Drinking the kool-aid...

We turned off our cable TV for the summer (one new method in my arsenal of penny-pinching tricks) and I was shocked and dismayed when I turned the ReplayTV's back on and discovered that Dish Network, the new owners of the Sonic Blue technology, had summarily canceled my subscriptions for my two non-lifetime units. No explanation, no email... just a tiny note on my account management page to call customer service. No, it was not for lack of payment, since I have a nice buffer built up while saving for more (yay) dental work. The lifetime unit is still going strong, at least.

I am now officially fed up with my Replay TVs. I don't even care enough to call and find out what the new deal is, but I suspect it's a price hike or a policy change.

So, this last payday, I splurged on a refurbished TiVo... with first month's activation, grand total was just over $100. It's not HD, so I don't get to use the Netflix streaming option, but with the Xbox 360 I won't miss it. And since Tivo has implemented a slew of features they didn't have when I was choosing a DVR, most of the reasons I went the other direction don't apply anymore. They're memory-expandable now (with the purchase of an external USB hard drive), the shows can be automatically archived to your PC via Tivo desktop, they use an internet connection instead of a phone line, and best of all, my Amazon video on demand purchases can be sent straight there. Fortunately, this cable box is compatible with the serial cable, so I don't have to mess with fiddly IR wires for the cable box. It's even dual-tuner!

It's hard to believe that none of those options were available a mere four years ago.

It's taken a few days since I hooked up my new purchase, but I really love it... it's been a huge boon to my knitting time, and has relieved some of the pressure on Netflix. No more eyeballing the mailbox, desperately waiting for the red envelopes to arrive.

Now, if only more shows would start their fall seasons a smidge early so they'll show up on my guide schedule... it's hard to set a season pass on something that isn't showing summer re-runs. Most notably Dollhouse, Torchwood, and a few others are still not in my "To Do" list. Bones only showed up yesterday.

As far as the knitting front, not much new there... still plugging away on the two blankets. I started some Nordic Lights socks, but I'm not terribly happy with my color choices. The variegated yarn for the "lights" part has some colors that are too dark to show well against the black, and the color repeats are too short.

If you're terribly interested in my progress, you can observe it with my new Ravelry progress bars over there on the right.

Fish Hat #2 is complete!

I can't believe I forgot to blog that I finished Barronius' Fish Hat! Once the yarn arrived, it took a mere two days to crank that puppy out... and he's in love. *snort* He wore it at his desk while playing free online poker all day. Why he needs luck when there's no money involved is beyond me. I assume the hat-wearing was for luck, anyway. He's a nut, but he's *my* nut.

If you look carefully in the "model" photo, you'll see that I put the eyes off-center... make sure when placing your eyes, you hold the dorsal fin straight up, rather than folded over to the side... it throws off your judgment. It was fixed shortly after taking the photo.

Did I mention...?

I had dental surgery a week ago. Nothing major... just something I'd put off for a while. Today I get to have my stitches taken out... whoopee.

Ironically, I feel worse today than I did two days after my procedure. This always happens when I'm on a long course of anti-biotics... towards the end, even the good bacteria have given up and strange things start happening to my mucus membranes, mostly in the nose and throat. I won't gross you out with the details, but I'm glad my last one was last night. Now I'll be scarfing yogurt and attempting to bring everything back into balance.

The blankets are proceeding apace. I ran into a minor glitch in the wool one when I didn't have enough of one color to finish a panel, so I concentrated on the cotton one for a while. Now the situation is reversed. I'm trying really hard to use this as an opportunity to destash, but these projects don't seem to want to let me do so.

On the horizon after the blankets, I have a crap-ton of projects I want to do, mainly because of my recent purchase of this book, French Girl Knits This is the first book in a long time that I want to make EVERY SINGLE PROJECT in it. It's insane... like I don't want to knit enough things already. I feel like a knitter's version of Julie and Julia

I'm contemplating whether to start with the (Ravelry links follow) Wrenna Leather Laced Cardigan or the Cybele Vest. I have the yarn for both. I have the notions and needles for both. They both look like really fast knits. Decisions, decisions....

I *do* want to knit a couple of things before I embark on such a journey. My uncle Doug, with his large feet, diabetes, and allergy to wool, needs custom socks. Barronius is still carping on (ha ha) about his lack of a fish hat. And I do need to make myself a decent coat for this winter, as taking Monkey Pants down to the bus stop can rival the snow storms in Minnesota. Seriously. It snowed here last year, and the wind chill makes it dangerously frigid. What *will* I knit next? Stay tuned... :D

I'm being very good...

...in some ways. Other ways, not so much.

We recently had a financial windfall, and that money has been earmarked for fixing my teeth (Yay! I've been waiting two years). I've been really good at holding back my spending, because quite frankly getting this crap taken care of is going to feel a heck of a lot better than seeing a bigger pile of yarn that is my stash.

No, seriously. That's how much they've been bothering me. Because we all know how much I LOVE my yarn.

However, as good as I have been about spending, I have been mega-lazy with getting organized and getting back into "real life" after my vacation. My Flip video camera is still sitting here on my desk, filled to the brim with a treasure trove of vacation-y goodness. Have I off-loaded it? Edited it into a cutesy DVD? Mailed it to my family? Nope. There's even extra footage that I off-loaded onto my laptop while I was up there, since the camera only holds an hour. Haven't touched that either.

The only thing I've done since I got back is re-arrange my Netflix "Watch it now" queue to watch while I knit.

