Lenten Samich

February 27, 2007

Okay, so it's Lent. I know this because a lot of the people I hang out with are giving things up (the most common thing is chocolate). That doesn't work for me. Maybe it's because I'm not a cradle-whatever; I came to this whole liturgical calendar thing comparatively recently. I don't recall even knowing anyone who did "fish on Friday" on purpose and it certainly wasn't until this most recent decade in my life that I ever heard anybody seriously say, "I'm giving up [chocolate] for Lent."

I guess that from the short time I began hearing serious "giving up" talk to the time that I actually became a participant, I got the impression that it was more like "Poor me. I have to go without [chocolate] for 40 days. I am really torturing myself to show what a good Christian I am. Look at me, look at what a good Christian I am."

Now, don't get me wrong. Everyone has the right to choose whatever Lenten discipline they deem appropriate for themselves. It is not my place to judge. In fact, I think that judging someone else's sacrifice is just seriously wrong. (The word heinous comes to mind, but it's not fitting well into a sentence right now.)

What I'm getting at is that instead of giving up, I choose to give to. If I, personally, give up, oh, say, chocolate*, what does that benefit other than my waistline? Heck, I know that on Easter morning I can get up and eat the whole darned 3-foot solid chocolate bunny if I want to. For me, it would just be postponing my chocolate intake, not giving it up. If, however, I give to one or more charitable organizations during this time, who knows how many will benefit?

Once again, I've joined in the 40 Days for Others KAL. Once again, I'll re-vamp it to a "CAL" - a CRAFT-along. At least 50% of the knitting, sewing, crocheting, whatever that I do during this Lenten season will be for the benefit of others. This year I've chosen the Head Start program and a local organization that works with autistic children.

*Note to readers: I don't particularly care for chocolate. This is just an example. No bunnies will be harmed on Easter morning at my house.

Sheesh. This isn't even where I was headed when I sat down to write this post. The point I had intended to make was about Charity Crafting.

I've been involved with a few social-ish groups that meet/met specifically to SnB while making items for charitable contribution. I'm glad to have found these gatherings, I've met good people, made some friends, been able to support or teach or entertain, you know - be SOCIAL.

What toasts my samich, though, is that at each group I've heard at least one person say, "Oh, it's just for charity. They won't notice if it (fill in the blank here - is wonky, is scratchy, is poorly constructed, etc.)."

---

Hold on, Nellie.

---

Do the recipients of charitable contributions NOT deserve a quality product? Is it just me, or is it supremely arrogant to imply that they should be thankful that they got anything at all? Of course they'll be thankful for what they get. There are those who may have to walk to school with no jacket in the winter for whom a warm knitted hat is a blessing. Those who, when they've grown and become (or not) more financially stable, will remember the time in their lives when a complete stranger made a hat for them (ostensibly) out of the goodness of their heart.

Sure, there are those that won't treat their hat with respect. They'll lose it two days after they receive it, they'll play keep away with it, they'll trade it for a chocolate bunny. Who's to say that if they lose it that it won't be found by someone who needs it more? That they won't make a lifelong friend during a game of keep-away? Who's to say that it won't be the only chocolate bunny they get during their entire childhood?

These things, ladies and gents, are what I call Pebbles In The Pond. We have no way of knowing what one little thing that we do or say will affect another now or later in their life. Good OR bad.

As for a decently made hat/scarf/wheelchair bag/preemie layette... who is it that you want to be happy when the charitable giving is done? Are you truly giving of yourself and your time and effort to make someone else's life a little bit better, or are you doing it to feel all righteous, so you can wear your perceived sacrifice of time and effort on your chest like a merit badge that you can point to any time you need someone to boost your ego?

Someone give me a hand and help me down off of this high-horse. I think I might've strained something.

Labels: babble, charity, THESE

permalink 4 folks clicked here to comment

Redefining Random

February 26, 2007

Here's kind of a disclaimer. I'm at my mom's this week, ready and willing to wait on her hand and foot now that she's returned home from the hospital (no, I didn't mention it in a previous post; no, it wasn't an unexpected emergency; yes, she's fine but sore and doomed to be on a liquid diet for the next 2 weeks). My mom may have one of the slowest dial-up connections on the face of the earth. If I am able to upload posts at all, they will likely be much, much more babble than fiber. Now, onto randomness:

You know that old Meat Loaf song? The "I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)" one? What wouldn't he do?

