Belated Oscar Notes

I watched the Oscars on Sunday, and noticed something very interesting. There was a woman nominated for best actress, and she looked so familiar, but I couldn't place her. Neil Gaiman tweeted about her, and things finally clicked. His daughter, Maddy was the one who put it all together. Carey Mulligan is the actress who played Sally Sparrow in the Doctor Who episode, Blink, one of my all-time favorite Doctor Whos!

Below, you can see how she looked in Blink, before she got her head mowed.

I love Sandra Bullock, and I'm glad she got an Oscar, but by the time they announced the winner, I was rooting for Carey.

Being a ground-breaking woman's rights person who campaigned by living a life full of things women supposedly weren't able to do, I was also happy to see that a woman got an Oscar for directing.

Some of the other awards seemed to go to the picture rather than the person, though. Maybe that's just me, and I can't really say that I could judge fairly because I didn't see most of the movies that had people nominated for working on them.

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The Legend of the Seeker will be back for a third season, although where it will be shown is still up in the air. Locally, I can watch it on the CW on Sunday nights, but if you're local, or watch it on the CW, you should know that they frequently list a different episode than they actually show (at least on the Comcast digital TV guide).

In the new show that was on last week (and, due to a mix-up, again this week), Zed has frozen some people and is describing them so that his crew can impersonate them. He describes the man as being "formidable." Richard says "He doesn't look like a fighter." and Zed says he's not, he's got a way with the ladies and describes him as "his reputation is not the only thing that preceeds him into a room!"

Lost is on again tonight! As usual, a recap of last week, and then the new episode. The recaps are excellent, because they add notes about things you might have missed.

The season finale for White Collar is also on tonight! It promises to be the best yet, which is saying something!

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Back near the end of last month, I ordered some great yarn from Herrshners. Everything seemed to go through just fine, and I've been running downstairs to check to see if it's arrived every day lately. Well, it's been a while, and I was starting to wonder what happened to the yarn.

At this point, I still don't know what happened, but it apparently didn't go through, and I'm very disappointed! It seemed to go through, and I got a confirmation email from Herrshners (which has since disappeared), and now that I go back and check for the charge from my checking account, it's not there.

I am very, very disappointed!

The worst part of all this is that I had a ball of it left from another project, and started knitting a project which will be a present for someone who reads this blog, so I can't talk about it here. But I've knit all the yarn I have, and have been waiting for the additional yarn.

This particular yarn has been discontinued, and I love the yarn, so I'm sad about that, but it is possible to find it here and there on line. I ordered some today, but it's not as inexpensive as what I originally ordered.

Back to waiting for it!

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I found a fabulous infrared photo of Cassiopeia on line today! You have to check this out!

Please click the link and go to NASAs website to find lots of other neat photos!

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I think today is the warmest day we've had here so far this year. I really need to get off the internet and get outside!

I hope things are going as well for you as they are for me!

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Addition:

Read about the knitting soldiers! His blog is here.

And the most important news of all: the second chapter of Jim Butcher's book Changes is out today! Changes is the latest book in the Dresden Files series and is due out in April.

New Majacraft Wheel!

There's a new Majacraft wheel that's been under development for a while. They've been sending me emails and dropping hints about it, but they won't let me see a photo or tell me what's actually different about it.

Here's what I know:

• It's called Serenity. The person who named it is a Firefly fan! That may be a temporary name.
• It can spin very, very fine lace yarn
• It can spin thick, bumpy "art" yarns
• The currently available bobbins won't work on it
• It can do things that no other spinning wheel can do!

The best news of all is that it's going to be available to see and buy at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival! If you go to the listing of vendors, you'll see that they aren't listed. They said that they will announce their location later.

Here's what they said about the new wheel in their latest email to me:

New Wheel Release - Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival - May 2010
Glynis and Owen will be attending this years Sheep & Wool Festival at Maryland, USA; and will be publicly releasing the much awaited "New Wheel."
The wheel is a collaboration of Majacraft and Lexi Boeger (Pluckyfluff) design, and is specifically focused at art yarns, however it can also be a general purpose wheel, as it is compatible with most of the Majacraft accessories.
The Poad's intend to be at our vendors stalls at different times, with plenty of saleable "new wheels" available (program of time and place to come), and as a special bonus Lexi will also be demonstrating the "new wheel's" special concept and design features.

There is other news from Majacraft, too. They have out new flyers that reduce air resistance when they turn. I don't see them on their website yet, but they announced them

This is what one of the new flyers looks like from the side view.

This isn't exactly really new news, but they also have a new skeiner out. If you click the link, you'll see that you can put a bobbin on the skeiner and thread it through a guide, fasten it to one of the pegs on the skeiner, and then just wind it up! Very easy to use. And it can be placed directly on the wheel to wind your skeins if you want to take it traveling!

You can probably tell that I really love my Majacraft Rose wheel, and Majacraft in general! If you're on Ravelry, you can find a discussion of the new wheel here.

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We have a new telescope, and it has detected a new, previously unsuspected ring around Saturn!

