Up Too Late, As Usual ...

A Bad Beginning for a Bizarre Book?

2012-01-28T20:15:00.002+11:00

This could be a Bad idea ... Because it could be totally Boring - But I was in the shower the other night and I had this Bizarre idea, for the Beginning of a Book, just kind of create itself in my head, so when I got out of the shower I wrote it down ... and then decided that it might be handy for my B post for ABC Wednesday ;-)

so ... Be ready to Be Baffled, Bored or Bugged - here it is:

Aguor sneezed. He could feel the hot redness rise up from his hairy chest, to the top of his ears, and back down, even redder and hotter - red enough to be seen on his hairy cheeks and neck - as he realised that what he had sneezed was now lying on the tablecloth, in a soggy wriggling lump. A hairbiter - black, with lots of legs. Thankfully his hosts were educated enough not to be too upset - enough to know that hairbiters and other pests could be caught by clean people, if they had to mix with those who were not. Normally he would have engaged the services of a groomer, with a well trained snufflecat ... but as he had not left the crowded and unclean city via the normal road, but rather, he had fled just a little too hastily by diving into the sacred pink lake of saltiness and swimming to the lonely temple, he had thought there was no need - and there should not have been - the salt kills hairbiters and other nasty hangers on. As he was bald from the top of his mouth, up over his ears, and down to the middle of his back, he had figured it did not matter that he had not totally submerged his head - but he had forgotten about the hairs growing inside his nose!

... pretty Bad, isn't it?

I am not quite sure why I started thinking of Book Beginnings ... I am fairly sure it may have Been Because I was thinking about the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest - a contest that, as it says on the website is "a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels" ... the 2011 winners are here ;-)
To enter this in that contest, I would have to remove that first full stop and replace it with "and" ... and that would give me 3 lines of horribleness until the next full stop ;-)
(which possibly means I shouldn't put it on my blog yet? ... then again - seeing you are probably the only person actually reading this I don't think it matters anyway - LOL ... besides ... now that this post has sat mostly written but not posted for a few days, and I submitted that Beginning to the contest in Between writing Bits of this post - can I get in trouble for plaigarising myself by posting it on my Blog after i sent in the entry? Besides ... what can they do - take away my Birthday? ;-)

Talking about Books ... which I guess I wasn't - Because that B$^%^t up above is only the Beginning of an imaginary Book - I do actually know a couple of REAL authors, who DO know how to write books!
I met them both on the #CSIROTweetup and I have read stuff written by both of them and really liked it.

One is Claire Corbett (her website is here ) I have a copy of her book "When We Have Wings" but I have not had time to read it yet (although I have read the first chapter ;-) and I also read a short story she wrote, one that is the idea her book is based on - that is here (click on the page numbers to see the pages and read it) ... as if I didn't already wish I could fly ... now that I have read that - I want to fly even more ... if that is possible! LOL

The other Author is Patty Jansen (her website is here ) She gave me one of her e-books (so I could read it and write a review of it ... which I did ... but not sure if I am any good at that sort of thing - lol) and she also has several other stories/etc available as e-books some are Here on Amazon (some of them are free ... and what ones are free seems to vary over time ;-) and she also has some on www.smashwords.com ... where they have a whole pile of different cheap and free e-books - some are full length books, others are short stories or even collections of poems/etc (I have downloaded and read a few of the free ones, including some by Patty, on my iPad ;-) I read them while I was away over Christmas. I also downloaded a heap more the other day ... not sure when I am going to get around to reading them all ... I have enough trouble getting around to posting stuff to my blog! LOL (this one sat, mostly done, as a draft for a few days ;-)

btw ... anyone want to write the next page of that silly story? ... could be interesting to see what happens next - lol

ps ... needed a photo 4 the ABC Wednesday link [andrea has a quick look 4 one] ah - this will do - something I had for tea one night a couple of weeks ago - how about a Beef Burger and a Beer?!

"Here is one I prepared earlier" ?

2012-01-24T02:08:00.000+11:00

This may or may not work ... (if you see nothing but a half a page of text, then it did not work ... at least not for you anyway)

I typed that bit of text and added the link that embeds the story in to this post, and previewed the post - and it seems to have worked ok, at least at this end ;-)
- I went to a website I had found out about (when someone else used it and tweeted their results) called Storify and clicked on the "create story" button at the top and had a fiddle - it let me search for all my tweets (I could have also searched for any other peoples tweets or various topics, or Facebook posts, or some other stuff, but I only wanted some of my recent tweets for this one ;-) and it let me drag the ones I wanted into the thingy (complete with any photos I had tweeted) and add whatever words I wanted ... kind of fun - and a cheats way to turn a few days of tweeting stuff into a blog post all about it - LOL

Methinks I will be using that site again ;-)

Anyway ... here is the story, the "one I prepared earlier":

Gee ... that was just a bit TOO long eh? ... next time I will just do shorter ones i think ... might go back there now and whip one up for Spot, the Blog ... then if any of the 2 or 3 people reading this blog actually go and look at the "other stories by ..." link then they might find something - LOL

btw - because those photos are in something else that is embedded in this blog post (kind of same thing as when one puts youtube videos in blog posts/etc) the photos don't do the same as on my other posts - but you can still see them bigger if you want - just click on them and you end up at the photo on Twitter, and click on it again and it should give you the nice big version ...
(so - if you click on the photo of the yarn - you should get to see a bigger version of the Twitter picture I am talking about the yarn matching ... unless I have changed my profile picture or something - LOL)

Androids And Apples And Apps And Accounts And Annoying Computers And Stuff

2012-01-18T20:02:00.001+11:00

Ok ... so that is a good post title for a letter A post, as we go into Another round of ABC Wednesday ... so ... Ahh ... er ... now what do I actually SAY? lol

I guess I was thinking I should post about that stuff because it has All featured rather a lot in my life lately ;-)

note: As this post has become Awfully long ... feel free to just look at the pictures if you don't want to read All that stuff I have raved on About ;-)

Anyway ...
I am not quite sure where it all started ... maybe way back - when DH bought our first computer, almost 21 years ago? LOL

Actually ... this little quilt, that I made last year, kind of tells the story - in fact that is exactly what it was meant to be About ;-)

... the words sewn onto the background are all the things I started playing with/using, and in the Approximate order I discovered/started using them ...
The couple on the right are the ones not quite in order ... Fractint is a computer program (still around but was less complex, but took way longer to do stuff, back then) that draws fractals ... can't remember when i started messing around with that ... probably not long after we got the computer - whenever DH downoaded and installed it and told me about it ;-)
The digital camera came sometime later ... if I had to put it in between the other stuf it probably would go between geocities and google - I was already using e-mail and yahoo stuff by the time we got our first digital camera (and now my PHONE takes better photos than that camera could!) I probably could have added more stuff like using various photo editing software and stuff ... but I decided that "digital camera" could cover all that stuff too ;-)
For the first few years we had the internet ... which I think we had access to before html/the www - DH used to run a "bulletin board" where people could dial up and download/upload files and e-mail or something like that ... but once web browsers and stuff turned up - I started "surfing the web" every now and then ... not too often - because when I did - I would sit at the comptuer, get "lost in cyberspace" and then it would be 8 hours later! oops?! LOL (some things don't change much ;-)
At about the end of 1997 DH called me over to the computer and showed me how to use the e-mail program to send/read e-mails, and to read newsgroups ... and he "created a monster" LOL - I found a quilting newsgroup (and a couple of others) and joined in ... then someone on there told me all about Scquilters (the Southern Cross Quilters e-mail list) and I joined that instead ... that later moved to "e-groups" which got taken over by yahoo to become yahoogroups ... sometime after joining scquilters I was looking at someone's quilt website on geocities and got curious and clicked the link to "get your own Geocities page" ... just to see what was involved in case I wanted to later ... a couple hours after I clicked - I was up way too late And I had a website on Geocities! LOL
Sometime over the next few years I also joined a few other e-mail lists ... one or 2 of those have died, all the others either were already on, or moved to, yahoogroups ... and I also used to do quite a lot of "surfing the net" ... and signed up for a pile of different free e-mail addresses and stuff (on sites that have mostly died since then) ... and sometime or another Yahoo, and a few other similar websites started to get not so good (free yahoo mail forwarding kind of ceased to happen, and yahoo bought Geocities and then later on the killed it) and Google got better and became the main search engine ... and I found blogger and started this blog ... a year or 2 before Google bought Blogger - lol
I am still active on a few yahoogroups ... and, after resisting it for a year or 2, I joined Facebook ... and Twitter ... but still didn't use them for a year or so ... but then I realised that a pile of people I know from the Scquilters yahoogroup are now hanging around on Facebook ... so I relented just over a year ago, and let one of them drag me in - lol Then I found that a couple of them were messing around with Twitter, so I had a bit of a fiddle ... that was in the middle of last year sometime - which is when I made that quilt ... Twitter is kind of where I got the title for the quilt, but I still didn't think I was likely to use it that much, because it didn't seem to be my thing ... nor did smart phones (which DH took me shopping for a few months ago, and I kind of wondered why I had one for the first month or 2 ... but then I found out about the CSIROTweetup - LOL ... so I started using Twitter (and Facebook) on my phone, and on the iPad that DH had bought earlier in the year (another thing I wasn't sure I would use much, although I did use it for Gmail and Facebook while we went on a holiday in the middle of last year - I posted photos of all the different food we ate ;-) funny thing is I think now I use the iPad more than he does - lol) ... once I worked out how to use the thing, I also started using a heap of other apps on the phone - some that I found out about during the tweetup, and a few I have found since, and then when I went away for Christmas I started using a few things on the iPad (mail and e-books mostly).
I think in the last month or 2 I have probably spent more time on Twitter than on any of the other things! (but I have it set up so my tweets get posted on my facebook - lol)

er ... this has got rather long - and that was kind of only part of what the title of this post refers to!
I was also going to mention how, when I went up to visit Mum and Dad for Christmas/New Year, I spent quite a bit of time fiddling around with all that sort of stuff - because Mum bought an iPad just before I went up there, and she was having a few problems with her computer/e-mail ... and if you have not used Any Apple software or Anything with Apps or signed up to many things where you have online Accounts - it can take a bit to get one's head around it All ... and I am no expert either - I just play with it - LOL ... but I ended up doing all sorts of odd stuff like using my phone as a wifi hotspot so mum could download iTunes and a big iPad software update (her dodgy internet plan did not have enough data left to use to do that, but my phone plan did ;-) and setting up e-mail stuff on her laptop (a fairly new one, not her first, but a different version of windoze that is a real pain to find how to do stuff in) and then setting up her new internet stuff - she changed from a wireless dongle on a network where she only had a bad signal, to a plan where she gets a lot more data for only a bit more money and has a little modem thingy that connects to 3g and is a wireless hotspot that she can connect either her laptop or her iPad to (which solved the problem of her wondering "should I have got a 3G one instead of just a wifi one?" - she can use her month's worth of data on either the laptop or the iPad rather than needing 2 different plans ;-) Trouble is - that stuff all had to be installed/set up/etc ... so Mum was glad I was there to help figure it all out - LOL
Also, while I was there to help set stuff up, Mum decided that seeing she had such Awful wireless reception from her ISP, she would change over to Another one instead (one that has better 3G coverage in her Area ;-) ... so I ended up helping her find her way through the maze of Accounts and passwords, And had to explain All About how the Admin password was for the thingy that connects to the net and then sends out the wifi signal that her laptop and ipad need Another password to Access and that those are Additional to the password/login she needs to Access her Account/e-mail/etc on her ISP ... the sort of stuff that can be Absolutely confusing At first, but All makes sense once you get your head around it - probably All stuff that I have learnt About a lot more slowly over the years, while watching DH set all that sort of stuff up while I just used it All ;-)

... and this is where I Added a few ideas (below) for the rest of this post, then left it As it was for a few days (although I did just Add a few more words and stuff to the bit Above)

And maybe some Additional A stuff?

As if this blog post needs to be Any longer?!!!! ... Anything I might have Added, I will be Able to use next time Around the Alphabet - lol

Authors?! (the 2 I met on the Tweetup and how/why I am reading their books? ;-)

er ... yes I did want to mention that About now, but it will Also fit quite neatly in with what I am planning to do for my letter B post, so it will Be in there, if I get Around to Actually writing the B%^&#%& thing ;-)

Anyway ... this post is probably Awfully boring with so few photos ... so here is Another one:

"Aggie's pants" (Agapanthus) ... I took the photo, with my phone, a day or 2 ago, and I just noticed , as I was putting photos into an Album on the computer and choosing which one of 3 Agapanthus photos was going here, there is An Amazing thing About this photo - there is Also An Arachnid on the Agapanthus flowers! (the pink hand is pointing to it ;-)

I Am sure I have some other Amazing photos I could put in here, but I keep getting lost on Twitter before I get Around to uploading them from the camera's memory card ... and I am not doing that now because DH and I are About to go out, As soon As he gets home from work (unless he has changed his mind since he rang me from work earlier today) - And I want to try and post this before I end up being too late ... Again
(oops - he is home, hope I have not left Anything out/messed up, because I am About to post this As it is and hope it is at least mostly Alright ;-)

Zarya, Zvezda, etc ...

