Category Archives: Personal

Finally sat down in front of the computer and uploaded some pictures.  Here is a pair of socks I knitted and gave to E.

From socks

It was knitted from top down and I find myself liking this way of constructing the socks than the toe up.  But it’s not quite set in my head of how it’s done yet.  I still need the instructions in front of me when I make the top down socks.  I made another pair and would save it as a gift.

Also uploaded the pictures for Jen’s shower.

From Jen’s Shower

From Jen’s Shower

Yeah, it’s only a glimpse at the great decorations C put up at her fabulous home. 

Also spent hours today transferring VHS tapes to DVDs.  It’s a long overdue project and hopefully one more sitting will finish this batch. 

Work tomorrow.  It’ll be fun.  The server was setup last week and I can focus back on the conversion project again.

After C’s shower for her soon-to-be daughter-in-law yesterday, it’s a quiet Sunday today.  We went to the community garden with Merrill who brought some tomato cages for us.  The tomato plants and the pepper plants are the only ones that survived the flood from the rain.  Our lot is at the lowest part of the whole area and the extra rain just totally rotted out the other vegetables that Leo planted.  We met Dick whose lot is more to the middle and his garden is so beautiful full of grown plants and free of weeds.  He said he goes to the garden 3 times a week.  No wonder!  Later, Leo cooked the beef stew and I made the Foccacia bread from Michael Chiarello’s recipe.  The stew was great but the bread was a bit disappointing.  I didn’t leave it enough time for the last rising before I put it in the oven so it’s not as risen as it could be.  Will try again next time.

C did a wonderful job for the shower.  She transformed her living room into a blue heaven.  Three round tables decorated with blue ribbons on the chair and blue napkins.  Jan made center pieces with white hydrangea in a box with blue ribbon and there is even a blue martini (name My Blue Heaven) to boot.  We did line dancing before lunch and J did a impromptu singing of the song for her wedding dance.  Lunch was also a very tasty lettuce salad and chicken and apple and fruits.  And after the gift opening, the guests left.   The five of us cleaned up and everything was in order in a short time.  She really put in a lot of time and effort for the planning and a lot of work getting everything decorated and food prepared.  Wow, what a wonderful job.

I’ve got the dancing bug lately.  Couple of times a week, I have the urge to go dancing.  It would be nice if there is a group of us that can go dancing together.  It would be fun to have some real dancing friends so you know you will have a good time when you go.  Watched a lot of reality TV tonight.  Senseless and a waste of time which makes me long to go dancing even more.   Guess I’m restless today.

It’s been a while since I have two dance lessons a day and today is it.  Just had one with Tim, we did standard and it was quite interesting.  He showed me a couple of silver steps, he he.  It was fun.  Now they are having the staff meeting and afterwards I’ll have one with Minas.  I have not had a lesson with him since before my surgery.  I am quite out of shape and form now of latin stuff.  It would be brutal today.

Last weekend, I helped move e to her apartment.  She has got it setup really nice now.  And she has a good eye on color coordination and the decorating things she bought would fit really nice in the apartment.  The apartment reminds me though of those days that you have neighbors above and below and on the other side of the walls.  And it’s 1000 miles from where you park to your apartment opening several doors and up the stairs.  Another interesting thing we found out is that there is only one big/huge dumpster with a compacter for the whole apartment complex.  One!!  You have to carry your garbage down the stairs, out to your car, drive to the dumpster to throw it away.   That’s interesting to say the least.

I experience my empty nest syndrom again after so many years.  And I worry a little about her in the apartment by herself.  I know we all have to go through these experiences.  I remember I was quite excited as she is now to have my own place and set it up the way I like it.  So I can’t blame her for wanting to have her own place.  But as her mom, I just can’t stop the worrying.

Since we gave her the couches, we have quite an empty living room till the new furniture arrives.  I kind of like it though with it being so open.  Leo pulled my spinning wheel up so I spun some watching TV with him and it’s quite nice.  I like the spinning.  It’s most zen like in all the activities.   The other day, we put some new age music on from my iphone through our music system while I spun and he read.  It was nice to do our separate activities together that way.

Lately my back is bothering me again.  Partly from the moving and partly from dancing.  With Alieve it helps a little.  Old age!  sigh!

First day at work after almost 2 years of freedom.  Signed tons of paper, one of them is to declare that I am not a terrorist.  This is probably the most funny one to sign.  Who in the right mind would put down they are one any way?  Whose back is this paper covering, it’s certainly not to help prevent anything just something to show that the question has been asked.  Does not make any sense to me.

Other than the paperwork, the keys, the network connection, the familiarization of the logistics like the bathroom and the vending machine location, I find the new gig pretty nice.  It happens to be Leo’s old office.  And it’s ironic that he retires and I go back to work and it happens that I get his old office to work in.  It’s nice and quiet inside a big empty lab.  I was able to focus on whatever I need to do.  

Besides having to fiddle with the chair that likes to sink down after you pull it up within 15 minutes, I actually like the fact that I’m back at work in front of a computer again.  Even though the pay is dismal compared to what I was making, I get to put time into the system again and it counts towards the retirement.  And I only need to work one day a week.  I remember that I enjoyed working at the computer solving problems before, but the politics and the unfriendly and unsupportive environment is something I would never go back to.  

IIS is not a fun server to play with especially you want to add login and try to keep the script separate from the login required and still keep it relatively secure.  So I spent a lot of time trying out different ways.  It’s good though to get me slowly back into real actions.  Checked out some scripts written in ASP and tried not to disturb the script while I add those security measures.  Copied a whole site from a linux system to my laptop.  That’s one I need to probably rewrite if I can’t port it directly with modifications to live on a windows system.  I certainly got my work cut out for me.

