Today’s LONG post is a veritable smörgåsbord of content – a rant, a rave, a review, and even some yarn pr0n, there’s something for everyone (well, mostly anyway)

Starting with the rant, we saw the DaVinci Code last night – PACKED theater, which made me triple glad we prepurchased and printed our tickets earlier this week. As we were walking into the theater, we saw a sign warning all patrons that they would be showing a preview of the World Trade Center movie with Nicolas Cage and that it contained graphic images and may be considered disturbing. As someone who lost a close friend, and has several friends who lost immediate family members, not to mention a New Yorker, I was really torn. I accept that fact that movies are made about disturbing events. I accept the fact that even a tragedy as extensive as 9/11 is fair game for writers and movie makers etc. What I have issue with is not allowing people to chose whether or not they want to be exposed to it. I went to the movies last night to relax, to enjoy the movie version of a book I loved, not to have that awful day blared in my face at full volumn on the big screen. Yes, I could have got up and walked out during the trailer but let me remind you again, sold out movie, packed theater. I just found myself angry at the theater for exposing me to something so raw when I was there for entertainment. I’m not arguing their right to make or show the movie (which is a whole other debate entirely and one way to close to home. It’s not something I’m going to get into here.) I just really resent that I had to struggle against an emotional tidal wave thru the entire movie I had been so excited to go see.

The review? The DaVinci Code itself was entertaining although it was nowhere near as good as the book in my opinion. I saw it with my honey and our friend, and neither of them had read the book. They both enjoyed it, although they both felt there wasn’t enough emphasis on the puzzles/codes they had heard so much about. They had to leave things out of course, the movie was already 2 1/2 hours. Am I glad I saw it? Sure. Would I see it again? On DVD, why not. Will I recommend people go see it? If you are a book purist, it might annoy you in spots, but otherwise, it was an easy way t o kill 2 1/2 hours. I just hope that should they decide to make a movie from Angels and Demons they learn a few lessons from this one.

And the rave is coming, I have just one more rant… we all know how I feel about children who are allowed to run amok in stores (as annoying as they can be, I don’t blame them, I blame their parents) This morning, I ran to the store to pick up a few things for the cake I’m making for Rebecca’s daughter’s birthday tomorrow. (Yes, the 2 layer yellow sheet cake, filled with canolli cream and covered in chocolate ganache) While I was there, I also wanted to pick up some turkey breast from the deli. Bad move. I saw the little girl (who was beautiful, but obviously very unhappy) before anyone else in the crowd, because she loud and calling attention to herself big time with her histrionics. But as I got closer to the deli counter, I watched her grabbing at the rolls and wraps they have lined up along the bottom of the deli case, squeezing them, mashing them, mixing them up, in general destroying them all. And her mother watched in silence. Lots of other people were watching, obviously uncomfortable with the scene, but not knowing what to say or do. When the little girl decided she wasn’t getting a response, she started to put them in her mother’s cart, which got her ignored even further – the mother STILL did nothing. I was about to ask her a question about her pretty dress, anything to divert her attention from her hissy fit when a deli guy (manager?) roared over the counter that if the lady wanted to pay for all the damaged goods fine, but otherwise to get her “hellcat” out of the store immediately. I was floored. Not that someone said something but that the deli guy actually called the kid a hellcat. The mother responded by yanking the little girl by the arm and huffing away while the people all around the deli looked away or muttered something to each other. My heart breaks for the poor little girl because she was sent such mixed messages, and what we saw today was probably not even the worst of it. And again – you need a license to drive a car, but not to raise a child???

Needless to say when I got home, I was sad. Seeing stuff like that tends to stay with me. I’m mushy that way. But when I got to the door, there was a box. At 1st I thought it was from my Sockapaloooza pal but then I saw the return label (my Sockapaloooza pal is still MIA, along with my socks. I haven’t given up hope though that they are both still out there somewhere)

This brings us to the rave AND the yarm pr0n section of the post

Yup, when the invites for the re-opening of the STR club went out, I tried to resist. I failed, what can I say? No one’s perfect!

Catherine won their name the colorway contest by naming Fairgrounds. (Go congratulate her, she won SIX skeins of GORGEOUS STR yarn.)

Member button and Emergency Sock Yarn Keychain – too cute!

