luisa's bat

K-dawg emailed me and told me I needed to blog. And I've got a bit of downtime tonight hanging out in Lakeland, so I figured now was a good time.

This is the bat I made for my friend Luisa's 30th birthday. We stopped by to see her on Friday the 13th on our way down to Florida for a wedding.

Luisa used to work at the Luby Foundation outside Gainesville, Florida, where they housed a lot of bats. One time she took me and Tiffany on a tour and we had a blast. Here are some video and photos from our trip... 6 or 7 years ago.

food update

so since i'm up and on blogger anyways, I may as well post a food allergy update. I'm not eating gluten, nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant), or anything with obvious corn in it (corn, corn flower, corn syrup). I've been feeling much better, which is exciting. I am not as tired in general (as evidenced from not being able to sleep tonight?), and not nearly as achy. I've pretty much figured out how to handle restaurants, including frequenting my most favorite Doc Chey's where the manager will watch the line cooks if necessary to make sure nothing contaminates the food. (I love Doc Chey's!!). After this busy weekend, I will probably re-introduce tomatoes and peppers, to see if those really bother me or if it's just potatoes. I'm not certain about the corn thing, but I think I get an upset stomach when I have corn, so I'm staying away for a while. I'm pretty excited to be figuring these things out, and I'm especially excited to realize that I don't feel so exhausted and cranky all the time anymore.

Hooray for discovering food intolerances!

electricity vampires and sleep deprivation

I cannot sleep. I don't really know why. Sure, I had a half-caff americano around 5pm, but should that really keep me up at 5am? I've been tossing and turning for 5 hours! So I finally gave up and just got up to stare at the glowing laptop screen. Today will be a tough work day. Not to mention Brooke hooked us up with free tix to a midnight screening of The Happening for tonight. Ouch.

So Chris sends me emails full of links to interesting things sometimes, and when I have a few free minutes I'll go thru them. But I've been really busy at work, so they are backing up and I've got about 7 emails of 2-8 links each that i haven't looked at. So I decided to check some of them out, and I found one I wanted to make sure everyone knew about.

Did you realize that your phone charger is still sucking power even when your phone isn't plugged into it? Same with your laptop even when it's got a full battery? I don't understand this concept AT ALL. What can my cell charger possibly be doing with that power if it's not going into a phone? Regardless, this is resulting in a lot of wasted money and greenhouse emissions. We are going to start trying to remember to unplug things whenever we aren't using them, but there are some sites that have other tips for reducing these electricity vampires.

good excuse

I have a good excuse for not posting or being crafty lately. I swear. The excuse is food sensitivities. I've spent the past month obsessing over food, mainly because there's so much of it I can't eat. So far I've figured out that gluten makes me feel icky, and strangely enough I'm pretty sure potatoes make my muscles hurt a lot more. Potatoes! I am also pretty sure that corn and rice are safe. But that's as far as I've gotten. Tomatoes and peppers are part of the potato family (strangely enough) so I am avoiding anything with gluten, potato, tomato, or pepper in them for a long time. During this process I try to see if I start feeling better (do my muscles hurt less? Is it possible that they will stop hurting altogether? Will I stop feeling so tired all the time?) and if things get better, I can bring back tomatoes and see what happens. Then peppers. Then I'll even try potatoes again just in case it wasn't actually potatos. Then comes the fun part (probably months from now) when I try gluten again (find my favorite bread product and chow down) and see what happens, most likely to find that it poisons my body. Hopefully though all of this I will figure out what I can and cannot eat, and from there feel like a better human being. Yay.

In the mean time, much of my life is revolving around coming up with yummy tasty things that I CAN eat, and researching and inspecting labels of everything to make sure I'm not missing hidden gluten. Did you know gluten is in FREAKING EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD? I would be better off if I just never bought anything packaged again, but let's face it, that's not very realistic for me.

I also decided that Food Restrictions Time was also a good time for me to lose a few pounds. I have a pair of pants that I LOVE that I bought about 4 years ago, and I think there is no good reason why I shouldn't be able to fit my butt into them again. So the goal is to fit back into them. I found this fantastic website called The Daily Plate where I have a free account, and I can search for the foods I eat and it will keep track of all the calories, fat, etc that I've eaten in a given day. It also tells me how many calories I should eat if I want to lose a certain amount each week, based on my weight. It's fantastic. So I've been planning my daily food with that, and learning how to control portion sizes (instead of eating half a bag of rice chips like I want to do REALLY BADLY right now, I only eat 10 chips which is like torture).

So with all of that going on, I've just been too preoccupied with preparing tasty healthy poison-free food to do anything else crafty and fun. I mean, I've kind of been having fun making things like mango salsa, sprouted 15 bean soup with chicken sausage, and curry-flavored roasted chick peas. But it takes lots of research and planning and grocery shopping.

Alas! I will probably be all-encompassed by this food nonsense for a few more weeks before I get used to it. I mean, I want to finish all my crochet projects, master resin beads, and fun stuff like that... but there just aren't enough hours in my days. So for now, they will have to wait.

update

So it's been a while since I've posted; there's been a lot going on. The quick update is that I had to get a root canal and I might be intolerant to gluten (that would be wheat)... and the only way to find out about the gluten is with a really strict awful diet, where I'm also trying to figure out if i'm intolerant to other foods as well (I'm currently wondering about potatoes and/or corn). It's making my really cranky right now because I really just want starches, but starches are what seem to be making me feel awful. So it will be a new rollercoaster of foods I can't eat, and avoiding restaurants until this is all solved. We love eating out so that's making this really hard as well. But on the plus side we'll probably save money on food! (Which is very necessary after the aforementioned root canal!).

I also just got a new computer because Chris's old one is about dead, so I gave him my old one and traded up. ::drools for the new macbook pro::

So with all this madness I haven't been in a crafty mood, or a reading mood, more anything fun like that. And until the new computer came I have been cutting down on my web surfing time, so that also contributes to the non-posting of blogs. And that's the update.

Pi day!

It's my favorite math-alicious day again, and I almost MISSED it. Luckily some random website tipped me off. So I went out looking for pi-themed crochet, and I discovered that last year's post about pi day is in google's top 10 list for a search of pi day crochet ... go figure. I'm a nerd. (For those of you who have no idea what Pi Day is, including all my coworkers, here's the wikipedia page to explain it all.)

In honor of the day, here are a couple of pi-themed crochet things I found:

Transcendental Number as Personal Chronogram (Pi)

And a little less high art: the Pi Calculator Case

Happy Pi Day!

Deer, side view

Chris posted a photo of the deer I needle-felted him for Valentine's day, but he never posted a side-view, which I like better. So here is a side view of my first completed needle-felting project. (If you can't tell, I'm playing catch-up with posts this morning.

