Category Archives: Cyberspace & Technology

Computer Woes, Continued

Things have been very up and down. Mostly down, although a couple of the ups have been big enough to offset the smaller numerous down issues.

The USB port issue became enough of a problem that after taking it to a Mac-knowledgeable friend who tested, troubleshot, and updated me to Snow Leopard without solving the issue, HRH took it into the Apple-trained guys at work. They thought they’d fixed the issue, only for me to discover at home that none of my USB peripherals worked, exactly as they hadn’t before, and then the Mini decided not to power on at all. Or rather, it powered on, but the startup sequence never happened. So now I had no computer at all.

In the Bad Timing column, the day before I sent the Mac in to work with HRH I was contacted by a national organization that wanted to know my rates for copyediting. A fellow spinner and copyeditor (hello Mitioticspindle!) had referred me to them, since she couldn’t take their contracts due to workload. I was thrilled about this, because the publisher hadn’t offered me a project yet, and money was getting whatever the metaphor is for way past tight and there are utilities getting very cranky because they are unhappy with the size of the payments they’re getting. So, without a computer on Friday, I checked my work mail via my iPhone (bless it) and saw that the client I was negotiating with sent me two documents for which to return an estimate. This meant I needed a computer that would open them so I could respond as soon as possible, so I scrambled around trying to get the rickety ancient Dell laptop to work. I needed to download new converters for Word, but eventually it opened the documents, and I sent in my quote. And then bang, okay, sure: the quotes were acceptable, go ahead on the shorter one because they needed it ASAP, but they’d need approval for the larger one. And suddenly I was working, and had a deadline. (An aside: In perfect irony, my publisher contacted me that same Friday to offer me a project, which I had to turn down because (a) I had no computer, and (b) the new client was going to pay me more than twice the hourly rate.)

Gack.

So when the newly returned Mini didn’t start up Friday evening, I panicked inside while trying to get the Dell into some sort of usable shape. The project partially involved checking four pages of URLs, and the Dell took *forever* to open a web page. On top of that, it crashed a few times, and I either lost work (never very much, because I have autosave set to back up every five minutes or so) or lost time, which at this point was the more precious commodity. I’d quoted them for two hours of work, because that’s how long it should have taken. Instead, after factoring in the slowness of the computer, the crashes, and the couple of hours of research and my crash review course in APA style, which I hadn’t used since university, it took seven hours. HRH was home sick on Monday, thank goodness, because I’d budgeted three hours to be done over three nights, and I was nowhere near done on Monday morning when I wanted to do a quick half-hour review of the document before sending it in at noon. Blowing past my deadline is not how I wanted to begin my relationship with a rather important new client

The dead Mac was panicsome, too, because I have a book-length document to edit next, and there is no way I can do it on the Dell. So I contacted another friend with whom I’d discussed purchasing her Mac mini last fall when she no longer needed it. Originally it was for HRH, to replace his equally ancient Dell tower, but then he discovered that the new Star Wars MMO wasn’t being released for Macs (while disappointing, this actually saves me a heck of a lot of time) and so he ended up purchasing someone else’s secondhand PC. Fortunately she still had it, so once she clears her old files off it it will be mine, and I will have a computer with confirmed functional USB ports with no more iffyness. My mother is to be thanked for lending me the money to get this happening sooner rather than later, because the only way it was going to happen originally was for me to complete the book-length edit and be paid for it down the line, at which time I’d have the money to acquire it. I’ll use my Time Machine backup to set things up on the new computer, and all will be well (or else).

So the upshot of all of this is that there has been a lot of panic and tension in work-related areas. I am very behind on e-mail and news and online stuff in general. All my music and pictures are stuck on the Mac, and I can’t transfer new ones from the camera or the phone.

The Mac issue has also been interesting for the Apple tech who works with HRH. It’s a professionally fascinating and frustrating issue, apparently, because the USB ports are getting power, and yet won’t recognize or allow the signal of anything bigger than a mouse or keyboard to pass. He’s never encountered it. They’ve determined that it’s definitely a hardware issue and are examining code now. If it can’t be fixed beyond powering up and successfully initiating and completing the start sequence (which is now does), then we’ll have a media unit to stream stuff downstairs to the TV while I use the other new-to-me Mac as my work computer.

