Dances With Wools

Well, the election is finally almost over.  Thank God.  I’m sick of hearing about all of it, particularly the local races.  I’m also really sick of hearing about how our elected officials are scum, they all need to be replaced.  Then the voters turn right around and re-elect the scum they were just complaining about.

The single most annoying thing about this election has been the cold-calls.  The phone rings, you run like hell for it, thinking maybe your kid is sick at school or something, then when you get there, you hear some stupid recorded message asking you to vote for whoever.  Really?  Has anybody ever voted for a candidate because of a robotic phone call?  Remember, these freaking brain-trusts are the people who lead our country.  And these morons are exempt from the Do Not Call Registry.  Really?  How is that fair?  Everybody else on the planet who breaks that list open and calls you has to pay a $10,000 per infraction fine.  But not political candidates?  Are they even paying attention?  If they were, they’d know that there was exactly ONE voting person in this house who hasn’t voted.  And they might even find a little asterisk by my name declaring my propensity for screaming obscenities at idiotic robot phone machines.

It doesn’t matter who wins anyway.  You heard me.  IT….DOESN’T…MATTER!  Obama.  McCain.  Whatever.  It’s the president and the president can’t do squat without approval of congress, etc.  And he isn’t all that smart.  He might be smart enough to appoint a well-rounded and learned cabinet, but on his own, the prez ain’t got diddly.  Take Reagan for example.  I loved Reagan.  Now, he wasn’t an economic genius and his diplomacy skills weren’t on a super-human level.  But that man knew how to put together the finest experts, combine them into a cabinet, and then talk down his detractors until they walked away loving him.  Now THAT was a president.  Without that cabinet, though, none of the great things he accomplished would have been possible.

So, it doesn’t matter who becomes president, after all.  If he tries to do anything really worthwhile, he’ll be stopped by the senate.  Or congress.  Or even the American people.  I’m not entirely sure the American people are smart enough to elect their own leaders anymore.  Seriously.  We vote the same incompetent clods into office term after term, bitch about them, then don’t have the brains to vote them out.

And if you don’t believe that’s true, just consider the fact that they voted Bush in not once, but twice.

As for me, I’m just glad the whole mess is over.  I can go back to watching cat food commercials and my phone can stop ringing.  Maybe I can even see the theater signs now that the campaign signs will be gone.  Aside from that, nothing else will change.

And just because I hate the search engines almost as much as I hate the robot calls: Sarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin John McCain John McCain McPalin Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Sarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCain Sarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin John McCain John McCain McPalin Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Sarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCain Sarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin John McCain John McCain McPalin Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Sarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCain Sarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin John McCain John McCain McPalin Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Sarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCain

Chew on THAT, Google!

When I was a kid, the one sure way to know that the holidays were coming was to look in the TV Guide.  Once you saw “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” listed, you knew for sure the holiday season had started.  So, you planned your week around that one night.  Your best friend HAD to be there, as well as all your fringe friends.  Holiday specials are best watched in groups, especially considering the fact that your parents had no more understanding of their vast importance than they did of how to play hopscotch.  With friends gathered and snack foods unwrapped, you glued your eyes to the TV from the first tinkling notes of Beethoven to the last.

Nowadays, we have DVD and Blue Ray and holiday specials aren’t special anymore.  You can watch them any time you want…with friends or without.  They are no longer a reason for celebration, their impact lost and diluted by the frequency of their play on that silly DVD machine.

Baby Boomers like me have children, grandchildren, a second and third generation with whom to share that idyllic childhood moment.  Only problem is, they aren’t idyllic anymore and the kids flat out don’t care.

“Let’s watch Charlie Brown tonight,” you say to them.

“Charlie Brown?  Why?”  They blink at you like you’ve suddenly sprouted a second head.

“It’s almost Christmas.  Come on!  We HAVE to watch the Charlie Brown Christmas.”

“We can watch that any time.  Besides, it’s old.”

“No it’s not it’s…” and suddenly you realize that it IS old…and you are old…and that old holiday joy slips away.

In the end, you search Ebay frantically to see if you can find a newly mastered hi def version and you bribe those little stinkers with some hot cocoa and sticky candy to get them to watch with you.  You can’t watch it alone, ya know?  You’d look silly, a post-menopausal testament to round-screened TVs and post-war, pre-video childhood joy.