Have you noticed that usually when it's foggy, it's not foggy right around YOU? Like you've got your own Cone of Silence or something...

Wait. I said foggy, not froggy. This was taken from my back door (I was the one on the inside). Our resident frogs tend to come out in droves (WTH is a drove?) when it's fairly warm and raining like there's no tomorrow. They also seem to have a curfew. It's rare to see a frog after 9:30 p.m. on our back step. Before that, though, it's definitely a "look before you step" situation.

The word infarction amuses me. Of course what it really MEANS doesn't amuse me. Just the word. 'Specially when it's shortened to infarct. I can just picture old ladies tsk-tsking when I say it.

That's not my favorite word, though. My favorite is profundity. It's not like I am often accused of it, but it's still my favorite.

When I get a chill, I get "chicken skin". Not gooseflesh. Not goose pimples (eewww, the visual...). Maybe occasionally goose bumples. Usually chicken skin.

There is one post that I made that gets spam comments at least once a week. Fortunately, that's about the only one that gets those comments (which, of course, are immediately rejected). I wonder why it's that ONE post? There must be some keyword or something. Weird thing is that I can't find the ISP/source in my stat counter stats. Uh-oh. The other post talked about my stat counter, too. What if THOSE are the keywords?

Oh. And I need a blackboard chicken. I first saw one when I fell off the yarn wagon at LaFavorites in Kelso. Then a couple of days later, Judy posted a picture of hers, modeling a sock, over at Persistent Illusion. Judy was kind enough to tell me that she got hers at The Real Mother Goose in Portland, though I didn't find one on their website. Amy over at LaFavorites had not only the chicken, but a pig and a sheep, too. (I think J needs a pig. She's always using the phrase "putting lipstick on a pig"... I wonder if the artist does special orders???)

Labels: babble

permalink 0 folks clicked here to comment

An Advance Apology

February 14, 2007

This is mainly for my feed-readers (bloglines and such). I'm gonna add labels to my previous posts. That means that all of my old posts may show as "New" in your feeds.

If you want to read everything again, feel free to do so. If not, try to find that spot where you can "Ignore Updates" (instead of "View Updates as New") and take care of it.

This isn't going to happen all at once, but it will happen. My apologies. Blogger MADE me do it...

Labels: blogging

permalink 0 folks clicked here to comment

Updating the Blog

Okay, I'll admit it: I get a bit pissy when I'm informed that I have to do something. Especially if I'm given no choice.

Such is the case with Blogger/Blogger Beta. For quite a while I was getting the "Yay for us! You can try this new thang!" info whenever I tried to log into the service. Well, hey. It ain't broke (for me).

Eventually Blogger got to the point where it wouldn't let me "in" unless I switched. Enter serious pissy-ness.

I immediately went a-huntin' for a new blog home. I found Wordpress. Started a blog. Found out that there weren't any templates that were Me. Found out that I had very limited options in trying to make the templates more Me. Of course, if I want to pony up $20 to import my own CSS, that would be fine, but after mucking around elsewhere in Wordpress I lost confidence that I could just switch over without some major remodeling anyway (and as some of you know, my current template isn't flawless anyway).

Okay. Let's try to make do. Blogger's in the schmit-house with me. After finally getting something that vaguely looks like something I'd post in, I found that I STILL had to switch over to the New Blogger so that I could import these here posts to the new Wordpress blog. Well, damn. I guess that's okay because I'm only switching to the New Blogger so I can dump it.

Um. No. Don't get me wrong - the switchover and import to Wordpress worked fine, BUT. My posts in Wordpress weren't separated enough, so the Sock Yarn post began in the body of the Almost Finished Quilt post.

Add to that joyous discovery the fact that it literally took FOUR minutes for the "Edit This Post" page to come up (IF at all) and then the edits (some lame-ass extra spaces at the end of the Quilt post) didn't even change the final layout of the posts. I've spent about an hour this morning trying to make it work (of which a huge portion was just sitting and watching the little loading bar at the bottom of a blank page).

Wordpress doesn't have an easily/quickly-found place for questions, design FAQ's, or... well, whatever. I know that other bloggers are perfectly fine with Wordpress. I'm not.