2012-01-14T04:25:00.000+11:00

So ... "What on Earth are Zarya and Zvezda?" you ask? Well - actually they are NOT on Earth! They are 2 modules of the International Space Station (ISS) that is orbiting around the Earth ;-)

Zarya was the first module launched, then Unity, then Zvezda (If you are interested, there is more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarya ... and from there you can follow the links to Zvezda and other stuff ) This website - http://www.zarya.info/ - has some interesting info on the use/history of the name Zarya (it was initially the call sign of mission control for the flight when Yuri Gargarin orbited the Earth ;-)

Zvezda means "Star" ... which is about how bright the ISS now looks when you watch it fly over!
Zarya means Sunrise/Dawn ... symbolising the dawn of a new age of space exploration or something ... and I guess there are definitely some exciting things happening at the moment (like the failed Phobos-Grunt in a decaying orbit and due re-enter the Earth's atmospehre at some random time in approximately 2 days time, and the MSL mission (Curiosity rover) due to land on Mars this August ... I hope they have another CSIROTweetup for that, and if they do - I hope I can sneak off from work to go to it!)

Talking about Dawn ... that is when I went to bed "last night" - LOL but - there is one advantage in having been still up at that stupid hour of the morning - I got to go outside and see the ISS fly overhead at 4:12am ;-)
(it has also been visible here in the evenings this week - but either I forget to look until too late, or it is too cloudy ... sigh)

To find out when you can look up and see the ISS fly over, one can just search on Google/etc for ISS sightings or something ... or go to http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/ or http://www.heavens-above.com/
If you are into Twitter - you can also follow @twisst to get sent alerts when it is due to be visible flying overhead ;-)
And if you have an iPhone or an Android phone ... there is at least one App that tracks satellites/etc and tells you where to look in the sky (the app I have on my phone tracks lots of stuff, including ISS, and the doomed and soon to re-enter Phobos-Grunt)

I did take a photo of the ISS with my phone - but it just looks like a tiny white dot on a black background - not worth uploading here ;-)
I don't have any recent/new photos of a Sunrise either, but I did take a photo of this Sunset over the house as we drove off to have tea at a pizza place with a name starting with Z, a couple of days ago. lol

[the next day] ... seeing this was meant to be my Z post for ABC Wednesday, I probably should have uploaded the photo and posted this yesterday (seeing it was already late then, and is now even later) ... but I kind of never got that far ... sigh ... but I might have a couple more Sunset photos now ;-) I took some on my phone when I was walking the dog this evening ... and then the dog and I got home just as the ISS was flying overhead ... not directly overhead, and some thin cloud - so not bright enough for any decent photos (besides - I would probably need to set up the camera on a tripod to get any photos that actually looked like anything other than a white dot in a black background - lol)

Anyway ... Here is the Sunset over the house the other day:

yes - it really was that colour!

And here are the other Sunset/etc photos I took, with my phone, while waking the dog this evening:
(I took some with my camera too, but they are not on the computer yet)

pink sky and hills

this is what normally happens when trying to take photos of the dog, or the cat:
photo of said animal at least part way OUT of the photo!

orange Sunset

closer up (taken just after other one)

a few minutes later (from a slightly different place)

Sunset reflected in the pond

more Sunset reflections in the pond

Diesel, wishing I would let him jump in the pond and chase the swan that has come over - probably to see if we have any food ;-)

Just for fun - the same photo after I played with it in GIMP (a very useful bit of photo editing software that can is free to download from the www) I was going to make it a bit lighter because the original (above) is rather dark ... but it didn't look any good when I made it lighter (all the colours became distracting and ruined the effect - the darkness is part of what makes it a photo I like - kind of moody looking, or something ;-) but I quite like the effect in this one too.

While I was playing with photos in GIMP ... I decided to play with the lightness and contrast of another photo I took this evening - I was trying to take one of the ISS as if flew over (using my phone ;-) but it was way too dark and the photo just turned out black, with no sign of the ISS or even the stars in the sky ... but when I upped the contrast as far as it would go, and same with the brightness, but one number less - I got this rather interesting "noise" effect, which I quite like - it kind of looks like an abstract art quilt or something ;-)

oh ... one more Z thing I just have to mention seeing this is meant to be a post for the letter Z ... something that someone Tweeted reminded me ... a piece of music that I love, partly because it was used as the theme song in the film "2001 A Space Oddesy" but also because I like it anyway - is a rather dramatic piece called "Also Spake Zarathustra" ... LOL
Oddly enough ... I just looked it up (at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Also_sprach_Zarathustra_(Strauss) ) and it says that the initial fanfare - the bit that was used in the film - is called "Sunrise" - which ties in nicely with where this post started - the name that I already knew, that gave me the idea for this blog post - Zarya, which means "Sunrise" ;-)

(so now that I have gone full circle, maybe it is time I hit the "post" button before I bore you all so much that you turn into Zombies? ;-)

Wishing you a Merry Christmas, Where have I been? Where am I going, and other Weird stuff.

2011-12-21T04:00:00.000+11:00

"We Wish you a merry Christmas, We Wish you a merry Christmas ... " etc ... I don't have time to go digging in my photos and make up a Christmas card right now, and I didn't do it earlier because I seem to have been rather busy doing all that other stuff people do when not sitting in front of the computer (and a bit too much getting lost on Twitter when I have been at the computer ;-) ... not sure if I will get to do it later either - because I am going away ... DH is working night shifts over Christmas, so he is staying home (which is handy because else who would look after the cat and the dog ... DD maybe - seeing she will probably working Christmas Eve and Boxing Day) so ... I am hopping on a plane tomorrow, and flying to Queensland - to visit my parents for a week or 2 ... and they don't have huge piles of download to use each month like I do here at home, or GIMP on their computer ... lol

But ... because I have not posted for a little While ... and it may be a Week or more before I post again (depending What I might find in the Way of free WiFi/other Internet access ... and/or Weather I feel like going off and finding some McWiFi - lol) I have decided to Whip up a quick post With a few Weird photos of Weird stuff for the Wonderful ABC Wednesday's W Week ;-)

Wow! - I just realised - now that it is after Midnight - I am actually posting this on a ... Wednesday! LOL
(but the linky thingy isn't there yet - I will have to remember to try and find a spare 5 minutes to log in to Blogger While I am at Work tomorrow and add my link then ;-)

now ... What Weird and Wonderful stuff can I find photos of in a hurry? (I still need to organise a few things because I have to be packed and ready tonight, because I leave pretty much straight after Work tomorrow) and I still have not taken the dog for the Walk I promised him (he doesn't care What time of day/night he goes - lol)

OK ... found some ... and they uploaded quite fast and Worked ok - Wonderful!

These few Were all taken with my phone ...
(might be why they loaded fast - smaller photos than my camera is set up to take ... but the couple of camera photos I put in here also loaded fast ;-)

Some Weird Wet person (me ;-) at the #CSIROTweetup:

the same Weird person (me) Wearing a Wig With antennae on it - at the #CSIROTweetup - next to a model of one of the Mars rovers ;-)

Weird animals ... Waiting for a scratch?

ditto:

Cat's Whiskers: (white ones ;-)

Weird sky

Weird sky again - the clouds really Were that colour!

What is this? and Why is it on my desk at Work?!

yes - it IS a live possum - I work at a high school, and Mr E's class Went into their sceince lab one Monday morning (about a week or 2 ago) - and there, in the corner, was a possum! (it had been living in the roof, and fallen through the ceiling tiles ... they are fairly sleepy during the day so it was easy to just grab a box, stick it over the possum and shove it's backside into the box, shut the flaps and carry it out of the room ;-)

(btw - that last photo was not my from my phone - I also took a photo with my camera ;-)

oh - and the possum was released into some trees. later in the day.

This is also a camera photo, not a phone photo
... and this one was yellow because it was taken with the flash off (I took one with the flash on too, but I like this one better ;-)
The colour could be said to be a hint as to what I was doing at the time - I just happened to have the camera in my pocket When I Went to ... do What I Was doing in there ;-) and the dog Was Waiting for me to finish. (he doesn't like it if you shut the door, and if you don't actually close it properly he just pushes the door open and comes in anyway - lol

... and this is some birds Walking around.

I was walking around too - with the iPad - which is what I used to take that photo ... and yes it is a boring one - I only put it in here to see what would happen ... because I probably had the ipad upside down when I took the photo - the thumbnail was upside down ... but (because the ipad knows which way up it is?) the photo comes out the right way up when it is opened ... I got curious to see if it was upside down in here ... no - that just seems to happen at random when there is a glitch - lol (had that happen once ... rotated a photo that I had taken sideways, and it looked fine, as a thumbnail and open, on the computer - but it came out sideways in here! - weird?)

Anyway ... time to finish messing around, and post this - While I still have some night left to Walk the dog, organise the other few things I have to pack/etc, and also squeeze in a good night's sleep before I have to get up for Work in the morning (oops? ... that adds up to a bit more than the approximately 7 hours that it is going to have to fit into!

"but Wait - there's more"

I almost forgot to add the first photo I found - was not going to put it first - figured it might gross a few people out a bit much being right at the top - more Weird stuff at Work:

Yes - that IS a plastic bag of EYEBALLS ;-)

better in the plastic bag than here!

... high up on the Wall!

... it was a particularly rowdy class that disected eyballs the day this happened ;-)
(usually the leftover chopped up greebly bits come back in the trays or whatever, and I just have to scrape them out and bin them, and wash all the trays/scalpels/forceps/probes/etc, rather than having to find a long stick to remove greeblies from the wall, and go find a mop and clean the ceiling! ... "and what did you do at work today?" "well, I scraped an eybeall off the wall, and mopped the ceiling ... " I guess it keeps the job interesting - LOL)

and ... if it Works (it said there was an error, but now it says it is uploading ... I guess I will have to "hurry up and Wait" for a While to see if it worked, and try again if it didn't)
here is will possibly be a link to a video of some Wonderfully Wild and Wooly Weather:

(it wasn't uploading on blogger, said "rejected by server" or somesuch - so I decided to try putting it on Photobucket instead ;-)

hmmm ... maybe it wasn't such a good idea to start uploading a video at 1:30am, and then noticing that it is 298MB in size! ... dog is now walked, other bits I had to do are done (unless I have forgotten something) it is now almost 4am ... and 25% of it has uploaded ... I wonder if there is a size limit? LOL
I will post this, and add the video later, if it uploads, (and if I can log in to photobucket and blogger some time/place and do what I will need to do, and if I remember ;-)

[the next day] OK - here it is (it took half the night, but seems it did upload ok ;-)

The video was taken at around Midnight one night late in November ... it was rather stormy most of the night, but for over half an hour it was like this - constant flashes and booms - amazing!
(kind of made me imagine weird things - like maybe it was elephants who had become angels and they were having a disco in the sky ;-)

Tweet, tweet, tweet ... Having a terrific time at the #CSIROTweetup

2011-11-27T01:13:00.001+11:00

Ok ... Yesterday I left work early and Went out to the CDSCC (Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex - http://www.cdscc.nasa.gov/ ) and spent an absolutely wonderful evening at the #CSIROTweetup (news article about it here - http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/11/21/3354487.htm ;_) ... we then stayed the night out at a school camp near there, and we are now in at CSIRO Discovery and the talks are about to begin ... And tonight we go back out to CDSCC to do it all again ...
Actually I can probably keep blogging during the talk, in between eating bites of my lunch ... Multi tasking?! LOL

Actually it is kind of funny ... A whole bunch of "tweeps" having a Tweetup in a radio quiet area (the telescopes need to be able to "hear" the signals from the spacecraft they are tacking, and there isn't any phone signal out here, in fact we have to turn all wireless devices off or to airplane mode ... so we have all been cut off from our usual connections to the www/etc. ... Apart from several computers they set up for us to use :-)
... So here we all are ... back in town with mobile phone coverage and guest access to a wireless network ... So everyone is sitting in the lecture theatre, phones/iPads/Netbooks in hand busily tweeting, emailing, checking phone messages and what have you ...
(I am trying to do this on the iPad but I am adding the links and a few other bits later when not using the iPad - LOL )

[later the same day ... er ... actually it is the next day, just - have not gone to bed yet - late night coming up]
oops - the lectures got too interesting (actually the first one was too - but I had already heard almost the same one a couple of months ago so I could kind of listen and blog and still understand it all ;-)

After the lectures/etc we had some spare time - which a few of us spent the first part of at the pub - lol - then we headed out to a nice picnic area by the river on the way out to CDSCC and had a BBQ ... and then we all arrived here at CDSCC for an entertaining evening of sharing computers to tweet/etc/eating party pies, watching stuff on the big screen at the front of the room, listening to someone talk about NASA and stuff, and generally have a good time ... now we are watching the NASA live coverage of the launch (of http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ for those who have not looked at the other link at the top - lol)

ooh "T minus 1 hour and 9 minutes" ... woo hoo - getting excited ...

ok ... time for some photos ... yes - I was the first one here to look at the computers and think to myself "oooh - usb slot - might try connecting my phone/camera"... worked fine with both of them ... but first ... here is a photo that I DIDN'T take - this is a group photo that one of the other "Tweeps" took and tweeted a little while ago - and is now saved on my phone - LOL

And here is a photo I got someone to take of me, last night ;-)

And guess who?! ... well - I had the wig with antennae so I had to put it on ... and the person organising things just took this photo and tweeted it ... so I "borrowed" it.

and now that I have monopolised the computer for way too long - someone else's turn ... should be just under an hour till launch now ... time to see if there are any party pies left ... LOL

I wonder if I can call this an early Wednesday ABC post, seeing we are up to the letter T in a couple days?

[edit: I decided "yes, I will ;-)" just added the letter T link here and am about to go add this link to the linky thingy there]

Some Roses are Red ... and So are lots of other Somewhat Random things ...

