Category: NaBloPoMo

Oh baby, it’s cold outside!

I took a day off of blogging yesterday, but I’m going to see if I can now do the rest of December as well.  If not, no big worry.  I actually ventured out yesterday, and I’m glad I did, even though the pavements down the hill were icy:

Snow - 01-12-2010

Today, it’s a tad snowier than it was yesterday, and it’s snowing again now.  No buses are running, and there’s very little traffic in general.  My brother’s friend was mostly OK in his Jeep, but I wouldn’t want to drive in this weather.  It’s a bit deep on my road, and we’re not likely to get gritted:

Snow - 02-12-2010
Snow - 02-12-2010

Brrr!

NaBloPoMo Success!

Yaaaaaaaaaaaay, I won!  Well, I passed the finishing line, having posted every day this month – and this time without a meme to help me along.  Woohoo!  I am ver’ ver’ proud of myself.

NaBloPoMo 2010 - I did it!Thank you very much.

In weather news, it snowed.  Luckily it didn’t start laying on the ground until I was back home again today, but now there’s a good covering out there.  Brrrr!

Snowy weather

Well, the snow is definitely here now – when I woke up yesterday there was a white blanket of it outside, and although it did melt up at my Mum’s house, it hasn’t done here yet, and we’ve had more since then.  I think there’s going to be more still over the next 24 hours – the BBC weather page seems to think so:

Weather Forecast 30-11-10

I hope I can make it to the library tomorrow!  I’ll get up early and check the bus info page.  Which means, I think, it’s time for a cosy early night under my nice warm duvet! Goodnight, internet.

Friday 5 for 26th November

Friday 5 for November 26: Holiday Music

  1. What’s your favorite holiday album?
    Either my two-disc set of Handel’s Messiah, or any album of carols. Puts me properly in the festive mood.
  2. What song’s lyrics, title, or theme best expresses the positive aspects of your general mood at this time of year?
    “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day”. It just makes me feel Christmassy.
  3. What song’s lyrics, title, or theme best expresses the not-so-positive aspects of your general mood at this time of year?
    Hmm, I don’t know.
  4. What’s your favorite song about a non-December holiday?
    More a season than a holiday, though I associate it with May Day: Summer is a Cumin In
  5. What holiday song makes you want to cover your ears and flee?
    Any cheesy Christmas song that I hear over and over and over… there used to be several, but now that I don’t work in a shop and have to hear them on loop all day long, I’m more tolerant of them all ;-)

No(t much) Snow

We’ve had a little bit of snow today, but it hasn’t really settled.  Which is good, because it meant that the rails and roads were OK for getting back from the Skunk Anansie gig at Brixton Academy last night.  That was fantastic, by the way, and if I can find the words I’ll try to write up some kind of review.

Today, I’ve finally been working on the photo album for this site again.  So, as an experiment, let’s try displaying a gallery from it on this post…

Continue reading “No(t much) Snow”

Travelling Woman shawl

Finally, belatedly, here are the pictures and info for my “Gap Year Travels” Travelling Woman shawl.

Travelling Woman shawl

Pattern: Traveling Woman by Liz Abinante [Ravlink]
Yarn: The Yarn Yard Bonny in Byron Bay & Art Deco solid, and Wendy Sunbeam St. Ives 4ply Sock Wool in Dark Grey.
Needles: 4mm metal circulars.

Travelling Woman close-up Travelling Woman close-up

On Thankfulness

I don’t normally do this, since it isn’t Thanksgiving in the UK, but I think I will this year.  So here goes: Reasons to be Cheerful, 1, 2, 3….

  1. My family and friends.  I’m lucky that I have people I’m close to, can have so much fun with, and can rely on.
  2. The Xandermog.  The biggest, daftest, and best moggy in the world.
  3. Technology.  Without it, I wouldn’t be able to keep in touch with many people so easily – wouldn’t have met many of them in the first place, in fact – and my world would be a very different place.

