In less than a week now we’ll (hopefully) be on a big giant boat off the coast of California. My biggest fear? Forgetting my underpants. We forgot a suitcase when we went on our honeymoon to New Orleans in 99 and of course fate being the big mean jealous auntie that she is I needed underpants while we were there. I’m packing some in all the bags and even carryon this time. Dammit.

We’re also bringing every medication (and female necessity doodad) we might possibly ever need because my other fear? Running out of money and having to spend thirty dollars on a bottle of Pepto Bismol because Cody decided to eat his weight in Crab legs and I won’t be able to buy all the goodies I want to get when we drag Jocelyn to ArtFibers in San Francisco.

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The pets are all up to date on their shots and they have their pet hotel reservations. We have a person set up to check on the house. Everyone has been paid. I even went to the yarn store and purchased extra needles for the classes I’ll be taking on board. Now we just have to do laundry and figure out what all to take.

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Cody is under some insane delusion to get the house clean before we leave. Stop laughing! Oh wait, that was me.

I’ve been dyeing yarn and roving like a madwoman the last few weeks and spent several hours taking about 300 photos of all the yarn and roving last night. I’ve been editing them today. Etsy hasn’t been working properly since late last night so I can’t list them. I have mixed feelings about Etsy and have for a long time. But for the most part I enjoy the built in audience and am damned glad I don’t have to manage the software so I’m going to keep rationalizing it for a while.

I uploaded photos to Flickr and made a mosaic of yarn to sell. Hopefully I can list them on Etsy soon or if you see one you like just contact me and I can send you a paypal bill.

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Sorry I’ve been so slack about blogging lately. A lot of good things have been going on in real life. Hopefully I can blog about them soon. And I’ll try logging in from the boat to update with photos and stuff too.

We paid the remaining balance for the cruise - which included extra excursions and train trips and stuff. It hurt a little financially. But I keep reminding myself how much fun we’re going to have.

And Cody’s passport is even in the mail. Now we just have to wait for mine, which might take a tad longer since I reported my old one lost (technically it is..somewhere in our house, it was expired anyway) and had a name change with the marriage stuff. It was more than a little unnerving sending original documents like our marriage license but I figure (in my naive way) that the guv’ment would pay for a replacement if they lose it. Haha right. But we paid a small freakin fortune to get these processed and mailed faster so I’m not worried about it.

So now all we have to worry about is getting the pets’ shots and into the fancy pet hotel, which is always shockingly expensive, but hey they take good care of the babies so it’s worth it.

Speaking of worrying about the babies, just in case you’re wondering: yes I have checked their food about the food recall. The kitties do eat Iams wet food so I checked the codes on the bottom of the can and while some cans did come from the same factory where there have been problems the dates were not in the bad range. My biggest concern is the 18 year old, Kurry, since her immune system would be the weakest but I’ve kept a close eye on her and she’s doing fine. In fact they’ve been a bit feistier than usual. Phunq was busy chasing his tail in the bathtub this morning and Kurry climbed up onto the windowsill in the office. Not bad for elderly kitties.

I put some stuff up in the etsy shop this weekend and had some good sales. It won’t sell unless you put it up there, I keep forgetting that part. haha no I just keep putting off taking photos. I love love that lightbox I can take photos any time day or night now.

Painted Desert
I had just finished navajo plying this one when I took some photos on Friday night and it’s already in the mail today. This is from spunky eclectic’s fiber of the month club. I can never remember what her colors are called so I just make my own names up.

Beachy Keen
This one’s already sold too. I dyed the roving a few months ago and spun it up a few weeks back. It has 400 plus yards.

Spring Rain
Another Spunky Eclectic club selection, this one hasn’t sold yet. It’s so soft. So so so soft.

I’ve been spinning such traditional stuff lately. I spun some thick and thin this morning with the latest Spunky roving. I think I’m going to ply it with some contrasting dark blue thread. Then I can be back in practice for the crazy spun stuff again - so I can make the milagro yarn I’ve been wanting to spin. Yes, Ramona, that milagro yarn!

