Saturday, December 29, 2007

It's fourth down, she'll have to punt...

Um, so that was me with regards to my handmade Christmas gifts. It just didn't work out this year, but I was in serious denial until the 20th or so of December, madly knitting while a tiny voice in the back of my head whispered that there wasn't enough time. Oh, sorry. That was actually my husband in his loud voice telling me to give up and get some sleep already!


And so, I did. I gave up. It was hard. I'm not ashamed to say that there were tears. You know how it is, with visions of perfect knitted gifts in just the right color, yarn, pattern all amazingly wrapped in your handmade, hand painted/stamped whatever paper with exquisite handmade card attached. While I never wrote about it here (because that would, you know, require me to actually write) I had in my head taken a "semi-handmade" Christmas pledge... not to be confused with anything related to Sandra Lee- how does she have a show on Food Network? I'm sorry but those tablescapes? Sometimes less is more. And have you ever noticed how the decor in her kitchen changes almost every show to match the theme? I once caught about five minutes of a lemon themed show, I swear the whole kitchen looked like a lemon meringue had exploded. She scares me and the food? yikes. I don't ever intend to watch her show but sometimes I'll be flipping through the channels and I get sucked in - I think it is the train wreck factor - what is she going to do next?


Um. Where was I? (but I do feel better, getting that off my chest)


I wanted to make as many presents as possible this year. I really had a bee up my butt about it. It is really tough for me to not be perfect when it comes to things like this. But, in the end, my sanity, what little I have left, was more important (thank you amazon! while you may be the total opposite of the handmade Christmas pledge you do come through for those of us with a last minute present crisis... ).


At least now I am, for the moment, ahead of the game for next year's Christmas gift knitting. I'd say I was ahead for birthday knitting but my family (with the exception of my daughter and my father) has inconveniently decided to be born in the warmer months when a wool whatever just wouldn't go over too well.


And in some totally unrelated, technology-makes-no-sense news, my card reader has decided to function again, just out of the blue. I didn't change anything, it just worked when my husband gave it a go. Unfortunately I don't have any current knitting pics in the photos I'm uploading to flickr but I'll try to get some in the next couple days and give you a year-end wrap up of my works in progress (too many). In the meantime, here is a little cuteness from "backstage" at my brother-in-law's wedding back in October (man, I have a lot of catching up to do), Gwen was the flower girl:

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Grrrrrr....

OK, so I'm feeling just a teensy bit frustrated.

As stated before, my computer won't recognize it's internal card reader so no pictures.

I tried an external card reader (we have one lying around- and I know it is functional because it works with my husband's laptop). No good. Still no pictures.

Per my last post, I tried sending pics from my phone and guess what? My phone is in on the conspiracy. I attempted to email photos directly to my Flickr account- never showed up. Tested sending them to my personal email account- nope, nothing. Tried multi-media messaging them to my husband's phone so he could then upload them- uh-uh. Now, I have a Blackjack so it should be perfectly capable of any or all of these functions... in fact, I have in the past successfully sent pictures to my husband. But now? Now that I need to use the photo functionality? Um, no.

So as a last ditch effort I gave my memory card to my husband to upload. Hmmm, you say, why not do that in the first place, seems perfectly reasonable. Patience, my friends, all will be revealed. Gave the Hubster the card so he could upload to his laptop and then transfer them to our network hard-drive so I could access them. Watched him plug the card into the reader and begin the process. Happily tripped back down the stairs to draft some posts related to the pictures confident that I would soon have pictures to share. Soon. A couple hours later I checked the hard-drive location where we keep the pictures- nothing new. No big deal, he was working and probably got distracted. So apparently he has been distracted for 14 days!!!!! I keep nagging and he keeps saying, I haven't had a chance. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.... HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO DRAG AND DROP AND FREAKING FOLDER FROM ONE LOCATION TO ANOTHER???!!!!!! THE PICS ARE ALREADY UPLOADED TO HIS LAPTOP!

ahem. sorry. Just really aggravated. I even tried doing it myself, as I am, after all, perfectly self-sufficient, but I can't figure out where the original file is on his laptop.

And so I am just so exasperated by the whole thing that I want nothing to do with blogging... but at the same time I miss it. Did I mention "grrrrrrrrrrr..."?

Obviously I am supposed to have a picture-free blog and I just failed to get the memo. *sigh*