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Thursday, April 28, 2005

I'm featured at craftrevolution.com!

Hey look at craftrevolution.com! I'm so superduper excited. I was emailed earlier this week that I would be featured on their front page on Thursday!

Yay Yay Yay!

*Happy dance*


Since I knew in advance I figured I should actually offer some in the shop (I had a 'coming soon' sign up since I was originally busying myself trying to get them out for May's Sampler, and only later thought I might add them to my site). I finally finished up the envelopes last night and made my own envelope licky gluey thing using a recipe I found here.

It's basically this:


ENVELOPE GLUE RECIPE

Ingredients:
6 tablespoons white vinegar
4 1 oz. packets unflavored gelatin
1 tablespoon vanilla extract (or any flavor that you like)

Bring vinegar to a boil in a small pan. Add gelatin and stir until dissolved. Add extract and stir until mixed. Brush on thin layer onto back of an envelope flap. Let dry. Moisten to apply.

I had to add about 4 TB water initially to make all the gelatin melt, but then I let most of it boil off so the solution was still as saturated as it was supposed to be. Then I just applied with a paint brush! I'm hoping to get some mint and citrus extracts to make fun yummy flavored ones to make my envelopes. How FUN!

Store excess glue in a sealed container and melt again for future use by putting in a pan of warm water.

on podcasting
I want to make a podcast... Just to try it out, see what it's like. I download podcasts, but I just want to be involved in the creation process too (is that weird? I mean is it weird that I should have this random urge? I guess not for me...)!

Podcasting is becoming more popular and familiar:
Just this week Infinity has said that it will broadcast select podcasts on the radio.

I just linked ervy to Open Media Network yesterday, and told him I've been itching to podcast.

Going with my interests, I would love to do some sort of craft related show, but most crafting is such a visual thing, that I'm not quite sure how I could make useful. & then there's the issue of who would be interesting to interview or bring onto a podcast.

Last year engadget posted a how-to on creating a podcast, but I need to look into whether new easier ways have been developed as well.


Lastly, while I'm being all uber bloggy and linking, I might as well point out this article my friend Roxy directed me to on blogging and business. I thought I would have heard most of it before, but I found the article to be well done. I did learn a few new things and found a few new interesting links. y'all might want to check it out.

*edit* if you missed my CR page debut I took a 'picture.' See it here

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

serenity

I've been waiting for this movie for awhile now. I'm so happy it's coming out this year somewhat on time :)

Trailers - Serenity

if you haven't netflixed or rented or seen or heard of the series Firefly by Joss Whedon... well now you have. So you don't have any excuse...

When you're done oohing over the trailer for the movie that I could only wish would bring back the series, go look at this. It's survivor in blogger form. I think it will be quite cool. Competitors are given topics they must blog about, and are voted off each week.

on experiments
I had to tell some one they might be colorblind. Actually, I first had to ask if he might be colorblind. I was running a subject on an emotional stroop (has to name the color of the words), and it became quite obvious that he couldn't tell the difference between green and yellow! So I needed to find out if he had a color definciency so we could throw out his data. But he didn't know/think he was at all colorblind. *yikes* I felt really weird having to tell him he might have a problem.

on knitting
so y'all haven't seen me knitting on here for a while, but I have gotten 20 minutes in every morning faithfully as I wait for my bus. I'm working on finishing the right glove of my Mikado Ribbon Gloves (of course I'm using a random Israeli yarn and not Mikado Ribbon). Some day I will finish it and y'all will see it here :)

Aardvark Firefox Extension

Aardvark Firefox Extension

Firefox has made me a new toy (don't be dirty fuson!). The Aardvark extension is way too much fun and will come in handy when dealing with ugly cluttered pages, and deleting ads from my printed net pages... I'm enjoying going around prettying up each page I come by to view!

Edibles!

I just found out scented geraniums are edible! I knew I was attracted to them for a reason (almost everything in my garden is edible). I currently have a jar of sugar sitting at home getting a lovely lemon scent from my lemon balm geranium leaves! I can even be all Martha and bake them into sweet breads to make them all scented and pretty! Huzzah! I can't wait for the nurseries to get them in!

I got myself a 1 gal. bay tree (grecian laurel) over the weekend! It's so cute! The scary Wegman's nursery guy talked me into getting a book on bonsai-ing so I can shape and train my little bay tree into funky shapes. I'm not quite sure I'm up for the task, but I now have a $15 book in my posession that I feel I must use to get my $$ worth.