So, here I stay for now. I'll just over myself about the forced "upgrade". If I can organize the tags/labels, I can dump my del.icio.us tags (that I never incorporated into the blog anyway). Maybe I can figure out how to add some pdf files.

This post is going to end abruptly in anticipation of the next one...

Labels: blogging

permalink 1 folks clicked here to comment

An Almost Finished Quilt

February 09, 2007

I've been machine quilting this week. I think that I need a new chair. After the first day, my back was tired. After the second day, I was a seriously hurtin' unit. On the third day, it took WAY less time for my lower back to start screaming than on the previous two days. Fortunately it's done now (thanks to some legal chemical assistance); the binding is on and it's on it's way to J to do the handwork.

This is the beginning of the second day, partly quilted, partly marked (the third day was for the borders and binding).

Labels: quilting

permalink 2 folks clicked here to comment

Sock Yarn

February 06, 2007

... and some serious asterisk action.

Edited after a bit... if you've already gobbled up the techo-info at the end of the post, I needed to change it after realizing that the placement of the < and > escape characters was off (I fixed a line break or two while I was at it, too). If this means absolutely nothing to you, um... never mind.

I went to my favorite yarn store last week and fell off the no-yarn-buying wagon. I didn't do major damage, just 2 skeins of Cascade Fixation. You see, I'd just finished an unsuccessful top-down sock* in LB Wool Ease and decided I needed to use "real" sock yarn.

Well, at least, that's the story put out there for general consumption. (Don't click on the links unless you want to go, "Eewww") Actually, I'd been inspired by a pattern from Frecklegirl which then put me on the road to other items of that ilk. After playing around with the first pattern (in a less expensive "test" yarn), I decided that I wanted more lace, better fit, yadda yadda.

Side trip: I sure seem to be doing the "yadda yadda" thing a lot these days. I don't even care for the TV show that pushed those words into the common lexicon. Apparently I'm getting too lazy to actually say what I mean to say.

Back to the test knit, I ended up pulling out my Barbara Walker books** and finding a lace pattern that could grow as the project was shaped. Of course I didn't stop there. I found a knitter's font. I created a document, charts and all. Even came up with a name for "my" pattern - No Diré. I expect that if I stay semi-focused (oops! already too late!) I'll come up with a pattern for a "set".

*The unsuccessful sock incorporated a lace panel-ish thing down the front of the sock, again from a Walker book. I did a picot top, but it flares out because of the thickness of the yarn. I tried the sock on as I went (and wrote down EVERYTHING I did in anticipation of a second sock), but when it came off the needles I found that the heel flap was too short. No way am I gonna frog this one. I'll just chalk it up to experience and start anew*.

**I tend to want to own an entire series of books. In fiction, I actually won't read a book that looks interesting (if it's part of a series) until I have at least the first two or three books in that series. Then I read them in order. I have Barbara Walker's Treasuries 1, 2 and 3. #4 continues to elude me. It's certainly not in a local shop. Amazon/BN has it (occasionally), and I've been watching for a copy on eBay or Half.com. The problem is that the #4 book doesn't seem to be discounted appropriately ANYwhere**. And since I haven't actually seen inside the book, do I really want to pony up almost-full-price for what may be an uninspiring rehash of patterns I already have? (L shared some wisdom with me: "Exactly how many stitch patterns do you really need?")

*I got the Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook from the library. Though I'm avoiding the whole spinning thang, I'm expecting to be educated and inspired by the actual knitting info in there.

**Neither Mr. W. nor I care to pay full retail for most anything. Having the wonderful wide web at our disposal USUALLY allows us to find a discount on pretty much anything we want/need, especially if we're patient.

Hmmm.... this post SO didn't go in the direction I expected when I opened up this here Blogger window. Might as well end with a flourish:

Asterisk coloration coding is <FONT COLOR="F6358A">**</FONT>" courtesy of htmlgoodies.com
Asterisk color codes courtesy of ComputerHope.com

Accented "e" (No Diré) is coded as No Dir&eacute; courtesy of Keyboard Help

Escape characters so that I can actually show the codes instead of implementing them courtesy of html-reference.com

Labels: knitting

permalink 0 folks clicked here to comment