I've been really slack with crochet projects lately. I still need to finish that sweater, and I made a baby blanket for a friend at work, but I don't really have any fun new projects to post. Hopefully I'll get some time to work on some of the stuff floating around in my head soon.

Nora's Dragon

I posted this to my Flickr account a while back, but kept forgetting to post it here as well. This is the dragon I made for my friend Nora as a belated Christmas present (I think I managed to finish it right before the end of January).

I was inspired by this slightly fierce but friendly really dragon, but I wanted to come up with my own design. The first time around the face was more of an alligator's face, so I made my dad a gator for Christmas (but forgot to take a picture, alas).

More Instructables Awesomeness

Much to my surprise, I got an email today letting me know that my crocheted goldfish is one of the winners of the Lion Brand Yarn Challenge at Instructables.com. I had seen SO MANY great projects on there that I wasn't expecting to win at all, so I feel very honored.

In other news, our lives have been crazy and work has been crazy and so blogging has been... nil. But things are good, and we're starting to shop for a house in Atlanta, which is pretty exciting. I actually haven't done much crocheting lately, because I've been focussed on other things. I still have a ton of half-finished projects and ideas for projects that I want to work on... and I actually have photos of some things that I haven't posted yet.

But if you're here looking for craftiness, check out my husband's blog where he posted the tiny needle-felted deer trophy I made him for Valentine's day. It's my first needle felting project, I'm really happy with how it turned out. But he needs to post a side shot... it looks better from the side.

momma purse

For my momma's upcoming birthday, I crocheted her a purse. She got it in the mail today so now I can post photos of it! I recycled a metal clasp from another purse and started by crocheting right onto the clasp, and then building it down from there. I used Lion's Brand alpaca yarn (same as I used for my elephant), which I love the look of, but the alpaca hairs really shed all over and I wouldn't recommend it for anything that is going to be WORN, which is why I just use it for purses and amigurumi. And it's really soft, so the purse was really flimsy... I had to rig some metal wire inside to keep its shape, and kinda sew that into place, and then I hand-sewed a lining to go inside as well. (I'm still kinda scared of my sewing machine, so I decided hand-sewing was the way to go). It definitely isn't perfect craft (I'm not much of a sewer), but I'm pretty happy with it. And my momma sounded excited about it, so that's what matters.

rocking my socks off

Okay, just when I was thinking I was making some kinda cool stuff, I find this girl's blog and find someone making way cooler stuff. I'm so jealous of her mad crochet skills... I like how she makes her stuff more realistic, not just cutesy. Most amigurumi is just some colored circles and cute eyes and a smile, it's a bit more rare to find someone doing something more realistic. I also think she's a bit more determined to make a ton of them until she gets it right... I don't have that much determination. Usually I just go with whatever I can come up with, or I give up. I never thought of brushing my yarn to make it fuzzier, I will definitely have to experiment with that now. And I might hafta try making her tree frog. I love tree frogs.

Blessings

This morning on the Marta the old guy I was sitting next to saw me reading my devotional and asked me if I was a Christian. I said yes, and then he asked if I knew where the ichthus fish symbol came from, so we talked about that for a minute. He said "I just thought of that when you got on the train for some reason." Then I went back to reading.

As I left he told me to "have a blessed day" and I told him to do the same. For some reason this phrase stuck with me... it's something cheesy that Christians say all the time and it always seems just like the stock thing to say instead of "have a good day" to signify "hey, I love Jesus, so I'm going to say blessed instead." But for some reason today I just kept thinking about it and what that actually means. I've been sick and feeling icky lately, and just really worn down... like it's just tough to get up and get through the days. So I started thinking about how I really NEED a blessed day... physically and emotionally. So I said to God "I actually need you to bless me today. I don't know what that looks like... but You do. And I know that however You choose to bless me will be what I need."

So I'm at work, having a quiet but productive work day (which is probably a blessing in itself) and I take a break to check Craftzine.com's blog, cuz I do that sometimes to give my brain a break. I love looking at cool crafty things. And what do I see, but a notice that I won their random book giveaway. How cool! I got pretty excited about that... I don't usually win things, but this week I won a crafty contest, which is awesome, but this one didn't even require any talent or anything on my part. It was just kinda random. And I immediately remembered my prayer for blessings. So that made me happy.

Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! -Matthew 7:9-11

Penguin wins!

My crochet penguin pattern won 2nd prize in the Instructables Homemade Holidays contest! Hooray! I'm pretty psyched to get a subscription to Craft magazine. I'm already addicted to their blog.

Crochet Goldfish Pattern

I made a goldfish this week, and I actually kept track of what I did and wrote a pattern for it. Since I'm kind of experimenting with writing patterns, I'm giving it away for free:

Crochet goldfish pattern in Acrobat PDF format (right-click: Save Target As... in Internet Explorer)
I would love feedback from anyone who makes this. I'm thinking the yarn i used is a little too dark orange, I may go looking for another color yarn before i make another one.
All the photos are courtesy of my wonderful husband. Yay Chris!

Update: When I wrote the pattern I didn't have a lot of time, so I didn't spend much time trying to format it to specific rows or testing it for typos. So a lot of people are mentioning having trouble with it, which probably means it has typos, and would probably also be easier if I reformatted it. Since I don't have any time to do any of that, I'm just removing the pattern until some later date when I can reformat it and get a couple of testers. I did all of that (good formatting, a few testers to verify it all works) with the Sea Creature Mobile, so if you're looking for some goldfish, there's a pattern for a different style of goldfish there.

Update 5/18/2010: Okay, enough people have been asking me to post it, so it's back up. Most of the people who have asked for it also promised to send me feedback, but no one has, so if you are the rare person who actually goes through the pattern and wants to send me notes/suggestions/feedback to make it better, I will forever be in your debt. At any rate, you've been warned that the formatting is weird, plus I just did some strange things to get it to look the way it is supposed to and sometimes that's hard to explain, but I do think that if you can look past that you can get it to turn out okay. Good luck!

my new hat

I made this last week to help keep my ears warm. My piercings get REALLY cold when it's cold and windy out. I also decided I needed more green in my wardrobe. I love this color green.

and since we've no place to go...

I really love the weather widget image for snow. Seems so much nicer than the real stuff outside.

featured 2

New update, they also featured my penguin pattern. Pretty cool!

crochet purses

I was just organizing posts with labels and such, and I realized I never posted a picture of the purse I made Emily for her birthday, because I didn't want her to see it. Now I can post it. So here it is:

This was actually the second purse I made... the first one is the one I use every day.



(first purse)

These two were both crochetted with wool and felted. I actually have a couple others I just never took pictures of. Right now I'm working on a purse for my momma (not felted)... I actually need to get off the computer and hand-sew a lining for it... I'll post a photo once I finish that one.

featured...

