Author Archive: meri

Well, nothing to behold yet, as I haven’t done anything with it yet. But I have one, dagnabit.

Zebra, the makers of the venerable F-301 ballpoint pens has come out with a fountain pen. The pen, available in black or blue, doesn’t have great reviews on Amazon. I’m not sure how much of this is from people simply not being used to fountain pens, and how much of it is from the product actually being shoddy. But, I saw one at the drug store today, and decided to give it a shot. I shall report back when I have impressions to share.

Tinking experiment: failed. Tinking lace is, as mentioned, a rather iffy proposition. This time, the coin landed on the, “HA HA!” side. One day, I will learn to use lifelines. But not today. Today, I will be ripping out my project (SSMS™ #3) and starting over. If that’s the worst thing that happens to me today, I can live with that. (*knocking on wood*)

*sigh*

Tinking is the process of un-knitting (tink = knit backwards). This is something that is done when one has made one (or more) mistakes. Sometimes, you catch your mistake pretty quickly, and you only need to tink a few stitches. Other times, you don’t catch the mistake until you’ve made a decent amount of progress. When that happens, you have a few choices: 1) tink back to the mistake; 2) pull your needles out and carefully rip back your stitches to the mistake, and then re-insert the needles; or, 3) throw your project across the room and find a good stiff drink.

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Today is looking to be remarkably unpleasant, meteorologically speaking. I hope everyone manages to stay cool, or – at the very least – hydrated. My plans for the day include geeking (which OSX keeps trying to correct to “geeing”), cleaning, knitting (probably finishing one of the SSMS™s) and perhaps lunch with G. There are definitely worse ways to spend a day. Best of luck with whatever adventures you may meet today!

The final installment of the Summer Solstice Mystery Shawl has arrived! It’s 30 rows as charted, with some optional repeats to add length. SSMS™ #3 will not be receiving any additional length, as I’m not sure about my yarn yardage, and would hate to run out before I’m done. However, I have plenty of extra Kauni Effekt, so SSMS™ #2 will continue to have all the extra length for which the pattern provides. (I’m also doing this because I love how seeing minor modifications to a pattern – such as extra repeats – provide for an entirely different finished product.)

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A few short years ago, Delicious Library was the pinnacle of “I own a Mac and I want to catalog all of my books” software. Then they got in a fight with Amazon, and have apparently pretty much written off the fabulous product. As I’m seriously pondering going through and laying hands on all of my books again, I thought it might be a good time to recatalog them. And thus, my query.

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You may think that you have no idea what a pangram is, but you do. You’ve certainly heard the phrase, “The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy grey dog,” before. This strange little collection of words is perhaps the most famous pangram of all time, but it’s hardly alone.

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Perfect activities for a low-energy day: puttering around in the morning, a brief nap, then south the be accosted by Jenn’s dogs for a while. Sushi dinner with G and Jenn. Now hanging out with Jenn and watching some TV and geeking before it’s time for bed. Good day.

I just got mail from a software vendor. This is not, in and of itself, all that unusual. However, what is kind of strange is that it was actually an email message directly to me, as opposed to an advertisement or announcement of some sort. Further, it was sent to an email address associated with a job that I haven’t had in nearly 9 years. To round out the weirdness factor, it was asking about a piece of software that I’d purchased for the team I was with 11 years ago, asking if we had any plans to upgrade to Windows 7.

If that’s a lead worth following-up on in your sales world, I’m sorry, man. I’ve forwarded your message on to the best person I could think of to handle it. Best of luck to you.

Whoo! As predicted, the fourth installment of the SSMS™ showed up on Tuesday. You may recall that I have started three different iterations of this shawl, and have discarded one, because the yarn and I were not getting along with one another. So, the black and white Kauni is SSMS™ #2, and the new blue / purple Blue Heron is SSMS™ #3.

When the fourth installment of the pattern showed up, I was working on #3, so I kept working on through. The photo below represents a couple of pattern repeats of the work in progress. It’s coming along nicely, I think.

As for SSMS #2, I’ve alluded to the fact that I’d made some mistakes and corrected them. I was, however, only half right. I did, in fact, make mistakes. I did not correct them. So, last night I completely ripped it out and started over. I’m about 90% of the way through Part B right now, and should be fully caught up long before the next (and final) installment of the pattern shows up.

(I do actually do things other than knit, I swear. However, my pain levels have been pretty high, and my energy levels pretty low. This makes doing much of anything else difficult, so there’s been a bit more knitting than usual going on.)