SockTart

Things are starting to even out.  My laundry still isn’t done, and the kitchen is still a mess, but those are ongoing projects since one person is generally asleep when the other’s awake around here.

• work situation hasn’t changed.  There was a chance it would.  That isn’t happening.  Now that this isn’t in limbo, I can concentrate on grousing that I’m the only person into the office first thing in the AM.
• got in some quality knitting time this week.  Knitting always helps even out the moods.
• our housing situation is still up in the air, but looking a lot more favourable and a lot less bleak.  This makes me happier.
• spent much less time on warcrack.  I actually *can* walk away from the game when it starts pissing me off. I actually rolled a wee mage on an Alliance server that a friend is playing on, just to noodle around.  I generally get bored with Alliance and ditch.   We’ll see if I continue the trend. So far for lvl 70 toons, Horde is winning, 2-0
• down about 6 lbs this week.  Blood sugar is somewhat stabilizing.

Today I start my new shift hours.  They asked me to come in for a 7am start as of this week, instead of my usual 9am to 5:30pm shift.  On the whole, I don’t mind this.  It means I get home 2 hours earlier, and usually the early mornings are fairly quiet.

(Robin would also like to interject that I totally miss rush hour)

The only problem is the having to wake up at 5am, minimum, in order to be at work on time.  I didn’t get to bed until around midnight.  I’m pretty tired right now.  We’ll see if I’m more awake and aware for Part 2 of our Karazhan raid tonight.

Almost halfway through Hedera #2.  Still working away on the remnants of Skein #1.  Makes me wonder if I can get some socks for my niece and nephew out of the remains of the other socks I’ve completed.  Hmm….

That was my question last night upon looking at the bar tab from FATS (apparently “crown float” is how they classify a drink such as a “Black & Tan”.  I’m still a little disturbed that my Guinness came from a can.  Heathens).

We’d been invited out by Dale & Morgan, and so spent the evening having yummy food, drinking yummy drinks, and screaming at each other over the speakers.  Bars are definitely not conducive to the one thing that is their purpose: Socializing.  The only other downfall we seemed to see?  Tyler has pointed out that here in Canada, a Pint is not a Pint.  He’s looking for his standard UK Pint, that he gets in the pub.  We don’t have that.  Maybe our favourite Microbiologist (at least the one in The Family) needs to start his own pub?  Pints with a PhD.  There ya go.  He can tell you all about the bacteria in your glass, and why it’s important not to use antibacterials while you’re chugging it all down.

A point in favour for FATS?  I requested the Mushroom Swiss burger without the bun…and the waitress didn’t even blink.  They even gave me extra salad.  Booyeah.

The Sock also made it to the pub, at least until they turned down the lights.  Morgan snatched it out of my hands to inspect it, then tried to start knitting away merrily in her tipsiness.  I practically screeched at her to stop, I’m afraid.  I was in the middle of turning the heel.  Thank goodness I was able to frog back and repair because it threw me off balance to the point that I mucked up a little farther down.  It’s all good now.  The first Hedera is getting closer to done.  It’s very pretty too. There’s just one part of the heel flap/gusset that I don’t like, and will need to find a way to tighten up.  Hrmf.

Robin’s socks are also done.  I decided to get that right out of the way on Thursday/Friday.  By the time he woke up on Friday afternoon, he had new socks.  He’s happy they’re done…but sad that it’s too hot to wear them.  I’m sure that come the Fall he will be begging for more socks

No Karazhan raid this weekend due to the aformentioned trip to the bar.  I’ve been told that I need to appear online more often.  While fun, this may impede my sock progress (grin).  We’ll see what happens :)  I think that our guild leadership just wants a little Shadow Priestie lovin’.  Mana battery my left buttock

Allrighty.  Last night was Night #1 of our new Karazhan group.  For those who are not partaking of the Crack that is World of Warcraft, Karazhan is a 10-man dungeon (aka “instance” or “raid”) that you can only go to if you’ve maxed your character’s level.  Clicky the link if you want to learn more about it.  It is filled with many things to kill, most of which take the effort of you and your 9 buddies.  Last night we managed to kill five bosses and do the Opera House event.