So I posted photos of my crochet elephant on instructables for a contest... a few minutes later I got an email telling me they were featuring it on their homepage. Pretty cool!

I took a screenshot of it cuz I'm sure it won't last there long.

Crochet Penguin Pattern

Okay, I posted a pattern for my baby penguin on Instructables. This took way too much work.

adorable...

This just might be the cutest thing I ever did see.

It's a good thing it was already sold out once I saw it, or else I probably would have made a completely impractical impulse buy! (impractical because I don't really wear rings.) The rest of her stuff doesn't excite me quite as much.

after Christmas shopping...

So we've been really busy, between prepping for holidays, being gone for the holidays, and recovering from the holidays. There are things I've meant to post that I just haven't had time to do. Not that I have time now; I'm at work and stuff. But I just remembered that I meant to post this and if I don't do it now, I'll forget forever.

My friend Kim has an Etsy store with some great paintings that you should check out. I got a set of Christmas cards from her to send to people for Christmas, they were photographs of some of the paintings she has for sale. And she's selling stuff for super-cheap, so if you see something you like you should snatch it up soon!

crochet holidays

So between my birthday last week (I turned "too many" years old) and early Christmas gifts, it's been a very crochet holiday season. I'm pretty psyched with all the yarn and yarn gift certificates and similar crochet-erific gifts. And teas. I love yarn and teas, and apparently everyone who knows me knows it too, which is great. Oh, I also got two Oxfam Unwrapped gifts, irrigating a farmer's land and providing seeds to farmers. Pretty great! Anyways, back to the crochet.

I think the best crochet gift ever is the one that my friend Jaime gave me last week. It's a crochet hook with an LED light at the end, so I can crochet in the DARK! Why would I want to crochet in the dark? The main reason is road trips. We tend to drive long distances at night, and it kills me that I can't do anything useful in the car when it's dark. But now I can continue crocheting! Because I'm a crocheting maniac.

Pretty great stuff!

crochet: clutch

So I crochetted this clutch purse for a friend of mine, and then I asked Angela to help me with sewing on the zipper since i'm clueless with a sewing machine. Little did I know that this would require making a whole inner lining, and that the whole process would take something like 10 hours to figure out. Poor Angela! But she was a trooper, and I think the lining makes this so much better. But I will probably never make another clutch since they need a zipper and zippers are difficult. Alas.

crochet: rockhopper penguin

I just finished this for my cousin for Christmas, because he likes penguins. I'm not sure he turned out just like I expected, but I hope he likes it.

I think I'm going to try to write a pattern for the baby penguin. We'll see how that turns out.

lol of the day

Chris says I am a total loser, but today's Dinosaur Comic made me laugh a lot. So much that I had to share.

more crochet

So I finally uploaded some photos of some of my other crochet projects... one of them I did a couple months ago, is this elephant that I made without a pattern... I still don't really know how I did it, and I'm not sure I could replicate it.

I also crochetted and felted this purse for my sis-in-law Nicole for Christmas... we just exchanged gifts this past weekend, so now I can show you.

She picked out the colors and gave me an idea of what she wanted, because I'm kind of determined not to make things like purses for people unless I know what they want... I don't want to spend 50 hours making something that someone is going to throw in their closet and never look at again, ya know?

I also made a purse for my other sis-in-law Emily for her birthday, but I don't k now where the pictures are. I forgot to upload them to flickr I guess. Alas, later.

Oh yeah, if you're wondering, I still haven't finished my sweater. I kind of got tired of making the sleeves, so I'm taking some time off from it while I try to get a few Christmas gifts made. It won't be a very handmade Christmas though, I just don't have a lot of time. ::sigh:: But hopefully I'll get that sweater finished this winter while I can still enjoy it.

Christmas Ideas

If you're overwhelmed by the thought of asking for more "stuff" for Christmas (or people gifting you stuff even though you didn't ask for it), try asking for something a little different this year... like a sheep, or a crocodile, or an irrigation system. Not for you, of course, but for people for whom a gift like this could change lives. Oxfam Unwrapped has a ton of new gift ideas since the last time I talked about them, so you should check it out and see if there's anything in there that strikes your fancy.

I know that personally I'm afraid to give these gifts to most of the people I need to get gifts for, because I'm afraid of offending them by not giving them something tangible that can clutter up their homes. Maybe I'm totally misguided, but I keep hearing everyone's unenthusiastic "uh.. thanks... this is... just... great," when I think of giving these gifts. So if you would like something like this, make sure to tell people so that they know this is a gift you would enjoy. I'm all for it, in case you were wondering. :-)

laying low

Not a whole lot going on here; nothing to report. I have been really lazy during my long weekend. Really lazy. As in watching hours of YouTube videos and playing games on my PDA lazy. I planned on going out shopping on Friday, but then I went through all the Black Friday ads and realized that there were no better sales than normal sales. If there were some good sales on hard drives, maybe a cheap PC laptop to replace the one that is falling apart, maybe some good sales on jeans, I'd be out there fighting the crowds with the rest of the good Americans doing their patriotic duty to spend money the day after Thanksgiving. But when the "sales" are things like $30 jeans and buy one pair of shoes get one pair half off, or $600 laptops, it just wasn't worth it. That's the kind of sales these places have most of the time. So why would I fight the crowds on the busiest shopping day? No thankyou.

So to make up for barely leaving the house Friday, I planned to go run some errands on Saturday. But then Chris got some awful food poisoning from our Tin Drum Asia Cafe take-out, and woke me up in the middle of the night with it. So we had a rough night, and he spent most of Saturday recovering from that. I just thank God that I didn't get food poisoning, too. The last time we were both out of commission with food poisoning, and that was about the worst two days of my life. We were so helpless we had to call a friend to bring us gatorade and soup, and then we didn't know how either one of us would manage to open the door when she arrived, because we were afraid if we moved an inch we'd be sick again. Awful.

Anyways, I left the house long enough to get us some groceries and cleaning supplies, and that's about it. (I did go to Michael's to get some yarn that was still on sale for the rest of Saturday, but that was a lame sale too, so I only bought what I needed. Disappointing sales). Anyways. I've been lazy.

Chris works tomorrow so we won't go to church until the evening service, and now that I've spent 3 days being lazy I don't know if I'll be able to snap out of it and make myself leave the house when I have no plans and most the people I know are still out of town for the weekend. Maybe I'll just work on my sweater. I've finally got the body completed and I sewed snaps on it today... now it's just down to the sleeves, and I'll have made my first sweater. If I'm really diligent this week I might even finish it in the month of November, which was my goal for NaKniSweMo. Huzzah!

Chris says it's bedtime, so off I go.

chased down

So if you haven't read Chris's account of our drive up to see my grandma last week, you need to start by reading that now. Then come back here, because I'm not going to repeat it, just add to it.