Even if they DO watch with you, it’s not special anymore.  It’s not the same and you finally accept that…along with the fact that YOU are not the same.  Like Charlie Brown, you’re older now, out of step with the times.  Your film is grainy and your audio sounds a bit weak and single-channel.

Maybe if Lucy got a tramp stamp.

Or Linus could trade his blanket for bling.

Maybe YOU could get a facelift and a little botox.

Maybe Schroeder needs to trade his piano for a nice synthesizer.

Naw!  Like Lucy, Linus and Schroeder, we’re classics.  There’s a reason classics survive all those years.  They’re perfect just the way they are and so are we.  A little rough around the edges, a little old-school, but filled with wisdom and warmth and a touch of irony.

Time to watch the Great Pumpkin again.  45th time for me.  Time to remember why it’s so important, so classic, so…well….special.  Time to make the kids remember too.

Have a Happy Halloween,

Trish

This year has seen some of the greatest financial failures since money was invented.  A lot of people are standing by, wondering how in the hell this all happened.  The rest are ducking and covering, hoping to avoid moral and legal prosecution.

Not to blow my own horn, but I predicted this whole mess way back in 2003.  I’m no financial guru, but I spent a decade in the Ginnie Mae market, in real estate, writing mortgage paper when interest rates were 18%.  I know a thing or two.

Following the tragedy of 9-11, the geniuses that run our economic behemoth here in the good ol’ US of A decided that it would be a good idea to drop interest rates, to forestall what they perceived was a huge economic threat.  And once done, it’s hard to get off that mortgage rate train.  It worked a bit…for awhile…and so the fed kept dropping rates.  Effectively, they forced people to buy houses?  How could you not?  Interests rates had never been that low in most our lifetimes.  It was a no-brainer.

What most people failed to realize, and what the geniuses failed to tell us, is that whatever goes down…must go up again.  Eventually, interest rates would go back up, the desperate grabbing up of real estate would stop, and we would be facing a crisis.

Back in the good old days, you couldn’t write a mortgage for more than 90% of a property’s value.  But mortgage brokers and bankers alike found ways around that, eager for their piece of the pie.  If someone wanted to borrow $200,000 on a house worth $180,000, the mortgage people just had the appraiser list the value as $220,000.  That way, the buyer was borrowing the real full value of a house, and the prices were driven up.  Doomed to collapse.

And once things started to slow, people stopped buying, and houses stopped leaping in value, the bankers were stuck.  It all defaults to an old financial term of OPM…Other People’s Money.  Banks were lending THEIR money, they were lending money based on loans they took out.  They were holding $14 billion in outstanding loans, but that was okay, cuz they had borrowed $30 billion from somebody else.  Except now, people were holding a $300,000 mortgage on a house that was only worth $200,000.  They couldn’t sell it for the value of the mortgage.  They had no equity.  They had nothing.  Families did the only thing they could do…they walked away.

And so, we saw the failure of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae…and their subsequent buy-out.  Wall street took a hit.  The government bailed them out and we pressed on.  Lehman failed, and AIG.  Lehman was gobbled up by Bank of America, AIG was bailed out.  Now, if you owned a corporation and it failed, would anyone step in and bail YOU out?  Not a chance.  But now, suddenly, the government regulators who hadn’t been paying attention, were paying keen attention.

Remember, this OUR money they’re bailed the banks out with.

It all boils down to greed.  All the financial geniuses who worked for those failed financial institutions drew MILLIONS of dollars in salaries over their tenure.  They don’t really care if the institution fails or not.  They’ve got their pie.

But what of the rest of us?  Well, we’ve got the FDIC, after all.  We’re safe.  Not true.  At the financial apex of this country, there has only ever been enough money in the FDIC to pay back  one third of the country’s depositors.  That means that if your bank goes down and you have $60,000 in that bank, you’ll get back $20,000.  Do you like the landscape I’ve painted here?  Thought not.

So, how do we fix it?  Obama says he will.  McCain says he will.  But if the financial gurus and regulators who have been running this store for so long don’t have a clue, how could they?

First of all, we have to strangle the hell out of mortgage markets.  Yes, I know, real estate is already in the crapper.  But think of this: if we go on writing paper, even good paper, based on money that has been borrowed from the borrowers, eventually the borrowers will fall into a giant circle-jerk of financial doom.  ALL the banks will fail.  Everywhere.  So, interest rates must be raised…and they will be.  There’s no way to stop it.  First of all, the failure of so many banks and the devaluation of Wall Street has made foreign investors and banks leery of us.  Remember now, that those are the people whom the federal government borrows money from.  You know that big deficit we’re always talking about?  Well, we owe that money to foreign banks and they quite literally own us.

