Win Something!

Random stuff:

1. My blog's reading level is apparently High School. Eh. I guess that's a good thing because it's not boring and it's not something embarrassing like pre-K?

Movie Reviews

2. To my victim...if you read this. Stop worrying. No socks have been mailed yet. You still have time. You can thank Target for ruling much of my time for the past few days, but I have a day off coming and intend on wearing out my needles then.

3. Everyone should go here and leave a comment so you can be entered to win a $50 gift certificate to Shabby Apple . Once you leave a comment there copy and paste it to a comment here so I can learn all about you too! (Although I don't have a prize to offer, just thought it would be fun!)

4. I really, really, really need to get internet at home. Mobile blogging sucks.

5. I don't do enough self-promotion. I sell album-making supplies (as well as digital stuff and framing) through a company called Creative Memories. I really need to ruffle up a few orders in the next few days so I will do a contest. If you place an order (any amount) on my website by midnight on Saturday I will enter you in a drawing for free photo organizing software. Even if you don't scrapbook, this software is awesome to organize all those digital photos you take and upload to your computer. C'mon, click the link...you know you want to.

5. I love knitting on my back porch on days like today. Nice cool breeze, warm sun, Chance curled up at my feet. Mmmmm.

Have a wonderful Monday!

Blustery Day

(anyone get the Winnie the Pooh reference? One of my favorite stories when I was younger.)

Yesterday day was an extremely windy day. Hubby and I went out to the Downtown Mall for Friday's After Five and this is what we came home to:

Not cool.

He had just changed out our storm door insert from the glass one to the screen one for summer and hadn't yet put the glass one in storage. Boo.

I guess this just means we'll have to get the fancy new storm door I've been wanting sometime before it gets cold. Darn! ;-)

Sock Wars

What have I been doing for the past 5 days? I will tell you. I have been working on creating a deadly weapon.



This may or may not be a picture that is recent. Just in case my victim happens across my blog I will keep it a secret as to whether or not I am finished making my weapon.



Ok, so for those of you scratching your head, let me explain. I am talking about Sock Wars. Basically it is modeled after the game "Assassin". It's a little difficult to explain, but everyone who signed up was given a "target" to knit socks for. The person you are knitting socks for is knitting them for someone else, not you...it's a circle. When you receive your socks, you have been "killed". You then send your socks in progress to your assassin along with your Target's info. Your assassin then picks up where you left off and your Target becomes their new Target. Make sense? I know...totally confusing. I'm not even sure I totally understand it, but I am having fun. My hands and shoulders are sore from all the knitting. I am just hoping that my assassin is knitting VERY slowly so I can stay in the game for a while! The winner (last one left standing) will receive 60 balls of sock yarn (Tofutsies) from Southwest Trading Company . People. 60 balls! What in the world would I do with 60 balls? I don't think I could knit 60 pairs of socks in this lifetime!

Speaking of SWTC, let me relate to you a wonderful tale of excellent customer service. I encountered four knots in my yarn while making my socks. There was a discussion on Ravelry about similar situations so I commented that I really liked the yarn, but the knots were a little frustrating. Within TEN MINUTES of posting that I received a message from the co-owner of SWTC asking for my mailing address so they could send me a replacement ball, totally on them!! I was blown away, I mean...to offer a replacement ball is outstanding enough, not to mention that I was simply posting to a discussion, not complaining to the company or anything! WOW!

As if that wasn't enough for one day, I wrote a quick email to Lantern Moon about a set of needles that I bought last summer. It was a set of ebony sock needles that I splurged on, and on the very first sock I ever knit I broke two of the DPNs. I was bummed but figured I could exchange them without a problem. Uh-uh. No receipt, no exchange. Period. I will not mention the store that gave me such an issue, but if you knit and live in Charlottesville you can probably guess. I didn't think much about it again until the other day when I saw the remaining three lonely needles. I decided to write the company and see if they would be able to do anything for me. The same day I got an email back and they are going to send me two replacement needles for the two that snapped. :)

Lots of good vibes in the universe for me today!