You back? Okay. So being pulled over by the police 3 times in 4 hours is Nones The Cool. I was freaking out by the end. I knew we weren't speeding, but here were these cops insisting that we were speeding, and treating my husband like a criminal, patting him down and making him sit with him in the cruiser while they make sure he's not a wanted felon, all because they say we were driving 64 in a 55. (And let me take this time to say, for all you haters out there who have already decided that we must have been at fault if the police pulled us over, that Chris's cruise control was set to 60. Going 5mph over isn't illegal. And my boss, who is awesome, let us borrow his TomTom last night to check our speed, and it turns out our spedometer is off by 2mph, so we were probably really going 62mph. NOT 64 like these cops insisted. That's a big difference too, because you know a cop isn't going to pull someone over for 7 miles over, it's not even worth it.)

It was really ridiculous. I'm pretty sure that the Indiana police were looking for something in particular... either specifically looking for a car that met our description (which is what it felt like) or maybe they were specifically targeting a certain group who tends to drive cars that look like ours? I don't know. I'm also pretty sure the last guys who pulled us over and said we were going 64 knew they were lying but wanted a reason to pull us over. When I said to Officer #2 (while Chris was in the cruiser) "Our spedometer must be off, because I know he was only going 60," the guy just said "Or he was lying, and didn't want to admit he was going 64," like there was no way they were wrong, AND there was no way our spedometer was wrong. We MUST be lying, because Chris is bald with a long ghoti. It was also weird when they got the confirmation over the radio that Chris's ID came up with nothing, the way the cop assured me "Well, there's not a warrant out for his arrest, so you're fine." He told me like this was NEWS, that I would be happy to hear. I just stared at him like "Well no kidding. I knew that before you did." And THEN that's when they wanted to search our car. After all this other crap, they are still so determined to find something because apparently we fit some bullshit profile, so we MUST be carrying drugs. But, thank goodness for my sanity, after questioning us extensively they decided not to tear apart our car to look for the non-existent drugs.

After all this nonsense, the only thing I can say is that, okay fine, they're doing their job and if they were looking for a car like ours (which is the only reasonable explanation), then sure, pull us over every hour, but when you realize we're not the people you're looking for, just freaking LET US GO and don't search for reasons to give us expensive tickets or waste our time searching our car. Really. I would be much less pissed off if these guys were just honest about what they were doing. I can't afford a ton of meaningless tickets because some other jerk did something with a green acura integra or something. It's just unreal.

That's all I have to say about this ridiculousless.

Savannah Film Festival ... 2007

Chris and I are spending a couple days back in the SAV for the Savannah Film Festival. We're not showing a film here this year, but it's such a fun festival that when we were able to score some passes, we decided we had to go. (Our friend at Short End Magazine has Chris taking photos for her, so he has a media pass. And my boss's boyfriend works for SCAD now, so he managed to get a pass for me, cuz he's awesome). And Angela has an apartment here for a couple more days, so we're crashing on her floor just a block from The Bean. We've got some other friends in town for the festival, one of whom is a producer for Honeydripper, which is showing Monday (and its director, John Sayles is being honored with a lifetime achievement award). So it should all be good times, for the couple of days that we're here. Chris will spend the days photographing and watching films, and I'll spend the days working on my computer at the Bean. Then in the evenings we'll enjoy the films and the after parties. Fun Fun!

So anyways, the funny things for my weekend are how my brain has apparently predicted too many of the events of the weekend before they happened. This isn't something that usually happens to me, so I'm wondering if something is "up" for the weekend that I should keep my eyes out for. For instance, last year I told Chris that I expected Michael Douglass to be at SFF, which he was not, of course. But he WAS here this year, and was honored last night. So I was just a year off in my prediction. That's pretty random in itself, but I also had a dream a couple weeks ago where I was in Savannah right before Angela was supposed to move out (did I mention she's moving out in the middle of the week? When I had this dream not only did we not know when she was leaving, but I also had no intention of coming down for the festival). Anyways, we were staying at her house, and it was pretty empty because it was falling apart and people were moving things out, and some guy took the door handle off the door and we were pretty ticked off about it because that meant that anyone could get into the house. Some guy was also dismantling the roof and it was about to rain. I was telling Angela that she NEEDED to leave, her apartment was being taken apart, it was obviously time to go, but she was putting it off and saying she needed to stay a few more days. I thought it was all a big metaphor for the fact that Angela is afraid to leave what she knows even if what she knows is falling apart. And while sure, I'm sure a lot of it was a metaphor, but here I am, and her apartment is basically empty except for the carload of stuff she's taking with her, and this morning a woman at Home Depot ruined her only key into her apartment while trying to make a dupe, so she had to call a locksmith who had to take the handle off the door in order to make her a new key. Pretty strange! Angela told me that if a tree falls through her roof she's going to totally blame me (in my dream there was also part of a tree int he apartment, so I am guessing that's why they were dismantling the roof). Crazy stuff. So I'm trying to stay on guard in case anything else happens that seems eerily familiar.

But for now I'm gonna try and be productive and hope my computer doesn't overheat (it's been doing that a lot lately. It's about time for a visit to the apple store for a tune-up).

life ...

I keep meaning to take the time to post about a bunch of stuff... I've forgotten most of what I actually planned to post about... I've got some photos of some crochet stuff I've made, and my parents came to visit recently, and... oh, who knows what else. But I've been really busy with lots and lots of work and so I've felt guilty even thinking about taking 20 minutes to post a blog so I just haven't been. But now I'm at a coffee shop in Savannah and I already spent two hours chatting with old friends when I was supposed to be working, so what's another 20 minutes? That's what I figure.

Anyways, Atlanta is good, work is good, but I'm too busy. I don't get to rest enough, and when I do rest because I'm exhausted I feel guilty because I have work to do. It's because i have a full time job and a part-time job and so those come first, but then I also have freelance work. So after all of those I don't have the time to work out and crochet and hang out with friends like normal people. Or if I do any of those things I, again, feel guilty. I keep thinking I'll get things under control and stop feeling so overworked but... yeah, that hasn't happened yet, so I don't know why I think it would start. Anyways.

I have actual stories but I'm going to post that in another blog post so it looks like i've actually been devoting time to this stuff.

walk to work

When I get off at the downtown MARTA station, I have a short walk through an above-ground covered walkway to get to my building. It's actually a pretty need walk... all these photos were taken from basically the same spot on the walkway, just turning in different directions.

fun crochet projects

These are the things I made this week. An iPod cozy (cuz my old case broke), and an amigurami bird. I made them both up from scratch... no patterns, so I'm pretty proud of them.

My bird needs a name, so I'm open to suggestions.

My iPod cozy isn't the prettiest thing ever, but it works.

I've got a few more photos of them up on my flickr site, some different angles of my bird and the back of my iPod cozy. Fun times.

Bomb Art, or Stupidest MIT Student Ever?

