Another Giveaway and Miscellaneous

Wow! I opened my email today, and there it was… Berroco sent me a notice about their newest giveaway, a kit for the Northampton Kerchief. This is much prettier than it sounds like it would be.

The photo doesn't have a link in it, you have to click the link in the paragraph above.

Pretty, isn't it?

I entered immediately! You might want to do the same, since entries have to be in by the 26th. You might also want to sign up for their newsletter, because the winners will be announced there.

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More knitting content: If you design your own knitting patterns and/or would like to chart your own designs, here's some information about three knitting chart fonts! I haven't tried the fonts yet, but they sound like the best solution to charting yet. And I chart things all the time.

My previous best solution has been graph paper and pencil. Although that's probably the best while you're developing something, I really want to keep a permanent, and reprintable solution on my computer! Not to mention that you can publish it that way!

I'm seriously considering frogging almost all of the Celtic Sweater and redoing it! There are a few things that I'm just not totally happy with. I'm still thinking about it, but you may suddenly be hearing a lot more about it on my blog (with photos, I do have a new phone, after all).

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If you use antibacterial soap, you might want to reconsider.

The ingredients that provide the antibacterial effect for these kinds of product can pose a severe threat to your endocrine and reproductive systems. Please click on the link to find out more.

There are millions of people in the US with hypothyroidism who have not been diagnosed due to the misinformation spread by drug companies to doctors who hang on their every word. I see people around me all the time with hypothyroid symptoms that are so bad that I notice them just from sharing a bus ride with them. And their doctors not only don't know enough to recognize these symptoms, but are actively testing those people with inaccurate tests and telling them that they don't have a thyroid problem!

And, by the way, if you have high cholesterol you do have a hypothyroid problem! Not maybe, not possibly, you DO! And I can almost guarantee that your doctor is unaware of this connection.

If you have high cholesterol and you do happen to be diagnosed with hypothyroidism by your doctor, make sure he prescribes natural desiccated thyroid (Armor Thyroid, Naturethroid or West Throid), which he probably won't want to do. This will fix the cholesterol problem (along with a lot of other problems) whereas Synthroid or other T4 medication won't fix those problems. But the drug manufacturers have told doctors to prescribe T4 medications so that they can sell lots of other drugs for cholesterol and more. Check this link!

I'm glad to hear that it's the FDA that's being sued. Maybe they'll learn to stop rushing dangerous drugs to market so that drug manufacturers can save money on the testing and start making money on drugs that are going to kill thousands. The drug companies won't learn. They make so much money on drugs that they feel they'd rather pay out some of it to the people they harm than miss all the profits. Unfortunately, the episode of Leverage that dealt with this problem is all too accurate! It's called The Double Blind Job, and I'm sure they'll rerun it. Watch for it! TNT (I think) has been airing reruns of Leverage on late night/early morning.

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I was going to post this earlier, but we had a power outage last night, and somehow, it damaged the elevator. I was just about to start the post earlier today, and my computer went off. I panicked for a moment when it wouldn't start up again, but then thought to check the printer, which also wouldn't start, and after a bit of investigation realized that the stove didn't work, either.

I tried resetting the circuit breakers with no effect, and then they made an announcement about the problem with the elevator and said that they'd turned off the electricity in part of the building while they fixed it. It seemed confusing, because the TV and some other stuff, like the microwave and refrigerator, still worked.

Everything's back to normal now, though.

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I love my local library, and read lots of books that I borrow from them on a regular basis. There's just no way that I could afford to continue reading without them.

But I ran into a bit of a problem with them this week. There are some books that are very popular, and I ran afoul of that this week with Meg Cabot's Airhead series. There are three books in the series: Airhead, Being Nikki, and Runaway, in that order. They have plenty of copies of Airhead, and I got that with no problem, but they don't have many copies of the other two books. Unfortunately, Airhead doesn't have much of an ending, it just segues into Being Nikki, so it's kind of like getting half of a double-length book. I picked up the first book, which my local library had on the shelf a week or so ago, and read it. I had the other two books on order, but had to wait because of the demand.

I checked on what books were in, and found that Runaway was sitting and waiting for me, but that I wouldn't be able to get Being Nikki for a while! Who wants to read the first, third and second books of a series in that order? And, since there are other people waiting for the last book, I can't keep it very long.