The computer issues and the new client have made the past six days pretty stressful. We had a bit of a respite on Sunday when we had the families with whom we’re connected by being godparents all over, and it was just a lovely afternoon. The food was delicious, the kids played together beautifully, the babies were all smiley and social and loved being passed around from person to person, and it was good to finally see people, which, as I have chronicled here, hasn’t happened since late November or early December since schedules and plague wrote off all social activity during the holidays.

So that has been my professional and technological life lately. Yay for new contracts and what is hopefully a permanent new client. Boo for computer issues that are really making executing those contracts nigh impossible. I’m getting tense about having gone two weeks without syncing my phone or backing up the computer, too.

Stopping By To Say Hi

I am swamped with work. I have a month to deadline, and hospitals and doctors have eaten up a lot of work days in the past couple of months. I have to add April to my list of Months In Which I Will Have No Time To Do Anything So Please Don’t Ask.

Here’s a scattershot report of the past week:

1. You know that whole “maybe now that I don’t have to visit so many hospitals for tests and consultations I can get work done?” Yeeeeeah. Guess where we spent Tuesday? That would be checking out the emergency ward of our local hospital, because HRH got ambushed by a wicked kidney stone. The hospital and staff seem very nice. HRH is bruised and recovering from medical trauma.

2. We went in to Le Melange Magique this morning to bid farewell to Debra, the owner, who after nineteen and a half years decided that she had other things to do in her life. From the moment she told me of her plan to sell the store in January I have been behind her one hundred percent. She’s pulled off some pretty amazing stuff in the past twenty years, and deserves her retirement from the metaphysical business and eventual refocusing on a new career. I admire her immensely, both for what she built, and for moving on when the time was right. And I am thrilled that a couple of my friends have bought the store; the administration team is going to be terrific. The store is in good hands.

3. The boy attended his first group cello class on Sunday, and it went very well indeed. He saw seven or eight other kids, ranging from his age to late teens, playing, and was thoroughly energized. He played open strings that fit into whatever the other kids were playing from the Suzuki repertoire, and I saw him imitating their bowing rhythms and pretending to move his left hand fingers on the fingerboard like they were doing, too, which is huge because he’s been resisting left hand work; he just hasn’t been ready yet. My teacher lent us a basic first cello performance book that uses the Twinkle Variation A rhythm for the young “soloist” along with a piano and second cello accompaniment, which sounds like “real music,” and we have played “Wintertime in Russia” and today we played “Carnival in Rio.” Sure, the young soloist in question is playing an open string over and over, but the piano and second cello move around and use different keys, and as a result different moods are created. “Wintertime in Russia” really sounded Russian; “Carnival in Rio” sounded like a gentle samba. He loves playing with me, and I think the fact that we’re playing “his” music makes a big difference to him. And he’s doing a good job maintaining the rhythm, and watching for cues to stop, too.

4. We’re in the last few days before the spring concert this Saturday. There are some things I still can’t get, mostly cues that feel sudden to me, and I can’t do any more work on them on my own because it’s about fitting in with what’s happening in the orchestra. I can play the stuff on my own. It’s understanding where to come in that’s throwing me. And as usual I feel awful, because I’m right in front of the conductor, and I feel like I’m personally letting him down when he suddenly turns and cues me and I miss it. I know it’s coming; I know, and I’m physically prepped, and then whoosh it’s gone. I am definitely proud of conquering some stuff I was struggling with up till last week, though.

5. The baby (whose code name is Owlet, dubbed thusly by the boy) is big enough to be visibly bumping my tummy around from the inside. It is amusing.

6. Yes, the baby has a name, or one so far, at least. No, no one’s getting to hear it until she’s born. Partly because, well, it’s ours right now, and partly because if it really doesn’t suit her when she’s born, we don’t want to have to explain that we’ve changed it. She has actually had a name since a couple of days before she was conceived, when the boy casually mentioned to us at the breakfast table that he was going to have a baby sister, and this is what her name was going to be. Two weeks later I showed HRH the pregnancy test, and when the boy asked what it was, we told him it was the baby he’d ordered. It’s an unusual name, too, one we’ve never heard before. We have no idea where the boy found it; we know no one with that name, there are no kids at school of that name, it hasn’t been in any books or films we’ve seen or read. We suspect he made it up, although HRH has since found it online as a variation or diminutive of another name. We really love the fact that he’s so voluntarily involved with this baby. He’s taken on the task of designing the nursery theme as well, and has proposed several crafts for us to do to create mobiles and blankets and so forth.

