7 Quick Takes (Vol 248)

Winter, Winter go away. Come again, like never.

You know what to do. When you are done ingesting your weekly dose of rejuvenating blather, you need to click on the picture above to be whisked, at the speed of the melting Sochi snow, over to Conversion Diary.

A triple toe loop of blather just for you.

1.
For all who have inquired…..

My back is doing MUCH better. Large doses of ibuprophen and application of heated cornbag have made life much better.

And the garage door was fixed by Monday afternoon. I was right, it was a gear.

Hopefully now the motor, and consequently the garage door, will last for another 17 years. It certainly sounds better.

2.
The Rainbow Wrap of Awesomeness……….

Was completed yesterday. That might have been why I haven’t blogged in a few days. I was totally might have been obsessed with finishing it.

Oh. My. Gosh I love her. LoveLoveLoveLove. She is only 14 inches wide but she is…….

9.25 feet long.

That is PLENTY long enough for wrapping around my ample body several time.

All told I knit 166 rows of linen stitch using 6 different skeins of yarn. Each row was 600 stitches long. That means that in just over three weeks time I knit….

99,600 stitches. On one project.

And I am going to be honest and say that I am already thinking about the next time I knit this pattern. There will be a next time I can assure you. It will look nothing like this one but I am already thinking and planning.

Oh, just to answer a question that someone asked me when they saw the photo up on Facebook. Will I make one for sale?

No.

In order to make it worth my while to do that (it took 65+ hours to complete) I would have to charge the purchaser an egregiously large sum of money just to cover minimum wage costs for time. I sincerely doubt anyone is willing to pay that.

But if you are…..then let me know.

3.
I cannot believe that I am going to say this but….

I am getting tired of the Olympics.

Maybe it is just because I am getting tired of watching TV. And perhaps it is because some of the competitions that I have watched (Men’s Figure Skating) have been totally uninspiring to me. And I definitely think there was something hinky going on with the Women’s Figure Skating final. Yuna Kim should have won.

I am ready to get back to my generally Netflix only TV schedule.

4.
Tomorrow is brew day.

I know I said that last week. But after I published that post I realized that I was out of the stuff that I wanted to use to sterilize my brewing kettle. It is this “non-rinse” stuff that makes life a whole lot easier. I ordered some on line from Northern Brewer (thanks Jon for the heads up on this company), the box arrived yesterday, and tomorrow is the brew day.

Who wouldn’t like to order supplies from a place that puts these kinds of stickers on the inside of the box.

5.
I have always been fascinated by macro photography. So cool.

But I do not have a macro lens. It is fairly specialized and fairly expensive and I just haven’t worked it into the budget…..yet.

BUT, you can do a gonzo macro photo shoot by detaching your lens from your camera body, turning the lens around and manually holding it to the camera body. You don’t have any control over much else like focusing but you can move yourself until you get something in focus.

The operation was a bit tricky because I was concentrating on holding my 50mm lens (my favorite lens) to my camera body with one hand and trying to steady my camera and myself at the same time. Like chewing gum, walking AND talking on your cell phone all at the same time, while there is a high wind warning.

OR, you can order a reversing ring for your lens so that at least you can have the lens secured to your camera body.

Which is what I just did.

Here is the Light Stalking article on how to do some macro photography without a macro lens.

6.
I might have mentioned before that I have an Audible account. I love audiobooks. And yes, I know that I can get lots of audiobooks at the library. No need to tell me that. I use the library audiobook system too. But there are MANY books that I want to listen to that the library doesn’t have available. So, Audible.

I love Audible.

I love it for the mind blowing number of books that are available.

AND I love it for their customer service.

Many years ago I had another Audible account. I didn’t have it for long, there was only one book in it evidently, but I knew it was there. But I didn’t remember what email the account was linked to and I couldn’t download it to iTunes or to my current Audible account.

What to do, what to do. It was a book that I really wanted to listen to and I didn’t want to re-buy it.

This morning I chatted online with an extremely nice rep named Julie who, after looking at the situation, added a credit to my account so that I could just re-buy Master and Commander but not have to actually spend any money again on it.

Now I can start listening to it this afternoon…after I finish The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich….which was 57+ hours long.

I love Audible.

7.
And here are just a few of the seemingly endless Instagram photos that I seem to produce on a weekly basis.

I am obsessed with Instagram.