The day passed very quickly.  I liked it.  And I’m glad I’m back working again.

Next week, the parking situation would be a challenge.  I don’t think the office people want to give me the one day pass any more.  So Leo may have to drive me in and pick me up.  I don’t think my pay would justify buying the parking permit for one day a week parking.  He is such a sweet heart to offer that.

After Leo went hiking, I unraveled the throw once again and put the Taiwan soap opera that Sandy gave me in the DVD player.  And there I was stuck for the rest of the day.    The yarn I spun from the Coopworth on the wheel didn’t come out very well in the ply.  I was still doing trial and error and by the time I got the hang of it, the ply was done.  So there are lots of overspun singles that got tangled up in the ply.  Not a pretty yarn.  My spindle spun yarn was even better than the wheel spun one.  So I just can’t find the right pattern to hide the defects and yet produce a smooth enough surface for a throw and have a decent size also.  Very high order for the yarn from the first try.  Hopefully, I’ll find a pattern that would be good enough so I won’t have to unravel yet one more time.

I have to finish two bobbins full of the Border Leicester roving and make a ply before I can move onto the alpaca roving I bought at the Alpaca show.  It’s amazing that there was very little fiber being sold at the show, I was very disappointed.  But man those alpacas are so cute and they walk like noble people with head held high and long dainty legs.  Leo met Don and Nancy who raise alpacas in Kansas, I think.  They haven’t seen each other for years, so it was a great surprise that Leo saw them at the show and I chatted with Nancy who promised to send me samples from her alpaca when they are ready.

Anyway, I did finish plying the brown yarn and skeined and washed it.  It’s hung to dry now.   This second roving has turned out a lot better.  The singles are more relaxed and the ply is more balanced.  I’m pretty happy about it.  I still have more than half left to spin but I can start on the alpaca a bit now I have three empty bobbins.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll give it a try.  I’m a bit nervous, after all, it’s only the third roving I bought and it’s alpaca.  I was told to stay away from alpaca as a new spinner, but I just can’t wait any more.  So we’ll find out..

As Leo left to take his hike in the Virginia Kendall Park, I hit the shower and started planning the day.  Earlier I thought I would go out to the mall or something to window shop a bit.  Then I realized that I would be out all day tomorrow for dance lessons and hanging out with Connie (maybe), I should stay home and get some ongoing project wrapped up.  So I came downstairs and started the video tape conversion project for Connie.  I have two tapes left to convert and one to burn.  I brought the spinning wheel down with a hot mug of Oolong tea and Brenda Dayne’s Cast-on on my iphone.  The time passed very quickly between ripping, converting, burning and spinning.  In the end, I finished the video coversion project and the bobbin is almost full with the dark brown yarn.  Tonight, CAVs is on and I really hope they win this one.  Magic and CAVs are very compatible teams, but somehow Magic always pulls up to win in the end for the last 2 games.  It’s pretty frustrating as a CAVs fan.

Benny stayed in his little bed with me downstairs.  I bought it for the cats but somehow neither Manfred nor Tido wants to have anything to do with it but Benny jumped right in and barely fit his body in this little cat bed.  He seems to like it though.  It’s an enjoyment to listen to podcast talking about knitting while you knit or spin.  And although I think the music is a bit out of place in the beginning in a podcast, I have grown used to it and sometimes like the songs she is playing.  I downloaded all of the episodes and now I’m listening to Episode 32, still only half way through yet.  But it’s a nice in-between audible books filler for me.  I like Kelly Petkun’s podcast also.  But I”m all caught up with her now. 

It’s been an overcast day, sun barely poked through the clouds earlier and now it looks very gloomy outside.  I really enjoy having this room downstaris for computer work and as a craft room.  Time seems to past very quickly down here.  For the first whole year, it’s not organized and it’s cold so I rarely came down here.  But now all the junk is put away and it’s summer time, I don’t mind staying down here to work on the computer.  With the perfect view out to the lake when you try to think through a problem is a gift in life that I never dreamed of.

In the past week or two, Benny has been exhausted after his daily walk in the sun.  So we decided to give him a short haircut.  Took him to Pets Mart this afternoon and he came back looking really cute.

From Pets

I brought the socks in progress with me and knitted in Border’s with a cup of coffee.  Leo saw a contest for a Taiwan tour and he’s been bugging me all day to enter the contest and do the video blogging for it.  I am very hesitant about these things, don’t like competition of any kind.  Hopefully, he will out grow this idea eventually. 

We grilled steaks for dinner, Elim is on call at the hospital so we saved her one for later.  The steak was medium rare but it tasted bland and tough still.  Not sure if it’s from being in the freezer for a while or the store we bought them from.  We decided to get real good steaks from now on maybe from the neighborhood butcher. 

Spinning continues and I think I have settled on the thickness of the yarn to spin for this batch.  Hopefully, it’ll be better when it’s plied.  Got to get the hang of plying the singles on the wheel.  The last try was not very good.

Indians are losing 2-1 bottom of the 5th.

Picture taken and sent from iphone.

They finally won!!  The home run by Sizemore at bottom of the 8th sealed the deal.  I was chanting home run, home run as he batted.  And he came through.  It was great.

But it was very very cold up there especially when the wind was blowing.  My feet were numb by the middle of the game.  But it was worth staying and seeing the winning runs.  

We also visited the restaurant and had a drink and Leo had a hamburger before we got to our seats.  That was fun.  Next time, we’ll get the one time food bar.   Seems like a good deal.