Oh, and today is our 8th wedding anniversary but he has to work tonight so we won’t really celebrate it until the weekend. Really, we’re considering the cruise and the extra days in Vancouver and Seattle both of our anniversary and birthday presents this year. It’s the first (non-family oriented) vacation we’ve had together since our honeymoon in New Orleans so we’re really looking forward to it.

For the folks who have seen me knitting those Lorna’s Laces socks and asked where I got that special pink and brown striping colorway.. I found it!

Ashley and I are going to Camp Pluckyfluff in Taos in the fall! Woot! (We’re getting a hotel room though, gotta have my own bathroom.)

We saw Zodiac last night. Here were my exact thoughts as I watched it:

Ooh! Fun music
Hey, this is actually pretty good.
Damn, Mark Ruffalo is doing an excellent job.
Look! It’s that guy! (That happened a lot)
Ouch, we still have another hour to go.
What? Why is Jake Gyllenhaal not aging like everyone else?
Woowoo! Mark Ruffalo in his underpants!
Ew, that ending was a bummer.

Yep that was pretty much it.

After a bit of tinkering today Cody got the plugin working for me that reads the rss feed from my Etsy shop and displays what’s for sale on a sidebar on my page. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see the list on my sidebar on the right in the Noelle’s Noodles box. Pretty cool.

He didn’t think the What I’m knitting plugin he made for the site had clean enough code to really share with the public but he made sure that this one was because we thought some people would be interested in this one.

It’s really a neat setup for people who are used to editing their wordpress blogs: install, activate, edit, add to the code. In the Options section you can specify how many items from your shop you want to show and how they’ll be displayed in the sidebar.

Disclaimer: We’re going to assume that you know how to go upload a plugin to your server and are pretty used to going in and editing your presentation code. There are a lot of places on the web that are better at teaching people how to do that kind of thing. One major piece of advice for everyone of any skill level: BACKUP your files before you change anything!

This is for the 2.1.2 version of WordPress - today’s most current public version as far as I know.

So here are the instructions for installing and activating:

- Download and extract bEtsy files

- Upload file ‘betsy.php’ to www.yoursite.com/wordpress/wp-content/plugins or wherever your wp installation is /wp-content/plugins

- Login to your wordpress dashboard and navigate to the “plugins page”

- Locate the bEtsy plugin in the list and click the “Activate” link

- Navigate to the “Options” menu and on to the “bEtsy” submenu

- Enter your Etsy shop feed URL (you should be able to find this link on your shop at the bottom of the right hand menu where the image “rss this shop” is.

- Specify any other html you want to come before and after the item lists.

- Navigate to “Presentation” and “Theme Editor” submenu.

- Place this link in your sidebar in whatever layout works for you.

- Check your links!

- Rss feed will update and change as items are sold!

In case you missed it, here’s the link to the plugin file again.

If you really like this plugin, please go tell Cody about it! He does a lot of cool stuff like this and I don’t think he realizes just how special his talents really are.

I bought Ashley’s lightbox Friday night. She didn’t want it anymore because it really didn’t give her any better photographic light than what she can get in her bedroom anyway. My house, on the other hand, tends to be dark and cavelike. Which is good for Mr. Daysleeper / Nightworker but a bitch for taking photos of pretty crafty things. Now that my usual photo spot on the back porch has been besmirched I decided the best course of action was to finally break down and make or buy a lightbox.

Quite handy Ms. Ashley’s didn’t work out for her, no? So I’ve been taking photos like a crazy woman all weekend and putting stuff up for sale in my etsy shop. Some of this stuff goes back to leftovers from the Zia show just to give you a good idea of how lazy with the photography I’ve really been. I’ve also got Cody working on a cool way to show the rss feed from my Etsy listings on my sidebar. He’s becoming an xml genius at work these days donchaknow.

I’m only going to post one photo of each thing but there are many many more on Flickr.

Yarn

I’ve been making spindles for spinning kits too

Handknits

I’ve been painting ceramic eggs with a sort of, um ‘fertile’ theme. Sort of a Georgia O’Keefe Ostara kind of thing.
I wanted a sort of Lady of Guadalupe feel to this one

These are more abstract ones my four year-old friend, Zoe, helped me paint.