Wow, this article is pretty bizarre: Woman at Logan claims fake bomb is art, police say. I have to assume that this girl expected to be arrested, wearing a fake bomb into an airport. But the fact of the matter is that she very well could have been shot and killed if she slipped up at all and any of the officers were afraid she was about to detonate her "bomb" ... they have no way of knowing if it's fake or not when it's strapped to her body. (I mean, they thought LED signs were bombs a few months ago).

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think it's silly when people get scared of Mario Blocks or LED signs and think that they're bombs, but because people are afraid of that anything out of the ordinary is a bomb, I also think it's really stupid to actually PRETEND to have a bomb. Especially in an airport. Even if you think you're being a risky conceptual artist (and this is coming from the girl who was indoctrinated for 4 years in an art program that is ALL ABOUT risky conceptual art). And that's my 2 cents on the matter.

soap

So I did some freelance work for a woman I used to work with in Vidalia, for her soap company. She makes it all from home, so I exchanged work for soap. Today the box of soap came! I'm pretty excited to have yummy soap for a while. My eczema on my hands totally cleared up when I started using only organic soap, so I'm happy to be stocked up for a while.

If anyone else wants some yummy soap, you can order it from her website. I think she's also got some at Wild Fibre in Savannah.

plants!

Okay, so I've been wanting to post some photos, and I finally took some the other day, so here are my new plants (and my old plants too)...

my new herbs...



My new Salvia plant. It has blue flowers that are supposed to attract hummingbirds, supposedly.


My indoor plants that make me smile.




Shannon gave me a tiny offshoot of this plant, and it's grown to this crazy thing in the past year. I also broke off 3 pieces and started those as new plants. I've never done that successfully with any other plants, but this is the most hearty plant ever. I have no idea what it's called, though.




This is one of the offshoots. I just planted this one and gave it to Noralil.

for Angela...

... and Nicole... and Sam... and Emily.

Did Steve tell you that, perchance? Steve.

Talk Like a Pirate Day

Because it's my duty to tell you about important, oft-forgotten holidays, I must pass on what Jaime reminded me - today is
International Talk Like a Pirate Day! While it's debatable whether this is more or less exciting than Pi Day, where you get to eat pie and sound nerdy reciting the numbers in pi, on International Talk Like a Pirate Day, you get to say "Arrrrrrgh!" and, my favorite, "Aaaarh, I've seen it before!" ... and of course, it's the only day of the year you can get away with telling that awful joke... "Have you seen the new pirate movie? It's rated Aaaaaaarrrrrrh!" It's also a good excuse to wear an eye patch and drink rum. Or sing the songs on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney. (Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me!)

So now you know.

success!

I don't really know the difference between yesterday and today (other than walking around the block to the Capitol building twice), but my pedometer tells me I walked 12,000 steps today. So that's exciting. Although really... I have no idea what the real difference is. Whatever. Hooray!

Hillary pointed me to mapmyrun.com where it tells me that my walk to the Marta station is only .92 miles. Now I'm playing around with setting up a profile there. Fun fun.

discouraging

So I'm getting pretty determined to get in shape, because I've been feeling pretty cruddy and I think that's partly to blame. "They" tell you that you need to walk 10,000 steps a day to stay in shape, and "they" usually also say that it isn't hard if you just walk around a little more than usual... take the stairs instead of the elevator, etc. Since the weather isn't so oppressively hot and muggy anymore, I decided to start by walking to and from the MARTA station... (which Google tells me is 1.1 miles one way) this is on top of the quarter mile one way I already walk from MARTA to my office building, AND taking the stairs everywhere... but that's not all! After dinner I walked a quarter mile up to our apartment's gym, ran 2 miles on the elliptical machine (I love elliptical machines), and walked the quarter mile back. By my math this is 5 miles of walking not counting random everyday walking that people who are inactive do. And what do I have to show for it? I'm a couple freakin' hundred steps short of that "easy" 10,000 steps, according to my trusty pedometer. My trusty pedometer also tells me that I only walked 4.6 miles, but by my math and according to my Google maps, that should be more like 5.2 miles. But that just means my pedometer isn't calibrated properly to the length of my steps.

Anyways, all this rambling is to say that I feel like I did a good deal of integrating exercise into my daily routine as well as "going the extra mile (or two)" at the gym, and it's frustrating that all of that doesn't reach that 10,000 step suggested daily exercise. Blah. I guess I need to ignore the stupid pedometer and come up with different goals. Or something.

Recent Projects

Wow, I really haven't been posting much lately. Chris has been doing a great job of keeping y'all updated on our movie watching, but I've just been living life and not sharing it, I guess. Anyways, work is fine but I'm still adjusting to a normal 9-5 job... my body seems to get worn out REALLY easily, and I feel like I just can't keep up recently. I've been trying to get enough sleep and eat well, but it's just really helping. So in an attempt to see if my diet can really affect how I feel, I'm trying something new. I have been reading up on how to make kombucha tea online, and I found a guy on craigslist who sent me a mother culture to get started, and I'm trying to make my own kombucha, which I'm excited to see how it turns out.

I also got my plants in the house and they are making me happy, but I still really want more herbs. The other thing I've been doing to maintain my sanity is some crochet work. I've finished Emily's Christmas present, and I'm almost done with Nicole's, too. But since they're Christmas presents, I'm going to have to wait a WHILE before I can post photos. I'm trying to figure out what my next project should be... do I want to make myself another purse, or do I want to be REALLY ambitious and try to crochet a sweater from a pattern I got online? I'm scared of the sweater idea, but it WILL be getting cold in a few months and I know if I was successful, I'd be pretty thrilled. November is the second annual "National Knit a Sweater Month" (NaKniSweMo) so I was thinking maybe that would inspire me to crochet a sweater in the month of November. Hmmm....

Anyways, this weekend I have a ton of work to do, and I don't know what else to share. Oh yeah, we have a ton of PEZ dispensers in our house now. And I love my apartment. And one of these days we'll find our digital camera and I'll take pictures of all this, but right now it's lost, and I don't know how to operate Chris's fancy camera. Alas.

Sadness: Bear Grylls is a big phony

So a while back I was talking about some of the gross things that Bear Grylls does on Man vs Wild. And then Chris watched it and decided that Bear was his hero. But then he sent me an article online about how he's really a big phony, and why they tell us he does isn't actually what he does. Like he doesn't sleep in tents all night, he films with a big crew and then goes and stays in fancy hotels and stuff. And that really sucks. So he is no longer cool at all. I figure they must have known that at some point we would figure out that he was a big faker, so I don't understand how they think it's worth it to try... cuz now everyone will just hate him. Anyways, here's a sad video about what a big faker he is. Just had to set the record straight.