There are many more things I could list (music! yarn! spinning! knitting!), of course, but those are three just off the top of my head.  Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Pretties from NZ

My brother and sister-in-law brought pressies back from New Zealand!  So I thought I’d show one of mine off:

Creative Fibres Hand Dyed Mohair in Pukeko
Creative Fibres Hand Dyed Mohair in "Pukeko"

The name of the colour comes from a New Zealand bird which has plumage in the colour of the yarn.  Oh, and it’s a lovely 100g hank of bulky-weight mohair… I’ve been thinking about what to make with it, but I think I’ve settled on a shawl of some kind.

And we’re back

I thought I wasn’t going to get to post today, because the website has been down since about midnight last night, and it wasn’t looking hopeful!  But then my host fixed everything (hooray), and although I had to restore a couple of posts again, at least I had a backup of my own this time.  That’s right, I got cautious.

So today, while I’ve been working on the site design, I’ve only just uploaded it, and… well, a couple of things aren’t quite working yet.  Ah well, try again tomorrow.  I’m happy enough with most of it.

Now, I’m off to bed, as I am library-ing in the morning.  Good night!

Coding, Comments and Connectivity

I’ve been faffing around with the design of the non-blog pages on this site today and yesterday… and I’ve made a right hash of it! That’ll teach me to try modifying someone else’s code rather than writing my own. I’m going to take a step back and do some rewriting – it’ll make more sense to me that way, and hopefully even work!

In other news, today is the start of this month’s IComLeavWe, and marks a year since I first joined that group! Maybe I’ll try for Iron Commenter status this time around. I’ll have a crack, at any rate.

IComLeavWe
IComLeavWe: Join the Conversation

Comments awaaaaaaaaaay! (If only the website will stay up; this server move seems to be taking longer than I expected… Apparently there are now some issues with SQL that’s causing database connection errors. Which temporarily eats this site! Hopefully that will be fixed soon.)

Family Reunion

My brother and sister-in-law got home from their honeymoon today, hooray!  They’ve been in New Zealand for two months, so it’s lovely to have them back and be able to see them and chat to them in person, rather than just reading about their adventures on their blog!

This afternoon we’ve been over to their place to say hi and see some of the photos they took.  They met up with some NZ cousins of ours while they were there, so it was lovely to see pics of them.  I think we still have some photos to see, though – there are lots and lots! :-)

Repost for 18 Nov: In which my computer was unhappy, but my web server more so.

I should have taken a back-up after I posted yesterday.  I should have known.  But silly me, I didn’t.  So the entry I did post is gone, eaten I assume by the server move that’s happening with my web host at the moment.  It didn’t help that I was having computer troubles the same day.

Argh! icon from my LJMy livejournal feed did manage to grab the entry before it vanished again, so I can tell you that it was posted at 23:57, the post id is one which doesn’t exist in my current database, and the excerpt text (whyyyyy did I never change to full text feeds?!) says:

“Oh dear, my computer hasn’t been firing on all cylinders today.  I’m pretty sure the problem was with my virus checker since it all started after a change to that.  I’ve run a ‘repair’ thingy on it, and hopefully everything …”

… and then I continued on to say that all should work now, fingers crossed etc, the end.  That LJ feed will only stay there for 10 days, I think, so it’s not a permanent record.  Bah!

I hope the mods are OK with counting this for yesterday’s NaBloPoMo entry, considering I did post, but it vanished.  I shall drop them a line to check, I think.

Proof Positive

This will make more sense after reading the next chronological post, but the proper post from 18th Nov went missing.  But!  Here is proof that it did exist:

Having heard back from the lovely Nablopomo mod, I have the go-ahead to backdate this post so that I don’t miss out on an entry yesterday. Hooray!

I fibbed

Well, sort of – I said I would post pictures of the finished shawl today, and I haven’t got around to taking and uploading them yet.  What I do have is a sort-of, half-finished, almost new blog design.  Yeah, I know, but it’ll do for now – there will be many more adjustments to come.  It’s a fork of the Thirty-ten WP child theme.  Pictures by me, some things (like the Rav bars) not working yet.  Maybe tomorrow.