mermaids

With both Mother’s Day and my birthday in the same week, the guys have been fishing for gift ideas.  In reality, I am a low maintenance girl.  Lots of things catch my fancy, but I am too practical to seriously entertain the thought of ownership. 

There was lots of brainstorming.  The guys wanted to get me something really good this year.  At the electronics store, we were all salivating over the giant monitors.  J teased me that my Mr MaGoo vision makes a bigger monitor a necessity.  Thus, the idea was born.  I had no idea just how big that idea that would get. 

We looked at bigger monitors.  Hubski chimes in that I could set up my computer to have two monitors running simultaneously.  Sweet!  No more minimizing windows to work on two applications at once.  As a joke, I said our 42″ TV would make a wicked monitor.  Hubski got that glint in his eye again.  There are TV’s that can be used as computer monitors.  It is easy to switch back and forth between the two functions.  Totally sweet!

My head was spinning at this point.  I don’t even remember how it entered the conversation, but the option of a second DVR was now on the table.  Somehow we went from simply getting a larger monitor to a really big monitor/TV with a DVR.  Of course, I had to get a new graphics card to support the dual monitors.  The new graphics card is freakishly amazing.  It is dangerous to let our family loose in an electronics store. 

My old 19″ monitor is now dwarfed by an awesomely swank 23″ Sony LCD TV which is hooked up to my very own DVR.  I can tape all the craft, DIY, and sewing shows I want.  Hubski was all set to get the 32″ TV, but I just don’t have the room.  It is so cool to drag windows from one monitor to another.  Looking at Flickr photos is seriously fun on the Sony.  The resolution….there are not the words to describe it. 

I have seriously geeked out sewing room now.  I guess I owe the guys a few new shirts.

This post is long overdue.  Sometimes, I have the attention span of a gnat.  I think about things I want write about, but when it is time to write, those thoughts fly right out of my head.  I am trying to get better about jotting things down when the thought strikes.  There is just too much bouncing around in my head at any given moment.  Geesh….there I go again…distracted from my original thought…

If you are looking for some great sewing podcasts, check out Lori’s at Sew Forth Now.  She covers a wide variety of sewing topics.  She has snagged interviews with some “sewing celebrities.”  Lori has a delightfully easy manner and conducts a great interview. 

Way back in the early days of Lori’s podcasts, she asked me to do an interview.  I am not a sewing celeb or expert on anything, but I did give Lori’s editing skills a workout.  :)  It was a little weird being interviewed over the phone.  The interviews I have done in the past have been in person where I can talk with my hands.  Not being able to use my hands or draw pictures is like asking me to lose fifty percent of my vocabulary.  Nonetheless, it was fun.  I think it gave Lori a chance to figure out the whole podcast thing.  We talked about organizing sewing stuff, one of my favorite topics.  Click here if you want to hear it. 

I generally play podcasts on my computer while I am tracing pr cutting out.  I can’t listen to them while I am sewing because the sewing machine drowns out some of the interview.  I definitely cannot listen to them while I driving because I get so caught in listening to the interview that I forget to pay attention to the road.  (The same is true of books on tape/CD.)  Fortunately, my commute to school is less than 3 miles, so I barely have time to listen to whole song much less a long narrative. 

If you pop over to Sew Forth Now, tell Lori “Hi” for me. 

Hubski, C, and I played Scrabble tonight….on line.  We were on three different computers in three different rooms.  Despite the geekiness of it all, we had fun.  We chatted on IM while playing, but Hubski was able to sneak in a little work between turns. I did a little organizing in my sewing room.  We tried to convince J to join in via the laptop, but he was busy reading.  Isn’t it sad that we have enough computers with access to the internet for the whole family to play at once?  Believe it or not, we do not own an actual Scrabble board.  How did that happen?  A normal family would go out and buy a game board.  I am thinking, “Why have more clutter when we can just play on line?” 

We wanted to do something in the mountains, but, collectively, we have way too many orthopedic issues to even think about hiking.  Gem mining sounded like a good excuse to drive up into the mountains and enjoy the view from our car.  We typed the location into Tom the GPS and off we went.  After a thousand twists and hairpin turns, Tom took us to a very rocky dirt road.  At this point we were going on total faith in Tom because we had absolutely no idea where we were or where we were going.  Good ol’ Tom took us right to the front gate where we were greeted by these guys: 

   and this adorable little guy: 

The dogs were quite friendly.  The owner said, “You must have a GPS because there is no way you would have found us without one.”  Apparently all the road markers had been blown down with the recent strong winds. 