2011-11-22T19:57:00.001+11:00

Really? ... who would have thought ... lol

... yes - if you think I write about some Rather Ridiculous stuff - you are proabably Right ... but I am not going to Refrain - I will go Right ahead anyway - because it is past time for those of us doing the ABC Wednesday thing to post about stuff starting with the letter R and now it is time for the letter S ... and there is at least one of these R things (which I was also going to post about again as an S thing anyway, because it really is S related ;-) that I Really wanted to post about anyway ;-)
I decided to make this an R and S post because I am not sure I will have time to do another totally S post between now and next week ... (if I do then I guess it could be a Second one?) ... although most of what I will be posting about, if I do get a chance to post Stuff this week, is also Related to, and part of, what I was planning on blogging about for my letter T post ;-)

Righto ... let's get Right into it? ... first R thing is the Rover that will be Rolling over ... the Surface of Mars - "the Red planet" ... no - not the the ones that, Remarkably, are Still Rolling Round the place (well at least one of them is ;-) but the one that is now Sitting on top of a Rocket, Ready to Roll onto the launch pad Rather Soon - the Mars Science Laboratory - which is a Rather large Rover called Curiosity - due to lift off and head out into Space (which is why this is Really an S thing too ;-) in 9 er ... make that about 6 (because I didn't finish this the day I started and it is now about 3 days later) days time (and Land on Mars next August I think)... unfortunately I live a bit to far away to just Rock up to watch the launch, but, provided it does take off when planned, I will be doing the next best thing - I will be Right in the middle of the action at the CSIRO Tweetup, here at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex ;-)
Strangely enough, the launch has just been delayed by a day, meaning it won't be happening in the wee small hours of Saturday morning (Australian time), but in the wee small hours of Sunday morning instead - which is a bit Sad for those poor Sods who booked cheap flights that they can't change, or have other places they have to be on the Saturday night - because they will miss the actuall launch ... but, because it was too late to change all the other plans (guest speakers and Stuff) all the other fun Stuff, apart from the live cross to the USA during the launch, will Still be happening ... and then we get to go back again on Saturday evening for more fun Stuff and do the live cross for the launch at about 2am Sunday morning, and get to spend another night out at the place we get to Stay at on the first night. (provided the launch isn't delayed/Scrubbed or something ... which, unfortunately, is possible)

So ... this S part of this Rather odd post might only be a fairly Small part of it - but it is a Rather Significant bit as far as I am concerned - LOL
If any of you lot (all 3 of you? lol) reading this are on Twitter - I am @UTLAU - and even if you are not signed up to Twitter yourself, you can find, and look at, my twitter page at http://twitter.com/#!/UTLAU
(I am not sure how often I/we will be "Tweeting" during the actual event - for one thing - we are going to be rather busy having our guided tour, eating dinner, listening to all the guest speakers, etc ... and the other - there is probably no phone/etc reception out there anyway, and even if there is - the place we will be during the guided tour, and the launch of the MSL mission, is a "radio quiet" area so we will have to turn our phones/iPads/whatever off, or to "flight mode" anyway ... but we will have some access to computers that are connected to the internet ;-)

Anyway ... now to Resume the previously written R post ... which I should have posted a week ago, but it took me a few days to get around to writing it/finding what photos I wanted to put in, and then a few more days to actually get said photos onto my blog ... not sure if it is me or them, but uploading photos seems to be a pain lately ... works ok for a while, sometimes, and then it just seems to hang ... grrrr ... and unfortunately I do sometimes have to do other things besides sit at the computer getting lost on Youtube or something while waiting to see if things are working or not ... sigh ... LOL

R is also for Round and Round in my head ... which is what is currently happening with David Bowie's song "Life on Mars" - LOL
(note to Self: maybe I Should put that Song on my phone, so I can play it /sometime during the Tweetup ;-)

R is also for Remembering what other Relevant R things I was going to post about ... but I know I have Rather a lot of photos that I have taken Recently - an amount would be several Rolls of film, if it wasn't for the Recent Replacement of that technology by Digital - what a Ripper of an invention that one was ;-)

I guess I should go and Rummage around in my photos, and See what Results I find ... it is amazing how many Random things I found to photograph Recently, that were Red, or otherwise R Related ...

btw ... when I decided to walk the dog late this afternoon, I only had room for 3 more photos on the memory card in the camera, so I took that one out and put an empty one in ... it now has 72 photos on it!
(and I also took a few more photos with my phone ;-)

[a day or 3 passes]
er ... I Really should finish this post before I Run out of days in the week before it is next Wednesday (and time for the letter S)
(oops! LOL)
... and I think that Red is a bit TOO Red Mars seems to look a bit more like this colour in the photos anyway ... LOL

I guess I should stop Raving on about Random stuff that is probably Really boring, and find a few Reasonable "R" Related photos to put in here ...

I just Realised that will Require me to Remember, or look at the blog post to Remind myself, which ones of my Recent photos I have already posted (I Remember that the Red hot poker flowers were in my P post ;-)

Hmmm ... a couple of these photos could be S photos as well ... which is probably a good thing, Seeing this R post kind of became an R and S one - lol
I uploaded the rest of them last night, but it was a bit late to stay here adding captions when I had to get up for work today ... so I will add them now, and then I can hit the "post" button before this post becomes as Ridiculous as the Rather Strange R post I found Saved in my "drafts" (I might have to be Silly and post that one next time we ABC Wednesday is up to the letter R, if I don't think of something better ;-)

Red flowers, looking Rather Striking actulaly ;-)

the roof of my car just before I went to work last Monday morning - there is a tree next to where I park the car (there is a branch of that tree poking into the top right corner of the photo) and it dropped a whole pile of bits of flowers, and sticky nectar as well, onto the roof of the car ... and then a whole pile of those plague soldier beetles gathered there - I presume to continue eating the nectar.

this is about 15 or 20 minutes later - after driving to work (at speeds of up to 80kph) - some of the beetles are Still on the Roof!

this is a closer up shot of the flower bits and beetles (taken a few days later I think)

Some Red and blue Recycling bins Ready for me to put them in the Science classroms at the school I work at.

Sunset, Refleced on the water (while out walking the dog)

Red Sky ;-)

Reddish light Reflected on the path ... which also has a heap of Snails on it ;-)
(btw - my mobile phone Rang just as I was trying to take this photo - lol)

Roses ... Some Red and Some ... not ;-)

Red Roses ... Rather wet ones (I was walking the dog in the Rain ;-)

Srange Red light - from the Street lights Reflected in the foggy Sky

Same Reddish Sky, with the moon - this was the Sky just to the Right of the Sky in the previous photo ... lol

Red flowers in a coutryard at work (same Red flowers as the ones in the first photo, which are in my garden at home - in fact I think the ones in my garden were grown from bits that fell/were broken off these plants at work ;-)

Red chairs in a corridor at work ... in front of the principal's office actually ;-)

Red flowers ... "Bottle Brush" flowers ... a species of Callistemon (not sure which one - they are an Australian native that has been bred into a lot of different new varieties for gardens/etc)

Rainbow colours in the camera lens (and another one of those Red flowering Callistemon bushes ;-)

a Rose

a Red gutter, and a Rock at the front of the school I work at
(actually the long building in this photo is part of the science block - where I work ;-)

Rust dyed fabric ... actually Rather Rotten too - this is what happens when you decide to "dye" some fabric by wrapping it around some rusty wire and stuff and bury it in the garden for 2 or 3 days ... but then don't Remember that you did that until it has been there for 2 or 3 MONTHS ... oops? LOL (I will still find a use for it eventually ;-)

a Reddish orange Grevillia flower ... we have some Strange looking flowers here in Australia ;-)

Ok ... photos now have captions ... which I am still not sure I like the look of how blogger does that ... but it takes ages to get them all lined up neatly if I try and write in between them because all the html tags that get added with the photos tend to mess up the formatting or something, which it also does a bit doing it this way, but not quite as badly ... and the only way to make things look neat/how I want them to is to edit the html code and delete them all - and that takes ages ...

btw ... for those who want a closer look a a weird flower/beetles making beetles/whatever other weird thing in one of these photos ... these are actually quite large photos (they will probably not be quite so large after a while if I keep posting this many every time I post to my blog - there is actually a storage limit for photo on here ... but, from what I read somewhere on a help page, because I have google+ I get to keep uploading stuff after the limit is reached, but anything over a certain size will be made smaller automatically). Anyway ... if you want to see these photos even bigger than they come up in that thingy you get when you click on one - do a right click and open it in a new tab/window and it should come up the full size (which even if I have reached the limit and my new photos do get re-sized as I upload them, they will still be a lot bigger than they appear in the blog posts ;-)

One last S related thing ... DD (Dear Daughter) came wandering in to the room the other night, while DH (Dear Husband) and I were watching TV or something ... and she asked if it would do anything bad to a keyboard if you drew/wrote on it ... when asked why she wanted to know that she answered: I want to write "the final frontier" on my Spacebar ...

(and if you don't get why she wanted to do that - you need to go and watch a few episodes of Star Trek ... even one episode ... or even just the Start of an episode - lol)

"Purple Mountain's Majesty"? - Looks Like Lavender To Me

2011-11-20T05:04:00.000+11:00

I guess there is more to making something look majestic than just telling the browser to display it in a particular hexadecimal colour code - LOL
Ok - so what am I waffling on about this time?! - I found a link to Project 64 on someone else's ABC Wednesday post, and that looked fun too, so I posted something for that a week or 2 ago, then forgot about it until I went looking at my blog to see what photos I posted recently so I would not post the same ones again for my ABC Wednesday letter "R" post (which I was doing, but the photo uploading seems to have decided to work for a while then have a really big go slow) so I decided to see what colour Project 64 was after for this week, and noticed that if I get in quick enough (and the photo uploading actually works) I can post a photo or 3 of my Lavender bush for "Purple Mountains Majesty" which is this colour of Crayola crayon, #9D81BA, according to the colour lovers website ... (yes - working our way through the colours of Crayola's box of 64 crayons sounds like a weird idea for a meme - but I think it is a good one - LOL)
I also think it is a bit pale to keep typing in that colour (if it is too pale against my background colour and you can't read that bit - highlight it with the mouse and you should be able to read what it says - lol)

Actually ... when I went hunting in my photos, I found a whole pile of purple ones that are the right colour - but I posted most of them in my ABC Wendesday letter "P" post - here ;-)

These 2 were not in there though:

Diesel the dog next to the rather bushy lavender bush ... which I am sure I have a better photo of - have taken lots of close ups with bees and stuff, and I am sure I was looking at one I took of a butterfly on a flower, that is the right colour for this, just today ... but do you think I can find it now?!

I must like laveder bush colours - lavender/purple and grayish green - becuase I seen to und up using those colours in all sorts of odd things - including this experimenting with acrylic pains and hair gel that we did at the art quilt group I am part of (which I intend to post about on that blog sometime in the next week or 2)

Ok ... found the one I was looking for ;-)

a cabbage white butterfly on my lavender plant

and a photo of the whole plant, taken just after the butterfly one.

But ... somehow I think this one I posted in that other blog post is the one I want to submit to the linky thingy for Project 64 ... who else is going to have a photo of a sky this colour?! ;-)

A rather weird coloured sky - and yes it really did look that colour - that is why I took the photo!!!

P.S. ... Probably not a dandelion ...

2011-11-08T04:12:00.000+11:00

ok ...This colour is Probably a bit Pale to write my whole Post in ... but it is the Crayola colour "Dandelion" ...

ugh ... back to normal colours (I kind of had to hightlight the Dandelion colour with a dark grey background because it probably would not show up on my blog background ... but why the Dandelion? ... well - I fell over something called Project 64 and it looked like fun ... a bit like ABC Wednesday (which this could be a second letter P post for? or maybe we could just call it a Post script to the Previous one? lol), except with Project 64 they are working their way through 64 colours in a box of crayons. This week's colour is "Dandelion" ... and I knew I would be able to find a photo with that colour in it ... so I decided to Pop in and Post something ;-)

banksia roses on someone's fence ... a bit pale actually, so not quite good enough for the Particular Picture that I Put in my link on there.

not dandelions, but some kind of daisy that has similar colours ... actually the petals are lighter and the middles darker ...

soggy wet flowers in my garden at night ... this is getting closer to the right colour ... so was the other photo, probably of the same flowers, but on a different night, in my recent O post

ah why not - one can always rely on sunsets to produce a profusion of colours ;-)

I think the last one will do - I am sure the perfect match for "Dandelion" has to be somewhere in between the dark foreground and the blue sky ;-)

Perhaps I Should Post Something Interesting?

2011-11-07T03:17:00.000+11:00

Actuallly I can Possibly think of a whole Pile of P things to Post (and ended up finding a Pile of Photos) for a letter P Post for ABC Wednesday ... some of them are Probably not Particularly interesting to most, and a few could be downright Peculiar, but Perhaps most People will find at least some of them may, Perchance, Pique their interest ...

One thing I Particularly want to Put in here is this:
I have a friend who has, over the last few years, Published some Particularly good/interesting blog Posts - about the People and Places she has been ... after enough people said to her "you should write a book" - she has done so! It is called "Pack and Follow" and she has Published it with one of those Print on demand type websites ... it can be found here - http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2578726
(perhaps I should Produce a book and Publish it? ... not sure anyone would want to read it though - lol)

I Put a (small) pile of ideas in here before I went and did other things, then came back a few days later ... so I will leave them in whatever colour the text defaults to, and add the rest in this Peculiar Pink ...

Peas +/or Pies er ... yes - I like Peas and/or Pies ... and yes the "and/or" does mean I like either one, or both together ... I could go a Pie floater about now ;-)

Puppy
Pussycat
I have lots of photos and stuff about those in this blog ... Probably have enough other Photos to add to this Post that I don't need any more ...

have a Party and invite my Pants down ... the pants I was wearing at the time were a bit short ... they were second hand, and had shrunk a bit more too ... original Plan was to add some Patchwork or something to the bottoms, but I never got there ...