Blog to Email

You will notice a new option to your left where you can input your email address, and have new posts send to your email inbox. This is because Emily asked for it, not because I really think you all want to be notified immediately every time I feel like posting something. Although if you DO want to be notified immediately every time I have something to say, putting your email address in the box and hitting Subscribe would be the thing to do.

It's important to know that you have to subscribe to my posts & Chris's posts separately. So if you wanna know what we BOTH think, you have to put your email address in here AND on Chris's blog page.

Oh yeah, I'll eventually post photos of our awesome new apartment... but we need to get it just a little cleaner first. I'm sure Chris will eventually get some awesome pictures of it with his new camera.

It's Moving Day!

It's finally here! Today, Chris & I move into our new apartment, with the help of a bunch of awesome friends who will be braving the 100 degree heat with us to help us get all of our stuff in our apartment. (We will be bribing them with food and beer, but come on, is that really enticing enough to move things in 100 degree heat? We've just been blessed with awesome friends).

Radio Lab

Have I told you yet how addicted I am to Radio Lab podcasts? I might just love it more than This American Life, for starters. This show is FANTASTIC. But they're limited run, so there's only 15 of them so far over three years, and, um, I've already listed to half of them. So before long I'll be going through withdrawal. I learn so many great and interested things. Tonight I made Chris listen to one on music, which he actually admitted to liking (Chris doesn't do talk radio) and then I proceeded to talk his ear off about the other two or so of them that I listened to today. Every episode I learn something fascinating that I have to tell Chris all about. He humors me. I think it's just great. Good times. Go listen. You will be happy you did.

In other news, we move into our apartment on SATURDAY! I cannot tell you how excited I am. Being in Atlanta Proper will make all things better and easier and waste much less gas. And it will be nice to have all my clothes again. And my bed. Oh, two months without my bed has taken such a toll on my body... I ache in ways I haven't ached since... since before we bought our fantastic bed. Blech.

Other things I can rave about Atlanta... West Egg cafe's black bean cakes, R. Thomas's quinoa bowls, and the pastor at Trinity Vineyard. Complaints - it's super muggy hot (but come on, I'm from Florida, it's not like it's WORSE but it still sucks a lot), and a smog alert level of Unhealthy today in metro ATL. Boo for toxic air.

But I digress. Where was I? Oh yeah, Radio Lab rocks. Listen to any episode and then tell me how right I was. Go ahead, I'm waiting.

drive-by Christians

I wish more Christians would realize that handing out tracts is not ministering to anyone's heart or actually converting people. Where exactly in the bible does Jesus command us to make disciples by handing people little pamphlets that break down God's love into tiny impersonal bullet points?

This blog post comes from this comic which, along with her blog post below, is what I would assume to be a pretty fair assessment of how a lot of people feel when they get one of these... if they actually read it, that is. The thing that really bugs me is that this is obviously someone this girl WORKS with who has decided the best way to minister to her is by sneaking pamphlets on her desk. I mean... really?

atlanta update

So Atlanta life is going well. We're still not settled yet, of course. Won't be til mid-August. So I still don't think it's sunk in that we LIVE here. It feels like an extended vacation in some ways. Weird. But obviously it's not a vacation because you don't go to work every day on vacation. But even that has been fun, so no complaints. So here's the extended update of what we've been up to:

Work: I've got a "real" job for the State of Georgia, doing web design and development. Our main portal is georgia.gov, but we do lots of stuff. I work in downtown ATL, right by the capitol building. In a sea of cubicles. Right now I drive 30 minutes to a MARTA rail station, then ride MARTA for about 30 minutes, then walk for another 10 minutes to get to work. When we move, I'll walk 20 minutes to MARTA instead of driving. I'm strangely happy with any length of commute as long as it's not in a car though. So it's all good. And the governor is a big fan of teleworking (working from home) to cut down on commutes, so I get to be productive in my own home once a week or so, which is even better. I'm also still teaching online for Southeastern Tech, and I've got a few freelance projects happening, so I'm keeping busy.

Play:: so I think we actually have more friends in Atlanta than we did in Savannah, which is weird. Or at least we know more people who actually make time to hang out here. Some are friends from Gainesville (we've been psyched to get to hang out with Brooke a lot, and we finally caught up with Melody yesterday, and one of these days I'll get to hang out with my friend Beth who was in art school with me), and then we've also got some friends that we made at the Atlanta Film Festival that we've gotten to hang out with as well. They are also awesome. And on top of just normal hanging out type stuff, there's all sorts of fun random things that happen in Atlanta, such as special Harry Potter screenings (yes, I saw it before you), a Soap Box Derby, and The Decemberists playing with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (this Friday night). I think we might heart Atlanta.

And it should only get better after Sam & Nicole get back, and we move to our apartment, and it no longer takes 45 minutes to get to Atlanta. I'm really super excited about our apartment. And settling in. And then it won't be long before everyone starts coming to visit us... Emily has already claimed the first weekend of September, and my parents will probably come up before that. And lots of other people keep promising to come see us too. So I think one of our first orders of business will be to get our guest room in order. I love having guests! I figure we'll finally make it to the aquarium sometime when people come to visit.

Okay, that's the update. I think that's everything. Now I gotta get working on some of those work things I mentioned.

more crochet

So I've gotten a couple more little crochet animals made, and I think I'm getting better at it... but I'm still not thrilled about em yet. But I'm getting there. My second project was this bunny. He doesn't have a name yet, so I'm taking suggestions. I've also made something else I can't post photos of yet cuz I'm giving them away and I don't want to ruin the surprise. So this is all you get for now. I have a whole bunch more patterns now, and I think it won't be TOO much longer before I'm ready to try things on my own instead of going off a pattern. We'll see.

Name my bunny!

Give the Gift of Sheep... or Cows... or...

I'm very excited about Oxfam America Unwrapped, where you can buy gifts of sustainability for third world villages. It's pretty freaking awesome, and right now I'm trying to figure out which one(s) to ask for for Christmas. I can't just get these gifts for others because I risk pissing them off that I got someone else something cool for THEIR gift, so I just hafta ask for myself. Some options are to get someone a Sheep for $45, or maybe Support an indigenous craftwoman for $90. Other gifts include buying a crocodile, a cow, or a camel, or irrigating a farmer's land, supporting a fair trade co-op... even building a coffee mill. Prices range from under $20 to over $5,000. Pretty freaking awesome. Interested? Start shopping now!

hardware

Yesterday I got a new piercing. It's something I wanted for about 5 years, but I was waiting for a good reason to do it... it needed to be a celebration of something big. And with everything the Lord has been doing in our lives lately... sending us to Atlanta, providing me with a great job (I start Monday!), and then giving us a fantastic apartment (move in August 11), I thought this would be a good time. And it helps that Atlanta has this really great piercing place that is really obsessive about the quality of their hardware, and proper piercing care so that it heals well. It's called Piercing Experience, and although their website is butt-ugly, that just means they're too busy being concerned with their piercing rules to worry about anything else. Although my ear still smarts a bit today, I'm pretty hopeful that the healing time on this cartilage piercing will be significantly shorter than on the last ones I got 5 years ago (which, by the way, took more than a year to heal). Anyways. I like it, and I especially like that it's pretty understated... I don't think it's too noticeable, especially since my hair half covers it up.

experimental Amigurumi

I found a free pattern online for an amigurumi Panda bear (scroll down for it), so I decided to give it a shot. I made it while at the PEZ Convention this weekend, so I didn't really have access to stuffing, so I used toilet paper... I don't know if that's to blame for how dumb he looks, or if I should blame his eyes (I also didn't go out and buy eyes to go on him, so I just made them out of yarn) or if I am just bad at this... nonetheless, I'm not too pleased with him. Chris named him Milton. I was gonna give him to Emily since she loves purple, but Milton is too ugly to give away.

