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Fiber is good for you. July 28, 2008 ~ 11:39 am

Posted by Julie in : Craftiness Is Next To Godliness, Random Insanity , comments closed

Hey, you know what’s awesome? When you realize that your refrigerator door is open about an inch when you wake up to pee in the middle of the night. And then? When you open the fridge in a panic and realize that everything in it is room temperature and the door has probably been open for hours and your electric bill is going to be sky-high because the fridge has been trying to cool your entire apartment for hours because of a stupid 12 pack of Diet Dr. Pepper that kept it from closing completely? And it’s 4:30 am and you’ve had to throw out most of the crap in your fridge? That is made of the awesome. Except not so much. Yeah, that happened Thursday night/Friday morning. I am mostly over it now, but still cringing every time I think of the electric bill I will be getting next month. Ouch. On to happier subjects.

Since I spent a large part of yesterday manually updating Word Press to 2.6 (*rude finger gesture at hackers*), and my Flickr Photo Album plugin works again, I can now show you pictures! Without having to link to my photosets! Woohoo! Pics behind the cut. (more…)

Heat = melted brain July 21, 2008 ~ 11:02 am

Posted by Julie in : Rants, Urban Family, photo safari , comments closed

With the summer’s second official heat wave, we have reached the point where it’s too hot for Julie to want to do much of anything. I spent Saturday and Sunday entombed in my house, where the a/c was on energy saver at 82*. It was that high (1) because Con Ed owns my soul and (2) because there were power outages in every neighborhood around mine, and I wasn’t sure that mine was going to be the exception forever. I resent Con Ed very much these days. I have a geriatric kitteh, Con Ed, so the a/c stays on. And you bill me more every month for unreliable service. NOT COOL.

I promised you a post about Boston, but I can’t keep my mind on any one thing long enough to write coherently about it. So you will get snippets of Boston. I like it very much - I could totally picture myself living there. And the fact that I got to hang out with Aimee and Sloth all the time while I was there? Made it even better. We packed a fair amount of stuff into the five days that I was there, and there was so much more that we didn’t get a chance to do. I’ll definitely be going back. I do have some great memories of the trip, though: eating chowder with Aimee at Quincy Market, the Benjamin Franklin walking tour I took, walking past the Green Dragon Tavern (where the Sons of Liberty met and planned revolution), seeing Craig Ferguson recite the Pledge of Allegiance on the 4th of July, the party in Dorchester where I discovered that champagne goes with everything, dinner at Sloth’s house…the list goes on and on. I was going to put pictures into the post, but apparently my happy Flickr plugin isn’t playing nicely with the blog today. So instead, I will give you the entire Boston Photoset. Have fun.

Coming soon, fiber progress. Because there has been a fair amount of it despite the heat. You all can thank Plurk for that - since I hang out (virtually) with knitters all day, I knit and spin and stuff now. :)

Which way to Walton’s Mountain? July 9, 2008 ~ 8:39 pm

Posted by Julie in : Craftiness Is Next To Godliness , comments closed

Boston stories in the next post, promise. Really. But now, for something entirely different. We all know I am a joiner. I joined Plurk, I joined Twitter, I joined Facebook, Ravelry, MySpace, you name it, I’m on it. But for as much as I like the tech, I also love being connected to the “old ways” of doing things. I like to spin, knit, cross-stitch, etc. ad nauseum, knowing that these crafts have been practiced by generations of people before me. I like to see my part in the chain of humanity - I suppose that’s why I was a history major in undergrad. I would like to learn how to cook, how to really cook, instead of just the meat/veg/starch combinations I throw together. I like to make things grow. I’m really interested in becoming greener and helping the planet to recover for the next links in the chain. And I love sharing these interests with others (which is why I’m in a Stitch n Bitch, among other things). Yes, I am a 21st Century Laura Ingalls Wilder living in Brooklyn. I was just in need of a Walnut Grove (perhaps without that bitchy Nellie Olson, though).

You all know where this is headed. I joined something else. Miss Violet, from the Lime & Violet podcast, started a Farmgirl chapter on Plurk. Go ahead, read it, I’ll wait. Basically, a Farmgirl “A farmgirl believes in the strong arms of friendship, community and the just plain fun of being together. A farmgirl takes joy in the quiet satisfaction of making things with her own hands. She exudes kindness, grace, humility, gentleness, patience and generosity, and loves the simple pleasures in life. A farmgirl is loyal and caring, especially when it comes to her family, friends and community. She gives generously of her time and talents. Farmgirls love to get together to share their ideas. She can be with or without fields and stock. Farmgirl is a condition of the heart.” While I haven’t decided if I’m going to pay the $20 and join the Farmgirl sisterhood, I have joined the Plurkette Henhouse, which is a virtual Farmgirl chapter. We are a community of mostly fiber-minded people who met on Plurk, and since I spend much time each day conversing with these people online, it wasn’t much of a stretch to join them in something else.

I’m looking forward to seeing where this can lead me. And you know I like the idea of merit badges. It’s just a good match.

Just call me Locutus of Plurk July 1, 2008 ~ 4:03 pm

Posted by Julie in : Technobabble, Urban Family , comments closed

And if you get that reference, baby let your geek flag fly!

Is it possible to be too connected to the ether? I wonder about this lately. In the past, I’ve had a habit of being very passionately interested in something on the internet, and then move on after a few months. IRC, Victor Garber (there was a website at one point…it is gone now), MySpace…the list could go on, but it would embarrass us both, so I’ll leave it. This blog is the one thing that has stood the test of time - it has been…holy crap, has it really been four years now? My blog is in pre-K? But of late I have let the blog lapse a little bit, because work has been too chaotic to come up with a single coherent thought, let alone blog about it, and the evenings…well, there are distractions in the evenings as well. My mind these days moves in short phrases, more suited to Facebook status messages than even Ravelry forum messages. Twitter would be good, but Twitter is often a little bitch and tells me I’m refreshing too much when clearly I am *not*. That annoys me. But Plurk, Plurk is cool. Plurk has a lot of knitters on it, so it resembles a cross between the beloved Facebook status message and IM, where we talk about socks and spinning a lot. That does it for me, I dunno about you.

And so I think in short bursts of third person thoughts, like “Evil Julie wants a jelly donut” and “Evil Julie is going on a ten-minute spin break, anyone in?”. Those do not make good blog posts, by the way, so my pre-K blog is probably being abused by the people running its daycare. My verbal skills are probably suffering, and looking back on that last sentence, it becomes quite obvious that my ability to come up with a decent metaphor has been compromised as well. And my attention span is not long enough to update Twitter (little bitch), Facebook, Ravelry, Plurk, and the blog. Sometimes, being this connected to the internets reminds me of the hive mind of the Borg…I haven’t lost the ability for independent thought, but I am always, always wondering “Has anyone written anything cool? What are these people up to? Have I blogged this week? No? Damn. Oooh, has anyone written anything in the past five seconds?” It is something I am going to have to work through. But I’m still taking my laptop with me when I hang out with Aimee and Sloth this weekend. So there.

(That last sentence totally caught your attention, didn’t it? Blog post when I get back. Promise.)

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