Kathy A. Graff

09:33 am: Long time between posts
It has been over a year already! Looks like there have been some changes to LiveJournal in that time.

Seems there are just too many places to go. I keep up with many of my relatives on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/kgraff. I started posting knitting and crochet projects on Ravelry http://www.ravelry.com/people/kgraff instead of my personal web site http://threads.kgraff.net/ or blog http://kgraff.net/blog/ because people who are interested will have a better chance of finding them there.

I am wondering if this proliferation of "communities" is serving to separate people rather than get them together? Joining all of them is time consuming, fortunately some have the ability to import posts from your other sites automatically. A web of webs?

This time last year my mom was recovering from her first stroke. She had a second worse stroke and with a number of other medical problems is now dealing with living with long term effects. In some ways this is more difficult than dealing with acute illness.

Bode is feeling his age and arthritis since early spring. His gait (sheepdog style, body almost motionless while the feet move like on wheels) used to go to the rhythm of some of Percy Grainger's compositions. Now he limps and may stumble and stops frequently. He seems to be in good spirits though, that tail wags just fine.

I have set aside the needlework projects for summer stuff. Have been munching Alpine strawberries and black raspberries (the ones that didn't bear fruit for the first two years!). Now the red raspberries are starting to ripen. For a second year I can't seem to get marigolds to grow well. The slugs reduced many of the first ones I planted to twigs. I have been baiting traps with cheap beer to try to get them under control. This damp weather just encourages them and being at the base of cliff that is heavily forested contributes as well.

Another big change is that this spring I opted for a DSL connection after years of using dial-up. I needed to add call waiting because my parents were having trouble using the phone in general (physical problems along with using a complicated calling card) and were discouraged when they finally connected if they got a busy signal. Nothing is simple anymore, got introduced to the world of "bundles" and after about an hour on the web site and another hour on the phone told the support tech that I would go with whatever they could put together that was under $50 a month.

Seems that the commercial folks are resisting the idea that there is no technological reason why all telecommunications and entertainment (TV, radio, FAX, telephone, movies, etc.) can come through one wire or wireless connection. I suspect that a high proportion of the current economic problems is from counting on people to be ignorant of the very basics of how things work. sigh...

I don't get digital TV signals here, so the DSL has allowed me to keep up with some of my favorite shows as well as viewing some that I could not get with the antenna. PBS, NBC, and CBS video web sites seem to work very well. On the down side, after the initial installation, my first bill didn't reflect the price I bargained for, so had to call to remind them. This kind of thing is a good reason not to have your bills automatically deducted from a bank account.

07:48 am: Almost summer
http://www.kgraff.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/viola_5850-150x150.jpg

With the beds where I grew flowers and vegetables last summer already dug, the gardening is off to an earlier start this year. We are probably past frost danger, so put in tomatoes and peppers in last week.

Tags: flower, garden

08:14 am: Winter is coming
Kind of somber here these days. Bode still encourages me to take him out for walks, but other than that, going to the grocery store is about it.

The Roland EP-7 keyboard that survived a Classic II, PowerMac 6100 DOS compatible, G4 desktop, and worked with the G4 laptop I am using now finally bit the dust. Only the two lowest octaves on the keyboard work. Haven't tried to see if the keys will register as MIDI events yet though. The speakers appear to work fine. Most recently I used it to practice my part in choir music, have also used it to input music to Finale. One of the reasons I got that particular model was to take piano lessons, but maybe that is something to let go of...

Tags: piano

03:26 pm: Posted using LJ Talk...
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03:05 pm: Living in Ford City PA
I found out in mid-March that the place on Cribbs Road was being sold and I needed to be out by May 1, so started looking around and found a nice place through the Pittsburgh Craig's List.

Ling Ling survived the move but died peacefully on May 11. Seemed like he held on long enough to make sure this was a good place.