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Tonight, we have new episodes of Chuck, The Big Bang Theory and Castle! There will also be reruns of Ghost Whisperer on SyFy.

Have a great day!

National Procrastination Week!

Finally, there's a holiday, or in this case, a special week set aside for people like me.

Actually, National Procrastination Week started on Monday, the first of March, but then, what part of procrastination didn't you understand?

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There's a new Ghost Whisperer and a new Medium on network TV tonight, and a new Caprica on SyFy.

Have a happy weekend!

Salt!

Salt is a healthy, and, if it's natural sea salt, nutritious part of any diet. It's essential to good health, and, in fact, to the continuation of life, itself!

Somewhere along the line, there was a clinical trial of various factors that might affect blood pressure, and two of the factors tested were salt and sugar.

Sugar raised blood pressure. More sugar raised it even more. And the more sugar you eat, the more it raises your blood pressure. The media was ready to report that until TV and radio stations and newspapers got phone calls from the sugar groups threatening lawsuits to any company that reported that news. Of course, the threatened companies said that it was true and they could report it, and the sugar people said, that's right, but it'll cost you lots of time and money to win that victory. The media didn't report that part of the study.

They reported the results on salt a little backward. Phrased more understandably, salt deprivation lowers your blood pressure slightly right before you DIE from it!

So, if your doctor tells you to cut back on salt in order to lower your blood pressure, he's really saying "I get my medical information from confused sources on TV, NOT from actual medical literature!" If he had read the actual trial, he would know better than to tell you that!

As of about five years ago, doctors in hospitals had killed at least eight people by denying them salt. That total may be higher now. They were unable to kill anyone outside of a hospital because studies found that when people approach death from lack of salt, they will crave it so much that they will eat it no matter what the doctors say.

In fact, the health benefits of salt are extraordinary, and exactly backwards from what doctors usually tell us.

So, I was appalled today to read this article in the New York Sun. It seems that the NY Department of Health and Mental Hygiene wants to kill the citizens of NY by depriving them of salt!

For an article that's actually based on facts about salt, check out this article. Here's some more basic information about salt. This second article is really interesting, especially about the different kinds of salt.

Gourmet cooks delight in the different kinds of edible salt available, and the best restaurants serve dishes with dividers filled with different varieties of salt so that you can salt your own food with the type of salt you prefer or wish to try.

I've been so interested in this because salt is one of my favorite things, and I'm starting to talk about health things here, that I'm starting my own Amazon store. It's definitely under construction at this point, but I'm starting to add salt products. This is a part of a healthy diet, and you might as well enjoy it!

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If you catch this post right away and tune in, you might catch the daytime rotation of Jake 2.0 on SyFy!

There's a new Mentalist on tonight as well as the season finale of Burn Notice!

Have a wonderful day!

Happy Birthday, John Ellis!

Yesterday was the beginning of March, and the end of all the problems that came with February (I hope). Happy March, everyone!

Today is John's birthday!

Happy Birthday, John!

I met John at one of the first (it may have been the first) August Parties, and we've been friends (and sometimes more) ever since. Other than my mom and my daughter, he's been the best friend I've ever had.

I wish you a day free from all stress, and one that's just fun from beginning to end!

John will be going to see Avatar today in 3D, and I can't wait for a report on it from him. We discussed the 3D process for films last night when I talked to him, and neither of us has actually seen a 3D film, so he's going to let me know what he thinks.

He's also got an appointment with the doctor, and is going to find out if the doctor has any new info on his thyroid function. I wish him the best luck with that!

For anybody who wants more thyroid info, I found a new (to me) website today!

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Here's the astronomy picture of the day for today. It is M78 and Reflecting Dust Clouds in Orion. You can see NASA's photo of the day here. There's also a link on the page to see previous pictures of the day.

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Primeval is on daytime SyFy today. I could swear that as of yesterday the digital TV guide didn't have it scheduled for today, but the TV guide that Comcast provides has been very messed up lately. Some, maybe all, of the problem is the piece of junk that they gave me that they called a DVR. Anyway, it's on.

And daytime SyFy will be showing Jake 2.0 on Thursday!

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While I was at the library yesterday, I picked up the first two Sookie Stackhouse books, and I've started reading them. So far, Sookie has nearly died, and been saved by a vampire. They promise to be good.

In the meantime, I haven't recovered fully from February, so I'm going to quit writing now.

Have a fabulous week!

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Addition:

The latest Dresden Files book, Turn Coat, is out in paperback today!

The next book out in the series will be Changes, available on the sixth of April. But the first chapter of Changes is up on the internet, and you can read it here.

Enjoy!

The 2010 Winter Olympics Debacle

The whole month of February has been a surreal, unhappy experience for me!

To set the stage for all this, you need to understand that Armor Thyroid was reformulated at the beginning of 2009, and although it had the same amount of thyroid hormone in it, the fillers and binders inhibited the absorption of the medicine. Which means that I've been getting too little effective thyroid medicine for over a year. And then with the lack of availability of it, I've been taking a bit less than half the dose I need for more than two months.