The STR club book, shown with the May colorway, Fairgrounds

We’re mid-way thru the cake making process (filling is done, cakes are cooling, but the ganache hasn’t been made yet) so I havent had time to look at the pattern or the tips sheet in the book yet. YET.

And you KNOW this is making it even harder to concentrate on the baby socks (which had to be frogged and restarted – something happened in the heel that I tried to fix but ended up with a snag in the yarn that I couldn’t get out and rather than leaving a knot, I decided to just snip -n- rip… it’s baby socks, they knit up quick enough, right? *sigh* I will be good. I will force myself to ignore the stash of STR and be responsible – I WILL finish what I promised I would finish before rewarding myself.

Final note – for those of you who might want to try an alternative to Flickr, or are just geeky and like to play with new things, there’s Tabblo . You can read more about it here and here

And how’s your weekend?

After giving me such grief in it’s 2 previous incantations, the Cascade has finally settled into a (very slightly) modified Vintage Bubble Bag.

I finished up the icord straps this morning, and will be felting it tomorrow. (The Smart Water bottle is only in there for scale, but I highly recommend it :winky: ) I would have finished it last night while we at my dad’s for a BBQ but I had forgotten to bring along another needle for the 3 needle bind off, and the DPNs to make the straps.

That was fine though, because I was busy watching the four footed kids. We brought Trinity with us so she could hang out with my Dad’s portuguese water dog Clementine (Clemmy)

They’re both really laid back so it was really easy to have them together. Nice that they got along though because now we know we can bring her with us when we hang out there.

Today is a low key day around here. It’s the 2nd Mother’s Day since my mom died, but somehow it’s nowhere near as hard as her birthday, or my birthday, or the anniversary of her death. It’s just not personal enough, if that makes sense. Today is an artificially created day, while those other days naturally belong to her… The really cool thing about today is two of my dear friends are celebrating their 1st mother’s day as moms. Both of them have been blessed with beautiful, happy, healthy children and I feel very lucky to be a part of it all.

I need to get started on two baby gifts (babies aren’t due until October… ), but to be totally honest all I want to do is wind up some of my STR from MDSW. Need vs. want – tough call! Either way though, the rest of my day will be spent watching the Monk marathon (until Grey’s of course!!) and knitting, so it’s a win-win!

PS – A head’s up to my fellow FireFox users

Sometime in the near future I will be updating this WordPress install to 2.0. Shortly after that is done, I will be be moving this blog to it’s own domain (which means updating all my ring codes etc – bleh!). This may happen this coming weekend, or not It all depends on how much time I have to do stuff. I wasn’t going to do it (either the update or the move) but decided the blog needed it’s own domain so I can do some of the things I want to do – I could still do them here on danisown.com, but there WAS an original plan for this domain, and I really should follow thru on those too… someday!

In knitting news, there is none – yet! I’m headed to SnB in a few and will be most likely working on a blanket for Project Linus, or my never ending lap throw. But that is actual knitting, so it counts! (Phone just rang, meeting Mary early for food, so Im headed out now instead… ) I’ll let you know what I decided to work on – since I know everyone is waiting with baited breath (HA!)

Happy almost Friday!!

Yup, another day of no knitting… :sosooryso: but my honey had a great birthday, and I did get a lot of work done. After being at it most of the day, I took a break around 6, and we went out for YUMMY Japanese food to celebrate. We came home around 8 and I JUST finished that :pissed: form a few minutes ago. (boring techy content – feel free to skip ahead! A form with 89 fields, 2 of which are file uploads, with 2 email confirmations – 1 to submitter, one to admin. The one to admin had to reflect all the fields in the form the person submitted, all 89 of them. Plus with field validation, I had to make sure if they forgot something, the fields they did fill out maintained their content, or people will get annoyed at having to fill out 89 fields AGAIN – - bleh! It was a bear to code, but it is basically done. It works proper and any changes will be cosmetic – whew!)

Lest you think the birthday boy was being ignored, he has been happily playing WoW and one of the new games he got Fear. (That game is CREEPY!) And we are headed in to watch some TV together now anyway… plus, his real bday celebration :w00t: is Saturday night anyway…

Since I am on a non-knitting roll, I am SO happy BSG is back! We finally watched it off TiVo last night and all I can say is wow. I really like the show.