One of the bosses is called “The Shade of Aran”.  The first time someone killed him, Guild Chat was filled with “Aran down!  We killed Aran!  Yay!’

I wanted to know why they were killing a sweater.  And how.  Did they unravel it?  What colour was it? Did they repurpose the yarn?

Right.  Two fandoms clash…WoW and Knitting….hm.  Unfortunately, unlike the Molten Core dungeon, I can’t spend my evening knitting between pulls in Karazhan.  In the 40-man raids, you have more tardlings going AFK…so when this would happen, I’d knit.  I got a good portion of some socks done around Christmas that way!

Anyhow.  We made progress last night.  Much better progress for a “new” run than many established runs have had.  It’s all good

In other news, I have turned the heels on Robin’s socks and have about an inch on the legs.  I find that working both socks at the same time is working well for me.  I’d like to see if I can do the same sort of thing for some of the Way Cool Patterns on the net right now (mainly Cookie A.’s patterns), but we’ll see.  I’m also grooving on all the yarn out there.  Two of the folks on my Ravelry “friend list” are yarnies….they dye and/or sell this yarn.  It is all verrah verrah yummy.  Very Apple Macintosh for the lick-factor.  I may have to save up the sheckles and get permission from He Of The Accountancy Family Background to use my Visa card and make a couple of orders.

Because, y’know, a girl can never have enough sock yarn.  Never.  Despite what he may think…

(I also signed up for secret pal 11.  which will raise some eyebrows around here when I start putting together care packages for a person I’ve never met.  The trick will actually be MAILING the darned things.  I know that I am postally challenged.  I accept this, and am willing to confront the Evil Postperson.  I shall start by anxiously awaiting my pre-ordered copy of The Last Freakin’ Harry Potter Book in a couple of weeks.  The Training is so strenuous ) 

“Did you wake me up by attacking me with a sock?”

Yeah. I paraphrase. It was something similar. Robin, who seemed very confused, was watching me playing on Ravelry, and it reminded him that somehow, somewhere….a sock played a part of his wakeup process.

Robin works graves. Sometimes he’s awake when I get home from work, sometimes not. I thought he was fairly lucid this evening, and decided to get an idea how much more of the foot I need to do before turning the heel. Approximately 1/2 an inch to an inch. Apparently he wasn’t as awake as I thought.
I’m forcibly keeping myself from digging out the Regia stashed downstairs, and a couple more pairs of needles. If that happens, these socks are never getting finished…and I distinctly remember hearing a sleepy “Yay…I get socks…” as I was leaving the bedroom with the pair presently on the needles. I admit it. I get ADD when I knit. Bad enough that one of my co-workers has decided to prompt me about Robin’s socks when she sees me…I don’t need to try and justify a distinctive lack of Project Monogamy. Particularly with another pair of socks. People can understand wanting to “switch it up” with a quick scarf, or pair of hand warmers…they aren’t quite so forgiving when it comes to a second pair of socks.

Luckily enough, Warcrack has been a little slow the past couple of days, otherwise I’d be feeling bad for not working on my character. Oooh yeah. I could be grinding faction rep, bay-bee! I’ve never been the best at grinding (uh…not as in “bump and…” for those of you not familiar with the term. It basically means working on a particular task for long periods of time, like killing a certain kind of enemy, or working on a quest chain, etc. Thus ends your gamer slang lesson of the day). I’ve been a good little gamer for the past couple of months. For those (admittedly 3 people) who will understand: I now have my Heroic Keys for Keepers of Time and The Sha’tar. Do I deserve a break? Damn skippy!

I still have Thrallmar, Cenarion Expedition, and Lower City rep to grind out.

It’s probably a blessing in disguise that my local YarnSmack Dealer is renovating right now…

Allrighty.

So I’d pretty well forgotten all about Summer of Socks. Then I got my beta invite for Ravelry (whee!!!)….and it all came rushing back to me. The socks. I’d meant to be finished Robin’s Socks by now, but there are only so many meetings at work that you can knit through. Seriously…the last big “meeting” I went to, I’m sure I got another inch put on the socks. I’ll have to get him to try them on.