Pumpkin beetles - Piles of the things!
Actually they were/are not Pumpkin beetles (that was what one person I knew called them once, but after some quick research on the www I noticed that is not what they are ... they are soldier beetles ... in fact if they are the Particular species I think they are - they are known as "Plague soldier beetles" ... which kind of does describe them:

bazillions of beetles flying in from who knows where ...

beetles being beetles? ... with a blurry Patch (Possibly a finger Print) on the lens ... oops ... I wiped it off after that Photo, but this one was still better than the others to show close up detail of what the beetles look like.

not so close up of the beetles in the tree - this is our "street tree" - they are planted in front of most of the houses in our street ... I am not sure what they are, but later in the year they grow big brown seed Pods ...

beetles in the tree in the dark - when I got back from walking the dog ;-)

While walking the dog I also found a few more of what I thought were the same beetles flying around ... caught one to get another photo - and noticed they are not the same at all ... these are Lycid beetles:

Lycid beetle on some grass

Lycid beetle on my hand

oops ... I was trying to take a photo just before/as it flew off ... but ended up with what I often get instead - an empty hand/finger where the beetle/other flying insect WAS ... lol
(btw - the blue thing is the dog's lead ... dog is a blurry blob in this photo - just above my "pinky" finger)

.. another day, another Pretty (or is this one also Peculiar?) colour ... (half those beetle photos uploaded then stopped, by which time I was off doing other things, so now it is the next day)
For those who want more information on those beetles/want to know what website I used to work out what they Probably are - I went to this Page - http://www.brisbaneinsects.com/brisbane_beetles/index.html - the Lycid beetles and soldier beetles are about half way down the page.
btw ... what have beetles got to do with the letter P? ... nothing really, except I had heard someone call one that looked a bit like these 2 (but may have been another species of orange and/or green/black beetle ;-) a Pumpkin beetle ... but those are something else, and there are lots of web Pages about them because they are a garden Pest. That, and the fact that most black and yellow/organge insects are either Poisonous to eat, have a Poison sting, or are Pretending to be one of those that are ...

now for the other P Pictures I was Planning to Post:
(and some that I wasn't, but found while digging around in my Photos ;-)

purple sky ... I took the photo because it really did look that colour ... but it wasn't until I had Put it here that I noticed it is almost a Pefect match for the Purple text!

Pink bits on the trunk of a gum tree (Eucalyptus sp.)

Pink bottle bush and Purple .. er .. hardenbergia I think.

Pink Person ... I made 2 of these - one to keep, and one for a swap ... the @ was because I spend a lot of time online, and is even more apt now that i am on Twitter ( @UTLAU if you want to find/follow me there ;-) but I made this before Twitter was even invented ... lol

Pincushions ... made at the quilt retreat I went on recently ... I wasn't going to make the hat one, but I just happened to have a circular bit of green fabric that was exactly the right size we needed (had to fit over an old CD) the other one at the top was meant to be a cupcake, but I had brown and yellow fabric and decided to make mine a Christmas themed chocolate cupcake with custard icing (hmmm I must try baking something like that one day - it could taste good ... or not ... lol) the other one was meant to be made with a lot bigger hexagons ... but me being me - I used really small ones, because I did not want a huge pincushion!

Pink (and black) gloves ... garden gloves I got from Aldi ... but bought because I think they will be quite good to use when doing machine quilting (they actually sell "quilting gloves" similar to this, but those cost a lot more money)

I took this Photo at work ... they often use Plasticiene in high school science classes, and sometimes I find Peculiar things when (if) it comes back ... (this lot has a blue Pony and a Pink snail shape and a Person ... lol)

Of course, Procrastinating about Posting this meant I had more days to Photograph a few more P things:

Pink flowers, Photographed while walking the dog ...

bright Pink bottlebrush flowers.

Pink and white and green leaves ... quite Pretty ;-)

the dog looking Pretty in the late afternoon sunlight
(instead of clouds with siver linings - a Golden Retriever with a golden lining? lol)

pink grevillias

Pink flowers ... quite Pretty, but some of these look a bit Peculiar

Purple daisys

bright Pink roses

red hot Pokers

a wattle tree with a Profusion of Pinkish looking Pods (and Pinkish looking leaves)

more Pink/Purple daisys

Peculiar Pinkish clouds

a Plot ... Part of a study of grass species or something ... in the nature Park I went on a walk in yesterday.
(I was Probably too busy taking Photos to Pay Proper attention to what the Person leading the walk was saying about these Plots ... ooops?)

Poo ... on a rock
(I am not sure why, but if I go somewhere that I end up taking more than just a few photos - I always seem to end up with at least one Poo Photo!)

a cow Pat - yes - another Poo!
(with a couple of tiny Pink flowers)

Pretty Purple flowers ... not sure what ... and no I did not Pick them - I had to Put my hand around them to stop them blowing around in the wind, so they were still enough to take the Photo

Pretty Prickles! (a scotch thistle)

Pink flowers, and pretty grass.

Peculiar flowers ...

more Prickles - this time on the Echidna that someone spotted over on the wall of the dam.

the Echidna near the Pond - after a few of us took photos it walked over to the grass and hid ... "I can't see you so you can't see me"? LOL

a Praying mantis on a Plantago Plant

Pink flowers on the edge of the driveway when I got home and Parked the car

and another photo of the soldier beetles ... not really a P photo - except they do look Pretty ;-)

I am sure I had a whole Pile of other P things I was going to Post about ... but after that Profusion of Photos ... maybe enough is enough?

I Pondered upon the idea of Posting a Picture of DD's Pigtails - she just got home, and was telling me all about how she got Pulled over by the Police (who were driving around doing random breath tests/etc) ... and how the Police officer gave her some Peculiar looks and they ended up having a Particularly long conversation about why she had Pigtails and how good they looked (and no - she did not get "Pinged" ... she tends to obey the speed limits and road rules, and doesn't drink and drive). I decided not to Put a Photo here though - it looked a bit Peculiar, and I can't be bothered Putting it onto the computer anyway ... not at "stupid o'clock" at night when I should have gone to bed 2 or 3 hours ago, because I have to go to work in the morning!

btw - as Per usual - clicking on a photo should take you to the lightbox thingy where you can look at all the photos, or a right click and choosing "open in new tab" (or new window) should take you to the original size version of that photo, if you want to see it bigger (yes - they are quite a bit bigger than they show up in here).

Out of this world!? (and a few Other things)

2011-10-30T03:04:00.000+11:00

... and Off to Mars ... and the next mission to Mars is scheduled to launch on Nov 26 (Australian time ... probably still Nov 25 in America,where it is being launched from ... but will be about 3am on the 26th here in Canberra ;-) there is some info about it here - http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html
... and why am I blogging about yet another spacecraft being sent off to explore Other plantes/Our universe?
well ... not only is it cool that "we" are exploring other planets and stuff ... but ... they are having a tweetup at the launch site in America ( http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23NASAtweetup ) ... and there is another tweetup here at the Canberra Deep Space Comminication Complex ( http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23CSIROTweetup ) ... and ... I ( http://twitter.com/#!/UTLAU ) am going to be there! ;-)

... which means I get to sneak off from work an hour or 2 early (boss said that was ok ... as long as my work is done when it needs to be done, it doesn't really matter if I stay late one (or more) day and sneak off early another day ;-) and dash (keeping to the speed limit of course ;-) out to Tidbinbilla to the CDSCC (Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex) where we all get to meet the other "tweeps" and have a "behind the scenes" type tour of the place, and a free meal, and listen to a talk or 2 ... and then ... at a rather late hour of night (like that is a problem, how? - surely you have read the title of this blog? - lol) they do a live hook up to the other "tweeps" at the Kennedy Space Centre ... and then link up to watch the launch (sceduled for "stupid o'clock" in the morning Australian time) ... then we go just down the road for bed and breakfast ... then in the middle of the next morning we head back in to CSIRO Discovery Centre for some more talks and stuff ... and go home in time to take the dog for a wak before tea on Saturday (unless DH wants to leave early and go out somewhere- lol)

Am I excited? well ... yes ... I am "Over the moon" LOL ... it sounds like it is going to be really interesting, and a whole lot of fun!

Actually I can't remember exactly how I found out about it ... probably from reading an e-mail newsletter thingy I get from CSIRO (one tends to subscribe to odd things like that when one works as a High School Science Assistant) ... but I noticed that people with a twitter account could sign up to go to the tweetup and they would randomly select 50 "tweeps" to go ... and I just happen to have a twitter account (which I sometimes fiddle around with) ... so I followed the link and put my name down ... and I am one of the 50 they selected ... how cool is that? LOL

... the fact that I (a 40 something year old Mum) am going to join a mob of people (who are all into the sort of technology that was only "science fiction" back when I was a kid) watching the launch of a mission to Mars is kind of weird actually ... seeing that when I was at school, my nickname used to be "Martian" - LOL
(I guess it had something to do with me deciding that Uncle Martin from the TV show "My Favourite Mattian" was my hero - becuase I didn't seem to fit in with the crowd at school so I figured maybe I was from Mars too - so, for a week or more in grade 6, I wore a pair of wire antennae to school ... lol)

Ok ... not enough O stuff for an ABC Wednesday letter O post?

[andrea heads Off to bed ... was meant to go that way ages ago - OOOOOps!?]
... I will see what O photos, Or Other O stuff I can think of/find, when I come back to finish writing this ... whenever that might be ;-)

before I go ... just thought of something I read somewhere - "if you have a whole pile of "Odds and sodds" and you take away all but one of them - what do you call the thing that is left?"

[later]

Ok ... I scribbled a coupleof words in here before I went ... some O ideas I thought Of ... just in case I couldn't think of any when I came back ...

orangutans?
old?
offal?
Orange?
Odd?

Other stuff? (Zooniverse)

ok ... Orangutans?! ... er ... cute, engangered, and their name means "people of the forest" ... I am sure "aunty google" can tell you more about them ... so I don't need to ;-)
(besides - I have not taken any photos of any ... that would require me having been to a zoo lately ... sigh)

Old? ... OK ... yes I am getting Older ... and I found out recently that I am going to be a grandma next year sometime (kind of scary when your kids start having kids - lol) ... but I am still hoping taht I have at least a bit more than half a lifetime left (I want to live until at least 100 ... although I would need to live to 1000 to finish making all the quilts/crochet items/other weird creative stuff I have ideas for, and do all the other stuff i want to do before i die ... sigh)

Offal ... yes I DO have photos of what one could call Offal - photos I have taken at work - of left over half disected eyes and kidneys and liver and stuff ... I proably should spare you from those?

... not sure I really want to spend the next 2 hours looking through folders Of photos for things that are Orange, Or Other Odd stuff either ... (I am tired, and have to do stuff/go places in the morning, and it is already later than I was intending on still being up)

(and the "Zooniverse" thing can go in my R post, if I Remember)

I should post some recent photos ... which I guess i should put Onto the computer? lol

[andrea goes and finds camera cord (camera is already in here - in my pocket, as usual ;-) ... found some wine in the fridge too ;-]

Ok ... maybe it is time I mowed the back lawn?! (actually I did that just after I took this photo ;-)

closeup of some of the grass on the back lawn ... see - grass does have flowers - lol

A very close up of a microscope slide on my desk (taken as an experiment to see what sort of stuff I actually can take photos of with this new camera

while I was messing around taking that last photo (and a couple others) I heard a buzzing noise over in the direction of the window - and saw this spider dragging it's freshly caught lunch across the web and into a crack in the window frame ...

one of the hazards of owning a Golden Retriever - they tend to drool all over your leg while you try to eat stuff!

a little while after the last photo - the drool has dried, and my lap has been invaded by a cat ;-)

... a lap full of cat fur was another handy thing to use to experiment with the camera.

I like taking Odd photos ... at Odd angles ...

more colours ... I keep seeing interesting colours ... lol

a redback spider ... that doesn't actually have the red back! (some don't - but to someome like me, who has grown up with these things and seen as many as I have, and likes spiders, the shape/etc is still instantly recognisable ;-)
... it was also in a usual place to find redbacks - in/under something that was lying around Outside in the garden.

this bit of fabric, and the wire that is now in the bucket beside it, is what I had picked up from the garden - the spider crawled out of it while I was untangling it from all the bits of wire/etc - which I had wrapped up in it in order to "rust dye" the fabric ... I was only going to leave it a few days ... but I forgot ... so it was more than a few weeks! ... so it is also a bit rotten - oops! the water on the ground is because I also rinsed the dirt/etc out of it after I untangled it from the bits of rusty wire and stuff.

yellow flower in the garden - with some Orange in the middle ...
(well - I am still sort of trying to keep this post at least slightly O related ;-)

a flowering bush catching the evening light ...

I was going to add more photos ... in fact i did ... but the uploader thingy kind of crashed/froze and only some made it here ... so I started again with some of the others ... and it died again after a couple more ... so I went to bed, got up, went out, came home, went out again, then came back in here and tried again ... still not working that well, and it is now bed time again and I still have not walked the dog, or done anything else that useful ... except read a pile of stuff on Twitter - LOL ... and mess around with a few silly colour websites ...

... someone blogged about one - http://www.palettefx.com/ - where you can upload a photo and it picks some colours from it, so I went and had a play ... actually the thingys it did, that I saved, are small enough that they might upload ok/quickly ...

oh good - they only took a few seconds!