This past weekend was the 17th yr anniversary of my grandfather's passing. Being such, the family headed out to dim sum followed by a visit to my grandpa's grave where we busied ourselves cleaning up the site, lighting incense, kow towing, and burning dead money. I also managed to catch a cold from either my cousin or my grandma.

Yesterday was my friend Roxy's bday. Of course, being a Monday, there was no time to party hardy. So instead we went out to Cafe Borrone for dessert and coffee. It was good to catch up with Roxy, Nick Chan, Goldie, and Rachael, and there may even be a dim sum get together in all of our futures. Here's a pic of the group, sans me (I'm hoping nick chan, the only other blogger present, will post some of the ones he took). This is probably one of the more unlucky pics of Goldie who is quite pretty. She's all glam and fashion cool now with her own line of clothes. She also works for Sam magazine (apparently the asian form of Maxim). We all sang happy birthday at the end, and I fought it out with Goldie and Rachael over calling the birthday girl Roxy or Roro. They may have out numbered me, but I think I yelled *Happy birthday to ROXY* quite loudly as we sang!



For Roxy's bday present, I'm going to teach her how to knit! She misses crafting things with her hands, and so she'd LOVE to learn how to knit. I'm also going to knit her a hat (hopefully with earflaps) that she can wear next winter :)

Friday, April 22, 2005

HHGTTG

Basically what I had guessed. Review: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

damn long work days

nothing crafty to blog about... just chugging along through the work days, visit Delia's most recent post. She's got how I feel when I'm coming home down pat.

But do check this out, someone was looking through bloglines just to see how people breakdown their categories... Their conclusion? Bloglines users are a bunch of knitters! lol. I could have told them that!

see it here (has link to complete breakdown).

Thursday, April 21, 2005

it's the time of year for garden pics

I think I posted pics of my garden around this time last year, and seeing how my garden makes me happy, here is some happiness to put on my blog.

A close up of the tiny purplish/pink flowers that have sprouted out everywhere on my Lemon Balm scented geranium


one of my first tomato flowers of the year!


a peek at some of the buds on my Kaffir Lime tree


Today I'm running 10 hours of experiments. Wish me luck! I'm finally piloting one of the studies I've been working on for the past few months, so I hope I can see some results!

I finally got mypyramid.gov to go through for me, and I was able to see my personalized food guidelines. Ya'll should try it out.

I also finally pushed out my new site, but I think there is still a bit I'd like to tweak. Let me know any comments or suggestions if you have any.

My mom almost bit my head off a couple days ago. I had been scheduling the next few weeks of experiment hours, and I had scheduled a long day for Friday May 6. I completely forgot that I was supposed to leave early Friday to go down to Southern Cali with the family for mother's day weekend to meet up with some relatives to play Mah Jong. Whoops. I fixed it all, but i sure wish I could remember these things better.

Monday, April 18, 2005

la la la

It's been so pretty out! Over the weekend I was able to get a few yarns made and visited 3 different nurseries to look at plants and pick up some stuff for the balcony garden. 3 of my tomato trees appear to have a prime spot and shot up a whole foot last week. The others are coming along a bit slower, but still happy. I think I want to get a Moro (blood) orange tree or a Bearss Seedless lime tree to add to my citrus collection. I tried to convince ervy that he wanted me to grow an arbol chile pepper plant, but he resisted saying I have too many plants already :( Maybe next summer.

None of the nurseries had any scented geraniums yet. Apparently all that rain we had just a bit back did something to make the nurseries not receive any from their suppliers. Summer Winds said they had found one rose scented geranium (my favorite kind), but they had sold it just a minute before.

I ate a bay leaf (grecian laurel) at Wegman's Nursery. The dude there told me to eat one, and he stuck one in his mouth and started chewing. I was a bit reluctant (it seemed an odd thing to do, plus the plant was covered in spider webs), but it was nice and spicy. I have a hard time saying 'no' to people. There was a similar incident at Petco a couple years back regarding some dog treats and a crazy petco salesman. When will I learn to say 'no'?