So, I broke down and bought a real, honest-to-goodness ebook copy of Being Nikki, my first ever real ebook! I got the Nook application for Android on my phone, and it seems to be working well. I'd rather have a real Nook ebook reader, though, because I can run down the battery on my phone pretty quickly when I read.

If you're interested in the books themselves, they are considered "young adult" books by the library, but a lot of adults are reading kids books these days. As I've said before, "A good story is a good story." The premise for these books is a little hard to believe, but if you can get past that, they're the usual top-notch writing that I've come to expect from Meg Cabot.

In the first story, Em dies in a freak accident, her body crushed beyond repair at the same time that Nikki Howard dies from an aneurysm. The doctors having a ruined body with a perfectly good brain and another perfect body with a useless brain are able to combine the two and create a healthy person, who is Em in Nikki's body. Obviously, Em has trouble dealing with a past that she can't remember and another that she can remember, but which is not legally her past.

The Meg Cabot series I've liked best so far is the Mediator series, and I have to say that if you like ghost stories and liked the Twilight series, this is even better!

I'm really tickled about my first real ebook, though.

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There's a new Eureka and Haven on SyFy tonight!

If you're a Harry Potter fan, ABC Family will be having another of their Harry Potter weekends, starting with The Prisoner of Azkaban tonight, Half Blood Prince Saturday night, and finishing with The Order of the Phoenix on Sunday evening! To the best of my knowledge, it'll be the first time Order of the Phoenix will be shown on non-premium cable.

Other than that, the big news on TV is that it's nearly football season, and it's squeezing almost everything else off TV! My only consolation is that it will eventually go away.

Have a wonderful weekend!

We Have a New Element!

Well, it seems I was confused about something, and that is the definition of an element.

People learn to talk by listening to people talk. Babies listen to their parents and others who happen to be nearby, and eventually add meaning to the sounds they hear so that they understand what is being said.

In school, when they tell you about a new word, they give you a written or spoken definition. But after using words for a while, they acquire nuances in our minds, subtle shadings of the original definition, until we'd be hard put to define the words without using the same word.

One of those words for me is element.

I know that at one point in time someone defined this word for me, but somehow along the way, my personal definition of this word went something like this: A substance that is a basic, pure chemical substance, such as helium, hydrogen, oxygen, iron, copper, silver, gold, etc. Pure silver is an element, sterling silver is a compound, an alloy made mainly of silver, but also containing other elements to make the silver harder, thus making it practical for jewelry.

But they are adding a new element to the periodic table, and the new element is made by combining other elements, which is where I begin to be confused. This new element is made by fusing zinc and lead. The fusing part is where I begin to lose it.

So far, they've made a whole atom of it on two different occasions, for a total of two atoms. I know when you get this high on the periodic table that atoms start to be unstable, and it stands to reason that you don't want to get too much of it together in one spot or you'll precipitate an explosion. But two? Two atoms who haven't even been introduced to each other? And one only lasted "an instant." It seems a little skimpy to me.

But I'm guessing that, being scientists, they know what they're doing. And they've finally proposed a name for this new element, Copernicium.

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For you science fiction fen, you should be aware that the fabulous SF roller coaster ride is beginning today on BBC in America. At three this afternoon (here), they will be showing reruns of five Doctor Who episodes to get us in the mood for what's coming up this week.

There are two episodes from the first season of the new Who: the two-parter, The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances. The Empty Child is one of the most frequently cited as scary in the list of new Who episodes. It's chief feature is that it's the first episode where we run into Captain Jack Harkness, and he's a lovable rogue and con man, traveling in time.

The next three are from the third season finale, and are Utopia, The Sound of Drums, and The Last Time Lord, which also involve Jack.

In my opinion, they should have just continued to the end of season one with Boom Town, Bad Wolf, and The Parting of the Ways. The last two explain how Jack came to be (for all intents and purposes) immortal. Rose also wears a scarf in Boom Town that I would love to copy. It's beautiful!

So, they're getting us in the mood for the new Doctor Who special, Planet of the Dead, which will be shown next Sunday, but they're also getting us ready for the big news this week, Children of Earth, which is a five-part story that will be shown every evening this week starting on Monday, preceded by an inside look at the hub. Each day's new episode will be shown after a recap of the previous day's show. In the spoiler-free reviews I've read, each one of the five parts has left their audience jumping up and down and screaming at the end, so expect this to be something you'll get involved with.