So, if they’re leery, they’re going to charge the US government a higher rate to borrow their money.  They will have to charge banks more, and the fed will raise the rates.  How much? A  little at first, to test the waters.  After all, we don’t want to panic people.  Then a bit more and more and more…I think it will probably top out at 16% before it stabalizes, but it could be as high as 18%.

So, mortgage money is hard to find, the real estate prices will drop.  And drop…and finally end up back where they SHOULD be…where they were before the real estate boom that killed us.  Wall street has been over-valued for nearly 20 years.  There’s no way the dow should be around 10K.  It ought to be half of that.  And we will see a correction.  We’re seeing a bit of it now.  The safeguards installed on the computerized models that all run Wall Street, will kick in…but it won’t save the stock market.  It has to drop.  There’s a saying…when interest is high, stocks will die.  When interest is low, stocks will grow.  There’s no formula for that.  But it’s true.

The stock market has also been affected more and more by the price of oil.  If oil is high, stocks will die.  And Vice versa.  With those two things working against it — the price of oil WILL drop after the election — the stock market doesn’t have a chance.

How do you survive?  You don’t.  We’re all going to take a hit, and we’ll be taking it for about another 20 years as we fight to fix this, and to repay the enormous amounts of money that the US gov has borrowed to fund our current crisis, coupled with the Iraq debacle.  But if you’re smart, you’ll pull back every dime you’ve got, get it out of the stock market, and out of American banks.  Putting it in Switzerland is the safest place…but a Canadian bank is nearly as good.  Those two countries have financial systems which seem to be more stable and less affected by foreign trends.

Bank of America just bought up Lehman and a huge amount of debt along with it.  They are going to be struggling for a long while to fix that…if they can.  If not, they’ll be the next casualty.  There are more hits that the stock market has to dodge.

More than anything, we have to tighten regulation on our financial system.  And we have to go after those who put us in this situation to begin with.  Prosecute a few oil speculators and see how fast the price of gas drops.  Prosecute a few of those financial geniuses who talked us all into sub-prime mortgages and see if we don’t see a lot of mortgage brokers fired.  And for the love of God, force some of those CEOs and CFOs to cough up their billions to bail out the financial institutions that made them their fortunes.  or beat them with big sticks in the streets.  Either way is good.

So, hold onto your hats, boys and girls, the end is not nearly here.  And if you think we’re in the financial crapper now, you ain’t seen NOTHIN’ yet!

You heard it here first.

Crack Man came back today.  He was sporting a brand new toilet and even more butt crack than he had before.  He seems to be particularly proud of it.  At one point, I walked into the kitchen (adjacent to the offending bathroom).  Crack Man was putting the new wax seal onto the pipe and the toilet was sitting sort of halfway our the doorway.  No seat, of course.  But Crack Man was sitting on the toilet, leaning WAY over to install this seal.  I caught just a glimpse before I fled for my life, choking back my lunch with every step.  I warned the girls.  Don’t go into the kitchen.  It ain’t pretty.

For all of his flaws, Crack Man gave us a new toilet.  It’s a grand jobby too.  One of those low-water, turbo flush dealies.   I swear to God, when you flush it, you can feel the air whoosh out of the room.  The whole procedure is over in about 10 seconds and you’re on your way.  Thank you, Crack Man!

We even dodged the rotten floor bullet, so we didn’t need to call the carpenter to replace the sub floor.  We love the carpenter.  He’s hard-working, highly skilled, and he never once sported an ounce of butt-crack the whole month he worked on our roof.  He’s one of our favorite contractors.

That tragedy now behind us (and hopefully Crack Man, too) we can move on to other things.  School starts a week from Wednesday.  Supplies are bought, tuition will be paid, and I will send my first born off to her senior year.  I dread it.  I cry at ALL the graduations.  What in God’s name is going to get me through this one?  Maybe a sedative.  Maybe a prayer.  Maybe an entire box of tissues.  I must be strong.  At least I’ll still have two kids at home.  And she will come back to visit.  I’ll drive out to Columbia U and get her if I have to, but she WILL come visit, dammit!