In fact it took longer to fix up the silly formatting it did, that stuffed things up so I could not type down here without the text being in the middle like the captions on the photos ...
(actually ... looking at the preview and being reminded what the photo captions lool llike once this is posted - it probably was trying to be the caption on the bottom photo ... which is not what I wanted - lol)
The photos I uploaded to that colour website were a lot smaller than the other photos on this blog, and are even smaller in these things it gave me back - with the photos are on the left and the colours it chose beside them ... I am sure I can see more colours in the blue photo! LOL (yes - there is a couple different yellows for a start) ... I guess this just picks a few main ones ... might be handy for website colour schemes/etc ... but for choosing what fabric/yarn/thread to use in something I might want to make - I would rather just use the photo (and whatever else might be floating around in my brain?) to inspire me as to what colours to use ... or just start digging things out of my stash and see what bits of fabric/thread/yarn tell me they want to play with each other ;-)

I also did a quick search to see what other similar things I could find (while waiting for those other photos to upload, or not ... ) and I fell over a whole list of colour picker/etc websites - http://www.smashingapps.com/2011/05/24/45-color-tools-and-resources-for-choosing-the-best-color-palette-for-your-designs.html ... I had some fun playing with a few of them too - LOL

Ok ... this post is definitely Odd ... and anyone who actually read it probably thinks I am Off the planet ... so On that note ... goodnight ...

I Have A Nice Nifty New Camera

2011-10-23T18:30:00.000+11:00

... Not that I Needed it ... well ... I probably do, or would soon - the other one is getting older, and was Not going to last forever - although it is still working fine for Now, except that the shutter button was getting a bit temperamental sometimes ... which is Not what one Needs ...

[Note: there are some (hopefully) Nice photos in this post ... so if you don't want to read all this stuff I am Nattering on about just scroll down Nearer to the bottom]

Isn't it Neat how DH just happened to have gone to the shop and bought it just in time for me to be able to use it for my letter N post for ABC Wednesday? LOL
(It was ordered ages ago, after DH found out it online and went and asked the shop if they had one to look at - they didn't so they said they would get one or 2 in and contact us when it arrived, a few weeks passed and he went in and asked and the order had been cancelled by person(s) unknown - so they ordered it again ... aparently it arrived a while back but stupid shop forgot to tell us it was here! I thought we were going to look at it before buying, but I was away for the weekend, and he liked it so he bought it - after that stuffing around I asked why he didn't go and buy it elsewhere, but it turns out that was the only shop where one can buy that particular camera ... although he might have been able to find one online - I found them here - Pentax Optio WG-1 14 MP Waterproof Digital Camera with GPS and 5xOptical Zoom - Gray ... that particular listing says they don't ship them outside the USA ... not much use to me here, but fine if you are there, and I am sure there would have been a listing where they do ship to Australia, but I just decided to stop looking and just link to this one because it has all the info about it and I did have fun reading the reviews (both good and bad) that people had written about the camera on this particular listing ;-)

What I do Need (for this blog post) is some Nice photos ... which I will first Need to take ...

(I am starting this Now, while I am here doing my Late M post, just in the Nick of time ;-)

? (well ... you Never know - I might get half organised ... or I might not ... reminds me of something someone posted on FB:

10 Reasons why I procrastinate.

1.

[later]

(when I have taken photos, but not put them on computer yet)

Now that I have a Nice New camera - I have to work out how to USE the darn thing! ... one almost needs a pilots licence to "fly" the old camera ... for this one I think i need certification to fly a Jet plane as well!
... and I still have not got the hang of how to do all the stuff I can do on my Nearly New mobile phone!
(I got that about 3 months ago - DH took me shopping to "have a look at what sort of phone I might want later/when my old one dies ... I had some cold/flu bug, but figured I may as well go out and do stuff rather than stay home feeling miserable ... so maybe that is why I ended up coming home with the fancy new phone, and a phone plan with calls and data and stuff, that HE likes - LOL
Mind you - it IS a nice phone - it has a better camera than our first digital camera was, also takes HD movies, lets me do stuff like google/etc if I need to, lets me do Facebook and Twitter for free (it is free if I use the "Tribe" app, but that only does the basic stuff ... but that does include posting photos to FB ;-) and i can dowload Android apps ... oh - and it also does text messages and phone calls - lol

Anyway ... I have been having a bit of a fiddle ... including some silly stuff involving 2 cameras and a phone ... now I just have to put the phone photos and the new camera photos onto the computer ... I did the other ones last night ... well ... early hours of this morning actually ("this morning" being the morning before I wrote this bit of the blog post ... which I will not be finishing and posting tonight because I kind of need some sleep ... I was going to have an early night ... and I was also going to walk the dog ... and, seeing it is after 11pm, I am not sure there is enough of this evening left to do either, let alone both!

... so I will put the photos in here later ... and rather than trying to make everything line up/etc I might do what I did for my last post - and put whatever I want to say about the photos in as captions (pity the captions don't show up in that new thingy - having the caption on the bottom of each photo... or at least the first line or 2 if it was a long one ... could be a good thing .. )

b4 I go - for Now I do have one or 2 pictures already on the computer that I can/want to include in here - so I decided to stick one here Now, and do what I have Normally been doing in my blog posts and Not do a caption using the thingy for it in the post editor thingy.

This photo was taken with the Now Not so New camera - which actually can take quite Nice pictures ... as long as they are not messed up by the Nut on the back of the camera ... who tends to choose really weird subject matter, and/or do silly things like change settings and forget to change them back and take scenery shots with the camera in macro mode or something stupid like that ;-)

hmmm ... I don't think I ever got around to taking a photo of the iPad ... or did I? [goes and looks at blog posts for about July sometime] no ... the photo I was thinking about was one I took WITH the iPad (a photo of DH's laptop and a whole pile of cords and chargers and phones and stuff in a hotel room in Tasmania) ... the iPad is another New thing we got this year - LOL
... I think I have just realised one reason why the computer is full of folders of photos (and once I put a whole pile more on here, from my phone and the iPad, it will be even worse!) - the iPad takes photos - it has 2 cameras in it - one on the back for taking photos of stuff, and one on the front for taking photos/video for chat/Facebook/etc. My phone takes photos/movies - actually my phone has 2 cameras too (same idea as iPad- front and back ones) ... and there is my old phone (which had one camera, but wasn't a very good one - but better than no camera so it did get used to take a few photos/movies the few times I had the phone but had forgotten the camera ... which only really happened if I had been putting photos on the computer and left it in here by mistake) I am not sure I even know how many cameras/things with cameras in them we have in the house - there is also DH's laptop and iphone, and his digital SLR camera (bought second hand from eBay several years ago) ... and one or both of the 2 almost dead old laptops might have cameras (but I can't be stuffed looking) and if DD's laptop is not off somewhere with her - there is another camera ... this computer doesn't have a camera, nor do the other old desktop computers we have hanging around
btw, we still have the original digital camera we bought about 10 years ago (still works but is a bit dodgy) ... but I don't still have the second digital camera we got (the not quite an SLR but almost as fancy one that I took overseas and used for scenic pictures because it had wide angle - the one I have been using also went with me, and when it wasn't in (almost constant) use it usually lived in my pocket ;-)

yikes ... I am getting confused just trying to count all those things - let alone remembering/learning how to USE them all!!!

Btw ... you may have Noticed that Blogger seems to have something New too - the "Lightbox" thingy to look at the photos in blog posts (unless the person blogging has gone in to their settings and said no to it) which means if you click on any one of my photos you see that, and thumbnails of all the others below it, so you can look at them all in the same place. The only thing I wasn't sure I liked is that they don't show up as the original size of the image, like they used to when they just came up as a .jpg on a page - but I decided to try something and found a way to look at them that old way if you want a really close look at something in my photo - rather than doing a normal left click on the photo - do a right click and then click on "open in new tab" - and it comes up as just the photo (like it used to for a left click)

[even later]

I reall Need to put those photos in and post this - so that all 5 of you who read this will actually have some photos to look at using Bloggers New thingy ;-)

the new camera (taken with older one ;-)

leaves - on plant next to my desk at work - taken with phone

more leaves, also taken with phone - works quite well actually ...

I uploaded this one by mistake (was in wrong folder and didn't notice) but will leave it here - was a photo (of what I spent my $100 quilt shop voucher on ;-) that I took with my phone, so I could post it to Facebook using my phone rather than waiting until I get around to putting photos onto the computer - one of at least a few reasons why having a camera phone is handy ;-)

those leaves near my desk at work - taken with new camera (at the same time as I took the phone photos)

another photo of the leaves at work (with new camera)

a bee ... and me discovering one problem with the super duper macro settings on the camera - not much use if one can't get your subject to stay still, or get close enough to it without if flying away - most bees tend to fly away from something coming as close as 1cm away from them!

a bee bum ;-)

and ... still messing around with new camera - the dog and cat just happened to stand in the right spot ... or is that the wrong spot - seeing the dog has a car wheel on his head - LOL (I tend to take the photo first, then try and frame a better shot if the subject is still where it was/needs to be ... which in most cases it isn't, where dogs and/or cats are involved ...

testing out the macro lights on a spider at night - has several LEDs around the lens so I don't get the weird shadows I got with the other camera ;-)

my trusty not so new camera ... and the crochet "sock" I made for it after someone borrowed the case ... I only really used the case, or the sock, to keep it in when in my bag ... but most of the time I am out and about the camera lives in my pocket, ready to whip it out and take a photo ;-)

taking the dog for a walk, while fiddling with the new camera ... I think I was also fiddling with the phone too - posting weird stuff to twitter actually ;-)

silly photo time? - using new camera to take a photo of using phone to take a photo of old camera ... except I didn't bother to actually take the photo with the phone, because I had just taken a photo of the old camera with the new one ;-)

I knew I made that crochet "pencil case" for something ... not that good for pencils (they wou.ld poke out) or my crocheting (the hooks would poke out, and probably totally escape) ... but just the perfect size for all the cords and charger and stuff that came with the new camera (and still has enough room for the spare battery DH has ordered online ;-)

the stuff laid out on the desk for the previous photo - I decided to take one of the mess/stuff I had ready for uploading photos etc ... there are memory cards from the old camera in the little fabric thingy I sewed to keep them in, and the phone cord and phone (and a few other weird things, like a bit of old telephone cable that I grabbed and tied some knots in when I found a "how to" video about those knots on Youtube ;-) ... and a few other odd things all over the desk, including the other keyboard for the other computer that is connected to this monitor, and a nifty little photo printer that we got for free a couple years ago (I don't actually use it, but I might one day - could come in handy if I am travelling and want to make a print to give to someone I meet or something ... if I get to travel again and IF I remember to take the thing - LOL)

OK ... that is probably more than enough photos, and probably more stuff in the captions than anyone wanted to know - LOL

... time I went and did something useful ... the stuff I was going to do a couple hours ago but this took longer than planned (B$%^%$& windows or something - found all the photos and got them half uploaded and the browser crashed and I had to start again ...grrrr) ... I have some weeding to do in the garden, and a lawn to mow ... a lawn that looks more like a jungle than a lawn, because it has got rather long - the dog almost gets lost in there and the cat probably does!

Many Marvelous Mixtures of Colours

2011-10-18T03:33:00.000+11:00

I was going to post about "Lots of Lovely Colours" for my L post for ABC Wednesday ... but I kind of Lost the plot and Left it a Lot too Late ... and then came in here to do it and got Lost following Lots of Links (from Facebook) and ended up reading Lots of posts on one or 2 Lovely blogs ... then realised that I had Lost all of my evening and it was so Late at night that it was actually early - and I had yet again Lived up to my blog name ... and I was either going to still be awake finishing off the blog post when it gets Light ... or if I wait until Later I will have missed the chance to add my Link to the Linky thingy ...

so ... I had a Little think ...

and realised I could think of another name for it and Make the same thing become My M post instead ... which Means I still have a day or 2 to write it and Maybe I can share it at the same time as Most of the other ABC Wednesday M posts get shared :-)

So why was I going to post about colours anyway? ... well - someone Mentioned some Methods of choosing colours for their crochet projects, on the Australiacrochet yahoogroup - in fact one person Mentioned his rather interesting Method - he works as a nurse and is inspred by the colours of all the pills he has to give to patients! ... of course that got My Mind wandering ... and I ended up Madly taking photos of all sorts of odd things - just because they had interesting Mixtures/combinations of colours, and I figured I Might have to put them in a blog post ;-)

... of course it Might be a point to Move said photos from the Memory card to the computer (actually I usually copy them onto 2 different external hard drives - one is where the photos belong and the other is the backup for anything important (like photos ;-) then once I have got organised and made sure all the photos are happily living in both of those 2 places then I delete them from the memory cards) ... putting those photos on the computer was one of the things I came in here to do ... the other being writing my Late L post (which has now become this M post ;-) but Mucking about putting photos onto the computer takes ages, and so does uploading them all to blogger and writing captions or whatever ... and it Might be a good idea to actually go to bed before the sun comes up and/or DH gets home from night shift (good chance to get a few hours sleep without someone snoring beside me ... except the dog sometimes snores too, and he will probably sleep beside me ... possibly even ON the bed - LOL)

[a day or 2 goes by ... ]

... and another day or 5 go by as well - oops?