Now I'm working on a rabbit to see if I have any better luck on my second try, with different (more forgiving) yarn. And eyes. Gotta get real eyes.

Team Skeene

I keep forgetting to point you all to my brother-in-law and sister-in-law's new blog, Team Skeene. I know what you're all thinking. "But Kendra, you and Chris have been married for four years, and Sam and Nicole have only been married for a month. How is it that THEY get to call themselves Team Skeene?" Well, the simple answer is because they DO call themselves Team Skeene, and... we don't. So there. We have decided, however, that whenever the FOUR of us are together (which will be often since we will be living close now!) we are called Team Skeene Supreme. That's right, Chris and I are the Supreme part.

Photos

A couple months ago we went down to Orlando/Lakeland for a Mother's Day / Chris's Birthday / Cornerstone Florida weekend. Chris was borrowing a rockin' digital camera from a friend (for shooting the festival) and so the evening of his birthday party, he ran around taking pictures with it. A lot of them were really good (considering he was taking "snapshots") ... I love this photo of Emily (Chris's sister) and her dog Duncan... and I always hate the pictures he takes of me, but I actually like this one. So here ya go!

Waste of money?

So a couple of weeks ago, I paid to get a Spot Test, which was to test for food allergies. I know some of my food allergies, but I still get a rash sometimes when I've been good at avoiding the things I'm allergic to, so I was hoping to figure out what else I may have overlooked. I finally got the test back today, and was pretty disappointed with the results. According to this spot test, I'm not allergic to ANY foods, not even sulfites. Here's the thing. I KNOW I'm allergic to sulfites... how do I know this? Well, whenever I eat something with sulfites in it, my faces breaks out in a horrible itchy rash. When I avoid sulfites, no horrible itchy rash. So either they messed up my blood sample, or their test is bogus? I dunno... but I'm pretty disappointed.

sweet sleep

chris and i rewarded ourselves for our last few days of excessive busy-ness by sleeping for 12 hours. ahhh, i feel so refreshed! (although, admittedly, I would feel more refreshed if i wasn't allergic to peachtree city. my sinuses are killing me!)

farewell savannah!

we're outta savannah and into HOTlanta! the move went GREAT, we have very great friends. Angela was especially amazing, she basically single-handedly cleaned our entire apartment, and helped me out with packing and stuff, for two and a half days. I don't think we would've gotten it done without her.

So now we're at Sam & Nicole's place just south of Atlanta, our stuff is in a POD for the month, and starting Monday, Chris and I start figuring out what our lives are going to look like in the ATL.

We're tired.

packing, and... break from packing

So we've been hard at work packing up the apartment... we have a lot of stuff, so it's taking a LOT of time. I'm pretty exhausted. So I took a break from it the other night to do something equally important - customize my computer's desktop image and icons. Since I got a new hard drive, I had to re-customize. This is extremely important for my mental stability. So here's what I decided on this time:

I'm especially happy about my new hard drive icon. Hooray for R2!
I found all these at Pixel Girl Presents, in case you wanna check 'em out.

missing: 9 months of emails

Note: this blog post contains some whining and some computer-talk. If you don't care about that, please jump to the important part below.

First I want to start by saying that I DO back up my computer. Not nightly, not weekly, but about every 2 or 3 weeks I force myself to run a backup, which requires digging my backup drive out of the fireproof box, plugging it in, and letting it run overnight. I have software that checks for new and updated files, and copies those over to the portable hard drive. So when my hard drive went kaput, I was unhappy, but not panicked because I knew that I was only missing about 10 days of info, not my entire lifetime of info (plus I was hopeful that the repair company would be able to salvage some of my files). Well, I finally got my computer back yesterday, with a fresh new hard drive, and they told me they were NOT able to save anything from the old one. This sucks, but again, I have a backup. No problem.

So yesterday I started the task of plugging in the backup drive, and copying files back over to the new drive. Pretty much everything is intact, minus those 10 days of work that will take me a little while to figure out what's missing and what I lost. UNTIL I got to the part where I was trying to open my email. I used to have all my saved emails on webmail, but a couple months ago I finally ditched my crappy web host in favor of a better web host, and when I did that, I had to copy ALL my saved email to my computer. It took a long time. I had to re-organize everything in Entourage (Outlook for the Mac), and from then just started using Entourage exclusively for email (whereas I used to go back and forth between webmail and Entourage). Long story short, I ran into two problems. The first problem is that Entourage decided that it couldn't open its own database of emails from the backup. Why? I don't know, but apparently when Microsoft wrote this software, they didn't bother with making the email database robust enough to be easily backed up. But when I finally got Entourage to open a backup version of my email, it turns out that my backup software hadn't been updating up this particular file! It's been doing great with EVERYTHING ELSE, but my EMAIL database hasn't been backed up since September of 2006!!!!

For those of you who are already bored with this blog post, let me get to the point: If you have emailed me with anything of importance since September of last year, I don't have it. That means email addresses, business info, ANYTHING emailed to ANY account with ANY importance is no longer in my possession. If you are waiting for me to reply to an email, or handle something important, or anything, you will need to send it again, because it's gone. Even if you haven't sent me anything important, you may just want to shoot me an email to say hi so that I have your email address again, just in case. I don't want to post my email address online because I get enough spam as it is, but I'll write it out for ya... kendra ... at ... idreaminblue ... dot ... com.

Now I've got to finish updating my computer, and then figure out a new piece of software for backing up my data so this doesn't happen again. I also might switch to Mail instead of Entourage since Entourage keeps screwing me up. This is going to take a while. It sure doesn't help that we're MOVING in less than a WEEK and I don't really have time to take care of my computer.

thanks for the understanding.