So, senior year, here we come.  And Sophomore year for Bill.  Katie is still at home for another year.  But at least we’ll get to do all this with a working toilet and at least part of our sanity.

Laters!

So, our toilet broke.  This isn’t the first toilet we’ve had that’s broken, but this one broke in just about every way a toilet can break.  The handle broke.  No prob, because we attached a nice red cable tie to the flushy thing.  I use the term “flushy thing” because toilets no longer use ballcocks and the like.  It’s a float valve or some such.  Whatever.  The toilet also began to leak a good deal of water from underneath….or behind….somewhere.  It was quite a lot of water actually.

Things always break when you don’t have the money to fix them.  We have another bathroom, we could let it go except for the fact that David’s mother lives with us and she can’t keep walking up the stairs to get to the bathroom.  So, I call the plumber.

With the garage needing painting and the front porch trim needing painting and Katie’s room needing painting….I had to sit my butt around waiting for the plumber to show up.  He finally did…at 4:30.  A day wasted.  But it would be worth it if the toilet got fixed.

So, in walks the plumber.  While he’s still standing, he sports a solid four inches of butt crack.  I snicker and look away, continue to explain to him about the toilet as I lead him to the offending room.  He bends down.  I peak in to indicate exactly where the water is pooling and….BAM!  There’s pure unadulterated redneck ass staring me in the face.  Not a little of it.  A lot.  His draws (as they say here) have slipped all the way to his thighs.  I choke back my lunch and turn away.

Crack Man says there’s no problem.  He’ll git that wax seal put ri’ in dere.  Really, Crack Man?  Really?  The toilet is OLD.  Like I told Lude Lady on the phone (so named because she apparently downs a handful of Qualudes for lunch and thus talks about as fast as a snail under general anesthesia) the toilet needs replacing.

Crack Man stands up and shrugs.  “When will the toilet be here?” he asks.  “Soon as you git ‘er off’n da truck,” I tell him.  I’m fluent in redneck.  I can’t look the guy in the face.  He looks like he’s in the road company from Deliverance.  He proceeds to tell me that the office didn’t tell him he would be replacing the toilet, just the wax seal.  Of course they did.  Otherwise, how could I be expected to waste an entire day for no good reason.

Well, Crack Man will be back on Monday.  As a quick fix, dude shut off the toilet so it wouldn’t leak anymore.  *snork*  I turned it back on because, leak or not, Granny HAS to pee.

On an up note, my security system is fixed.  I can’t tell you how because I was sworn to secrecy, but it is fixed and it doesn’t beep me awake at 5:30 in the morning anymore.

I’ll let you know how Crack Man works out on Monday.  Anybody got any anti-crack glasses?  Perhaps a pair that have those pixelated portions like they use on TV when they don’t want you to see something?  Help me.  Please.

You know, I lived in rural Florida in the 60s.  Things were slow, backward, a little off.  But here in rural North Carolina, it’s an entirely different story.  If you need anything that can’t be bought at Walmart, you have to drive 60 miles to get it.  Even the simplest of tasks becomes a month-long devotional to banging your head against a brick wall.

Case in point: Our roof has leaked ever since we bought the house seven years ago.  We started trying to get estimates on the repairs roughly the first day we spent in the house.  About half of the roofers would never even come out to the house.  The rest would come out, promise to return an estimate before the end of the week.  We would never see them again.  Failing to find a roofer in town, we branched out…all the way to Norfolk, 60 miles away.  He not only returned an estimate that was $40K less than everyone else, he actually came out and did the job.  So, the main body of the house was reroofed right after Isabel hit in 2003.  Only the porch and garage remained.

To make a long story short, it took us the last five years to get an estimate that was reasonable from a roofer who would actually take the job.  We had all kinds of solutions presented to us, ranging from spray-on rubber to a copper roof costing in excess of $120K.  That’s for roughly 900 square feet of roofing mind you.  Eight years and over $25K later, we have a completely dry house.  That’s nothing short of a miracle.

Let’s talk about cable and internet.  We have mediacom for both.  We pay through the nose for it.  The internet dies on a daily basis.  Channels disappear and go into a black out almost as regularly.  We’ve had the service people out here no less than 14 times and they still never fixed the problem.  Seriously.