I Might just be able to sneak this in before it it too late to add my link - I have just put Most of the photos onto the computer (there are still some on the memory card that is still in the camera, but I think I have More than enough to put in here now, so they can stay there until later)

ok ... I think 30 photos might be enough! LOL

red bark chips and green grass etc.

wet fence - rain brings out the colours in things

green, red, blue, grey, brown, etc

blackberries - pretty greens and reds and stuff

green and pink grass ... with a bit of yellow and brown

more green/brown/yellow/red/etc

soft greens/greys/browns/etc

red/green/white/grey

food can be colourful too, so can cats and dogs
(the plate of food was on my lap ... it was yummy roast chicken (wrapped in bacon ;-) and spud and vegetables and gravy ... and the dog and cat wanted it!)

brown, green, and yellow flowers

more browns and greens

er ... brown green grey yellow(ish) red ...

grey/blue/green/white/purple ... wisteria is pretty ;-)

brown/white/grey/green ... I love the heart shaped seed pods on this weed!

more browns/greys/greens

pinks and blue and more ...

more green/grey/brown - with a dash of yellow and red

lovely lavender - soft greyish greens and purples

a couple of cars adding some colour - lol

bits of buildings (I was actually trying to take photos of the cracks in the stuff on the windows ;-)

more building bits

and almost the same colours in bricks and ... water

blacks and greys in an old birds nest in a half dead banksia bush

lavender (again - but this time with a bee)

my stash often tells me what colours I am using - I just start digging stuff out and end up with something

... but I was actually digging that lot of yarn out for this!

these colours just sort of happened ... I started with the greener one, and then decided the "eyes" did not go (they were going to be another row around the edge of that rug) so they became the edge of another rug ... and a third one - lol

I was taking photos of spider webs under the pergola - but just noticed the bright colours

fruit, and shop signs - lol
btw - gee fruit is getting dear?! - no - actually this is a new supermarket near here - this was taken a few days before it opened, so they had not actually put the prices on everything yet, but it looked funny so I took a photo ;-)
The other funny thing is - this fruit is already in the shop, getting old, at least 2 days before it even opened - and they call themselves "the fresh food people" in their adverts! LOL

lovely lichen ;-)

... and last, but not least, a sunrise.
yes - I did say sunRISE ... I know - I don't blame people for assuming it is a sunSET - I see a lot more of those - usually the only time I am up at sunrise is if I have not been to bed yet ... but that day I was out at a quilt retreat and when one of my room mate's alarm went off (she wanted to get up early and do some sewing before breakfast!) I got up and went for a walk - and got to see a sundog! (that is what the bright dot to the left of the sun is)

I am not sure those colours will look that bright or eye catching in this post ... clicking to see them bigger might help ... but there does not have to be much of a colour in a photo to use it for ideas for a crochet/quilting/etc project ;-)

most (but not all) of those photos were taken just because I saw colours and I wanted to use them in this blog post ... I also took a whole pile that are not in here (at least twice as many more!) ... but I think 30 is enough!!! (a few were very similar to each other, and a few didn't actually look so good as a photo, but I probably could have added another 30 that I liked if I had wanted to ... and I could have taken dozens more, with even brighter colours, if I had gone to Floriade (the flower festival we have at this time every year here in Canberra - the one that has now finished/closed ... but they are leaving it set up for the Queen to come and see it on Thursday) .

er ... I had better post this and go to bed before I see another sunrise!!!
(it is after 3am, and I have to get up for work in the morning - oops?)

btw, I was going to add some links to a few good/interesting websites where I have played with colours ... but I didn't get to that - I might do that some other time - it will take a little while to dig them up - I have a couple in one of my older posts, and one I know about but might need to go hunting around for it on the blog/website I originally got the link from ... maybe I could post about colour for the letter C? (if I remember - lol)

Kangaroos and Knitting

2011-09-30T02:36:00.000+10:00

No ... I Know those 2 things don't have anything to do with each other ... well not normally, although I am now entertaining the idea of trying to get hold of some Kangaroo fur and seeing if I can spin it so that I can Knit a Kangaroo - LOL (or maybe a Kangaroo wooly jumper?) ... it is just that I was planning on posting about Knitting for ABC Wednesday, when I just happened to see (and take photos of) some Kangaroos, and realised I could also post about those for the letter K ;-)

ok ... first - the Kangaroos ... actually they are possibly Wallabies - same kind of thing but usually a bit smaller ... anyway ... I was walking from work, around the base of Black Mountain (which is mostly one big nature park with lots of bush and some wildflowers and stuff now coming out ;-) and heading for the middle of the city (which is right next to the mountain/bush/etc) and I noticed a few "skippawobbellys" hopping down the hill toward the track ... they waited beside the track until I had walked past, before hopping across the track and down the hill ... and one had a joey in her pouch - and she was happy to stand there while I took a photo, or 2 ;-)

Mum and Joey are on the right, and if you look carefully near the middle there is another Kangaroo (or Wallaby - which is what these probably are ;-)
(so you can play Where's Wally With a Wallaby - maybe I should have saved this for a W post? LOL)

here is a closer up shot

... complete with red eyes - lol

and here is "mum" hopping back into the bush at the other side of the track:

(the green thing isn't a tree trunk - well - it probably was in a past life, but now it is a power pole - lol)

btw ...
Q: what do you get if you cross a Kangaroo with a sheep?
A: a wooly jumper.

Q: what do you get if you cross a Kangaroo with an elephant?
A: great big holes all over Australia.

[Andrea ducks and runs]

and now ... for the Knitting:
Usually, I crochet - I am way faster/better at it (and that is probably mostly why I seem to like it better) and I do quite a lot of crochet stuff, but sometimes I do actually Knit things ... usually fairly small things - lol - and often unusal things I am trying out, like those curly twirly scarves, made from a special yarn that you actually Knit (or crochet) along the side of, that seem to be the "in thing" lately:
Actually only 3 of these 4 curly scarves are Knitted

The green one was Knitted by my mum ... she sent it to me with a note saying she figured I probably wouldn't have made one yet because it is Knitted and I crochet - lol
... so I had to tell her that not only had I made one - but I had actually Knitted one (the black and grey one) then crocheted one (the brown/orange one) and then Knitted another one (the brown one) ... and am also part way through crocheting another ... something ... with another variety of that type of yarn. (it might become a scarf or a beanie or a bag ... or get undone and made into something else - probably a bag or a beanie or a scarf - lol - or possibly an edging or a collar on a coat or something made from fabric, or different yarn)
btw ... I will eventually wear the one mum made - just not as often because the yarn is a lot stiffer and the scarf is thicker - but I probably won't wear any of them much for a while - Winter is over and the warmer weather is coming (not that one would think so at the moment - it is currently cold and wet and windy - lol)
anyway ... those couple of scarves are not the only thing I have Knitted this year - I also made these:
(the photos should all be clickable for a closer look ;-)

The small one (on the left) was made at a Textile art retreat I went to earlier this year - we learnt to use 3 (or more) yarns at once to knit these little bags (about the right size for a chatelaine to keep a tape measure/etc in ... or to use for a phone sock ;-)
We used a pile of yarn scraps, some of which were very short lengths and rather fluffy/fuzzy - we knotted those together and left the ends hanging out - and some of us "let it all hang out" a bit more than others - LOL
The bigger bag was made using some more of the fuzzy scraps (left over from what I kept to finish the little bag) and some green and black yarns that I saw in the op shop next to work, just after I got back from the retreat ... oddly enough - the green yarn was almost the same colour green as one of the yarns I used in the small bag - lol

Later on this year I found a few odd short bits of a sort of turquoise coloured yarn in my stash and was inspired to make another one of those knitted bags - so I started, and finished, this one:

I used dark blue as a main colour and used lots of other blues/purples/greens for the other rows, and left all the ends dangling when I changed colours each row - which resulted in the fringe around the top. The handle is actually one short bit with a hole in it, and one long side - which is threaded through the hole in the short bit so the handle is adjustable. (the other big bag is done like that too, but the handle is twisted cord and the long side is threaded through a loop in the short bit ;-)
The top bits of both big bags are crocheted (so is the handle of the blue one).

so ... I wonder what I will Knit next?

a Kangaroo? a Koala? ... no - probably easier to crochet those - lol

(and I am not going to Knit myself any Knickers - now that would be ITCHY!)

... maybe I should Knit a garden hose?!

Just Because ...

2011-09-22T00:37:00.000+10:00

Just Because ...
... I like to take weird photos ;-)

of trees and hills,

trees and moons,

more trees and moons,

trees in the dark,

trees in the daylight, looking straight up,

more trees at weird angles from underneath,

trees with flowers,

more trees with (and without) flowers,

weird trees and even weirder sky,

more trees and that weird sky,

not to mention other odd stuff like interesting patterns on manhole covers,

and raindrops in the puddle in the almost empty moat at the Academy of Science building,

and, for now I have decided I will spare you from the other thing I took photos of in that puddle (the dead mouse, which I will probably post about as "D for Disgusting" or "Y for Yucky" or something ;-)
so I will finish off with another photo of a tree in the dark.

I could go on (and on and on and on) but I think a "bakers dozen" (13) is probably enough photos for an ABC Wednesday "J" post ...

Eventful Exhibitions and all the Fun of the (Craft and Quilt) Fair

2011-08-26T02:16:00.000+10:00

ok ... so this looks suspiciously like an E post for ABC Wednesday, even though we are up to the letter F this week ... to be honest - that is Exactly what it was going to be, until the chunk of spare time I thought I was going to have to organise some photos and write it didn't actually Eventuate ... but that is Fine - because the subject of this post also quite nicely leads into a Few things that can also just as nicely work for the letter F ;-)

A couple of weeks ago, was the annual Canberra Quilters Exhibition, which is now on during (and as part of) the Craft and Quilt Fair (organised by a mob called Expertise Events - lol).

As usual - I Entered a Few things ...

First (first finished in this case ;-) was the diary cover that I made back in January, and blogged about at the time - that post is here - http://aykayem.blogspot.com/2011/01/zzz-zen-and-art-of-stitching.html (yes ... another ABC Wednesday post - lol - scroll down past the couple of "doodles" I drew and you will find the diary cover ... and when I found this post to tell Mum where to find it so she could look - I also noticed that further down is a photo of another small quilt that I had sort of forgotten about - I probably could have entered it in the quilt show if I had remembered it at the time entries were due! ... next year will probably be too late, becuase it will have been made too long before the show to be allowed under the rules, unless they change them back to what they were a few years ago when it didn't matter when the item was made ;-)

Here is a photo of it hanging in the Exhibition:

... with the card for someone else's stuff, and the corners of a few other items "rubbed out" (using GIMP ;-) because I don't know if they really want photos of their stuff on my blog (or anywhere on the www for that matter)

and yes ... it seems the quilt judge actually liked it! (didn't come first/second/third - but I got this neat certificate saying it was "highly commended" ... which is more than I expected to get for anything I entered this year)

btw ... once I decided to enter it I took it off my diary, to keep it clean/new looking ... so my poor diary had to be naked again for a while ... it is back on my diary now - and I think I am the only person I know of who is using a diary with a cover that has been "highly commended" by a quilt judge - lol

Next is my challenge quilt (next photo, not next Finished - I Forget Exactly what order I Finished them in anyway - the last Few were done in an Extremely Fast rush - LOL)

The theme we had to follow, for the challenge, was "Home" ... as usual I had several ideas, most of them looked good in my head but I knew I probably wouldn't be able to make them look that good in fabric ... except for this idea - because I had actually done something that looks similar in the past - and that did look good (in fact I believe it is still getting admired whenever anyone sees it hanging up inside Mum and Dad's campervan ;-)

Anyway ... this is (a rather bad photo of) my challenge quilt - I can't take another one right now because I don't actually have it here at home (they become a travelling Exhibition for a year so it did not come home with me at the End of the Exhibition like the others did)

oh poop! ... I just realised, when I was fiddling with that photo - I Forgot to colour the lake in blue! LOL
(or draw on a few green tree symbols or something, for a bit of extra colour/interest/realism/whatever)
I came up with the idea of doing a map to Find my way home ... and got to thinking about how home is the place where one is at ... so this is kind of meant to depict where I am at, and the stuff that is happening around my life ... or something like that ... hopefully reading the place names on that map will help my Explanation make a bit more sense ... and it may help Explain why my blog posts are as weird as they are, and as sporadic as they are ;-)
(it is no co-incidence that the "here be dragons" is right near "procrastination plateau" at the bottom of "slippery slope" LOL)

My miniature quilt probably also explains a few things about me:

... there are definitely a lot of things about this that the "quilt police" would arrest me for - wobbly weird stitching and lumps and bumps and tucks and puckers and creases and wrinkles ... but I made it because I wanted to (the "Tiny Treasure" (miniature quilt) catagory does not have to be to any theme, but this quilt was actually another idea I had for the "home" theme - figured it was not that easy to make a good looking bigger version so I did a little one - and I like how it turned out ;-)

I only had 2 actuall QUILTS in the quilt show ... but they have catagories for creative clothing - which can be actual vests/coats/etc wearable things, and accessories. So ...