People always expect my last name to be longer than 2 letters. The Wegman's guy was taking down my name and number to see if they could order me a small 1 or 2 gallon grecian laurel, and he was quite suprised that my last name ended so quickly. "Oh, you got one of those short Chinese names," he exclamed, and he then went on to tell me about a Chinese guy with an even shorter last name: 'I'. Today, I couldn't even fill out an online researcher's form because it claimed my name was too short. I'm now a researcher with the last name "Wuster" which digs up old childhood memories for me, and is apparently more acceptable to the online system.

I had wanted to go fishing over the weekend, but it seems all the lake type fishing spots are in the east bay :( My dad even brought me fishing poles and supplies! Oh well, guess I'll have to head home sometime and go fishing with the family.

yarns!
I spun up these three yarns this weekend:


I still need to wash, set, and balance them. The red bits are pieces of extra yarn used to keep the hanks from tangling in their current state.

My favorites are the purple and peachy colored ones. They're so fluffy!!! The curls are the cotswold locks I washed and dyed myself. The chocolate color is llama fiber, the white is soft corriendale wool, and both yarns are bound with a pretty variegated mercenerized (sp?) cotton thread.



Wednesday, April 13, 2005

you'd think

Yes you'd think I would have blogged about something crafty I've done in the past couple days. But you'd be wrong. Sheesh! I wish I had done something crafty. I've been working late, coming home at 8:30pm and eating something and then passing out by 9:30pm. Ervy has to poke me every hour to try to get me to take out my contacts and get ready for bed. Why the sudden exhaustion? I don't get it. It just hits me all of the sudden.

I was hoping to have the new site up by today, but I've been so busy working/sleeping, that I haven't had a chance to finish tidying it up! For some reason, everyone who I've ever worked for at Stanford suddenly needs me to work 23984739287429 hours for them NOW. yikes.

I know I know. It's sad I don't even have a vpod for y'all, I haven't had a chance to scan in any!

Thank you for all the compliments on the notecards! Hopefully I'll be able to show off something this week!

Monday, April 11, 2005

the weekend

Correction to previous post

The first sentence should read "Man! work" not "man work." To my friends IRL, y'all have dirty dirty minds.

charity
Hollis of Full Thread Ahead started a relay team for the Los Altos Relay for Life for the American Cancer Society. Our plan is to knit hats (in relay form) for 24 hours. We still need more team members and support!

sponsor me!

If you're local, join the team!
website
Much of this weekend was spent redesigning my website with ervy. I'll probably launch the new face sometime this week! I'm really excited about it, I think some major improvements have been made to it!

I also spent some time finishing up a few vintage fabric travel needle rolls for my site. I think they're quite adorable :) They'll hopefully be listed with the update. I designed a spiffy graphic for the top of the page. Given the horrid lighting i had to photograph in, this was the best I could do.


wool
here's a pic of all the wool I told y'all I bought. It's shown drying here in my workspace. 2lbs of cotswold on top, and 1lb of border cheviot on the bottom. Most of the curly cotswold has been dyed into wonderful bright colors with some easter egg dye I picked up on sale.


craftin'
I also spent time working on finishing up the blank notecards for my contribution May's sampler (assuming I get them done). See:

Thursday, April 07, 2005

knitty.com

oh yeah *excited*. The new Knitty is up!

worky worky

Man work has been running me full steam this week! Honestly, it's been exhausting, but the experiment we're putting together is finally coming into the runnable stage. And there's still so much I HAVE to get done for it this week.

Budget Living pointed me toward a police auction site. Much of it is stuff they have taken in busts or whatever (there are a TON of grow lights), and there's also stuff like parking meter heads and extra firemen hats. The funniest thing I found you could buy was a collection of 100 photos of Usher. They suggest building a shrine.

craftin
again, not much on the craftin' front given how busy I've been. I guess slightly knitting related, The Knitty Professor is having a contest on her blog to give away Addi Turbos. You must submit a haiku about Addis to her by the end of the month to enter.

vpod


we now return to the crazy times/drama on my street

On Monday we witnessed a car accident right outside our house. Actually almost our whole street saw it. It was around 6:30pm ish so it was still fairly light outside.

I was just sitting down to some salty prosciutto, soft stinky cheese from Whole Foods in the cutest ceramic dish, and stale bread to tide me over to dinner (mmm.....). Suddenly I heard an engine revving and tearing around near by. An old 80's red crap car turned at high speed from an adjoining street onto our street (probably had to be going at least 50mph) which of course he couldn't control through the turn and rammed straight into a parked car (still full of people mind you) in front of my house. The red car's crazy driver reversed quickly showing a hood bent back up to his windsheild and a smoking engine. Luckily the parked car was an SUV so really it's bumper and license plate got a bit bent.