Our alarm system is run through ADT.  We have monitoring.  We pay on time every month and have never been a problem to them.  But a month ago, it started beeping incessantly.  Low battery.  Really?  I call the company and they want $79 to send somebody out to replace the battery in THEIR system.  I said that I would change it myself, where is it?  They tell me to unlock the main panel inside the closet and the battery is there.  Only one problem: I don’t have a key.  They never left us a key when they installed it 6 years ago.  They promise to send me a key at the end of the week.  It never arrives and I call back.  They say that they will have a key brought down to me from the Norfolk office.  (all reason, sense, and skill emanates from Norfolk)  So we wait.  Meanwhile, the alarm beeps crazily at all hours of the day and night.  Sleep is lost.  We can’t leave our house alone.  I finally get fed up and call them.  They say that they have a technician right here in our home town.  They’ll send him over with a key.  Really?  Why didn’t you say that in the FIRST PLACE?

I’m signing up with Brinks on Monday.

We decided to leave the incompetence of mediacom behind and sign up with Embarq.  We can get phone, DSL, and dish network for $100 less than we’re paying now.  The phone guy comes, puts in the DSL line.  Only THEN do we find out that we won’t be able to use a phone on the DSL line.  We have to have another phone line put into the den for an actual phone.  Then we find out that the dish network can’t be hooked up the way we want it to.  They’re not allowed to go out onto the roof. (The roof again?  Really?) So, they’ll just be using the cable company’s coaxial cable.  Well, duh!  It’s not digital or hi-def and is therefore of no use.  We need new cables.  Fine!  We’ll pay extra.  Set it up.  They schedule for installation, we get the confirmation call the night before.  Hours later, we get a call saying they have to cancel because they don’t have enough equipment.

You’re the freaking dish network representative and you don’t have enough equipment? WTF????  They can get it.  But somebody has to bring it down from…you guessed it….NORFOLK!

It gets even more ridiculous here as the guy installing the new a/c unit shoots flames up all three stories at the back of our house.  The original guy who was on his way to fix said unit on a day when the temps were 103, didn’t make it because he spotted a fish jumping as he was driving over the bridge, so he just HAD to stop and fish.

The historic society here likes to burn down old houses for practice.  They can’t actually preserve them because they lack the funds.  Why do they lack the funds, you ask?  Because nobody can figure out how to form a not-for-profit corporation, therefore they are limited to raising just $25K a year.  Again I say, WTF????  Do you know where Office Max is?  They have papers there for that.  Not to mention the fact that at least two of their members are freaking attorneys!  DOH!

Our utility rates run an average of 30% higher than any place else in the country.  The water company operates on water that was tested in 2004.  They had a parade here on the Fourth of July.  It consisted of some kids on bikes, a few rednecks on horses, and some poor schmuck pushing a wheelbarrow and a shovel to pick up after said horses.  It was over in under 2 minutes.  Yippy!!!!

The police here don’t work after 8PM.  After that, they have to page a cop.  Oh, and they do own a fingerprint kit, but none of them knows how to actually use it.  If you call 911, you get put on hold most of the time.  The jobless rate here is enormous, as is the number of people on social services.  Now, don’t get me wrong, social services and welfare are good things, meant to help people when times are tough.  But I don’t see how a person can take actual PRIDE in being the fourth generation in their family to exist solely on welfare.  Jeez!  I’d kill myself.

Businesses are failing right and left.  The survivors claim that there’s not enough work to keep them going.  I say, if you WOULD actually work, you’d get more business.  Whatever happened to customer service?  All these companies act as if I’m being a complete pain in the butt by simply asking for the service I pay them to provide.  Whatever happened to an honest day’s work?  Whatever happened to pride in workmanship?

In short, if you buy a historic house, you’d better have a high six figure bank account.  If you buy a historic house in a rural area, you’d better have a high six figure bank account AND mad construction skills.  You’d better have a high tolerance for ignorance and general jack-assery to boot.

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Why are they shrinking our food? Have you noticed? Pizzas are now 2 inches less in diameter than they were 10 years ago. How do I know? I have a pizza pan from 1965. Frozen pizzas used to come right up to the edge on it. Now, there’s a good 1 inch to spare all the way around.

It’s not just pizzas. Bacon now comes in 12 ounce packages. You can still get it in a pound package, but you’ll pay a lot more and you have to really search the cooler for it. Then there’s the pies. Pies. Nothing’s more American than apple pie. You might be able to get a real grown-up pie from a bakery. But those yummy Mrs. Smith’s and other frozen pies are 3/4 of an inch less in diameter and a good 1/8 of an inch shorter.