I entered this bag:

which was easy to make - machine quilted some grey fabric, hand stitched between the lines of machine quilting (which takes quite a while to do but I really enjoy doing that kind of stitching and stuff) and made it into a bag ;-)

I also found some green fabric that I had machine quilted with black thread (as an experiment for something or other that I ended up not needing for what it was originally done for) and I decided that seeing DH had just bought us an iPad - it needed a bag to keep it in (so it didn't rattle around in places like the car glove box when we took it somewhere) - so I did some gold hand stitching in between the black, and made it into an iPad sized pocket:

Trouble is ... I finished the bag in time to use it on the holiday we were taking the iPad on ... but the quilt show was AFTER the holiday - so I did not want to use the bag and get it dirty/scuffed/whatever before the quilt show (which could have easily happend while I was taking all those photos of food that I posted to Facebook - lol) - so I put it away, rather than using it, and then had to whip up another bag for the iPad!
(no photo here ... think I took one, but it is still on the camera - I might have to post that, and some better photos of some of this stuff, at a later date)

The other thing I made ... was for the creative clothing challenge - same theme as the quilt challenge ("Home") but had to be either clothing or an accessory ... so I kind of somehow came up with a rather weird idea ... and was in a bit of a contrary/cheeky mood - and figured that I would be a bit mischevous and enter something rather weird and wonderful ... I was kind of expecting to totally confuse the organisers and have them wonder what the heck it was and what to do with it ... because this is actually a HAT!

pity they didn't tell me they needed a "head" for it - I could have found/made something that would have worked (even a foam ball on a stick with fabric over it would have worked, had I known ... or been able to be there helping in the afternoon/evening on set up day like I usually do, but couldn't this year because I had a meeting to go to on the other side of town).
It does actually fit my head - I made it so it would (no Mum - you don't have to walk beside me when I wear it - and yes - I DO intend to wear it ... somewhere - lol)
... it is meant to look like a hollow tree trunk, that is "home" to a bird (in a nest) and a whole pile of other creatures (worms and spiders made from yarn, plastic lizards, spiders, snakes ... etc).
(and the bird's body is a ball of yarn - because I ran out of time to crochet the body - although now I kind of prefer the idea of using a ball of yarn anyway ;-)

Funny thing is ... my weird idea kind of backfired on me - in a really nice way - lots of people actually liked it, including the quilt judge! - in fact she liked it so much that she awarded me that nice blue ribbon - yes - it came First! LOL
(and, I have not got it yet, because prizes are awarded at the next meeting - but according to the list in the catalogue - my First prize is a voucher to go and spend at a local quilt shop ... so I can go buy more Fabric to Fill up my sewing room ... or maybe I could spend it on some Fancy quilty gadgets/tools to Fiddle with?)

btw ... I Found the blog post where I wrote about the other quilt I made that looked like a map ... the post is at http://aykayem.blogspot.com/2007/07/magical-map-of-journey-of-life.html ... but now that I know when I posted it I can go and copy the html for the link and put it in this post so the same picture also shows up here:

... and so you don't have to go read all the other junk in that old post (although you can if you like - your keen stare will not wear the electrons off your computer screen ;-) I will explain what it is right here - I made this small quilt for Mum and Dad, and gave it to them for Christmas one year ... Mum made a LOT of quilts, and Dad used to work in a hardware store - so there is a "Quilt Town" and a "Hardware Hill" ... and a few other odd things ... lol
Both of those quilts are made from bits of the same peice of fabric - a length of calico that I rust dyed (by wrapping a whole pile of rusty junk, and dirt and stuff, in it and leaving it in a wet soggy heap for a day or 3 before I shook all the stuff off/out of it and washed it)

Anyway ... too bad if this blog post is not Finished ... because I have dedided it is ;-)
- I should be heading off to bed ... and even if I don't do that - I was meant to be doing other things this evening and still have not done them - and the main one was to Find some Fabric that I need to start making something that I want to have Finished For the textile art exhibition that is also coming up in a Few weeks time ... a Few too Few weeks ... as in I only have about 2 weeks to Finish the thing that I need that Fabric For!
(hopefully it will only take me a Few hours to make it ... providing I can Find a particular box of Fancy Fabric that I know I have hiding away ... somewhere ... !)

er ...

goodnight.

Here Be Dragons ...

2011-08-16T03:16:00.000+10:00

Drats ... I have missed quite a few ABC Wednesday posts, but I have just Decided that, Despite the fact that I am Dead tired and I already have less than 8 hours in which to sleep before I have to get up and Dash off to work, I might Duck in here and do a D post (before the linky thingy closes in a few hours time ;-) after all - I Did take a couple of photos, a few Days ago, just for this post!

I took a photo of a Duo of Dragons!

water dragons ;-)

and then I took a (blurry) photo of another lizard - Drinking

this is a stumpy tailed lizard, also known as a sleepy lizard (which is what I grew up calling them)

this is a better photo of a sleepy lizard, and 3 blue toungue lizards

All these are native to Australia, and I have seen all of them in the wild (well the sleepy and blue tounges definitely ... the water dragons I often see in the botanic gardens are probably not totally wild ... but they are not fenced in or anything either). These photos were taken at a reptile exhibit at the CSIRO Discovery Centre - they had an open weekend as part of Science Week.

I also took a video of the sleepy lizard Drinking

hmmm ... reminds me of that saying "flat out like a lizard drinking" lol

and now ... on a Different subject - a couple of photos I took last month:

who needs a cat when you have a Dog who Does this?

and this:

I am glad this is DHs pillow and not mine! ... he slobbers so the pillow was a bit Damp (er ... probably a LOT damp actually ;-)
(ok ... some might think that is Disgusting - lol - but Diesel (the Dog) is part of the family - we are probably already sharing his germs anyway ... and I think humans probably have more germs than Dogs Do ... except maybe if the Dog has just been rolling in or eating some "Doo Doo", or Dead things, or some other Disgusting stuff ... lol)

D is also for Div tags ... which this Darn blog editor insists on putting in, even though I keep changing the settings to try and stop it Doing that (although the reason it doesn't work could be that I probably Don't know what I am Doing) - when it adds Div tags it seems to stuff up the formatting and make it Difficult (or Downright impossible!) to put the text where I wanted it to go ... so I have to Dive into the "edit html" mode and Delete them all and that seems to make things work ok - lol

D is also for Drawing Doodles ... I have Done a few of those lately, but I have not taken photos of them or scanned them yet ... I will Do that later ... (I guess I could post them under L for public Lectures - because that is where/when I did them! LOL)

oh good ... the video uploading is Done ... now all I have to Do is publish this, and I can head off and Dive under the Doona, and Drift off to "sleep, perchance to Dream" ... (I Don't remember what that is a quote from - one of Shakespears plays I think)

btw ... I have something perfect planned for my E post ... (just happens to be the right timing for something I want to post about anyway ;-) that is if I Do get around to Doing my E post (rather than just Doing some of it and saving it as a Draft, and then finding it, still unpublished, a year or 3 later when I am Digging around in blogger) if it Does get Done - it is Definitely going to be Delightful ... well ... maybe not? lol ... but I Definitely Do want to share it with you ... (all 2 or 3 people who read my blog - my MUM doesn't even read it, unless I e-mail it to her ... lol)

oh ... I just realised - I Didn't post anything about my crochet Dragon!

... I Did it for an online Exhibition - so I will try to remember to add it to my E post ... which, if I actually Do it this week, will be about another Exhibition or 2 anyway ;-)

but I Decided I just had to put at least one photo of my crochet Dragon in here - in my Dragon post! lol

I also found this:

- an interesting example of a "what not to Do" - when out walking the Dog in the Dark, it is a good idea not to try and take a photo, in the Dark, when one is still wearing a pair of fluffy blue gloves - LOL
(it is a good thing I take Digital photos ... so I am not wasting film when I Do Dopey stuff like that ... DH would argue that I am wasting space on the hard Drive on the computer - because even if the photo is a "failure" I still tend to keep them, rather than Do what Mum does and Delete the Dodgy ones ... I guess that is because I think I might find a use for them one day - and see - with this one I DID ;-)

Too much technology?

2011-07-19T22:07:00.000+10:00

I took this photo with the iPad, in a hotel room, one night last week ...

... And I typed some stuff under the photo b4 I sent it to blogger (good thing I have it set to save emailed posts as drafts rather than publish them as soon as they arrive ;-)
But I got that to copy and paste from the "sent items" to here ... Maybe it was just URLs it didn't want to copy the other night)

The grey thing with green and purple swirls is the "sock" I made for the iPad (well actually it is the second one I made, in a hurry - because I decided to enter the first one in the quilt show, happening shortly, and it needs to be in new, rather than "used" condition ;-)
Under the empty iPad cover is DH's laptop, and around that is the power supply and pile of cords, cordless mouse, his phone and his electric shaver charging in it's thingy ... And there is also the room's DVD player and remote and the heating remote, and a power board full of plugs ... Maybe I should have added my phone and charger and the camera and it's cord/etc and spare batteries and charger - LOL

I think DH thought I was weird when I picked up the iPad and took the photo ;-)

Anyway ... Time to sleep ... Have to get up in the morning and do more fun things like taste wine and cheese and do/see interesting stuff ... LOL

Test photo

2011-07-19T21:26:00.000+10:00

I took this photo the weekend before last - from the back of the ferry to Tasmania ... I think we were possibly still in Port Phillip Bay at the time, may have been just outside in Bass Strait already (either way, this was BEFORE it got really rough)
I would have to work out what time I took the photo to be sure, where we were and I am not doing that right now ... Too busy working out how to get photos from the iPad to my blog ... Well I have sort of worked that out (if this has worked and there IS a photo at the top of this post) ... One way anyway ... Involves emailing them one at a time from the "photos" app (I could then copy and paste the HTML links for them all in to one post, but copy and paste is not easy to do on an iPad and doesn't seem to work between one browser window and another anyway ... I guess the iPad is not the best thing for blogging on, but it has been great fun using it to "Facebook" my food - LOL
(yes - been eating lots of interesting yummy things down here, and DH started taking iPhone photos and sending them to a mate and to our son, who is home minding the dog/cat/house, so they could be jealous ... So I decided to start taking the iPad in to wherever we were dining and posting yummy food photos to my FB)

I have actually taken lots of photos, but most of them with the camera ... So I might just wait until I am home, and have them on the computer to do stuff with them, but I guess I could email some of the ones I took with the iPad and then use DH's laptop to log in and move them all into one blog post ... If I get around to that ... it is getting lateish, and I am not sure if the next hotel will have free wifi (this one does - that is why I am messing around with stuff like this instead of doing my sewing - lol

Hmmmm I had better stop waffling and post this ... And wait for the "() police" to come and lock me up for mis using ('s and )'s. ( or using ( without matching )'s lol)

Zigging and zagging all over the place?

2011-07-17T20:26:00.000+10:00

Zoinks! - are we up to Z again already?

(Actually I think we have passed z a couple more times since I wrote this ... Just found it in my pile of half written drafts - was digging around in there because I am not at home on the computer, where all my photos live, but figured I should post something for the letter z ... So - as they say in the cooking shows -"here is one I prepared earlier" which means u get whatever links I had added, but not the photos I had planned to take ... And if the post looks all screwy that is because I am using an iPad and it doesn't quite do things the same as the computer and some things it doesn't do at all ... Like letting me use the nifty Wysiwyg "compose" mode to edit my blog Using pretty colours and stuff (and for some reason it won't scroll down in this editor window - so I had to look at a preview of th post to see what was in it - LOL)

- yes the ABC Wednesday crowd are doing the letter Z this week.

I wonder what z things I didn't already blog about last time? (yes this is the 4th time it is going around, but I only joined in at the end of the 3rd one ... and then went away/got busy/etc and missed a big chunk in the middle - lol)

Z is for zig zag

... which is what I seem to do when I am blogging about stuf, and also what my life seems to do - lol

... it is also a very useful stitch on my sewing machine ... good for finishing off edges and stuff, and for doing fun things like this ... I only just fell over that page today (not sure how - think I followed a link from somewhere else), but I have already done that before - I made a fabric bowl at a sewing day a group of us had a few years ago, and I have even posted a photo of it on this blog ... not sure where though!

I probably didn't post about Z notation because I probably didn't even know it existed ... I still know nothing about it - just found it when I did a google search - so if you want to know about it you will have to click on that link and read abour it on wikipaedia - lol

ditto with Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory ...

Maybe looking for z words on google/in the dictionary is not a good idea?

I probably have a pile of photos of z things ...

I could take a photo of my collection of zips

no - I don't actually collect them like stamps or something (although one could be forgiven for thinking that - lol) - I just happen to have collected a few piles of them that people were getting rid of, at places like quilt meetings, craft groups, garage sales, etc ... I have used a few of them on things, and will probably use a few more ... zips come in handy for making bags and stuff ... lol

I have also seen a few interesting bags and things made with zips, and not much else (DD even has a pencil case made entirely of zips - they seem to be the in thing to have at the moment among the teenage crowd)

hmmmm ... maybe I should have a go at making a vest or something out of all those light brownish zips?

Y not?

2011-07-09T02:17:00.000+10:00

Y am I posting to my blog? ... Y not?
... yes - y not indeed?! ... it has been a while ... sigh ...

I have missed so many letters for ABC Wednesday that I lost count ... but it seems we (they? lol) are up to the letter Y already ... where has the first half of this Year gone?!

Yes I am still alive, sort of been busy ... but when I wasn't busy I didn't seem to get anything else (like sorting out the sewing room/blogging/etc) done ... sigh

Y is for yawn ...
one can yawn if one is bored - which one would be if one was waiting for me to write a new blog post.
one can also yawn if one is tired ... I am ... had a few late nights, could go to sleep now but I have to sort out putting a few photos on to the computer and checking all the memory cards to make sure which ones are on the computer and backed up so I can delete what is on them - ready to fill them up again while I am on holidays for the next 2 weeks ;-)
... of course I could always be Yucky and talk about a "technicolour yawn" ... (spew/throwing up/chunder/etc) ... if that windy weather comes back DH and I might be in for an interesting ferry ride across Bass Strait tomorrow night - and if so - there might be a few more seasick passengers on there than normal - so hopefully nobody will do any technicolour yawns near me or I might just have to go out in sympathy and do one of my own - LOL

talking about Yawning ... am doing that now ... I should be going to bed and sleeping ... but I am still putting those photos on the computer/etc and I still have a dog to walk .... Yes ... it is almost Midnight, and it probably is below freezing outside by now (in fact I think it probably has been for a while - lol) but the dog and I have nice warm coats ... mine is a nice warm fleecy jacket and his is a nice furry thick yellow one - LOL ... he is a Golden Retriever - so he doesn't care if it is cold outside when he is out walking ... quite happy to snuggle up on the bed and be warm, but just as happy to go out walking on a freezing and/or wet day and jump into the pond to chase the ducks!

so ... I guess I should not rave on about Y chromasomes or Yellow fever or any of a number of other weird things I could post about ... but, seeing I am currently messing around with photos, I might see if I notice any "Yellow" photos before I actually post this ...

oooh ... just noticed a couple things at the bottom of this blog editor thingy are in slightly different places than they were ... had a closer look and noticed I can now add my location ... not going to put the pin right where my house is ... (yeah great idea - tell everyone I am going away and then pinpoint my house - lol - not that it will be vacant ... I am not the only one that lives there - do you think I would go away and leave the dog all alone?! LOL ... Yes - there IS one advantage to having kids who grow up but don't move out - LOL)
... so ... I put the "pin" in the pond ... one of the ones where the dog likes to jump in the water and get all Yucky and wet and muddy - lol

hmmm ... most of that memory card of photos are ... trees ... with no leaves ... lately I seem to have a thing about taking photos of naked trees - lol

ok ... here is one under a Yellow street light ...

