May!

 I've become truly lousy about blogging,


but I am getting some crafting done.  Two new fabric & rope bowls are done and in the gift bin, but much of my crafting time has been taken up by...
a new piano!!! My old piano had been my grandmother's and never had great action to begin with, and then shortly after we moved to this house, it was ruined by a water leak and was essentially unplayable and unfixable.  I have a digital piano, but it's just not the same.  I fell in love with the Essex upright pianos while I worked at the music store, and my mother had always wanted a really nice piano, so we went to piano shopping together and both picked out an Essex.  I love it!  Charlie isn't as sure.



On the one hand, it's something new to climb on.  On the other hand, I think she sees it as a rival for attention and walking across the keys isn't as much fun as laying on fabric when I sew or laying on the computer when I worked from home.  And I won't let her help with knitting,
so she's feeling pretty abandoned right now.  Most of her life, Andy and I both worked from home and she sees nothing good about us leaving the house.  Ever.

 Spring has arrived--sort of.  It snowed and froze on Monday, but luckily all I have right now are bulbs and annuals coming up,



but it has been a cold spring.  As I'm now doing marketing for a local heating & air conditioning company, that makes work just as interesting as yardwork.  It's giving me time to fix some problems with ads not getting changed (for 2 years and listing both incorrect pricing and advertising our former line of equipment), website issues (too many to list), and I've been given 5 direct-reports, so there's lots to do even in our slow season. 

Hope everything is going well in your part of the world!  Happy crafting!

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ostrich Plume Scarf

Image
This scarf is actually very simple, but I'm trying to make the directions as thorough as possible.  It has a moss-stitch border of 6 rows on top and bottom and 4 stitches on each side, and uses the stitch pattern KNOWN as Ostrich Plume (hence the name).  There's a 3-stitch decrease using a slip 2, k1, pass slipped stitches over, which creates a nicer look than the traditional slip 1, k2tog, pass slipped stitch over technique, but feel free to use the more traditional decrease if you choose.  I used a shorter bottom and top edging to allow the wavy stitch pattern to pull the border into the wave effect, but you could certainly add a few extra rows of moss-stitch to the top and bottom if you would like. I have written this to slip the first stitch of all but the very first row as I think it makes a nicer edge, but you may choose to simply knit them.  As a matter of personal preference, I never slip the first stitch of the first row--it doesn't work with some cast-o...
Read more

Prabook.org - Identity Theft R Us

So Sunday night I discovered a new "social media" website called prabook.org , and the WAY I discovered it was to find out that someone had created a profile for ME-- without my permission or knowledge --INCLUDING date and location of birth, who my parents are (including my mother's maiden name), and they even had a copy of an old resume and had uploaded all the details from that. I immediately contacted them to tell them to take it down, which they did, but they said that since anyone can add information, it could be restored, they would do nothing about it, and they assumed no responsibility for anything about their website. I know there's a lot of information and public records available online, but the resume they got hold of was from around 1997, so it would have been printed on actual paper and mailed to companies.  It was never emailed or uploaded to anything.  So the copy they have, if not obtained illegally, was certainly obtained in an unaut...
Read more

The Great Knit Picks Fiasco

As most of the knitting world knows by now, if you have purchased anything from Knit Picks in the past few years, your credit card might have been swiped and been receiving fraudulent charges in the past couple months (this in spite of the fact that their web checkout SPECIFICALLY says they don't store your credit card information).  They weren't actually hacked--it sounds like the server was sort of unsecured.  Now, if you are aware of this, you didn't hear it from Knit Picks themselves.  Nope. You would have found out from someone else, most likely Ravelry.  That is because vigilant knitters finally found a security breach announcement on the California Attorney General's office, here:  https://www.privacyrights.org/node/55899 The California notice says that the breach was made public on February 11.  It was cross-posted to a group I'm in on Ravelry on February 15.  Knit Picks customers were notified by email or mail...........NEVER.  In spite...
Read more