Doing well again

Having comments on my blog is always great. But doubly great was getting a comment from Tanya! :) Thank you for the hugs, my dear. Right back atcha.

christine, your comment was exactly right. DH was absolutely thinking about me when he got mad about his anniversary socks. He was peeved because he wanted me to have knitted things for myself and instead I'd spent time making more socks for him. The sentiment is indeed very sweet. His expression of the sentiment, however, blew goat. :)

Also, rachel said that the organization of my workroom (I'm sorry, I just can't refer to it as the re-organization with a straight face since it honestly was never organized to begin with) seems to be coming together. She is RIGHT. Check it out:

That, dear reader, is our household computer, totally connected up, sitting in the closet on the desk that DH made. It's a beautiful thing. The only thing remaining is for DH to build a small shelf on the left side, about a foot and a half above the desk (this leaves enough room to completely lift the lid of the scanner), to hold the printer.

Having the household computer in the closet meant that I was able to move the games computer over to the corner desk where the household computer used to be. Then we put the extra desk in the basement, where it is spending its days reconciling itself to its future as a garage sale item. The result of all this is a bee-yew-tifully blank expanse of wall which will house two more storage shelves:

The shelves have already been purchased and I'm assembling the first of them. Unfortunately, since this requires a drill, I can only do it when DD is awake, so I only have about fifteen minutes of assembling time every weekday evening if I'm lucky. But they will be done soon. Once the shelves are up, I'll use them to store all the crap from the spare room, and then both rooms will be functional. Incredible.

After that of course comes the organization of the shelves themselves. DH has an ongoing shopping assignment to hunt for good (read: cheap) storage containers. When I am done with these shelves it is going to look so frighteningly tidy and organized that no one who knows me will believe I live here anymore. (Or that I will have been replaced by a Stepford robot.) Seriously.

But wait...there's more!

(The non-geeks among you can skip this next part.)

When we originally got the household computer (back when we had money), I also bought a firewire card so that I could download home movies from our camcorder onto our hard drive and burn DVDs of them. Unfortunately, I was never able to get it to work. The computer just wasn't acknowledging the existence of the firewire card, which meant that either the card wasn't fully plugged into the motherboard, or that the card was a dud. However, I never bothered opening up the tower and pushing the card more firmly into the motherboard because...well...come on, it is such a pain in the ass to unplug all the crap at the back of the tower, haul it out in the open, open it up, find a good place for the screws so you don't lose them later, etc. etc. But this past weekend, since I had the tower unplugged and out for its move into the closet anyway, I took the opportunity. I opened up the tower, pushed the card further into the slot - pausing to note that it was already in there securely, this would probably never work - and closed it up again.

When I finally had the computer all connected up again and turned it on...IT RECOGNIZED THAT THERE WAS A FIREWIRE CARD.

Oh joy of freakin' joys. I immediately grabbed the camcorder, connected it up and downloaded some footage onto the hard drive. (DD loved this part. "Look! Iss me!") I added titles and credits and fade-ins and fade-outs and made myself a real lil' ol' movie. :) Next step: to burn the movie onto a DVD and see if I can play it on my TV downstairs.

Did I mention that DH has also been assigned the task of buying DVD-Rs? (Did I also mention that DH has begun complaining about being used as an errand boy? He has an excellent point and I admit that I have guilt. But once I have boxes and DVD-Rs and a printer shelf, I will totally lay off for a while. Probably.)

Self-patterning socks for moi

Yesterday I finished them!



And despite the fact that they look really silly when worn with a suit, I put 'em on while I was still at work. :)



200Sox will be getting wind of these, baybee.

Striped socks for moi

Sock #2 got cast on last night:

Herald's tabard for moi

The intarsia on the front is done. It turned out great:


Although it recently occurred to me that the proportions are going to change a bit once it's fulled. It's going to get a little squatter, since the swatch shrank more vertically than horizontally. Hm. Hopefully it will still look great, though.

My next step, before going much further, is to recreate the neck shaping instructions. But I'm still pretty close to finishing the front.

Dress socks for DH

Well, I did it. I ripped it all back to the part of the toe where I would stop increasing for the women's size. Then I started back up again, just knitting without shaping for the foot. I'm now following the pattern instructions for the women's size, width-wise, and the instructions for the men's size, length-wise. The theory is that this will give me a sock which is long enough for my husband's foot but which won't be ridiculously wide around his feet and legs, given the looser gauge I'm getting by knitting continentally. It's a bit too early to tell for sure but I think it's working. Still loving how I'm zooming along using this technique.