I found about 6 other photos, but for some reason it did this one ok, then kind of stopped ... and I have now finished the other stuff I was doing ... and tried again with 1 photo and it just did nothing again ... so that one (the worst one of the lot too - sigh) will have to do for now ... I need sleep ... and the dog still needs his walk ... and I still need the walk too - had some late nights lately and been awake all day, but have not been that active - and I feel restless - I think my body needs to be tired to match the brain - lol

yawn ...

another yawn ... time I left the computer alone and went to bed ... via a few of the streets/paths/etc around here - whatever ones the dog takes me along - within reason - if I let him keep leading the way we would be out walking all night!

btw ... I am hoping to eventually get around to tidying up my blog and making it look pretty again ... when I have a bit more spare time to fiddle with it for a few hours (days?) and make it all work ...

but first ... I have quilts to finish and some other textile arty stuff to do ... and a holiday to have ... and who knows what else I will get busy doing ... DH says I go to/do too many things ... but if I don't go to them/put my name down/do them/whatever - I don't seem to get anything else done anyway ...

goodnight ...

;-)

Sunset haiku

2011-05-29T01:30:00.000+10:00

The sun slides slowly
from the sky into the hills
yellow, pink, then grey

hmmm I wrote that Haiku earlier this year, but I wrote a longer Sunset poem Several years ago ... I wonder if I ever posted it to my blog (I actually wrote the poem before blogs were invented - lol - but I may have posted it here in another Sunset post Sometime ... I guess I will look and See if I did, Someday)

meanwhile ... here are some other Strange Sunset photos I have taken this year (at various times between about the end of Febuary and the start of May) ... and ... unlike the above photo - some of these are actually the colours I mentioned in the haiku - LOL

and ... I can't do an ABC Wednesday S post without at least one Spider ;-)

... like this one with Sharp looking Spikes on it - LOL

Just ...

2011-03-29T03:01:00.001+11:00

er ... I think I am Just in time to sneak in a J post for Wednesday ABC?

Just a short post? ... maybe ... LOL
(actually it probably will be fairly short - it is Just a bit later than I should still be awake ... came in her ages ago, but "Just had a quick look" at a few websites/etc and kind of seem to have lost a few hours ...

maybe this blog post should be Just text and no photos? (well - that would make it quicker to do, but I couldn't resist adding Just a couple of images ;-)

'Tis a funny word, Just ... "I will just be gone a little while" "I Just bought a little bit of fabric/yarn" (or whatever Junk you tend to buy too much of, to feed whatever addiction u happen to have ;-) ... "I will Just be a moment" "you Just do x - y - z ... " "it's Just a litle favour" "it was Just an accident" (Just a few examples there ;-)
The quilt group I belong to sort of has a rule about standing up to "show and tell" a quilt you have made - people sometimes get told off (but in a nice way) for using the word "Just" when referring to said quilt - people will spend hours/days/weeks even, crocheting a rug or doily or stuffed toy or whatever, or peicing and/or appliqueing a wonderful quilt, or sewing a dress or pants or shirt or something, or slaving over a huge cross stitch or something, or baking a yummy cake or cooking a wonderful feast for 10 dinner guests (or a healthy meal for their hubby and a kid or 2) ... and when showing someone/talking about it they will say "oh it is JUST a ..." or "it is Just something I threw together" or something along those lines ... but instead of Just dismissing it - one should do it the JUSTice of actually being proud of what you made.

... unless, maybe, it looks like this?

- I showed it to someone at work and she, very tactfully, said "it's an acquired taste" ... I probably couldn't have said it better myself ... I kind of like it more now that I didn't give it to the person it was originally meant to be for (I made a different thing that I think she would like better - although I am sure the baby she was about to have really wouldn't care what the bear looked like ;-) and I am also sure someone, sometime, somewhere, will quite like this bear ... and after all - it WAS an experiment ... just not one that worked as well as most ... especially not in that technicolour ~~yawn~~ ... er ... yarn. I could probably re-do the face (stitching on eyes/nose/mouth before stuffing it seemed like a good idea at the time - but it wasn't ;-) apart from that dodgy looking stitching on the face, it does look kind of cute ... I am not sure if that is despite the fact, or because, one can see the stuffing through the slightly too big stitches (note to self: if making an item that is to be stuffed, that particular thickness of yarn should be crocheted with a much smaller hook than I used for this bear!) ... and the fact that I used about 20 short lengths of yarn knotted together to crochet the thing! - which kind of adds to the ~~character~~ scruffy apearance - LOL

but ... rather than say "it is Just some experiment that went wrong" - I will say it was an experiment that resulted in the invention of the scruffy grunge/punk hairy bear!

and ... Just for fun ... had to wait while the other photo actually transfers to the computer (I had to take the photo Just a little while ago because I had not already taken one) ... I went digging around to see what other interesting Junk I could find ...

The dog and I like looking in half built houses (sometimes he even finds builder's leftover lunch in the Junk piles ;-) ... I Just had to take a photo of this - something Just doesn't look quite right with this room:

ok ... on the right is a window ... on the other 3 sides are other rooms ... but where the F... is the door?!
(I looked and looked ... and there were timber uprights no more than 8 - 10" apart all along all 3 of those internal walls!)

oops?

... or maybe they were Just going to make a doorway later?

An Idiotic post (with Interesting Images at the end) where I rave on about a Few things I should have posted about sooner ... where did the last few weeks go?

2011-03-16T20:00:00.000+11:00

I could have Invigorated your Intelligence by posting all about something Interesting, like the Instars of various moulting Insects, or some even more Intrigueing thing, but I Is also for Idiotic ... which, when I thought of it while walking the dog a couple weeks ago, seemed like a good excuse to post this rather Irrational F post as my I post for ABC Wednesday ... just so you lot can see ~~how Irritating I can be~~ the Inner workings of my Insane mind:
(but ... I did Include some Interesting Images In here, at the bottom of this Insane post)

so ... time to Investigate the idiocy of ...

An Idiotic post where I rave on about a Few things I should have posted about sooner ... where did the last few weeks go?

... or should I say the last Few months? years even? LOL

days/weeks/months/years ... whatever - the answer is probably all the same:

F___ if I know - they seem to have Flown by ...
(translation of "F___" ... er ... usually "fruit" or some other nice F word actually ... although sometimes I have been known to use an other not so nice F word, but not on a Family Friendly ... or at least mostly so ... blog like I am trying to keep this one - lol)

now what the F was I going to post about?

- I actually started writing this ABC Wednesday F post a couple of alpabets ago, I typed the purple bit, but never came back and Finished it ... so whatever I was going to post about is either so out of date it is not worth posting, or I have posted about it in other posts ... or just totally Forgotten about ... so maybe I should just dig around in my more recent photos and Find a Few F things?
(I was hoping to Find a half written F post with a Few more things already in it ... then I could have Finished it a bit Faster than this is going to take, and actually posted it ... but the one I was thinking of was actually a mostly written D post (but needs a pile of photos added, a Few of which I will have to dig around and Find what Folder(s) they are in) ... so, because it will still take too long to Find the photos For it, and also because I would have to totally re-write most of it anyway (I could have used the same events/photos as a D or an F post so I Did it as D because I thought I was going to get it Finished in time - lol) - I will save that one for next time we are up to the letter D, if I Don't Forget about it before then ...

I might also try and remember to take a photo of a Finished quilt, and possibly a Few other Finished things I may have Forgotten to post about, or include in that other recent post where I put a Few things like that ...

but First ... I have to go walk the dog ... LOL

... and I won't be back in here For a Few hours, possibly even a day or 2 ... pity - because this post is already late - I was going to say it is Friday - but then I remembered that it is already after Midnight so now it is Saturday ... and I have a Few other things to do before I come back and spend a Few hours Fiddling with photos ... like walking the dog, sleeping, and then having lunch and doing a Few things before heading off to a Friend's place For a BBQ - after which I will be staying there overnight - rather than being a Fool and driving home after a Few beers ... then I have an afternoon tea to go to on my way home on Sunday ... so I am not going to have much weekend left to do all the working out what I am doing/digging out Fabric/Finding things and starting some Fiddly sewing/art quilty stuff I probably should have been doing For the last Few weeks, because some of it has to be Finished Fairly soon ...

maybe I should Give up on F and Go for Getting G done in time? ... except I am sure I do have a Few F things I really should post about - LOL

btw - yes - almost 2am is an odd time to walk the dog - but he doesn't mind what time he goes as long as he actually gets to go for a walk! (and I kind of promised him one because we have not been for a few days ... which means he gets a bit Fidgety and Follows everyone as soon as they go anywhere near the Front door, or even down the Front end of the house ... )

A few ... hours? ... days? later:

flowers?
fungi?
finished things - panorama quilt? etc quilty/crochet stuff?
a Few granny squares? including the rainbow ones For Floods
Found objects? (close up of fish on "fish out of water" quilt?)
Flipping Footless Filet Fairy that I still have not Fixed and Finished?
F^#%ing Facebook?
stitching Fingers?
Frogs?

[add to those I want to/can Find photos for in green (or Fuschia?!) .. and leave the others there For Fun]

Farnarkling?

As you can see - that post was not only Intrinsically and Irrevocably Idiotic, but also Incomplete - several Instances of unfinished Ideas, and a sad lack of Images ... which I guess is why it was still In my drafts folder and not posted yet ;-)

I may Include some Idiotic Images In here If I get around to finding some before It Is time to post my I post (er ... actually It almost Is ... I am just In here at the computer because I came In to post a Hasty H one (which was a Incy wincy bit late to make the linky list thingy ... when some Instinct told me I should Investigate my drafts folder and see If I could Imagine some Ideas for my next few ABC Wednesday posts ... not that doing this sort of thing means I will actually come back In here and post It In time ... or even If I do come back in here - I might get lost in that Insidious and Intrigueing place known as cyberspace and my Intended post will, In the usual fashion, become merely an Imaginary blog post ... sigh

oh - and If you are Insanely curious about one of those Incomplete Ideas I mentioned - feel free to comment and ask me about It ... no Idea Is too Insignificant for me to Illustrate at greater length, either In a comment, or If It Is Important enough to me - maybe even In an Imminent future blog post ...

Is anyone still reading this Idiotic stuff?

(or are you just scrolling down to look If there are any Images? lol)

ok ... I have Inserted some Images - hope you find them Interesting:

and Image of I In the mirror just before I drove home from work one night:

I was trying to take a photo of the spider webs on the mirror but they ended up blurry and I didn't - oops?
(but I guess it does make and Interesting photo of me doing something I do a lot - taking a photo)

A spider with a knob on it - doesn't start with an I, but It Is rather Intrigueing ... kind of reminds me of a teapot lid!

yes - It Is on my finger ;-) I encouraged it to crawl there from the back of the car, where I found it - so that I could do what I then did - took it over to the garden and put it in a bush where it would hopefully be safe.

an "Icky" Insect ... a cockroach, In the process of laying an egg:

... which seems to take an Inordinately long time (any time spent running around with an egg, or anything else, hanging half out of you is way too long In my opinion!)

Some Interestingly Intricate Insects on a leaf:

some sort of scale Insect, I think...

Another Itty bitty spider:

most likely related to the sort with the knob on it.

Here It Is again, on a different stick (It was running around - like spiders seem to want to do when I am trying to get them to stay still for a photo!)

This one, and the other one are probably "Wrap around spiders" - genus Dolophones - because they sure look like the ones in the pictures - about half way down this web page - http://www.xs4all.nl/~ednieuw/australian/araneidae/araneidae.html
(that website says they are called wrap around spiders because they wrap themselves around twigs/etc - yep - the name sure suits them - the bottom one sure is wrapped around the twig ... the other one did the same thing when I let it go into the bush ... and look how neatly is has wrapped itself around my fingernail!)

And ... for some Idiotic reason I am still In here at "stupid o'clock" ... because not only did I add the Images to this post, and write all this stuff about them - I also uploaded a video to Youtube ... because it was a video of an "Inchworm"

... which Isn't actualy a worm, it is an Insect (and I think it was more than an Inch long too ... but then that isn't why they are called Inch worms - they are called that becaue they "Inch" along - just like this one in the video ;-)

... and now It Is time to stop messing around on the Internet and go get some sleep ... becuase it might not really be that Interesting If I fall asleep at my desk at work tomorrow ...

[aykayem sleeps, goes to work for the day (without falling asleep on my way to/from/at work ;-) and comes home again, and does some stuff]

... and so here I am - an Insane number of sunset/etc photos later (It was pretty, and I was out in the garden messing around with the dog and cat and pulling out some weeds and stuff, In between taking photos of the sky ... and the dog and the cat etc) In here checking to see If It Is time to add my I post to the linky thingy ... yes It Is there - so I had better post this so I have a URL for It - and then I can add my rather Insigificant link ...

Hang in there ...

2011-03-15T23:22:00.002+11:00

˙01 ɹo ʞəəʍ ɐ əq ʇɥƃıɯ ʇı ʇnq 'əʞıl n ɟı ʇıɐʍ puɐ punoɹɐ ƃuɐɥ -
˙˙˙ ʎllɐnʇuəʌə əɹəɥ əslə ƃuıɥʇəɯos ʇsod llıʍ ı