And the final non-knitting content is more of a pat myself on the back thing. I commented on a blog at around 3pm yesterday about how much I disliked the Islander coach Steve Stirling, and how he needed to go. In that same post, I said how much I thought a trade we made a few years back (Brad Isbister and Raffi Torress for Janne Niinimaa and a conditional draft pick) was HUGE bust and that Niinimaa did nothing for the team but take stupid penalties. Remember I made that post at 3pm on the 10th… Niinimaa’s trade was announced around 6pm and Stirling is reported to have been fired today – press conference tomorrow. (Aside from getting rid of salary and stupid penalties, I dont think this trade was anything great either – the guy we got has the same penalty minutes in less games, but it’s better than nothing) So, winning lotto numbers anyone? LOL
*ETA – HOLY! Milbury is stepping down too!!

Tomorrow is SnB – YAY! I need a blocked out time to knit the past few weeks – killing me!! And here I thought after the holidays things would settle down Tomorrow night though, knitting content will be posted here even if I have to pilfer it from somewhere else :wink:

IVRs (“interactive voice response”) are the annoying computers that answer phones. They can sometimes be useful (check flight status etc), but consumers should be able to decide when they want to speak with a human…

If you have ever experienced the frustration that is an automated phone system, CLICK HERE.
Or, if you want to skip straight to the codes that will take to a real live person, click here instead

Hopefully back later today with some knitting content!

I have no idea how it happened but I completely forgot about the poinsettia in progress! I have only a bit more work to do to finish it (10 more pieces total to knit) – just look at that pile o’ poinsettia pieces!

I finished the “intended to be an ipod case but will now be a camera case” too. Yes, the iPod is in there now, because the camera was, well, in my hands! But it is totally too big for the iPod and a replacement is coming soon with modifications and hopefully improveemnts! This one’s nothing special, just some leftover sock yarn, knit ala Magic Loop on size 3 Addis.

As for knitting today, it hasn’t happened – YET! (yet being the key word, because in about 5 minutes, I am going to change that !

Yay – my sidebar stuff is working again! I love Feed Digest, and Peter (the coder/man behind the scenes) is not only brilliant, but a genuinely nice guy!

Last item, and it’s rather important, even if it is not knitting related! If you haven’t heard, there is a nasty Windows vulnerability, called a wmf exploit. Microsoft has said they plan to release a patch on or about Jan 10th. That’s just not acceptable! Infections are up and people need protection NOW. So go -=HERE=- and read, and then grab the patch (unless you are a 98/SE/ME user – “Windows 98/SE/ME users: Microsoft’s original advice to “unregister the shimgvw.dll” (shell image viewer) was never correct or useful on those platforms. The good news is that all current WMF exploits appear to be non-functional on the older Win9x vintage platforms . . . so you will likely be okay until Microsoft has updated your system with the next security patches. There is no short-term workaround for Windows 9x/SE/ME users“)

And as they used to say on Hill Street Blues, let’s be careful out there! :2hi:

I didn’t have a whole heck of a lot to post about today, since we had a quiet night at home last night, and today has been quiet knitting/tv/ipod playtime (between laundry and cooking) while the hubby plays WoW, but I thought skipping a post today would set a bad tone for the year. I know, laughable after yesterdays post that I would be thinking that way, but I never said I wasn’t quirky :wink:

I’m taking a break from the knitting for a little while to check on the stuff in the kitchen – yet more of those ginger snaps, that I am now being accused of putting crack in (they are mighty addictive) and the yummy Navy Bean soup that’s simmering away (made it the other day, but I let it sit in the refrig a day, skim, and then simmer for a few hours before actually serving it – it is so good and thick and just a really good comfort food.) I also just finished converting some shows from my TiVo to iPod format. While I have no problem paying $1.99 an episode from iTunes, they don’t have all the shows I would want – like Knitty Gritty! For those of you with a Tivo 2 and TivoToGo, all you need is this tutorial, 2 pieces of free software (linked in the tutorial) and a bit of time to run the conversions and et viola!

I finished converting the sock episode to make sure it worked, and while I probably won’t put a ton of TV shows on my iPod (not sure I see the point except for long trips or Dr appointment/long waiting time type things that I would probably be knitting thru anyway) it’s still nice to know I can if I want to!

And now that I’ve made my 1st post of 2006, I’m headed back to the knitting so I might actually have FO to report and post pictures of! Hope everyone is having a relaxing start to the new year!