Ipod/Itunes Blast part II

When you go into the recently added playlist, or any other play list for that matter, you can only see song titles and not artists. This is of no help when 5 albums have been recently downloaded and you are not familiar with what song titles belong to what artist. I don't see that there is an option to change this...so for now what I have to do is click on the song to play it before I can tell who the artist is.

Photo Op

L and I went around Boston yesterday to shoot some pics since we both dabble in photography. The techniques seem so clear while reading the book and then I get out there and the situations aren't as isolated as they are in the book. I think it would have been easier to try to tackle doing one technique well because it was overwhelming to try to think of all of the rules for each situation. For example, there were water droplets, frontlighting situations, backlighting situations, panning opportunities and sometimes all together...ahhhh! I could have spent a day just trying to get a good pic doing one. But alas, there are a few pics I liked out of the 94 that I took!! Here they are...

Practice Space Pics

Hubbleson took me down to his practice space last night because he had to try a new piece of gear. He ordered something online and was sent something entirely different than what he ordered but with a much higher value so he wanted to try it out and see if it was worth keeping even though it wasn't something he was in the market for at this point. The verdict? Not worth it. While he was testing that out, I was playing around with my camera....

OMG!!

I had to pick my jaw up off the floor this morning as I came to a halt in front of my Harvard Square Dunkin Donuts...I read the sign, thought maybe I was still sleeping, nay, having a nightmare....'Temporarily Closed'...no!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But I have so many questions...why, for how long, what should my frame of mind be come Monday morning, should I start coming up with a plan B?

Oddly enough, I was going to buy doughnuts for my coworkers this morning but I guess what they don't know won't hurt them.

In the non tangled yoke Tangled Yoke Cardigan saga, I have officially completed the knitting last night. I finished the button bands but now I need to weave in all of the ends and find buttons. I'm going to be out shooting some pics tomorrow so I might swing by Windsor Button if I end up in their neck of the woods.

IPod Blast

I've always meant to put my vents about Itunes and the Ipod up here because I think you're a captive audience and Hubbleson is getting sick of my griping.

Issue #1: Itunes decided to erase everything from my Ipod the other week and it took me a full weekend to import everything back on. This was around the time that everyone who had gotten new Iphones was complaining about the servers going down and their computers crashing.....I didn't even buy an iphone and I'm stuck with the nonfunctionality.

Issue #2: My ipod lists authors of podcasts in the Artists section. Annoying. It also lists it by their real name and not the name of the podcast itself so you really have no idea what it is until you click on it. Money Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips becomes Andrew Horowitz in the list. Don't ask...he's filling in for Money Girl

Issue #3: When listening to podcasts that are a shortened nature, my ipod will go back to the main menu automatically after it finishes instead of just staying in that podcasts menu of other episodes. Then you have to rechoose podcasts, then select your podcast, and then scroll to find a new episode. I would prefer to be able to just play all down the list...but can I? No! The only way around this that I see is to make an on the go playlist of podcasts. I haven't tried it yet because the idea that this simple task is seemingly so difficult has turned me off to the idea of trying.

To be continued....

Good Mood

I'm just randomly in a good mood today...perhaps it's linked to the fact that I saw some leaves turning brown on a few shrubs that my bus passed on the way in this morning. I'm willing fall to be in the air! It's usually around this time of year that stores start getting their first batches of fall clothing, I buy it and insist on wearing it and then am waaayyy too hot.

It's also a dangerous time because I'm getting constant emails from my favorite yarn stores announcing the new fall lines are coming in...I've already got several projects lined up and I really should dwindle down my vast yarn supply before introducing more into the fold.