I *have* been going to town on the knitting though. With the allowance that piled up for me while we were out of town, I did make a small purchase from Pisgah and got cones of Peaches and Cream yarns for the *sole* purpose of cranking out dishrags. I have made two so far. I have also started two large blankets, one in the Peaches and Cream cotton in a three-toned blue, and the other in double-stranded Palette yarn from Knit Picks in a three-toned Plum color set. I had to start the cotton one because I ran out of the wool before I'd finished the first square, and am waiting on the order.

Both blankets are being done (in a rather loose interpretation of the pattern) using the "Moderne Blanket" pattern in the Mason-Dixon knitting book. It's a modified log cabin layout in garter-stitch... I would call it modular knitting. You create a block, bind it off, then pick up stitches along one edge in another color, knit a block, and repeat until you get the size you want.

I'm going to attempt to do the pattern in the exact method for the wool blanket (the double stranded Palette makes a luscious-feeling fabric in the garter stitch) but my cotton one is going to be attempted in a more free-form way, using the method more than the instructions. It should prove to be fun!

Somewhere in the middle of all this I will hopefully start taking some pictures, and organizing my vacation snaps and footage.

We are home!

Okay, I didn't exactly advertise in bright neon that we were going on vacation. There was a safety rationale in there somewhere, lets just leave it at that.

It could, quite possibly, be catagorized as the first "Perfect Vacation" we've ever been on. Even though I had to go to the emergency room in the same town where my high school is located (a surreal experience, to say the least) for an irritated nerve that was making me miserable, everything else was downright idyllic. I filled my small video-camera twice, and finished last night with only five minutes to spare. Much fun.

Right now I'm still recovering from my re-awakened coffee addiction, so I'll have more later.

I must be reaching that age...

...where everyone I know starts dying. Strangely, despite the physical feeling of slowly coming apart at the seams, mentally I feel like I'm too young for this to start happening.

Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Ed McMahon... even TV pitchman Billy Mays (that wonderfully, ever-energetic guy who pitched everything from Oxy-clean to Wonder-putty) died very recently. As if watching all the seasons of "Six Feet Under" didn't already have me contemplating pre-need funeral options.

But then there's my wonderful grandmother, still kickin at the spry age of almost 90.

I'm about to make a pilgrimage up to see her and the rest of the clan, so I may be quiet for the next few weeks (I know, like you could tell the difference. :D). I've been in book-reading mode, having discovered the wonder that is e-books *without* the benefit of a Kindle, thank you very much. So far I've read Lumley's "Necroscope" which was okay but not mind-blowing. I tried to get into the second of the series, but they changed the font enough that it was smaller and harder to read, thus very off-putting. So I switched to CJ Cherryh's Chanur series, and having finished "Pride of Chanur" I'm on to "Chanur's Venture". Even though they seem stilted and slightly stand-offish (the characters don't seem to want you to understand or get to know them very well) they are an interesting look at making something seem both alien and familiar at the same time. I just wish I could warm up to them and think of the characters as fondly as I do, say, the characters in MacCaffrey's "Crystal Singer" series.

So that's the news this week (month?). After I've recovered from a total of 52 hours in our tiny car, I'll probably be swinging back into the fiber mode. Since all TV up there is aerial, and all internet connections dial-up (gods preserve us) I plan on a lot of knitting, and possibly taking my Kromski spinning wheel, room permitting. I have two pairs of socks that I intend to finish, a beautiful laceweight sweater I might start, and a couple of baby hat/sweater kits from Knitpicks. Just in case little cousin Cole makes an appearance.

I feel like a slacker

Everyone who has ever kept a blog goes through dry spells, and they always apologise when they come back... so I won't bore you with another one. Consider it given.

There's really not a lot going on around here to warrant blogging, or at least not a lot that's shareable. Monkeypants had her awards ceremony for graduating fifth grade, and she was the last person to receive her awards because she got *every award it was possible to receive*. Well, except perfect attendance due to that very nasty flu we all got in November. But everything else from Bluebonnet awards for reading, to "Fact Frenzy Master" test awards (they never explain what these accomplishments mean, which frustrates me to no end). But her teacher made a point of mentioning that she got them all, which is very gratifying and not just a little bit scary. The word "brilliant" was used. I can't help feeling that we're making her into a big fish in a small pond by keeping her in public school. Are we doing her a disservice because we can't afford private school? Or is she better off being the most brilliant where she is, than the average somewhere else?

Other than the end of the academic year, there's not a lot to tell. We're trying to save up for a trip to Minnesota in July, but we're continually running out of money before the end of the pay period. Expenses haven't seemed to go up much, and pay hasn't gone down, we're just not making it as well as we used to, and we can't seem to figure out the cause. I've taken to making homemade pizza a lot again, and if you've been following my blog you know that's how I make the food budget stretch in times of crisis. We just can't understand how it's happening, unless some sneaky expense has been increasing so gradually we haven't noticed. For the first time ever we're cutting the cable TV for the summer... I know many people who do this, but for us it's always been a negligible expense. Now it seems a needless one. Between Hulu, Amazon Video on Demand, Netflix's "Watch it now" and DVD box sets, broadcast television seems like a luxury... and an unused one at that. Since my ReplayTV DVRs have been acting up, I may be less choked up about it than one might think.

Hubby has again attempted to quit smoking, and I think he might actually be serious this time. The true test (as always) will be to see if he goes back to it once we have money again.