But yeah. I haven’t even turned the heel yet. And that makes me a very sad girl. Because how am I supposed to know what I’m doing in regards to 2 socks on 2 circs if I don’t even turn the heels?

Guess it could be worse. I could be stuck at turning the heel on ONE sock instead of TWO.

So yeah. I’ll have to get back to that. Been too hung up on WoW to do much knitwork lately. I guess that instead of browsing the web from the Slow As Hell Public Computer at work, I should be going back to work on my knitting at lunch. Yeah…that’d do it. And my feet wouldn’t hurt as much from standing at the terminal.

Thought I’d go through some of my older photos and stuff earlier today to see if there was anything I should be adding to Ravelry, Flickr, or Facebook…and finally said “Nyah”. We’ll see what new stuff I come up with in the future.

Oh…and Chelsea…I have changed your user privileges back down to “subscriber”. Since you haven’t been posting, I figured I’d just use the blog on my own & reactivate the crossposter. Because I’m silly like that (I actually came close to just nuking everything, tell the truth. Think I’ll just go back to this being a general-purpose blog with mirrors at Livejournal. The LJ will have the uber-private stuff as usual. If you can’t see it…there’s a reason why, heh heh )

Lest anyone manages to google WINE and WoW and comes up with my website…no, I don’t have a solution for you. Hit that “Back” button poste-haste. I’m a relative noob, trying to figure it all out on my own.
Looks like I will be booting back to Windows for WoW, at least until I can afford to get a new Video card. Then we’ll see whether or not that fixes the difficulties I’m having. Apparently I have everything set up fairly correctly; the problem stems from ATI’s shitty drivers. Keep getting an error that says that I have no 3D Accelleration, or something along those lines, when I try to launch.

The silly thing? I managed to get it to semi-boot at one point..it showed the vectored boxes on the right (choose your realm), and the login box. No graphics. This was *before* I installed the ATI Xorg drivers through the update interface.
So yeah. I will be upgrading the vid.card next, and after that we’ll see if this fixes the problem. Always willing to listen to recommendations from the Linux geeks regarding which card to track down & choose (I can’t afford to pay a lot, so bear that in mind, thanks…and it needs to be able to run Warcrack and Sims 2)
No, I doubt that running under Cedega would fix this. Unless there’s something I *really* don’t know about Cedega, and for that I look to the guy who was commenting on my blog yesterday

For the rest of you, who likely feel a little lost? I’m with ya. I haven’t got a clue about *half* the things I’m talking about on this one…

In case anyone from WoW wonders where I’ve gotten myself off to, I’ve voluntarily turned off the computer…to install a new hard drive.

It’s been making clicking noises. I’m not the only one to notice this…Robin has too. In fact, it started clicking away last night so he turned it off. I noticed that the computer “hung” a couple of times when this happened. Described the behaviour to a couple of co-workers and the consensus was: You need a new hard-drive. Do it now before you lose your data.

Considering I just backed up my stuff about a week or two ago, and haven’t put anything majorly important on the HD since, I don’t think this will be a problem.

I plan to partition the 250GB drive about 4 ways: Windows, Ubuntu, and another OS that has yet to be determined (No, you don’t want to know). The rest will be storage of files. I have been told that under NO circumstances should I put my personal files onto the partition(s) with the Operating Systems! Much finger-waggling ensued!

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And Blake? There is no problem running WoW under Linux. The users who got banned were using Cedega, and got banned due to some difficulties in the program that mimicked botting behaviour. Those who really were just banned for this (and not for any other reason like actually running a botting program) were given an extra two weeks of free service and an apology. Those running under WINE were perfectly fine and did not get banned.

Blake, you want to either phone me after 10am tomorrow, or get hold of me online somehow? Looks like our WoW people forgot about the Turkey Deep Fry this weekend, and signed up for BWL instead.

Thinking we might just want to put it off for awhile…let the folks raid a bit before the EP comes out, since they seem to be chomping at the bit to get back to ye olde grinder…

(…plus…this is a really really lean time of year for the pocketbook in regards to making foods for people who won’t be there…we’ll just have to work on giving the Turkey in the deep-freeze some friends to hang out with, methinks…and our house really should be cleaner…)