I painted a few other eggs on Friday and I’ve been making some more jewelry and stitchmarkers over the weekend. I have several skeins of sock yarn from the last few months and I have some handspun too. Now just to go get photos of those.

I mentioned in my last post that the wind picked up the porch roof, blew it over our house (clearing the yucca tree, most of the chimney, and the Direct TV dish) and dropped it in the street in front last Friday. Didn’t even hit the mailbox.

Cody slept through the whole thing. But the neighbors across the street rang the bell to let him know what had happened. They all dragged it into the front yard until the insurance guy could get here.

He finally came yesterday so I took some photos since I was standing around in the front yard staring at it anyway.

The porch roof flew a long way in that wind. Our house is a lot deeper than it looks from the front. We have about 1600 square feet of heated space and a two car garage, not a mansion but a good size for two people. But it looks like a tiny cottage from the street and people are usually surprised by the size when they come inside.

When the roof took off it bent the exhaust pipe for the water heater a bit, knocked the cap off the chimney which hit edge of the roof a bit but no damage to the yucca tree or the satellite dish. Amazingly, I had a glass water jug sitting on my big worktable on the back porch that never even moved.

So the porch used to look like this:

Now we feel kind of naked and exposed when we look out the kitchen windows and the den glass doors during the day. Some of my chimes actually survived. I found the copper bird feeder in the street gutter the other day too.

My absolute favorite part of our porch was (and will be) the birds’ nests in the spring.

Some holes had gotten punched in the skylights a few years ago during all those hailstorms so we were going to replace it anyway. This saves us a little demolition trouble. I just keep wondering if anyone saw it take off into the sky.

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Busy couple of weeks. I’ve been feeling much better. Was a little traumatized after having, ya know, PINK EYE and all but the doctors gave me good meds and I’m all better now. A little rough-sounding in the mornings but otherwise doing pretty well. I’m hoping all these health problems are behind me because I’ve got a lot going on. A lot for me anyway.

Lots of big changes to tell you about.

If you’re reading this using bloglines or a feed-reader (if I’ve done my job right you can see these new posts using my old feeds, we’ll see) you might not know that I’ve got a whole new big spanking design. After years of futzing around with Movable Type and a few jobs for other people involving WordPress I decided to bite the bullet and convert my personal blog to WP. MT was the top of the line when I started this blog in 2004. I even got the pay version so I could have multiple blogs.

But the years have not been kind to MT while WP has aged like a fine wine. That seems to be the nature of open source - improving as people keep adapting it to suit them. So hooray for new site design! There are now actual functioning cookies for comments again, which means (if your browser accepts cookies) you won’t have to type your name and info in every time you comment like you used to on MT.

I only have one design ’skin’ for this site but having changing skins is a pretty old design trick anyway and has been a pain in the butt lately. Cody made this knitting hedgehog design for me. And he made a special WordPress plugin for me to keep up with my knitting projects on the sidebar. That guy’s pretty cool.

In other news I’ve been doing a lot of work on the Craftistas group too. We’re really getting moving on that. Getting all legitimate and shit. Beth’s working on a fee-free group shop for all the paid members while I’ve installed a Message Board and even made some fun variations on the logo to sell items at Cafe Press. Last night we gathered our squares for Project Compassion and we were all very proud to have 10 squares to send to Mama E.

We’re also getting moving on the Ugly Scarf Project, which should be fun.

You’ve probably noticed the dearth of photos lately. I’ve been on a photography boycott since Xmas. For some reason I just hate taking photos these days. Hate. It.

I haven’t even taken photos of the roof on the back porch that was picked up by the wind last Friday night, flew over our house, knocked the cap off of the chimney, and landed in the street in front of our house. I was out with Ashley and Christie and apparently Cody slept through the whole thing so the neighbors had to ring the bell to wake him up to let him know what had happened. So this mangled aluminum porch roof is sitting in our front yard waiting for the insurance adjuster to come take a look at it. I guess I should get some photos of that. But meh don’t feel like taking photos.

