All this free time!

Yeah. And then I go and spend it playing this! Warning, may be addictive!

Miss me?

Phew. I had quite the long weekend. And I've been so behind that it's now been a week since I last was in control and caught up with my online life. This stuff is hard work!

My in-laws went camping and left Wednesday afternoon, leaving me with no sitter for Thursday or Friday. We were joining them for camping Friday evening, so I knew I couldn't goof around on my days off and leave housework for the weekend. There was a time when catching up after 5 days offline was no big deal. Now? Let's just say I have enough blog entries to keep me busy for a week's worth of naps, and that doesn't begin to touch email and op-eds. Not to mention the fact that being gone all weekend leaves me with just as much catching up to do on craft projects and housework as ever. *And* I started reading a new novel, and added 2 to my long-neglected tbr pile. eek!

Additionally, I've found a very prolific blog that I'm sharing because, well, if I don't have time for anything but blogs, neither should you. Very useful stuff too.

Have fun at LifeHacker.

Need a throw-away email address?

Ooh, I'm thrilled with this little tidbit I just learned from Bloglines. Did I mention you need this?!

"You can create an unlimited number of special Bloglines email addresses that are tied to your Bloglines account. The email addresses show up as subscriptions in your My Blogs page, and email sent to those email addresses appears as new items.

When you create a Bloglines email address, a subscription is added to your account. If you unsubscribe from that subscription, the email address becomes invalid and mail sent to it will bounce.

Email subscriptions are great for announce-only or broadcast mailing lists that don't provide RSS feeds. They are also useful as temporary email addresses."

Go...go sign up.

Argh! Ahoy me maties!

Yes, it is international talk like a pirate day, and I'm entering into the spirit of things quite happily. After all, it seems yesterday's post, admitting defeat to the inevitable change of seasons, resulted in renewed vigor from our Western Washington weather, and this morning I woke not only to clouds but heavy rain fall. I need something to cheer me. Argh!

Actually, I don't really mind the rain all that much. I just don't like walking in it. I suppose a good rain coat might change that, but who can afford that? I always seem to have better things to spend my money on.

Swab the decks ye lubbers!

Sorry. Ahem. Anyway, there are some things I really like about the change of seasons. For instance, television! I really don't watch much TV, although I'm sure I watch more than others. And unfortunately, Tom and I have gone from being down to 2 shows we wouldn't miss, to 4 since Eve was born. But still, it's only 4 hours out of my week, and honestly less than that, since we never watch it live with commercials.

Sadly, the days of Buffy and Angel are gone (Oh James Marsters, how I miss you!), and Friends too has ended, but we still have CSI (Season premiere this Thursday!!) and Survivor. (Actually, I don't love Survivor, but Tom is an addict, so I have learned to appreciate the entertaining aspects of the show--and Jeff is a cutey!) Second episode of Season 13 airs this Thursday. The year Eve was born, we added Lost, a show with some really great actors and a frustrating plot, and some absolutely great episodes and some really crappy ones. It's basically a gamble, so we watch it because we'd hate to miss a good one. If this season is worse than last, this may move to our don't-miss-unless-there's-anything-better-to-do list. ;) Mark you calendars for Wednesday, October 4th if you don't want to miss this one. And last but certainly not least is the newly added Battle Star Galactica. This show actually tops our list of must-see TV this season. As television goes, this is the best, as far as I'm concerned. Well, excepting Firefly, which is off the air. :( Battlestar Glactica has drama, adventure, romance, and robots! It could only be improved with the addition of Steve the Pirate. ;) If you are a TV fan, you really should see this show. Yes, it's scifi, but it's not just scifi, it's great drama. Really. I suggest adding the Miniseries, and the first and second seasons to your Netflix queue now, so you can catch up with things before the season premier on Friday, October 6th.

Okay, that's enough about TV, it is, after all, only less than 4 hours out of my life each week (time in which I can often embroider!)

What else can I console myself with now that I don't get to wear sandals and ignore my lack of good rain gear?

Eve sleeps better when it's not light until 10 PM, and as we've left July behind, night time has become a little better. For those of you who don't know, Eve isn't exactly a great sleeper even at the best of times (I think she has a record of sleeping 7 hours straight, once!) So any improvement is a blessing. Daylight savings time is my mortal enemy.