Scarring movie moments

I saw this meme on Jennifer's blog a while back and thought I'd share my own movie moments that scared the bejeezus out of me when I was a kid:

1. Ghostbusters- the scene where Slimer is chasing the librarian through the stacks. My parents took me to see this in the theater and on the way home I was convinced there was a ghost in the floorboard of the car that was going to steal my new sandals right off my feet.

2. E.T.-this was the movie we watched at my 9th birthday party. Don't know what exactly scared me, but something about the scenes when they quarantined the house. I had to leave the room.

3. Watcher in the Woods-the main character was named Karen and when she went through the mirror and got trapped she wrote "Nerak" on the mirror. Ok, so this memory might be a little foggy...but I remember something about "nerak" and being scared.

4. Beetlejuice-my parents were watching this one night after my bed time and I sneaked peaks through a crack in the door. I was totally terrified of my soup after watching the scene where they have the seance and they try to scare them away. "Come Mr. Tallyman, tally me bananas!"

These are all very "vanilla" on the horror-scale, but what can I say? I scare easily...I still don't like horror movies very much.

P.S. Everyone should go check out this post about comments. I really agree with her!

Of Sheep and Wool

Ok, so I have been a HIGHLY negligent blogger, but it's not all my fault. As I've said several times before on this blog I have no internet connection at home. Well, I live across the street from an elementary school and managed to pick up on their internet connection so I've been happily clicking away on Ravelry for the past three weeks. Problem is, their connection has a bunch of firewalls so anything with "blog" in the URL is blocked. So, no blogging for me. (Also no reading a lot of your blogs....I've been missing out!) Anyhoo....last week I lost the signal. I don't know if they found me out and privatized the signal or what, but I'm back to being a mobile blogger. I know, it serves me right for being a moocher, but they didn't password protect their wireless signal either, so....

Ok, so lots of catching up to do. I acutally took a lot of pictures in the last few weeks with the intention of specific blog posts, so bear with me. This will be a long one.

A few weeks back I went to visit my sister in Farmville. I took a fantastic "Saturday Sky" picture to share.

The next Saturday that I had off I went to the Jeopardy auditions.

Sadly, I didn't make it through the first pre-test. My dad did make it through, and went on to take the 50 Q test, but didn't make it past that. Great fun though!

By the way, I just want to share....I *heart* my Garmin GPS. Does anyone else have one of these? I've been doing a lot of traveling lately and haven't gotten lost once. Great, great invention!

Last weekend I went to Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival with my sister Morgan and my friend Jessica. We had such a blast! Morgan got her first spindle and learned to spin

...we made some felted flowers, just like last year.......went to the Ravelry meet-up and saw some fab bloggers.........and drank some homemade soda (veeeery sweet, couldn't drink the whole thing).........and of course, bought yarn! Here's my haul:That's two skeins of 100% wool (greens) intended for some felting, the blue on the left is intended for a small lace stole, the purple/blue is sock yarn, the brownish-green next to it is a frogged Eddie Bauer sweater that I am undecided what to do with, and the blue/green at the bottom is for a lace shawl.

I have a question for any knit-bloggers out there...how do you feel about meeting bloggers in real life? I find it to be a very awkward situation. Especially if I don't comment very often, but always read the blog. I feel a little like a stalker. What do you say when you go to a blog meetup at a festival? "Hello, I read your blog and know all about your life, but you have no idea who I am?" Even if I comment now and then I feel like an intruder if they don't know me. If we read each other's blogs and know that we are both going to the festival and have even mentioned meeting up, that's one thing. But what if you see a blogger that you read a lot? Do you say hello? Maybe it's just me. Any thoughts? I would love to see if anyone else feels this way.

Whew! If anyone needs me, I will be doing this on my back porch for the rest of the weekend.