I had visions of a very cheesy, high commercial operation with the Gift Shop being the big focus.  Nope.  This was a gorgeous, tranquil farm.  She gives you a bucket and a shovel, then shows where to dig.  Once you have the bucket of dirt, she shows how to sift the dirt through screens in a trough.  The water is diverted from a beautiful little babbling brook.  The water was cold and it was breezy, but the sun felt warm on our faces.  Who knew sifting through dirt could be so relaxing.  We were not expecting to find much in the way of gems.  One or two each would have been exciting.  Well, we each found a little plastic baggie full of sparkly things.  It was mostly rose quartz, fluorite, smoky topaz, and amethyst.  We even found several rubies and sapphires. Of course, they are all unpolished, uncut, and not really gem quality.  Nonetheless, it was fun to find them. 

Checking out the farm animals was an added bonus.  I cannot remember the name of the geese, but she said it is the only breed that does not chase after people.  A very fine quality in a goose, indeed.  I loved the ruffled feathers…so festive….    

Cows have always been a favorite of mine.  They have those big, sweet eyes.  They are good to eat.  They make great coats, bags, and shoes.  This pretty girl let me pet her and even mooed for me.  I did not tell her that the sight of her made me hungry for a burger. 

This horse came walking down the path as if he were jealous of the attention the cow was getting. 

Heading home after a long day at the mine….

If you click on any of the photos, it will take you my Flickr account where I have even more photos.  I am in love with our new camera.  Most of these photos are straight from the camera.  The only editing I did was a little bit of cropping.  I have zero photo skills so this is very exciting for me.  The animals and beautiful scenery just begged to photographed. 

I bought Hubski the GPS because he has no innate navigational skills.  Before any trip, he kills off a forest of trees by printing the entire MapQuest site.  I thought the GPS would bring calm to our family vacations.  This weekend was the first time we really used together. I fell in love with Tom (the GPS) on my escape to DC.  On the first day, Hubski began questioning Tom.  Despite Tom’s insistence that we “go left,” Hubski thought we should go right.  He had absolutely no data on which to base the decision.  No maps, no prior knowledge of the city, no road signs, just his innate navigational skills.  You know what comes next….we were going the wrong way.  Ever patient Tom was giving us directions to get back on the correct path, but Hubski remained dubious.  Ugh.  Tom was smoking from rapidly recalculating our route every time Hubski made a turn that took us farther from our destination.  I began pleading with him to listen to Tom.  The boys joined the chorus of “Listen to Tom.”  At last, he listened to Tom and we found our way.  Why did I buy the man a GPS if he is just going to ignore it?

Towards the end of the trip, I changed Tom’s language preference to Spanish. That made the trip very amusing.  :) 

Here is another photo from our trip:

Lisa’s guess of NYC was good one, but not right.  :)  Another hint - The weather was quite pleasant all weekend, but the temperatures plummeted Sunday night.  There was a chance of snow on Monday.  We were very happy to leave before seeing any snow.  Oh, and I did not buy any fabric because there really were not any good fabric stores, except for a silk shop.  Since Hubski brings silk from Asia, I felt I could skip the silk shop.

Any other guesses? 

Dear Hubski,

If Tom the GPS says, “Turn left,” you really should turn left.   Don’t try to out think it and definitely don’t try to wing it when it comes to navigation.  Really, it is not one of your strengths.

Connect2School (C2S) is a virtual desktop that allows students and teachers to access their data and applications via the internet.  A student can begin working on a document at school and then access the same document from home.  It eliminates the need for carrying floppy disks or a thumb drive to and from school.  (Does anyone even use floppies anymore?!?)  Anyway, there are lots of nifty things one can do with C2S….in theory.

C2S has two major flaws.  The servers are frequently overloaded.  When teachers are trying to input their grades for report cards, it is not uncommon to be unable to log in at all.  More servers would solve that problem, but finding the money for the servers in unlikely.  Reliability is the second issue.  It is not unusual to have documents, even complete folders of documents, simply vanish from C2S.  Our wonderful tech guy, KH, is able to retrieve them on rare occasion.  However, this is of little help to the student whose term vanishes on Sunday night….and the paper is due first thing Monday morning.  KH works long hours, but he is not on call 24/7. 

J is cursed when it comes to C2S.  A few months ago, he had a very involved project about 90% done.  The project was due the following Tuesday morning.  Since it was a long weekend, he was feeling good about his progress.  His plan was to finish it up Saturday morning so he could relax the rest of the weekend.  He logs in and the project is gone.  It was as if the folder never existed.  We make a mad dash to the public library for some fast research because the library was going to be closed on Sunday and Monday for the holiday weekend.  C and I helped him by pulling books, making photo copies, and document source citations.  Poor J spent the rest of the weekend trying to recreate what had been lost.  He finished on time, but there was no relaxing that weekend.  The tech guy never could recover his folder.

Having been burned once, J got smarter.  If he starts a document on C2S at school, he saves a copy to his hard drive as soon as he gets home.  If something gets lost, at least he has some of data saved.  This has been a good practice because it happened again a few weeks ago.  Unfortunately, he had done a large amount of work at school and C2S lost it before he could get home to back it up. 