It's soup season! I like soup, cooking soup, eating soup. It's all good. It never really seems appropriate when it's warm.

More time for crafting? Hmm... maybe, maybe not. TV season was never good for my writing, which is what I used to fill my free time with. But, the nice thing about crafting is that a lot of it can be done while you do other things. I can sit and watch TV (especially bad Lost episodes and every Survivor episode) while I embroider or sew. So, we'll see.

Fires! I don't mean the brush variety, which is more a summer thing, and not really all that good. I mean the fireplace kind that crackle and smell good and look pretty!

Winter squash with dinner.

Politics! Speaking of which, today was the deadline for mailing in my ballot for the primaries, and I forgot! ARGH! I'm not a big fan of mail-only voting. Hopefully I can get it done tonight and take it to the post office this evening...maybe that will work. If not, I guess I'll survive.

What makes Autumn positive for you?

I think that's it for me, me hearties, I'm off to sail the high seas of the blogosphere. Argh!

Summer is definitely over

I don't want to sound dreary, but it's true. As my dad always says, it's summer in the northwest from July 5th to August 31st, or there abouts. He's mostly right. It's been cool and overcast (or partly cloudy for most of the day) or drizzly or breezy since Tuesday (which was a perfect late summer day, just the right mix of hot and cool, and quiet because all the kids are back in school. Yay!) Nearly a week of such weather is more than a cold front, it's a season changing.

A few of the leaves are changing too. And I only have one half-ripe tomato. There will be no harvest from my carefully maintained plant. Bummer! I've got about a dozen green tomatos of various sizes that will remain so, I suppose. Maybe I should try frying them.

We've yet to find a woodburning stove insert for our downstairs fireplace. We can burn wood in the upstairs insert, and the convection circulation does a great job at heating that level, but Eve and I sleep downstairs and our television and Tom's music and computer are downstairs too, so we really need to heat from the bottom up.

We were supposed to put away the boat for the winter this weekend, but it was too cold for such activities.

Eve still has summer clothes we found in August that she hasn't gotten to wear. They'll be too small next summer. I guess that means we'll have to take a vacation this winter to somewhere warm and balmy. Hawaii anyone? (Yes, please!)

All that to say, we aren't really ready for summer to be over. How about you? Are you still enjoying summer weather? What do you want to accomplish before you pull out your scarves and boots?

Blogroll!

Check to the left for my Bloglines generated Blogroll!

P.S. Eve and I are working on our first joint sewing project, check back soon for the glorious results!

A brief time-out from frivolity

I do my best to keep things light here. I don't like to start arguments with friends, and especially when I must conduct the arguments in online text. I have previously mentioned the lost nuance that goes along with such communication.

Be that as it may, I had to share a serious article which I found regarding Plan B contraceptive (a phrase I use rather lightly here.)

I do expect you to go read it, but allow me to summarize. Plan B is going to increase the incidence of STDs, mainly among poor women, and especially among the younger of those women.

I am totally against Plan B, as some of you may have deduced from what you know of me. Then again, I don't really think the vanilla brand contraceptive pill is good either (for various reasons I will not go into in detail at the moment). And of course, I'm entirely against the more accepted definition of abortion. However, my reasons have chiefly been based on the sanctity of human life (even embryonic), and the physical and emotional damage of chemicals and invasive procedures on the mothers who choose these. Lately I've been struck by the fact that abortion works against the ideal that "reproductive freedom" would add to the equality of the sexes.

How's that, you ask? I know proponents of Choice tell us that abortions give women freedom. And to a certain extent they are right. I'll just mention here that I think the cost of such freedom too high, but I digress. Sure, women can avoid the burden of pregnancy, but this also gives men freedom to not worry one whit about possibly becoming a father, giving them little to no reason to keep it in their pants and respect the women around them as people instead of conquests. Men should be held responsible for their actions against women and for any children they father, abortion allows them to get off scott-free. Women (and aborted fetuses, of course) pay the high price of life, health, and emotional well-being of the wide-spread availability of abortion. Grr.