7. I got the mock-up of the cover for the bird book, and it is absolutely exquisite. It’s easily my favourite of all my book covers. It looks like an old botanical illustration, but with birds. The tentative release date for the book and the companion journal is January 2012. (If I ever get it finished, that is. I’m going to have to start adding another work day on weekends, probably Sundays, to hit my deadline. Stupid doctor appointments. At least I only have two scheduled this month.) (She said with great emphasis, glaring at the universe.)

8. I need a new laptop. The borrowed iBook is running Panther (2003, boys and girls!), Safari crashes on it repeatedly when I try to access half the research pages I need to access, and it is, alas, very slow. I can write a rough draft of one entry on the iBook in the time it would take me to write two polished entries on the desktop. My original plan to buy a secondhand iPad on which to write has been morphing into a less-exciting plan to buy a secondhand Macbook, which will serve me better in the long run for switching between documents and online research. Not that I can buy either until my delivery cheque is issued to me after I hand the bird book in. (The point that I will not need to switch back and forth so often once this research-heavy book has been handed in has not escaped me. I have three months to decide which to choose, in which I may be able to borrow an iPad for a day or so to test it out.) Yes, I do have an old Windows laptop, too, but it dates from about 2003 as well. I should see if I can update its browsers and such.

That’s all I’ve got right now. I have to go turn the oven on to bake today’s bread, and get at least one bird done today (this morning and early afternoon were errands and such). I got four birds done yesterday, which was heartening. I’m looking at the number of birds I have left, and at the remaining space within my allotted word count, and thinking that I need to stop going into so much detail. But I’m still stuck on the “can you flesh this part out more?” request that came back after I handed in a sample with my proposal, so I’m adding as much as I can. It can always come out later, but as time is beginning to be of the essence, I may have to dial back to basics.

Weekend And Otherwise General Roundup

The big standouts this weekend: The boy’s first cello lesson, his first at-home practise on Sunday evening, and the arrival of new spinning equipment.

If you hit the previous post or the RSS feed early on Friday afternoon, you may have missed the two small updates to it, including photos.

The biggest obstacle to the lessons may be the travel time. Forty-five minutes, while fine for me because it’s roughly the length of a cello concerto so I get a sense of completion, is long for a squirmy boy in a snowsuit in the back. We’ll have to figure out a way to keep him busy.

Otherwise, the lesson went really well. There was lots of information that an adult would absorb almost immediately about how to sit and how to hold the cello, but the boy had to be talked through it. It was really fascinating to watch the Suzuki method being enacted with someone of the age for whom it was originally developed. He adores his tuning song ( “Ants, Ants, Ants, Digging in the Dirt, Dirt, Dirt, Going under Ground, Ground, Ground, All the way to China, China, China” for the four strings, ADGC), loves the “catapult” exercise where he holds his cello hand out to the side, palm up and hand slightly cupped, then bends the elbow and the hand is “released,” catapult-like, to land on the fingerboard. His teacher lent him her completely adorable Twinkle Bow to use for the week (because the bow that came with the cello set is a 1/2 bow, so it’s extremely unwieldy for (a) the 1/4 cello and (b) the child who needs the 1/8 cello), and put two tiny frog stickers on it so he had a visual reference for mid-point and balance point when he does his bowing exercise (which, he will discover, is the rhythm variation A of Twinkle). He was very proud of showing her that my luthier taught him how to make a bunny shape with the fingers of his right hand, then the bunny opens its mouth a bit and slides over the frog of the bow, teeth and ears kept long:

Not only is the bow two inches too long for the cello it came with (and therefore probably three to four inches too long for the boy), the 1/4 cello is unwieldy; we’ll be needing the 1/8. At the proper angles, his endpin is only extended two inches and his reach around the upper bouts is limited; he can’t get the bow down between the fingerboard and the bridge. The oversized instrument may have been a contributing factor in the slight mishap that occurred about three-quarters of the way through the lesson, when he twisted an odd way without holding onto the neck and the cello slipped off his body and fell to the ground. I thought my heart was going to stop. We all froze, our teacher picked it up and examined it, and all seemed to be well… but it could have gone very, very wrong. She asked him to apologise to me, then taught him about the three points of contact (knees, chest, floor) and the correct way to stand up and sit down with the cello so that he’d have a better understanding of the mechanics.

