spaazlicious

This is the sweater for which I've been using the Gatsby. I wanted a simple repetitive cable stitch pattern and picked the lancet braid from Barbara Walker's third stitch book, that I received from my Mom for Christmas.

This is very fast...unless you count knitting and re-knitting the left front four, five, six times.

It's snuggly. It's also missing the collar and midriff. I'm going to knit a spiral rib and we'll see how it goes.

Good Causes

Amy Boogie's husband has a very funny friend with a very unfunny brain tumor, and there's a fundraiser going on to defray the costs of its removal.

If you are a small crafting business looking to get your name out there while benefitting the best. dogs. ever. or somebody who digs independent crafty stuff (there's vegan stuff, subversive cross-stitch, handpainted yarns and fibers by yours truly...) check out Crafters for Critters.

And I have to get my @ss in gear 'cuz Nick and I are running the Race For Autism 5k on the 25th with Nancy and her family in Balboa Park. Diagnoses of autism are going up, causes are still unclear; it's a very worthy cause, please donate if you can spare it.

And I received info from the Revlon run/walk in the mail today. It's a 5k, and held in L.A. on May 13. It's a flat course and I loved running into the Coliseum at the end (they have the same route this year). I didn't dig the disorganisation at the start last year, but it'd be a fun run. Then again, an early morning...I can't decide if I want to run it again this year. We're doing the Bay to Breakers 12k mobile party scene for the first time on the 22nd of March. Which reminds me, I need to start pricing hotels.

Oh wow. I just checked out the Fairmont for the dates, because we had a great time at The Tonga Bar when we lived in the Bay Area, and umm...yeah. For $750 a night, I expect a cleaning service in the line of Coming to America ("the royal penis is clean, sire"). Wow, must be a nice room. We'll probably stay across the bay anyway, and may drive up in the first place. I want to go running in Redwoods again. Man, I miss Oakland.

Although, I miss Sacramento too. But we love San Diego too (see photo at end to see picture which summarises why). Are we geo-polygamists?

Via IM, Nancy and I watched the first half of an "Inside Polygamy" program before I couldn't take it anymore.

When Nick and I lived in Sacramento, we had an InstantMessaging program. It used to drive me crazy because every time I was trying to waste time on the PC online it would log on and Nick's family would pop up trying to chat with him. Then I would have to relinquish the pc/or admit that no, I was trying to waste time online and he wasn't available.

So I've kind of had a "meh" attitude toward IM, until recently.
Recently, while we were all trying to organise a local knitter outting we flurried something like 26 e-mails. So I thought we should look into it. I thought I'd try to be cool and install Jabber as part of my pseudo-tech geek persona. Part of picking jabber is picking a client. I picked Trillian, because of the name, being a HGTG fan and all. But I didn't download/pay for Pro, so it's kind of moot. The free version still has a ton of plugins, namely Yahoo, without all the yahoo service crap add-ons and failures. So, I'm really diggin' it. I only sign in to Trillian when I think I might have time for chatting and it kills all the problems of an auto-logging in service (yahoo's apparent default). So, if you ever want to IM a total dork, add "tortadetortuga" at yahoo dot com to your contacts. It might be fun, but no guarantees. ;)

Also, via IM, Nancy gave me my favorite link of the week:

A Catapult!

Beauty, eh?