As long as I can keep deleting those yarn emails...it's all over once I open the link :)

Beer Fest and A Tangled Yoke We Don't Weave

Last weekend, Hubbleson and I traveled once again to Burlington for the MicroBrew Beerfest...I'm not even sure what the actual name of it is and I'm too lazy to google it for you. We had a slight snafu with our hotel not recognizing our reservation (they said we cancelled it days after we booked it which we did not and we could still see our reservation when we logged into our email account) but alas they found us something and gave us adjoining rooms (we met the In Laws there). Friday night we ate at A Single Pebble which was really great. I'm not a huge fan of Chinese food but this was really really good and it was a fun lively environment. Saturday was the actual Beerfest which was fun but we all agreed we would have liked it more if it was in fall...it's pretty bad when you're sweating from just drinking beer. Of course, after our fourth sample, I didn't really care about the heat anymore :)

I also got a chance to work on the Tangled Yoke Cardigan which is a mere shadow of it's former self. I'm pretty impressed with myself because I basically just loosely used this pattern as a guideline and ended up changing the majority of it. I totally customized it based on the gauge of my knitting which called for a lot of math and a lot of ratios and proportion figuring because between the size of needles I wanted to use and the weight of the yarn, even the smallest size would have been too big. I recalculated everything and rewrote the pattern, tweaked it so that it was more fitted, changed the collar and eliminated the tangled yoke cabling. I was not going to get the pattern right on that since I had totally different stitch counts than what the pattern was calling for because I changed so much so it had to go by the wayside. I'm currently picking up stitches to knit the button band..I'll post a pic when I'm finito.

Here are a few pics from the weekend, all fairly lackluster but it was so hot I didn't feel like tweaking the manual settings.

Photo Post

I've been listening to Jeff Curto's Camera Position Podcast which has inspired to take my pictures and read more about my problem areas (no not my thighs, my exposures!) I'm in the middle of a Understanding Exposures currently which is really helping to solidify the aperture settings needed to achieve certain looks and how to do some experimentation with depth of field. Here are some of the pics I've been inspired to take as of late mixed with some that I've previously taken but have a new appreciation for:

Cupcakes and Asphalt or My Thursday Morning

So I decided to bake cupcakes for my coworkers...they were quite festive with red and blue jimmies inside the yellow cupcake for a patrioti effect. Then I used vanilla frosting which came with more jimmies and little red and blue stars. I went to bake them and realized that I had a miniscule amount of vegetable oil. Ding ding ding....what's a perfect substitute? Applesauce and I'll keep my coworkers healthier. I open the applesauce to see some weird powdery stuff coating the top...expiration date.. December 2007. Ok, guessing I'm going to the store.

The actual baking of the cupcakes was fine and I had this brilliant idea to transfer the cupcakes to cake pan that has a cover with a handle to make my commute easier. Get to Harvard Square, bypass my usual coffee so that I have at least one hand to hold on on my subway ride. Look at that! There's actually a seat! I sit down, the woman next to me tells my cupcakes are beautiful and admires my carrying case.

I get off at my stop and start walking and just as I'm passing the Liberty Hotel, my case let go o the pan leaving my holding only the handle and the cover,the pan is now one the sidewalk. Luckily, the pan landed face up so there was no asphalt interference with the cupcakes (as my title would have you believe). The cupcakes jumbled onto each other so one or two had a serious lack of frosting but aside from that they were fine. They were tasty despite their battle wounds.

I Get Results

Why am I presenting to you a baby sweater knit a charming shade of soft purple when the only baby around for me to knit for is male? Because now.....there's a new baby in town! My best friend J's sister had her baby! I crafted up this little sweater which I'll be sending out soon. It seems like there's babies all over the place....Mom's coworker is due July 4th, B just had O, and this youngin.





Now what's this you may ask? This is the Hourglass Sweater from Last Minute Knitted Gifts, the second attempt. I wanted a better fit (longer torso and arms) so after I completely finished one I restarted it and made another of the same color. Luckily, I had enough yarn left over, well almost, I had to order two more skeins. This sweater is perfect, EXCEPT I do not like how wide the boatneck is and I even tweaked the pattern and made it substantially smaller than the pattern. I'll still have to wear a tank under it because my bra straps can be seen otherwise. I really like the fit of the sweater otherwise and I'm actually tempted to make it again in another color. By the way, I loved this yarn. It's a cotton/linen blend that was on clearance at WEBS (it's called Cotolino). I'm going to check around if I can find it other places becuase it's the perfect spring/summer weight yarn. This sweater pattern was nice and basic, it would be a good one to experiment around with some of my patterns from Vogue Stitchionary....hmmm perhaps.