He’d drawn a picture for her (unprompted) that he gave to her at the end of the lesson, which she put up on her fridge. When we pulled out of her driveway, he sighed deeply and said, “I’m going to miss my cello teacher.” So I think it went well. She made quite an impression on him.

When I got home from my (quite excellent) ensemble lesson on Sunday, we set up his little chair and his endpin plank for his first at-home practice. This little cello doesn’t keep its tuning very well at all. I don’t know if that’s a commonality to all fractional celli or an idiosyncrasy of this one, or even because it’s literally newly set up and the pegs might not fully fit the pegholes properly. I may put a drop of peg dope on the pegs to keep them from slipping as badly as they’ve been doing. Anyway, after I wrestled with the pegs for a bit he got to sing his tuning song about the ants, practised his catapult, did his pizzicato rhythm practice, then again with what he and his teacher call “the magic bow”, and finally with fingers 1 and 2 of the left hand in prep for fingering. He loved it, and I did, too. I wish my practice sessions could be that fun.

In completely unrelated news, this arrived on Friday morning just as the boy and I were walking down the driveway to go to the bus stop:

I had a noon deadline, so I exerted magnificent self-control and didn’t open it until after I’d handed my project in and had made myself lunch:

I love that the maker signed the bottom of the table:

I bought walnut-coloured stain, tack cloths, foam brushes, and fine sandpaper on Saturday morning. HRH will borrow one of the tins of wood wax from work once I get to that point in a week or so. Once it’s all stained and waxed, we’ll assemble it. I figure it will be functional by mid-February (coincidentally, my next big deadline, so it’s probably a good thing it won’t be ready before that).

And two days before, this arrived in the mail:

As I was on deadline I didn’t try it out right away, but I did sit down Friday evening to test-spin some… vitamin cotton. Yes, I was crazy enough to have saved the cotton stuffing from the last few vitamin bottles, and I fluffed it up and used it to test this new Spinner’s Lair reclaimed walnut and oak spindle that weighs in at 0.88 oz. And you know what? Using a good-quality handmade spindle beats using a heavy, mass-produced, beginner’s spindle, hands-down.

If I can spin vitamin cotton on this thing, I can spin anything. I no longer hate spindles.

In other non-related news, I’m getting used to the iPhone. The headphone jack is on top instead of the bottom as well as being on the left instead of the right, which is now my most commonly enacted mistake. It annoys me that when I pull it out of a pocket I have to flip the thing around to access the home button and iPod controls, unlike my Touch, which had the headphone jack on the bottom so it went into a pocket upside-down with the controls easily accessible if I put my hand in my pocket. I need to work on focusing the photos I take with it, too, as you can see from some of the recent images here. It eats battery charge, something I have learned is a common weakness of the 3G series; to partially combat this one must be careful to close apps before putting it into sleep mode. Figuring I had nothing to lose because there was nothing on the iPhone yet and therefore a factory restore wouldn’t kill anything, I updated the iOS to 4, and all was well. I figured if Apple had to have fixed whatever killed most 3Gs back when the iOS4 was released last fall in the last two updates, and I seem to have been right. Now I can run my more current purchased apps like Toodledo and so forth.

My mouse is being annoying, sluggish and recalcitrant even though I just changed its battery and cleaned off the optic sensor, the ungrateful thing. I’m going to go back to working on the bird book.

Hindsight

I did something not-very-bright yesterday. I made bad decisions, and I’m paying for them today.

The fibro is bad. The cold snap makes it worse. Struggling with heavy winter clothing is exhausting. Driving in the winter is draining, draining, draining. As an added bonus, I have a head cold, which on its own would be enough to put me on the chesterfield at this time of year with the fibro.

I don’t look sick. However, I am sick, with a chronic illness that is kicking my butt right now, like it does every winter; I just somehow forget how bad it gets.