J has a major paper due on Tuesday.  He has been working on this for weeks and backing it up at home.  His goal was to finish the paper today, print it, bind it, everything, so he could have Sunday to just be a slug.  He had to use C2S for his annotated bibliography because it has a “citation maker” tool that teachers like the students to use.  He had backed up the actual paper to the hard drive…thankfully.  As soon as he completed two page bibliography, he tried to save to the hard drive.  For some unknown reason, C2S not only did not save the additional pages to the hard drive, it lost them completely.  The bibliography was not even on the C2S server.  Vanished into thin air. 

It could be worse.  The whole thing could be gone.  J was just so thrilled to almost be done with this albatross of a project.  He decided it was enough for one day.  Tomorrow, he will recreate his bibliography.  He will still be done ahead of schedule, but he could have done without the additional drama. 

The district wants C2S to be an integral part of the school day and the curriculum.  There is even a program to provide computers and internet access to students who cannot afford it.  In theory, it is a thing of beauty.  However, in practice, it is a nightmare.  We have a high level of tech knowledge in our household.  The fact that we have 5 computers and 4 people speaks volumes. We have learned tricks to manipulate C2S, but there are still times like today when I want to scream in frustration.  I think about the students who have no support at home.  Yet, so many assignments are required to be done on C2S.  Most teachers are fairly understanding of the tech issues.  They will usually give an extension, but it still means recreating your project.

Dogs no longer have to the rap from missing assignments.  Now students can blame it on the computer.  Sadly, it is usually not a lie. 

The tech specialist had a huge coffin like box in the back of library.  It was the new plotter printer and he was not looking forward to deciphering the pictograms that the manufacturer tries to pass off as directions.  The puzzle lover in me was intrigued and I had nothing to do for the last two periods of the day.  The next thing I knew, I ripped open the box and started putting pieces together.  The directions (and I use that term very loosely) were beyond dreadful.  I thought of it as a sewing pattern.   How would I take a bunch of flat pieces and turn them into something three dimensional?  It wasn’t long before that coffin full of parts became this: 

Watch out folks, I have a screwdriver and I am not afraid to use it.

At 8:30 this morning, I was IM’ing with Shari who is visiting DC.  She was torturing me with talk of a trip to IKEA.  Somehow the conversation went from “wouldn’t it be fun to shop at IKEA together” to “find me a hotel room and I’ll call from the road.”  I was DC bound by 10 a.m.

Not only did I ditch Hubski with the two boys (one of whom is somewhat sick), I swiped his birthday present.  Yes, I took the brand new GPS that was going to be his present later this week.  I went with the Tom Tom because it was on sale and we can download the Yoda voice.  As a testament to Tom Tom, I ripped the unit from the packaged, plugged it, and was on my way to DC in a matter of minutes.  The owner’s manual is still in the sealed package.  It is entirely intuitive.  The unit probably does all sorts of nifty things that I will discover when I read the directions.  However, it took me exactly where I wanted to go even though I didn’t really know where that was.

After a couple of phone calls while en route, Shari and I decided to rendezvous at IKEA.  I did not have the exact the address to put into the GPS.  No problem.  A few little taps on the screen and Tom led me right to IKEA.  In a freakish coincidence, Shari arrived at the exact same time.  Considering the distance we were both traveling, from opposite directions, it was an amazing coincidence.

There is much more to say about Tom, the new love of my life, the IKEA visit, and Shari, but it will have to wait.  Right now, I am in a hotel room….all alone.  No one is asking me to find anything.  There is no homework to check.  No laundry to fold.  No one to tell me to turn down the heat.  So please excuse me while I go enjoy the solitude for a bit.

Do you think I can come up with a different “Sew ____” for every day in November?  Is it annoying yet? 

Actually, today’s entry should be “Muy Delicioso!”  The boys had to do some cooking for their Spanish classes.  They chose to make a dessert because they are my sons and know dessert is the most important meal of the day.  They selected Mexican Mocha Cookies because “the recipe has chocolate in it and doesn’t look too hard.”  Yep, definitely my boys. In order to get credit, the boys had to do all the cooking.  My only job was to make sure they didn’t burn down the house or chop off a finger.  Emeril has nothing to worry about, but they did okay.  The house smells positively divine!  The recipe calls for coffee, lots of brown sugar and chocolate coating on top.  Naturally, we had to sample the cookies.  I think we have found a new family favorite recipe.  However, after spending the afternoon making several dozen, I don’t want to see another cookie for at least a day or two.  If anyone is interested, I will post the recipe.

On the sewing front, not much was accomplished.  I thought about the jacket quite a bit. I am still in a quandary about the sleeves.   There are several options, all of which would look good.  I need to just commit to something and move forward.  Holding true to my goal of physically moving the project forward each day, I did sew a couple more seams on the lining.  Tomorrow, Hubski will be at work, so I should be able to focus more on sewing.  He was distracting me today with looking at reviews for a new digital camera.  There are too many from which to choose.