Bad blogger…

I haven’t been a very good blogger lately. I could come up with all sorts of excuses, but really none are very good. So, in no particular order here’s what you missed while I wasn’t blogging.

I got this awesome yarn from Patty of Midwest Knit Girl. I won it in a tag line contest. She dyed it herself with kool-aid! Cool! I’m pretty sure it’s the KnitPicks Donegal bare. In any case it’s super cool with little flecks of all different colors. There was some candy too, it, um, didn’t make it in the photo!

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This, ladies and gentlemen, is a piece of unpopped popcorn. Where did it come from?

Why see that rather red ear? Yup, that “piece of wax” in Bunny’s ear turned out to be none other than a piece of popcorn. Been in there three weeks… go figure!

I had fun knitting up a bunch of tiny socks. Cousin Mel put beads on them and actually sold a few at a craft fair! I plan to knit more of them this week-end and use them for Christmas gifts.

The final news is that I have booked a trip for Bunny and I to go to Disney World! I am super excited and have traded my obsessive web reading time from knitting to Disney! More info about that later…

In the meantime, off to PA for Thanksgiving. Hope you enjoy yours!

The Phone, The Phone is Ringing

I have been debating the title for this post all morning… the other choice is “On The Shoulders of Giants.”

Last night I had an amazing success. I have wanted to have the song from the show Wonder Pets as my ringtone ever since I heard it. Just read the lyrics, they’re perfect.

(Linny:) The phone, the phone is ringing.

(Ming-Ming:) The phone, we’ll be right there!

(Tuck:) The phone, the phone is ringing!

(Ming-Ming:)This must be serious

(Linny:) There’s an animal in trouble…

(Ming-Ming:)There’s an animal in trouble!

(Tuck:) There’s an animal in trouble, somewhere.

Through advanced googleing I found that this guy had made it a ringtone for his iPhone, so all I needed was an iPhone. Since that didn’t seem to be an option I went about figuring out if I could use his file on my phone. Turns out his is an MPEG-4 audio file and my phone (Treo 700p) will only play WAV or MIDI. Ok, now I needed to convert the file. At home, B showed me how to convert from the MPEG-4 to a WAV using iTunes. Then I had the file, in the correct format, but it was on my computer, not my phone. Back to the internet and by pawing though the posts here I had my answer! And now, if you call me, I will hear “The phone, the phone is ringing” and I’ll smile!

So, many thanks to B and the nameless people on the variety of sites that gave me the information I needed.

All this got me thinking about the way I learn. In college I took Abstract Algebra and boy was it abstract. But I did ok because all of the tests were open book and as soon as we got the test I would head to the library and sit on the floor in the abstract algebra section (who would have thought there was and abstract algebra section) and start looking through books. Little by little I would piece together what I needed to understand to answer each of the problems on the test.

Since that time I find that when faced with a challenge the way I get through it and figure out what I need to know is research. I do find it a bit ironic that when I worked as a researcher I hated it, but that’s another post…

My knitting has been this way recently as well. I wanted to learn Norwegian purl so with instructions and advice from here, here, and here I was successful. I have been making teeny, tiny socks (to become ornaments) and have been working on my increases and short rows also with the help of the internet!

So all this learning from experts has got me thinking… thinking about knitting camp… talk about learning from giants…