Not letting us up for a moment this week, the BBC is following Torchwood with Being Human. This is the premier of a new series about three "flatmates" who happen to be a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost. I haven't seen this one, but I have heard good things about it.

As if all this weren't enough, it will be followed on Sunday by the new Doctor Who special, Planet of the Dead. What can I say? It's Doctor Who! What's not to like?

There's another Merlin on NBC tonight. I'm beginning to think of this as something someone from another planet wrote after hearing the Arthur story, but couldn't remember it right and didn't know much about Arthur's era. Once you do that, and stop looking at all the things they got wrong, it's an OK series. The original story contains enough scope that they could have done this and made it historically accurate as well as true to the legend. I suppose that part of my problem is that shows like Doctor Who and Torchwood have lead me to expect intelligence from the BBC, and sometimes that expectation is misplaced.

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Holly and I went to see Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince yesterday.

It was far better than I could have hoped for! With a few relatively minor quibbles, I loved it!

The quibbles involve the fact that it would be impossible to fit the whole book into a movie. I knew that going in, and I knew they were going to have to cut a lot of it. There is one quiddich game, and the rest got cut. But the teams do have some neat new uniforms. I want a quiddich robe like theirs!

As expected, a lot got cut, but what's left is far more of the book than I ever thought they could cram into a movie. And it's wonderful!

Order of the Phoenix had so much cut out of it that it wasn't even a coherent story anymore. If you hadn't read the movie, I'm sure it didn't even make sense. But I think Half Blood Prince stands alone. You can see it without having to have read the books first, and it will still be a coherent story.

There is one scene that was made up of whole cloth, and came out of left field. It also could have ramifications for the next movie, but I won't spoil it here.

The bottom line is: you should go and see it if you haven't already.

I hope you're having a great weekend!

Shore Leave Sunday

If you've been following my Twitter posts over in the sidebar, you've had a small taste of the Shore Leave experience, and I have to say, I enjoyed it. There were rumors of who was drunk, who attracted more than half the female population of the con, the second most popular person at the con being a 'droid, who called who what, who missed out because they were at the filk sing, which guests sang karaoke, and reviews of local Chinese restaurants (traditional at cons).

It wasn't the same as being there, but if you missed it, you can catch up here. There are links to photos of Klingons and 'droids as well as people just having fun.

I'm hoping to do the same thing for Pennsic later this month.

This will be short because I want to get back to watching Harry Potter movies on ABC Family. If you're a fan, you should check it out because they're showing a large assortment of trailers for Half Blood Prince during the commercials.

While watching BBC in America last night, I found that we're going to have one really amazing week later this month, starting on the 20th! The first thing up will be Children of Earth (Torchwood), shown over 5 consecutive nights from Monday through Friday, the premier of Being Human on Saturday,  and the Premier of the Doctor Who episode, Planet of the Dead.

My DVR is having a hernia this weekend, but it'll be bleeding internally after that week!

Speaking of watching BBC in America last night, they reran the episode of Primeval that was inevitable, and that I had been waiting for: the one where a dinosaur goes to the Middle Ages and is chased by a Knight through another anomaly into the present.

I really have to go watch Harry now!

I hope you've had a great weekend!

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Addition:

This whole thing with Shore Leave has started me down memory lane as far as SF cons are concerned. Which led me to discover something interesting. For years, at every con I went to, there was another con-goer called Filthy Pierre. He was in evidence sitting in hallways, playing wonderful songs on a keyboard. Well, my discovery is that he has an entry in Wikipedia! Yes, everybody's friend, Filthy is immortalized in their pages!

What started me off on this is that I wanted to find out the dates and places of upcoming cons with an eye toward maybe going to some of them, and, as everyone knows, Filthy is the person to contact about that.

Wow!

Fourth of July Aftermath

Well, the 4th is over, but it's still the holiday weekend, and I plan to enjoy it to the very end.

Holly and I went out, did a quick errand, and had dinner together, always lots of fun. She showed me a fun new app for the G1 phones, and now my phone makes a Star Trek communicator chirp when I get a text message, and also whoops and says "Incoming transmission" when I get a phone call.