I cancelled cello today. I am declaring a moratorium on all social events for the next two or three weeks except Tarasmas (unless I am literally unable to get out of bed that night). Regularly or already scheduled stuff will have to be evaluated as it comes. Work (sigh) and the basics like staying upright and remembering to eat have to come first.

In completely unrelated news, I have a new-to-me iPhone 3G. It is heavier than my first-gen Touch, and the on/off button is on the top right instead of the top left. These two things alone are throwing me off. There is a camera to play with (Cricket had the honour of being the first thing I photographed), and an interesting-sounding voice memo function that I can’t figure out yet. I have to go to the library to find a book on how to use an iPhone. Yes, I am that lame. I have the basics down — it’s essentially a more complex Touch, after all — but I’m going to need to know the why and how of things. At some point I will need to upgrade the iOS to the current version, and eventually initialise the actual phone part, too.

Idle Thoughts on Podcasts

The boy was home again yesterday with a bockety digestive system. We shooed him off to school today with lots of encouragement.

I’ve been really slow to pick up on podcasts. I spend most of my time at a computer working with words, and listening to words while I do it distracts me. I can’t follow both trains of thought at the same time without failing at both, which not a model of efficiency. On top of that, if I want information, I’ll read about it; it’s a lot faster.

But I discovered the SpinDoctor podcast last summer, and I love it. Sasha, the host, started spinning at just about the same time I did, so we’re around the same level. She reviews things I’m interested in, like DVDs and books and fibre and equipment, and things I’ll probably never experience like the huge fiber festivals, and I like her personality. I generally listen to it while I spin (what better time?) but I haven’t been spinning much lately. There’s been a boy home or work to do or I’ve been knackered by fibro, and to be honest, this yellow Polworth is taking forEVer to spin up as laceweight. (We’re talking a single of about 54 WPI, on the fastest setting of my Louet S15, which is a ratio of about 10:1.) I split the four ounces into two parts to spin a two-ply yarn, and I’m so close to finishing the first half. When I am, I suspect I will stuff it in a bag and spin something else before I start the second half, because I’m so tired of it. I’ve spun all of one ounce of Merino before this, and I find the Polworth very much like it. I really prefer BFL and silks to the Merino kind of sponginess, I have discovered. Longer, silkier fibres are my thing. I don’t know how to explain my liking for Corriedale or Coopworth, then, but there you are.

Anyway. I have discovered that with the weather so cold, I can’t read books, either paper ones or ebooks, while waiting for the boy at the bus stop in the afternoon any more. Enter the podcast! I can stand there and watch for the bus, hands warmly ensconced in mitten, and listen to a bit of an interview or review or whatever.

I’m still not a huge fan of podcasts in general. I find I need to be doing something that doesn’t require a lot of attention in order to listen, and that’s a tall order when I’m fighting fibro fog a lot of the time because the fog demands that I focus all that I’ve got on what I’m doing like cooking, baking, writing, editing, what have you. The car may be a good place, but I don’t have a widget that allows me to plug my iPod into the stereo. On top of that, while I may find a segment interesting, it’s rare that I’m always interested in all the information a podcast covers so I get impatient or bored quickly. I’ve sampled a few here and there, and a lot of the time I find an episode is too long for what it should be.

I have some podcasts I’ve been meaning to listen to or try out, especially ones by friends or acquaintances, but for the above reasons I just don’t get around to it. Part of me wants to, and part of me just sighs at the amount of investment it takes in time and energy. I’ll get around to it someday.

In Which She Messes About With Technology

This morning, my monitor started doing that wonky trying-to-load-the-desktop-and-failing thing again. This happened a few weeks ago and I panicked that it might be the Mac (oh gods no, please, no) because the lovely Mac guitar-chord startup sound had also crackled and slowly faded. (Curiously, that came back after the move, then slowly faded again. Meh, the onboard mini speaker è morto. Not a big deal.) Then I figured out that it was actually a problem with the communication between the monitor and the computer, and after reading a bunch of stuff online I lowered the monitor refresh rate. Worked like a charm. The display did this odd flashing off then on thing once or twice a month upon startup, but always settled down.