And now we move on to the most heinous downsizing of all: cookies. You remember when you were a kid…those packages of oreos and ChipsaHoy cookies had three stacks in them. And the cookies were 3″ in diameter. Go measure your cookies and get back to me. I think you’ll be shocked.

Now, I wouldn’t really have a big bitch about this. I can hear some of you out there shrugging and wondering why I don’t just eat more cookies. Well, all packaging is smaller. And that means that all those marvelous recipes that used to be clipped off the containers and stuck in your mama’s recipe file are OFF. A can of condensed milk isn’t the same as it was 50 years ago.

I have a recipe for pie that calls for a crust, one tub of cool whip, and one large hershey’s chocolate bar. Well, the crust is do-able but there are now a ton of sized of cool whip and the largest Hershey bar isn’t the same size it was. So, it took me multiple tries and many, many failures to make the pie.

And don’t even get me started on rice-a-roni. I have a chicken casserole that’s been the rave of every gathering I’ve served it at. It calls for 2 boxes of wild rice. But a box is now 3 ounces smaller than it was 9 years ago when that recipe was written.

Food dudes, come on! If you’re gonna shrink our food, at least have the common decency to hand out a measurement converter with it. If you want to put that left over shrink ray to good use, go to the nearest beach and point it at some of those fat tourists wearing nothing but butt floss. Give us a break. Not all of us are fat and in need of smaller portions. And we don’t want to simply quit cooking certain things just because you decide to shrink the food.

Trish

o, I developed this little flower fixation for awhile. I can’t explain it, but I found that the same flower pattern can be used to surround buttons. That quick, I made a plain white shirt custom made for my daughter’s shorts. I also made more flowers for her to attach to her flip-flops. Instant custom, color-coordinated outfit! My older daughter grabbed up two little pink flowers and declared them earring cozies. I can’t make the silly flowers fast enough. They can even be slipped over simple burrettes and they make this neat ruffly thingy that the girls like. I’m sure my girls will find more uses for them, but for now, here are a few pictures, and the pattern.

Button Flowers

MEDIUM
Uses size D hook and number 10 crochet thread

To Begin: Ch 8 for up to a 1/2″ button. Join with slip st to form a ring.

Row 1: (Sc in ring, ch 3) 5 times. Join to first sc.
Row 2: sc, ch 1, 3 dc, ch 1, sc in first ch 3 space and each space around. Join with a slip st to first sc.
Row 3: Ch 2, sc around shaft of middle dc of first row, ch 4, (sc around shaft of next middle dc in cluster, ch 4) 5 times. Join with slip st to first sc.
Row 4: in each ch 4 loop, work sc, hdc, 3 dc, hdc, sc. Tie off

If you want a larger flower to go around a really big button or to go on a hat, use size G hook and worsted or sport weight yarn. Follow same instructions except begin with a ch 10 ring. If you want to make an earring cozy, the size of the center ring doesn’t matter, since you’re only putting a post through it, not an entire earring.

Okay, so have fun with these and let me know what you create, new uses you find, etc.

Loopy love,
Trish

So, the constant droning of hammers and saws on my roof finally got to me. In the middle of cleaning house and making dinner, I got bored. And when I get bored, I make things. I usually make tedious things.

Today, I made a font that I can use to create patterns out of crochet symbols. You can use it too, because I believe that (said in a Tommy Chong voice) creativity should be free, man! Click the link and save it to your fonts directory.

http://www.danceswithwools.net/crochetfontfix.ttf

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE WEBSITE, FILE, AND THE COMPUTER HAVE ALL BEEN DESTROYED. IF ANYONE WHO DOWNLOADED THE FONT STILL HAS IT ON THEIR MACHINE, PLEASE LET ME KNOW.  I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE A COPY OF THE FILE

Now, as if that weren’t enough, I also made a Paintshop Pro XI tube. You can click on this thumb, go to the large gif, then save it to your computer. Open it up in Paintshop, click EXPORT and then TUBE. It’s 4 across and 10 down. Go forth and be creative, babies.

Oh, and I did finally find the best textured stitch for my scarf. I’ll write more about that tomorrow, as well as the bracelet I intend to make to match it.

Love and stitches,

Trish