We came back to my place for fireworks. We watched fireworks on the mall in DC on TV, and also watched them live out the window. 

For a rather extended time, the fireworks in DC were so constant that it looked like fire was just raining down on DC! I have seen more sophisticated displays (and seen them in DC), but this really outdid them for sheer volume. There was no time that the sky didn't have something exploding in it.

My window showed fireworks from about seven different displays in the local area, although the ground displays weren't really visible. We did catch the finale of a very close display, though, and before it was totally dark, there was a short batch of fireworks that someone set off in the commuter's parking lot next to the apartment building.

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Other than that, I call your attention to the fact that there are only 11 days until the Half Blood Prince movie opens. If you want to wear Harry Potter knits to the movie, you don't have much time left to knit/buy them!

I'm making this a short post because I want to enjoy the rest of the weekend (what's left of it) and get back to my HP knitting.

I hope you are all still having a great weekend!

Deadlines!

There are two deadlines I'm thinking about today.

The first is Christmas. No, don't laugh at me. I know it's 194 days until Christmas, but if you're a crafter, you can't start too early. 

It's time to get out that notebook and list all the people you want to make presents for and get started on them. It helps if the notebook is small enough to carry to the craft store with you. If you give each person their own page, you'll have space to brainstorm and write down anything you think of that will make a great present for each person, and, if it's something you plan to make, maybe there will also be space to list the supplies you need for each project. That's where taking it to the craft store comes in.

I am personally thinking about making Christmas stockings to sell on Etsy. After finding that great yarn at Herrshners, I want to get some more and make some glittery stockings!

The other deadline is coming up fast! This is your wake-up call!!!

There are only 32 days until Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince opens!

Are you ready, with something fabulous to wear to the opening? Something that says "I am not a muggle?"

If not, you'd better get a move on! There are lots of great things you could be knitting or crocheting! 

My first thought was to search for Harry Potter patterns on Ravelry, because I know they have a lot of them. But if you're on Ravelry, you already know that, and if you're not, any link I give you won't do you any good. But I found a looooong list of patterns at the Leaky Cauldron! I haven't checked them all out, but with so many to choose from, you should be able to find something you want to make. One of my favorites is the Golden Snitch Hat. There are sparkly yarns out there that would work well for the snitch, too. The pattern calls for black yarn, but the photo looks like it was done with navy blue yarn, and I think I'd like navy, personally, but then, I usually prefer blue. Even if you don't like the hat itself, you can click on the chart to put the snitch design on something else.

Anyway, wander around and have fun on the list. I don't want to see you at the movies without something distinctively wizardly!

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There's a new post up over at the Steve Canyon on DVD blog! Jet on over there and find out what's happening!

I hope you've been having a great weekend!

This Is Bizarre

Check out this news story from China. You'll have to follow the link. I can't possibly do it justice. 

I've seen this in a couple of places where people can comment, and the comments are all very mixed. The general reaction seems to be bouncing back and forth between horrified and laughing.

The weirdest part is that I knew someone who probably would have pushed the man off the bridge. My family will know immediately who I mean, but I don't want to admit it publicly.

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My package from Knit Picks arrived today! Such an event is always cause for rejoicing! I got a pair of Harmony tips in size 6, and three balls of Merino Style in fog. Or mist. Or something. It's light grey, and it's going to be used to make the copy of Hermione's hat from Half Blood Prince. It's for a class in the Harry Potter House Cup KAL. I intend to wear it to the movie, too.

The first thing I have to do on this project is write the instructions. So, I'm going to get busy and do it.

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There's a brand-new Reaper on TV tonight, and unless I'm mistaken, it's the season and series finale. There are a lot of people who are very unhappy about this. I'm not terribly enthused that it'll be off myself.

There's a rerun episode of the The Mentalist tonight, too.

And tomorrow night, there will be the Monster Quest episode about the Jersey Devil on the History Channel. I grew up with Jersey Devil stories, so I'm looking forward to it.

Have a great evening! I hope the weather people aren't promising you three more days of rain to go with the two we've already had like they're doing here.

107 Days Until Half Blood Prince

There are 107 days until the premier of The Half Blood Prince!

For all you Harry Potter fans out there who are knitters: have you started your knitting projects so that you'll have something Harry-Potter-themed to wear to the movie? If not, you need to get started in time! You don't want to go to the movie without your Dobby socks, dark mark scarf, snitch sweater and other stuff. It's a shame it'll be during the summer instead of in the winter like some of them have been.

