has flown by. How does this happen. You remember your marching orders don’t you? When you are done rolling around in the blather here you need to click on the picture above to be whisked, at the speed of the laser scalpel of Joan Rivers’ plastic surgeon, over to Conversion Diary to see what everyone else is up to.

Fear not for Blather is here!

1.
I have a new ~~toy~~ tool of productivity. Joy of Joys.

I have…..

An iphone.

I know, I know. Whoopdee do. Well PFFFFFT! to you. My poor old cell phone was slowly dying. It would sometimes decide not to tell me that I had a voice mail. And sometimes a button wouldn’t work correctly. And sometimes it would just turn itself off for no apparent reason and take a vacation to Tahiti.

And sending a txt msg was a real pain in my patootee.

So last Saturday HHBL and I zipped over to the Verizon store, walking in as soon as they had unlocked the door, and we both got new phones. Of course, even though we knew what we wanted and we knew how we were going to structure our plan it STILL took over an HOUR to get it done. AND I have to call the store tomorrow and have them change the price that we were billed for the phones because the price dropped today….$100/phone. But it was done.

I am no novice to Apple products to be sure. I am not sure what I would do without my ipad. But the iphone is just too much fun. And with the iOS 6 update yesterday……I used the Maps feature for the first time when going to a job and it will speak the directions to me. I almost want to just drive somewhere just for the heck of it.

I love my iphone.

2.
Soon, very soon we will be kicking cable to the curb. Giving Time Warner their walking papers and a swift boot out the door. In fact I believe that next week is the big break up. We have had it.

We can get internet and phone from Windstream for the cost of what we were paying just for home phone a few years ago. And we can tailor what we watch on TV by having Netflix streaming and Hulu and a host of other stuff. I can hardly wait.

I have a bad TV habit. I will turn the TV on and then just channel surf for ever. This should help to fix that.

We have had Netflix “old style” (just DVD) for quite a while but hadn’t set ourselves up for streaming. That was the other thing that we, or should I say HHBL, did last Saturday. Bought one of those Roku devices and signed up for Netflix streaming. For the love of all that is HOLY that is fabulous. I /we can watch on the TV or ipad or computer. And we can both be watching something different at the same time. And then there is Hulu +. And of course if I have to watch something like The Walking Dead I can always watch it over the internet later on.

Time Warner cable we are sick of you and your over priced nothingness. Of paying for channels we never watch just so that we can get the few channels that we DO watch.

3.
I am feeling the annual urge to knit a new winter hat. And I really have too many things already on the needles to contemplate adding something else.

But you see…..

When, for all those many years, my hair was short. Like this….

I never wore hats. Never, Never, Never. I looked horrible in hats with short hair. Some people, like Cartoon Girl for instance, can pull that look off. I could not. But now that I have the wild and crazy long hair hats and I have become BFFs again.

Now if I could find just the right pattern……..

4.
For all of Max the Magnificent’s life he has spent the night sleeping in his “house”. That was how we trained him when he was a puppy. The first few years we would lock him in his crate at night and close the laundry room door. After a while we noticed that he just put himself to bed so we left the door to the laundry room open. He would still be in his house when I came downstairs in the morning. No problemo.

But recently…..well…..recently he has decided that he no longer wants to sleep in his house at night. He wants to roam the first floor and sleep in all his favorite places. But there is a problem with that because as he roams the house he makes noise.

He jingles his collar.

He sneezes.

He scratches thereby making even more noise with his collar.

He sleeps on the stair landing and he is black in color and when it is O dark thirty and I am going down the stairs first thing in the morning I nearly kill myself by almost tripping over him.

He licks certain areas of his body with fervent and lengthy abandon.

And then we cannot sleep.

And so we are back to making him go into the laundry room at night and closing the door. He just looks at me as if I have taken away his only toy and made him eat liver.

5.
Circling back to #3. The other signs of Fall approaching.

My hands and feet are suddenly always a bit on the chilly side. When that phenomenon starts to be evident I know it is time to break out the wool socks so that my tootsies stay warm. Nothing says, “I appreciate myself!” than wearing hand knit socks.

But the problem is not just the cold feet, it is also the cold hands. When the temp is consistently below 50F my fingers will just be cold, especially when I am working at my computer for some reason. That may be because it is Fall and then Winter. But my computer desk sits right next to a bank of windows and when it is really cold outside that isn’t the warmest place to sit and do my work. And of course I have a job that requires hours sitting in front of the computer editing photos.

However, I can lessen and sometimes even eliminate the cold fingers problem by wearing a pair of fingerless gloves. But I also need a new pair of these for the season.

Thank goodness they are relatively quick to knit. I am halfway through a pair at the moment. And therein lies a problem. I have actually knit the first mit…..and I don’t like it. I had some doubts about it as I was knitting it. I tried to talk myself into liking it.

But hand knit garments are like shoes and clothing that you buy. If you love it in the store and it really works for you there you will love it when you get home and you will wear it. If you have to talk yourself into it…..then you will never wear it. And I have a feeling that it is going to be the same way for these fingerless gloves.

Sigh.

So I will send them to the Frog Pond and start over.

6.
I bought a new tripod this week. Nothing fancy, just serviceable. It isn’t like I don’t have a tripod because I do. In fact I have two. But my bigger tripod has an issue or two. The main issue being that it doesn’t extend up high enough.

Now you wouldn’t think that would be a problem but it is with some of the work that I do, specifically interior shots.

I shoot natural light, no extra lighting set up and no flash emanating from either my camera flash or an external flash. It makes life so much easier. And it can be done, even with less that spectacular lighting situations. But if the light is low you will get camera shake showing up in your pictures. And that is not good when you need to have clear and rock solid photos. So I bought a tripod that extends up to 58 inches which just happens to be right at the level of my eyes, right where I would be holding my camera.