Except it happened again this morning, and nothing I did would wake it up; the display would flash briefly and then go dark, over and over. This time I noticed that the power button was also flashing on and off slowly, and when I turned the computer off to try booting again that button didn’t go to amber the way it’s supposed to. Fortunately we have a second computer in the house, and HRH had given me permission the last time the monitor had this stutter to unplug his lovely widescreen monitor and use it. Before I did that, though, I turned his computer on and searched for problems with a ViewSonic flashing power button. And wouldn’t you know, this is a common ViewSonic issue. The monitor tries to load the display, but it goes black repeatedly. The cause is blown flux capacitors in the power supply, which can be replaced by the user.

Heh heh heh. I get to turn my monitor into a time-travel machine a surgery patient and use a soldering iron. It will be a heck of a lot cheaper than buying a new monitor, and it gives me a certain satisfaction to know that I can extend my monitor’s life instead of dropping it in a landfill and spending a couple hundred dollars I really don’t have on a new monitor. If replacing the capacitors doesn’t work, then I haven’t lost anything but a bit of time and a negligible amount of money, and I’ve gained an experience. Once the monitor’s on it can go for hours, but it’s the uncertainty about if it will load properly in the first place that’s unwelcome. It finally loaded this morning, for example, but only as I was on the floor reaching for the cables to disconnect them in preparation for switching the monitors after twenty minutes of this one flashing.

In other exciting-to-me technological news, I figured out how to hook my iPod Touch up to the stereo. When I was in the shed earlier this week I found the Random Electronics box and scrabbled through it till I found an RCA-to-minijack cable and brought it inside. Yesterday, when I was too dead from all the driving and celloing I had done the day before to do much other than just sit there, I decided to spin a chunk of the dyed BFL I’ve been working on (Lady Jane has to go home in a week, and I want this project done before then so I don’t’ have to switch wheels in the middle, because they spin differently and that affects the yarn, of course) and I wanted to listen to the great SpinDoctor podcast while I did it. I didn’t want to blast my computer speakers like I’d had to do before, though, so I pulled the stereo amp away from the wall and plugged the RCA jacks in, plugged the minijack into the headphone output of my first-gen Touch, et voila, podcast on the stereo. Look, this is a big deal for me, okay? The thinking it out, knowing I had the right cable somewhere (we still haven’t found the last box with all my wall altar stuff and the tealights in it after the move, argh), and the wherewithal to figure the connection out when I got the stereo, the iPod, and the cable all in the same place is a decent accomplishment for me these days.

Speaking of technological experimentation, there are two and a half ounces of that fibre left to spin up. And I have decided that what I originally considered a wood-violet colour scheme is actually more like polished fluorite when spun and wound on the bobbin. Equally lovely, just different. (Photos at some point, yes. This camera doesn’t capture colour and light the way I wish it did, and all my pictures look dull, which is why you haven’t gotten many lately.) It’s interesting to see how colours on a braid of combed top shift when drafted and spun. I find myself interested in the technical adjustments to a Saxony wheel set up in Scotch tension. What happens if I increase or decrease the tension? What happens when I move the mother of all away from the wheel? I’m secure enough to treadle at my usual speed now and my hand speed while drafting has caught up to it. I’m looking forward to Navajo-plying this BFL when it’s done, too, to see how the wheel handles it. I do wish I had time to try double drive, but I’m barely going to get the singles of the BFL done and all plied before it’s time to take Lady Jane back to her home. HRH asked what I thought of double treadling, and I’m fine with it. I thought I might feel ungrounded, but it’s all okay. So I’m no longer worried about getting a double-treadle wheel at some point and not being able to use it properly.

Day By Day

Yes, things are quiet. I’m sorry about that. I’m tired, I’m on new medication and it’s a struggle to get used to it, and there’s stuff I have to get done before I jot things down here. And by the time it’s done I’m exhausted and can’t string two coherent words together.

Cello is going well. My teacher is patient and sympathetic about what I’m handling right now, for which I’m very grateful. We had a cello sectional at orchestra this week, and that went much better than I expected.