If you're on Ravelry, search there for Harry Potter projects, otherwise, you'll have to use search engines. Whatever you do, there's a lot out there, so get those needles clicking!

Don't forget that there is a count-down timer at the bottom of this page. It not only tells you how long until the movie, but it also has a link to Mugglenet, which is filled with all sorts of wonderfull Harry Potter news!

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Which reminds me that I have to have my mobius hood finished today to turn in as homework for the Harry Potter House Cup KAL/CAL! All I have to do is weave in some ends and take a photo. Oh, and get it up on Ravelry. 

So, you can expect a photo tomorrow.

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This will be a short post. I've just finished putting the barcode on the cover for the second volume of the Steve Canyon DVDs, and I'll be uploading it to a server in a bit, so I can't hang here too long. I may be wrong about this, but the sense I get from it is that John has all the files and stuff he needs to dump it on the DVD manufacturer, and it's about to be out of his hands for a bit. I'm sure that will be a big relief to him. Then all he'll have to do is wait for the DVDs and feverishly ship them out when they arrive. 

I'm really enthused about this!

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Comcast messed up NBC all last night. This is so run-of-the-mill for them that you may wonder why I'm even mentioning it. For three hours on NBC (and maybe more--I only watched it for three hours), the picture would periodically freeze for from one to 5 seconds, sometimes followed by the picture breaking up into large pixels, which then smashed up and slid off the screen. The sound was going in and out, and the story was interspersed with blackouts of sound and picture for several seconds. I got to watch Chuck, Heroes and Medium in that messed-up way. Castle was playing OK, though, and at least I got to see and hear that without all the mess.

There is no Fringe on tonight, but it's supposed to be back next week. I don't know what's wrong with TV networks today. They only have short runs of shows (Star Trek used to have 25 shows per season, now we only get 13 episodes of a series if we're lucky), they interrupt them with other stuff rather than showing the whole series, change the times of shows, and generally do everything they can to sabotage their own series, and then get rid of the series as though it's the fault of the series. It's disgusting!

There will be a new Mentalist on tonight, along with a new Reaper, though.

I have to run.

Have a great Tuesday!

Happy Pi Day!

I guess this is a big day for mathematicians, but, although I can see that the discovery of Pi is useful, it just doesn't strike me as something I really want to set aside a whole day to celebrate.

But then, I was never very good at arithmetic.

Maybe it's just today. It's not getting too far above freezing today and it's raining. I was going to go out with Holly, but Robin made plans to get off work and do something with her, so it's been postponed until tomorrow. After looking at the weather, I'm not really sad about not going out today.

Today is the kind of day that (back when I had a job) made me look out the window and want to call in sick, then crawl back into bed and go back to sleep.

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In knitting news, not much is happening. I'm almost done with a sock, but it looks just like the sock before it, and only slightly different than the two socks before that. I've done more on the mobius hood, but it's just a little longer, it really doesn't look too much different. The excitement will be happening when it gets even longer than it is,  not now. But photos right now will be unbelievably dull.

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There's also almost nothing worthwhile to see on TV today or tomorrow, so, all in all, it's just a blah day. It's a good thing I have a DVR with a backlog of stuff to watch.

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I finished reading Inkdeath a more than a week ago. It was a good series, and I enjoyed reading it, but I'm glad I was able to borrow it from the library instead of buying it. I'm really in a blah mood today.

After that, I read The Alchemyst, which is the contemporary adventures of Nicholas Flamel, the famed (and real) alchemist from the Renaissance. I have the sequel, The Magician, ordered at the library. Amazon says in on place that it's already available, but another listing says it won't be out until later this month. There's a third book (The Sorceress), and judging by the first one, I'll definitely want to read all three.

In the meanwhile, while I'm waiting for those, I'm reading the copy of Twilight that I bought in January.

So, it's back to knitting, TV, and maybe some reading.

I hope you're having a great weekend!

Oh, I nearly forgot! There's now a widget at the bottom of my blog that will tell you about pollen in your area. Just scroll down all the way to the bottom. It's with the widget that tells you how many days are left until Christmas, and the one that says how many days are left until Half Blood Prince (the movie) will be out.