Hopefully that will change soon as I’ve got about ten thousand things to sell. Stitch markers, dyed yarn, handspun yarn, knit items. Even actual jewelry and pottery. Ha! Yes, I’m going to sell some things from the paint a pottery place. I’m pretty embarrassed about that. But not so much so that I won’t do it.

Anyway I hope you like the new design. I’ve still got a few little adjustments to make but it’s pretty much done now. And we’re going to be at Ladies’ Night at Art Attack this Friday night! Come paint dorky pottery with us!

So the root canal pain is totally gone, the sinus infection is still around, I had a severely sore throat on Tuesday so I went to the doctor’s office to get some meds for that and tested negative for strep again.

I had to go back today because I was having trouble with gross goopy eyes. Now I have conjunctivitis. The doctor thinks the tooth, the cold and sinus trouble, the eyes, the weight, and probably the depression are all related to my hypothyroidism and I’m supposed to go see an endocrinologist.

On the bright side I no longer smell pickles all the time.

There was an hour and a half wait in the doctor’s office, even after checking in and seeing two nurses. It was very, very crowded today too. I had a feeling a lot of us had the same cold. We were all coughing and sniffling. They had a television in the waiting room and at one point the tv mysteriously changed channels from msnbc to the game show network.

Despite everyone’s obvious sickness and inpatience we all kind of enjoyed watching Card Sharks and making fun of how outdated the statistics in the polls were. 15% of young boys in a Rhode Island middle school admitted to turning their report card Fs into Bs. 26% of the marriage counselors thought wives tended to be too overbearing. 13% of the high school boys with steady girlfriends admitted that they wished they could date other women. 3 out of 10 women have experienced unrequited love. 55% of the psychologists thought that women would feel more fulfilled with jobs outside of the home. We kind of had fun laughing at it.

Then the channel was changed to some sort of celebrity shopping network and we all went back to being sick impatient grumps.

to mention that last week, January 29th, was my fourth anniversary of quitting smoking.

In that time I would have smoked roughly 51,418 cigarettes and spent about $8,998.15 US dollars, even if I’d been going to the smoke shops on the pueblos. I smoked American Spirits they’re expensive.

I don’t think I’ve spent that much on yarn. Geez I hope not.

Yep. I had to get another root canal. I think that makes it five? At least it was on a different tooth, I’ve had to have three on the same tooth. Melon’s had to be spayed twice and I’ve had to have three root canals on one tooth. We have bad luck.

Interestingly the dentist thinks the abcess that this tooth’s roots had were what was causing my sinus infection. The doctor thought it was just a general sinus infection (although I was cleared on the strep, I found out that I didn’t actually have that). Both put me on antibiotics. The dentist’s antibiotics win the big prize for the nasty smell. They beat the dog’s farts any day, and that’s really an accomplishment. The doctor’s antibiotics were a nice quick and easy dose - one a day for just five days, which made me wonder if it was going to work at all anyway. They also both gave me various pain prescriptions and other interesting things. The root canal pain has subsided for the most part, although my gums are mighty pissed off.

The sinus issue comes and goes. At the moment, it’s here again. So I took the guafinex or whatever it was that the doctor had prescribed for the sinus congestion. Now everything smells like pickles. Strangest thing.

The in-laws had a party for that football game thingy. I got to stay home in bed trying to sleep and watching Puppy Bowl III (with the kitten half time show!) instead. Hey at least I didn’t record it on the Tivo like I did last year.

I hate to be whiny sick blogger but geez I feel like I’ve been consistently sick since Xmas day, just getting little breaks in-between. There are so many things I want to be doing instead. I have all kinds of beautiful roving to spin and I fixed the bobbin for the Lendrum’s plying head - one end just needed some wood glue. I’ve been dyeing yarn like crazy with Ashley. I started a needle felting project at Mara’s house. And I have so many beautiful beads to play with.

I’ve been working on the besotted scarf with little cable Xs and Os for Cody’s Valentine’s present. I hope he’ll be ok with the yarn, it’s red but has some pink tweedy bits.

I’m stumped about what to get for our third annual stupid t shirt valentine’s gifts. He never wore the “No one knows I’m a lesbian” shirt but I have several times; he wears both of our ThinkGeek code shirts from the first year. What to do.