Mizero

Mizero is the Kirwandan word for "Hope." The Mizero Foundation is a non-profit organization who is bringing hope to orphans from the Rwandan's genocide. They are organizing a tour for a group of orphans to perform traditional Rwandan music and dancing at churches around the United States this fall. They will be raising money to build a cultural arts center for the orphans in Kigali, Rwanda.

The Lord has been moving and growing this organization within the short time since its inception just a couple months ago, and He has been bringing some great people together to make this happen. But we still need a lot of help in a lot of different areas of the ministry. If this is something that the Lord is prompting you to look into, please visit their website at www.mizerochildren.org to learn more, and if you feel you may have resources (time, money, contacts, knowledge, or things we haven't even thought of) that the Lord could use in growing this foundation, please fill out the form on the Partner With Us page.

sleepless night

Well... I don't know the best way to "tell" this story. It probably won't be eloquent. I'm rather sleep-deprived. Last night, just as I was finally dozing off to sleep, around 12:30am, I hear what I thought was a gunshot outside our bedroom window. It freaked me out, but Chris wasn't sure it was actually a gunshot, plus we can't see out our bedroom windows anyways, so we just tried to go back to sleep. Then just as I was falling BACK to sleep, we heard a bunch of gunshots all at once (I think I counted ten) right outside. This time we were sure of what we heard, so Chris called the police, and was told that a call had already been made and police were on their way. The strange thing was that we didn't hear anyone talking outside (back behind our apartment is a seedy bar, and we usually hear people out there until all hours of the night, so you'd think if someone was shot outside, people would be making some noise). Chris said "probably someone shot into the air." Within a couple of minutes, there were cop cars EVERYWHERE, and the whole block by our apartment was blocked off. Chris managed to get enough of a glimpse out the window to see cops running around everywhere, see someone put into an ambulance, and then see a police officer inspecting the ground about 15 feet from our bedroom window. Of course at this time we really couldn't sleep, and we were half expecting a police officer to ring the doorbell to see if we knew anything.

After a while of trying to look out windows to see what was happening, we realized we really need to try and get some sleep. Chris had to be up at 5:30am to open the coffee shop, and I had a 90 minute drive and a 12 hour work day ahead of me the next morning. So, of course, it took us a long time to finally fall back to sleep, and I was just barely falling asleep AGAIN when we heard knocking, at 2:30am. We're used to people ringing the doorbell if they need to get us, because the door to our apartment is inside of another locked door, and if anyone knocks on that door, we can't hear it. So Chris opens our door to investigate the noise, and is surprised to see a cop standing there, asking if we heard anything. Chris told him what we knew (gunshot at 12:30, lotsa shots at 12:50, the end). And the officer left. So needless to say, we didn't exactly get any sleep.

This morning I did a google news search for the incident and found this article, which tells me that a man was murdered outside our apartment. Just a little scary. Needless to say, we're REALLY happy to be leaving ghetto downtown Savannah in under three weeks.

Computer in a Coma, and a Life Update

Yesterday my computer decided to quit working. I think the hard-drive died. It came as quite a shock. For those of you that don't know, basically everything I do requires that machine. I am a freelance designer, which requires the computer. I manage a business for our PEZ documentary, where all the records are kept on that machine. And I am a graphic design & web design teacher, and when I'm not at the school I need to check emails from students and grade assignments for the online class I teach. So I'm going through a bit of withdrawal today.

We still have Chris's computer to check emails and do a LITTLE bit of necessary work, but, well, Chris's computer sucks. It doesn't have all my software on it. And while I actually have a work laptop that I could, in theory, work on, that one started acting funny a week ago and I need to take it in to work to have the tech guys look at it, because right now I can only boot it up in safe mode. So I'm kind of being forced to do less on the computer and more in the real world for a while. It's probably a blessing in disguise, but right now I'm expecting to start displaying symptoms of withdrawal... like the shakes, or nausea.

What this DOES mean is that I have no excuse NOT to start packing up our home while I'm computer-less. Why would I start packing up my home, you ask? Well... we've officially decided to move to Atlanta. In three weeks. It's a really long story with lots of pieces to it, but the short version is that Chris and I really feel this is where the Lord is leading us, and so we have made the decision to step out in faith and follow, trusting that the Lord will put together the pieces in His timing. The middle of June is when my classes end for the quarter, so at that time we're going to move up the the Atlanta area and start looking for apartments, finalize jobs, etc. Chris's brother and our new sister-in-law have offered to let us stay in their apartment for a month while they're out of town, so we're taking them up on it. It's going to be a crazy ride, but we're looking forward to it all. We're just really ready to get out of Savannah, and we feel that now is the time. As things become more finalized, I'll post updates. For now I don't want to start talking about things we haven't confirmed. But that's what we know.

What, no GoLive? What a surprise...

A year or so ago, my husband and one of my best friends were both taking a web design class at SCAD. They were being forced to use Adobe GoLive in this class, although it is TERRIBLE web design software (and this is coming from an Adobe girl). I complained about it and mentioned they should be learning Dreamweaver. They said "Well, Adobe bought out Macromedia, so our teacher said that Dreamweaver will be discontinued, so we have to learn GoLive." I insisted that this was ridiculous, Dreamweaver is the industry standard, and there's no WAY Adobe would trash it. They insisted that their teacher is WAY smart (he has a degree from HARVARD, after all) and WAY cool, and of course since I'm not a Harvard grad, nor do I take pictures of deer antlers covered in icing, I must not know what I'm talking about. In their defense, the Kendra-bashing did not actually happen, but in my mind it may as well have, since they were so enamored with their teacher and his GoLive-loving ways. And don't even get me STARTED on how his OWN website is all images and in no way optimized for search engines to even FIND HIM. Some web teacher.

Well, ladies and gents, you know what's coming. The new Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium comes packaged with none other than Dreamweaver, NOT GoLive. GoLive has, in fact, been discontinued from the Creative Suite. Although this victory matters to no one but myself, I still take great pride in knowing What's Up. I am The Nerdiest.

ego

Sure, I graduated nearly 10 years ago, but it's still kinda cool that my high school (Fort Myers High School) was just ranked in the top 100 in the COUNTRY.

And what's with all the talk of Florida schools being among the worst? I was always surprised because I got a pretty stellar high school education, in Florida. But I guess as a state it's not so hot, but there are some good ones. 22 of the top 100 schools are in Florida, actually. (12 in Texas, 13 in N.Y, only 7 in California, 11 in Va, and after that is seems like no state has more than a handful).

new sister-in-law!

My brother-in-law Sam got married to an awesome girl named Nicole this past weekend, and Chris and I were blessed to be a part of it. It was a crazy-busy weekend, but worth every minute of it. Lots of time with family, making new friends, and celebrating. Good times were had by all.

Favorite Sesame Street Moments

I don't know how I got sidetracked watching old Sesame Street clips this morning, but here are my favorite clips in Sesame Street history.

This time-waster was brought to you by the letter K.