Work is… problematic. Trying to focus with the fibro was bad; trying to focus on it while working through the period of adjustment with the new medication on top of the fibro is harder. I know it will all even out in the long run, but when I repeatedly forget the sentence I’ve just read it doesn’t feel like I’ll ever be able to get past it. I can do bits of the repurposing project at a time, but trying to remember where other thematically-similar material is in a 200-page document when I’m muddled by medication is frustrating and depressing. I’m doing work on the book proposal and sample chapter away from the computer, which is great to a point, but I’m going to have to come back and start organizing it into something coherent at the computer next week. I finally gathered up the courage to take down the old pro website and upload the new iWeb one after a few more tweaks, too, and I’m very happy with it. I aced the copy-editing test, and start with that department at the beginning of November, too.

Spinning proceeds apace. I’m starting to get used to Lady Jane, although I’m still experimenting with her. I’ve plied the Shetland with silk thread from my local Fabricville, which went very nicely and yielded about 230 yards of lovely soft black yarn. Lady Jane spins the wood violet-coloured BFL I’m working on beautifully, too, and I’m interested to see how that chain-plies. I like it so much that I’ve planned to make a wrap out of it, so I stopped by Ariadne to buy the second 4-oz braid of the colourway so as to have enough.The drive band seems to be stretching and getting floppy, though, and I originally moved the mother-of-all to account for it, but then the treadling got stiff. I checked with Bonnie and she gave me the go-ahead to move the MOA as close to the wheel as possible and then trimming the drive band, and now it treadles beautifully with no stiffness at all. The new drive band just stretched, I think. I still have to check my spinning books to see what they say about adjusting Saxony wheels in Scotch tension, as it’s completely foreign to me. I like the Scotch tension a lot, though. I don’t know if I’ll have the courage to try double drive before I give her back.

I’m still trying to find a comfortable angle at which to spin, though. My knees seem to complain if I’m sitting straight on or at too much of an angle. Interestingly, I’ve switched my fibre and twist-controlling hands. Usually I hold my fibre in my left and pinch with my right while drafting straight back from the orifice past my left side, but I reverse my hands on the Saxony and draft in front of me to my right, at a right angle to the orifice. Speeding up my drafting has been a challenge; there have been a few slubs in both the Shetland and the BFL. I’m still not wholly sold on the idea of DT, though. At least I don’t think I am; I’ll try something on the Louet next week and see how odd ST feels after a week and a half of DT. It still just feels like another method, and I don’t know if I have a preference for one over the other. Overall I feel like I’m not good enough for a Schacht-Reeves, but I also know something like this would last me my entire spinning life and give me lots of room to grow.

I also accidentally taught myself how to knit Continental-style (I think; I haven’t formally checked against a video yet) and finished half a replacement handwarmer for the boy that way. (He lost one and was devastated, so I knit a replacement, and of course someone found the lost handwarmer at school, so now we have one in reserve against the next time it happens.) It happened when I wondered what feeding the yarn over my left hand would do, and then I saw that I didn’t have to actually wrap the yarn over the needle; I could just sort of flick it up with the needle tip. The first few stitches were awful but by the next row it looked just like the other way. I fact, my tension was better and my first finger wasn’t locking up.

Meallanmouse lent us the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and the flickering issue we had with the last set we tried to watch is still there but not so pronounced as to make it impossible to watch like last time. I don’t know if it’s the different discs, the new TV, or the Blu-Ray player, but whatever the reason we can actually watch it this time without both of us getting headaches, so we’ve stuck it out and are enjoying it immensely. HRH and I watched the first two episodes together and then decided that yes, the boy would adore it, so we introduced him to it the next day and rewatched those episodes with him. Now we get to watch an episode every day together after HRH gets home before supper.

Last weekend the boy went down town to McGill to participate in a research study, and was very excited about it. They video the interviews, and apparently when they asked him if he knew why he was there he chirped, “Of course: I’m here for an experiment!” with a little double hand-flip thing as if he was displaying something, and cuted the researchers right out. The next day we went to Ada’s naming, which was lovely even if I did leave out an entire paragraph of introduction at the beginning. If you have to drop something, dropping the least-essential bit is the way to go. It was a beautiful day with good weather, fabulous food, and excellent company.

Okay, you’re caught up with my endlessly scintillating life. The rest of today is work where I can between laundry and the long list of errands before Thanksgiving weekend.