Still not completely unpacked because I gave planting flowers and vegetables priority. In the summer it is a lot nicer to be outside anyway. Bode has a small yard and we are about two blocks away from the Armstrong Trail, similar to Milwaukee's bike paths.

10:05 pm: First Jabber post
Here it is! Fooling around with iChat on new iBook (received last week). Have added three Jabber accounts so far. Got the MIDI stuff working, did some adjustments with the firewall and corrected a typo in Gmail so am pretty much up and running on the new machine.

09:11 am: Mid-summer
Here it is almost August already. I still have the two sets of socks (actually stockings) on double point needles, no rush though, they probably won't be needed for several months. Puttering around with my little flower bed garden, playing with the dog, and just being outdoors are my main occupations these days. In the mornings or the evenings the three of us often sit on the porch, the dog at my feet and Ling Ling on my lap.

I am still blogging on my web site and have started a site on a subdomain for my high school class to keep in touch.

09:05 pm: finding dog, etc.
Not dyslexic, found a dog in January and he is still here, named him Bode. The vet said he is probably 8 years old. More details in my blog starting here. I have finished a pullover sweater in sport weight handspun yarn, now working on a navy turtleneck sweater in fingering weight commercial yarn. Although it is spring by the calendar we are still having snow. The ground was white this morning.

12:22 pm: Still knitting
I am working on the fourth pair of socks since I started knitting in earnest the middle of December. Got off the a late start this year, but fortunately the recipients were patient.

This has been an unusually mild January so far, dealing with mud more than snow. Got a pair of "wellie" boots to wear last week, very country living.

Got a car last week too. It is big enough to haul my electric scooter, will need to get a ramp though. There is room to use one at both side doors and the rear. Been neglecting computer things.

08:35 am: Still unpacking
The spinning wheel is out, and some of the books are unpacked. The computer has been moved several times. Yarn and knitting books are still in boxes. Saving the best for last.

Last week my mom gave me some six cord size 30 crochet cotton that probably came from my grandmother. Getting the itch for a new doily!

My kitchen is working quite well, still arranging things though. Have made my third batch of raised bread, sure sign of being settled.

09:16 am: Second season ...
... here on Cribbs Road where I relocated in mid-September. It was like summer except for one day of frost. On Friday we had a rainy but mild day, then it got cooler. It is still cloudy today. Went from having the windows open to running the furnace.

Haven't unpacked the knitting and crochet gear but should as I need something that I can do while sitting and resting. The physical activity of settling in is starting to take a toll.

09:51 am: The move
I haven't posted here for a while, been keeping a blog on my web site http://kgraff.net/blog/ with pictures.

M-day is Monday, September 12.

03:01 pm: Spring?
There have been a lot of sunny days this week, but temperatures were below 60. The daffodils are out now! The buds were out at the begining of the week, but there are blossoms now.

I visited with Geoff and the dogs yesterday afternoon at the lot. The sun was nice but I started to chill even with wearing a sweater, parka, wool hat, wool socks and fingerless (hobo) gloves.

07:37 am: Blog++
This week I installed, then removed, then installed again a WordPress blog on my personal web site. Heaven knows I don't need yet another platform for my blather, but wanting to tinker with it won out. Forced me to look at PHP too. The only hack I have done so far is to play with the top graphic in Photoshop.

The other news is that Pat decided to go live with the Gertie the Duck information. This is quite appropriate as the ice is gone from the river and pairs of mallard ducks are staking out nest sites. Really feels like spring.

09:19 am: Ides of March...

Over the weekend I went through the photos and scans from raising butterflies last summer. As the temperatures have been below freezing here in Milwaukee, was a nice diversion. After minor reorganization yesterday here they are.

Just as the last blossoms on my Christmas cactus were fading, the hoya (honey vine) produced two flower clusters. The flowers actually drip nectar and have a distinctive scent.

When my son was here on Sunday, Basel the German shepherd kept sniffing around the plants. I lifted the stem of the lower of the two blooming clusters and her eyes lit up and she licked but didn't damage them. She really notices things, and is usually the one who finds "toys" for the others.