Anyway, that's a tangent. Back to Plan B. This article caused a light bulb moment. Here is yet another reason to be outraged by the development and outrageous over the counter availability of this drug. How dare we subject the most unfortunate of our sex to further danger? How much are we willing to destroy at the feet of "choice"? These women will pay with their lives and flesh for the convenience of a morning-after pill. Our society owes them better.

A little bit bored

So there's not much to do at work today. Not because there's not work to be done, but because one of our major tools is getting updates.

So I've plenty of time, but not much to say.

Let me introduce you to two sites you might find interesting. I'm still not sure what I think of them yet.

First, I may have previously mentioned Next Favorite. It's a really cool concept: rating books, movies, and music all in one place and giving you recommendations all across the board. Think about it, your taste is reflected in music, movies, and books that you like. Yes, you can rate movies in one place, and books in another and music in another, but you can't link up all that information together, until Next Favorite. Sort of.

I'm not really sure how well it works though, as I haven't rated enough yet. Why? It's pretty clunky. Someone else should do it an make it slick and simple, more like Netflix. There's simply too many steps involved for me to want to spend a whole lot of time on it. I keep hoping they'll improve the system. Maybe I should approach Netflix with a similar idea, they have a really cool ratings->recommendation system... just imagine if it were harnessed for more than movies.

On to something actually cool. Have you checked out Wists? It's a cool concept and a cool execution. Visual bookmarking. Like something you see online? Wists it. Then when you go through your wists you can actually see why you "bookmarked" it to begin with. Never puzzle over a bookmark again. But that's not my favorite part, as cool as that is. My favorite part is how pretty it looks! I imagine my wistsing will be aimed mostly at building a beautiful gallery page, and less about the actually bookmarking aspect. :)

Another cool feature is that you can view the galleries of other users. If you find someone whose taste you admire, you can look at all their wists and find other wists to add to your own. I like the word wists even. Yay for Wists!

In other news...

I caved and got a myspace. I know. It's silly. And actually, I'm still not a big fan. It gives me a headache, and it seems to be rife with poor grammar (you know, because I've got perfect grammar myself). But, it's fun to get in touch with people you haven't seen since high school. On the other hand, it's not so great for meeting absolute total strangers who share nothing in common with you (unless you actually want that, in which case, it's like a candy shop). I think it's possible that myspace was responsible for a creepy email I received, but then, I'm all over the place on the Internet these days, so I can't really blame any one place. It kind of makes me want to rethink all the picture posting I do though.

That's all for now. I'm off to find pretty pictures to Wist!

Read the manual

Okay...so I have been taking pictures of my embroidery work for over a year. And I'm always really annoyed that I can't get a really good shot of the details...So a detailed, beautiful piece ends up looking like this:



On Saturday, I helped my mom prepare for some ebay selling of her huge collection of antiques and I needed to be able to take good close ups. So, I got out the manual for the camera. Look what I can do now!





So, the moral of the story is: Read the manual! :) Now all I need is an uber expensive flash and diffusion umbrella thingy, and I'll be set. :)

Crafty goodness

And now the post I wanted to make yesterday. :)

Here's some of my latest embroidery projects, and by latest, I mean back to the very first! :) Go check out my post on Craftster! This one too!

And here is the labor-intensive project Tom and I tackled in June, again a post on Craftster.

I'm such a junkie. :)

Happy and Sad

Morning! I was going to post some links to my latest crafty ventures, but Crafster is down! :( Oh well, lucky for you, I had a backup plan. The other day we got some pics of Eve doing her "cute" face and her "sad" face. It's pretty darn funny when we tell her to do her "sad" face. I'd describe it for you, but take a look yourself.





Of course, she doesn't know that both of those "faces" are cute faces.

And just because, take a look at her struting on the catwalk in her bikini (it's finally getting too small, but we got it for her last summer, so I can't complain.)



In case you forgot what I look like, I was able to find a recent picture of me too! With Eve.



This was at Tom's sister's recently (nearly) finished house. That room behind us is her music room! My music room looks a lot like Tom's computer room/office. Oh wait, it is!

And last but not least, Tom caught a nice shot of a pale sunset the other night. Not exactly the most impressive we've seen, but it was very pretty.