The crazy driver's passenger tried to get out of the car, but he started speeding off (apparently almost hitting Evan who had just parked his car further down the street) and the girl finally jumped out of the moving car at the end of the street while Mr. Crazy sped off. Actually there were quite a few young onlookers (as well as an old man who stumbled out of his house in his tighty whities to see the commotion). There was a young dude across the street sitting in his car during the whole engagement. A bunch of people on the street who had started yelling at Mr. Crazy, now shouted orders at Mr. Dude armed at his car to follow him in chase (Mr. Dude later reported that Mr. Crazy tried to run into him as he followed him around. Mr. Crazy apparently departed via the freeway, bent hood/obscured vision and all).

The rest of the episode goes as follows, shortened due to its less exciting nature. Street people all get on the cell phones (Mr. Mostly Naked goes back in his house thank goodness). Girl from Mr. Crazy's car sits crying on the street relating her story to those around her. Three police cars show up on our already crowded street (two blonde lady officers and one male officer who question everyone and then explain that they can't arrest the guy for some reason ervy and I failed to be able to hear through our window. Something like it wouldn't even make it to something or other courts which I assume must be the smallest most trifling courts). The police seem generally in a good mood. As far as accidents go, this one was an easy one for the coppers. No one got hurt, property damage was mostly affecting Mr. Crazy's own car, the girl from the car stayed behind so they knew the name of Mr. Crazy and his type of car and everything. The coppers were smiling and joking around by the time ervy and I closed our windows and window shades to start making dinner.

until next time on.... the crazy times/drama on our street.

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Hello Again!

I'm back!

Nikko is Vampire kitty!


All my stress built up for Saturday's test. My cutie offered to wake up at 7am and drive me down to the testing center (San Jose State) where I got to spend a tense 3 hours pushing my brain to recognize a multitude of psych terms.

Afterwards, we went to lunch with Adam, emi, and fu, and headed over to Summer Winds Nursery in Mountain View. HUZZAH! Can we say HEIRLOOM Tomatoes!! They had like every single heirloom tomato (well probably not every one). I even got my Green Zebra tomatoes! I now have 12 different varieties of tomatoes that I will be growing this year! YUM YUM YUM! I'm also planting 1 yellow bell pepper plant to see how I like growing it. And I filled out my herb collection (recent additions include mint, golden oregano, garlic chives, lemon grass and lemon thyme). I love growing season!!

After our adventure in gardenland, we trekked off to see Sin City. I admit I was worried when all the previews shown in the theater were horror flicks. While Sin City wasn't a horror flick, it had lots and lots of gratuitous violence. It was good, but I did have to turn my eyes away a few times. Did I mention how much I think Elijah Wood looks like that Harry Potter kid? That's a very creepy fact given Elijah's character in this movie.

crafting while I was MIA
I did get a chance to order some raw wool from Cranberry Moon Farm (through Localharvest.org) in Massachusetts. I got 2lbs of cotswold, and 1 lb of Border Cheviot. I have to admit, it was fun smelling all the sheepiness and cleaning up the fleece. I even added a bit of lavender essential oil to the last water bath of each fleece to give it a lovely scent and ward off moths.

I also tried my hand at spinning silk caps. Wow, for me this a bit difficult. My hands are kind of rough so all the silk thread catches on the rough patches on my hands. I'd show y'all a picture, but it really doesn't seem like it will photograph well.

Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy
I've been wanting to read this for awhile, and after finishing the GRE, I finally picked up ervy's copy and sped through it. Ooh I love it! It's so funny! The rest of ervy's collection of Douglas Adams from the series is in H town, and my plan to borrow the rest from a friend was foiled as he whisked them off to Singapore with him. So of course, I picked up the compilation at Barnes and Noble this evening along with a Vogue Knitting (Super Yay!).

vpod is back


sorry this post has been so scattered. I need to get back in the swing of things, and work has been crazy busy since I put a lot of stuff on hold while I was stressing right before the exam. I've been trying to reply to people's comments on their bloggers, but i honestly give up when blogger won't let me through. Later this week, I should be reengaging Halo Scan (I wonder if my paid acct is still active...) so that I can reply directly to y'all!