Since some of my mito buddies like to use IM and chat rooms and my web hosting includes a Jabber server I downloaded Fire. a Jabber client for Mac OS X and got an AIM screen name set up to complement existing Yahoo! and ICQ accounts. It is rather strange that although I have been on the Internet almost forever (OK, since late 1980s) I didn't do a lot of stuff like that before. I think it was because talk requests distracted me when I was busy working in a terminal window.

09:55 am: Last week I got up to the 23rd round of a 24 round wheat ear pattern doily I have been working on since November and noticed that there was a glaring omission on the 17th round. Rip time. Must have looked at it dozens of times, even photographed it, and didn't notice it until then. Sigh...

I have been mainly working on my web page customizing things for the new host Dreamhost.com (this is a shameless plug -- they award referral fees!). They are the first shared hosting I have used where Analog site stats really work, and in addition, you can configure Analog yourself through the control panel.

I have been working on updating Perl CGI scripts and MySQL databases. Wouldn't have had to do much, but I am using the move as an excuse to make changes. Last week I adapted a script I used on the old host to show the most recent pages (from a list in a MySQL database) to make a user-configurable site map page.

Dreamhost doesn't require you to put all your scripts into a cgi-bin directory, so I have been mixing scripts in with the static HTML pages. I am liking Dreamhost more and more as I use it.

The current needlework slump fits in with my theory that transposing music, doing calculations, designing, and programming use the same brain circuits.

07:16 am: Its been a while...
... since I posted. Been busy with some work (woohoo! income is nice!) and last week moved my web site to a new host. Seem to be in a cycle of two migraines per month that last one or two days. The secret to getting them to go away sooner is to sleep them off. Since I am semi-retired this is a viable option. When I was working "IT full time" (40 to 80 hours per week plus on call 24x7) they often lasted three and four days and taking off a day to sleep often resulted in getting behind in hours causing more stress.

Ling Ling turned 17 on February 18. Yesterday I added some new photos of the birthday boy. He is slowing down a bit and the cat suit isn't quite a snug as it used to be, but he is still quite the fellow.

Geoff now has four dogs. He had thought of putting two up for adoption, but in the process of training them he apparently got more attached than he expected. His dogs are nice and I enjoy when he visits with them.

An added bonus is that he is saving their combings for me to spin. The German shepherd seems to be the best "producer" and her undercoat is a beautiful carmel color. I dug out some knit swatches from yarn I spun from dog hair when he was little in the early 1980's. Sam IV, a friend's Samoyed from Champaign-Urbana IL, provided fiber in purest white. My cousin's tricolor border collie / collie mix Smokey's swatch is noted that I spun it on a drop spindle. I remember it especially because I showed it to an experienced knitter who also had a PhD in biology - they mistook it for camel hair!

I am still working on spinning some cotton and silk blend roving I got around 1993, but maybe this will be an incentive to use my spinning wheel for more than plying yarn.

10:14 am: Sunday morning
I listened to the BBC3 Choral Evensong broadcast from Trinity College, Cambridge for the Feast of Epiphany this morning. The first anthem was Mozart's Venite Populi, a lovely piece that I can't recall having heard before. They sang his Ave Verum Corpus too, a piece a friend once described as being closest to a perfect composition, and two pieces by Schutz. The choir was wonderful and the readings included turning water into wine at Cana.

Being able to listen to programs for up to a week after broadcast is wonderful, sort of a TiVo for radio only no extra hardware needed. You don't need to figure out time zones either.

Yesterday I passed 20 inches on the brown foldover hat. When making this kind of hat it is important to keep on knitting even though it looks impossibly long. To make it work, you need twice the length from the top of the head to the bottom of the ear, then twice the depth of the brim plus some extra for the folding. I didn't do this the first time and ended up with a beanie, fairly useless for Wisconsin winters. I split the original hat at the fold line and picked up the stiches on a 16 inch No. 1 circular needle and knit down on the old outside below the herringbone pattern in stockinette, then finished with a generous section of K2P2 ribbing. The current hat is from picking up the stitches from the former inside and knitting in plain stockinette.