This would usually guaranteed depression. I don't think I've really been depressed, but I will definitely say that it's been harder to keep things from getting the better of me.

On top of that, it appears that I've also been getting too little vitamin D, which can also cause SAD, and make you feel down and depressed. Not to mention the bad effect it has on bones.

So, it was in this shape that I signed up for the Knitting Olympics. You can see Stephanie's last blog post on her experience with it this time around here. If you read the whole thing, and click the list of athletes near the end of it, you can scroll down to my name and see my pathetic entry into this whole dismal failure for me.

Keep in mind that during this time period, we had a lot of snow!

It started off with me waiting longer than I should have to decide to enter, and pushed me into making a hasty decision and ordering yarn later than I should have. Even though it was late, the yarn could have arrived on the day of the opening ceremonies for the Olympics, but, sadly, no, it didn't.

Before the Olympics had even officially started, there was a death of an athlete. I'm sure you've all read about it, and during what was listed as the "Opening Ceremonies" on TV, the first hour and a half was spent on preparations for the Olympics (not opening ceremonies), and they showed video of the accident over and over. It was bad enough that he died, but I really didn't need to see how very violent the accident was over and over!

So Friday evening, I watched a selection of the opening ceremonies, and because of a malfunction in the torch mechanism, the actual lighting was delayed, and I didn't get to see the lighting of the flame. That's what I get for DVRing it without adding extra time at the end of the recording.

I consoled myself that the yarn would arrive on Monday.

That didn't last too long because I realized that Monday was Columbus Day, and everything in DC (including the mail) shuts down for that. Except, of course, the stores, which go into overdrive and have big sales. Unfortunately for them and me, I think the buses were shut down for the holiday. I didn't have the energy to walk up to the bus stop to check this theory.

Then, because of the usual incompetence of Comcast, I was forced, on Tuesday to spend more than three hours on various buses and waiting for those buses to go there in person. As usual, that didn't help much.

But it did leave me in such pain and so wiped out that I really wasn't able to do much of anything for a few days. Although the yarn arrived on Wednesday, I was so mentally foggy that I just didn't have any ideas for designing the vest that I wanted to make.

When I finally recovered enough to be up and walking, I had to go over to WalMart to get some nutritional supplements that I couldn't find anywhere and really feel bad if I don't take. So, I went there on Friday, and fell due to the snow and hurt myself pretty badly. No broken bones or major injuries, but muscles and joints that had been rudely yanked in various directions, and were thereafter determined to cause so much pain that it would teach me never to do that again! Along with bashing my head really hard on the cement! When they give you the diagnosis of Paget's Disease, they tell you to be careful and not to bump your head because it's bad for you, and can cause even more malformations of your skull than usual with the Paget's. I had some real headaches from this one!

About the time that I was beginning to realize that I would probably be able to deal with knitting soon, and should probably spend some time with my brain fog and design the charts for the cables in the vest, I found out that someone I know was missing in Vancouver. And eventually, I learned that Josh Andrew Koenig had died there. I hadn't seen him in a long time, but it still made me even sadder than I already was.

I accidentally injured some of my already injured muscles, and dragged my recovery out even more. For a while there, I wasn't really knitting at all.

Although I didn't get to see the doctor and find out the results of the vitamin D level tests she did in January, I read the list of symptoms, and it's pretty clear to me that my D levels were very low, so I tried supplements, and that has started to improve things considerably. Oh, and I did get some new thyroid medicine, so I 'm back to what is probably close to a good dose for me. Those things should improve my health, but although both things work quickly, it's not like waving a magic wand. The effects are not instant, but I'm seeing an improvement, and that's encouraging.

Around this time, Holly was finally able to find her car where it was hiding under the snow, and tried to dig it out, only to discover that a passing snow plow had not only piled lots of snow on it, but had actually hit it and smashed the left rear quarter!

And then the end of the Olympic Games. I got the see the mechanism they were using for the flame at last right at the end when they extinguished it. It really was very pretty.

Aside from the actual Olympic scores, my personal life scores were: two people dead, one someone I knew; I haven't even started my Knitting Olympics project; a patch of injury and bad health, although there's hope for the future on this one; Holly's car smashed; and a real thankfulness that it's over and that February was short.

Things have to get better from here on in, right?

During the last few days, temperatures have been going up above freezing, and the pond next to my place has changed from being solidly frozen to a shimmering pool of light when the sun comes out. It was supposed to go up to near 50 degrees yesterday, although it felt colder than that when I went out.

I did walk to the library yesterday (the sun was actually out for a while!) and to Safeway for food, and came home without that horrible ache in my bones, so maybe the vitamin D is doing some good. If it stays that way, I plan to walk more. I'm hopefully looking forward to a MD Sheep and Wool festival that I can survive without being in pain for the next two months.

We have snow flurries in the forecast for this afternoon, tonight and at least part of tomorrow. Flurries don't sound bad, but they're also using the word "storm" which, after the ton of snow we've already had makes me uneasy.

But it will be Spring soon! I can see just a few hints of it, and I've ordered some super clearance yarn for almost nothing that will make some great Spring clothing!