This will give me three hats in this brown fingering/lace weight cone wool I bought from an eBay seller from British Columbia. The first hat was two layers throughout with a diamonds pattern, the second with a single layer and a fold up brim, and this one will be two layers throughout plus a two layer fold up brim for four layers over the ears. The trick to having a warm head where the winters are cold and windy is to use many layers of a fairly tight fabric in fine yarn (similar to the gauge for socks) rather than go for thickness with heavy yarn. The blue Lamb's Pride Coronet hat I made in December is quite thick and warm unless there is a wind. It is good under a parka hood though.

To pass the time when I got up last night and couldn't get back to sleep, I continued the double decreases on four sections started earlier in the day. I have decreased to 24 stitches on each of the four sections. It will need to go onto double point needles soon. I put markers every 48 stitches a few rows after the picked up stitches. Using stitch and row markers are a trick to keep on with plain knitting, you perceive progress. This time I used crochet thread loops with one, two, and three beads plus a plain loop for the start. If I don't get involved in anything else, may finish and block the hat today.

I have only been out once since the snow storm, had promised a friend help install DSL on Friday, but she picked me up in her car and I used the walker to get out to the street. Although the snow was plowed quickly on the streets, the result is that it was piled up and compacted along curbs, including the cut curbs I rely on to get around with the scooter.

Thursday afternoon after the snow stopped falling,I heard shouting. When I looked out the window, discovered that the crew clearing the alley was having a dispute with the crew clearing the parking lot as to where to pile the snow. Looks like they worked it out.

I am listening to Choral Evensong again, have finished a breakfast of French toast and a mug of tea with milk and sugar. The theme of feasting is mixed with prayers for the victims of the tsunami. I ran low on tea during the week, so ordered more from Uptons rather than trying to get out through the snow. It arrived two days later. I wonder about the people in Sri Lanka who picked the tea that I enjoyed earlier this morning.

09:41 am: Snow!
We are having our first real snow storm of the season today. It is great to be indoors looking out though. I used to cherish this kind of weather when I was still cross country skiing. That was a long time ago, used skis that you wax. There was a rich vocabulary to describe snowfall and temperatures in the color coding for the waxes. When I lived in Salt Lake City (around 1980) the radio weather forcasts included ski conditions and recommended wax to apply. We didn't get much snow in the valley, but often I would be greeted by flakes of wax falling from the upper balconies in our apartment building as people scraped their skis and got ready to commute to the slopes.

Some kind of communicable disease went through Milwaukee and Chicago over the holidays. A friend called it the flu, but I came down with it the day after Christmas even with having a flu shot. (Mitochondrial disease, chronic respiratory problems, and never getting over the 1999/2000 strain qualified me for the first round.)

I am getting close to the top of another brown hat, this one similar in design to the gray hat I made over the summer. The wheat pattern crochet doily in size 30 thread is still at the 15th round, set aside for Christmas knitting.

08:17 am: I have been down with some kind of bug a lot of this week. Here it is New Year's day already.
The navy blue tubular scarf is done, washed, blocked, and presented. It turned out 8.5 feet long and 10 inches wide. The recipient was very sweet, called yesterday to say thank you.
During the week I made a pair of slippers in leftover sport weight yarn. They were done by percentages, may try another pair or two in a different gauge yarns then post the pattern. I looked at the wear patterns on socks that are starting to get thin but are not yet to the puppy toy stage, then made the slippers cut low to cover them. Found they fit under the sandals I wear for slippers too. Thought people might be looking for projects to use up leftover yarn from holiday projects.
It was sunny and mild here yesterday with lots of wind. Felt more like early spring than winter.
I am getting ready for our regular Saturday morning mito chat. Not sure how many people will join because of the holidays.