Knit Geek Life

Despite the fact that Matt and I had been debating getting rid of the TV portion of our cable (I rarely ever watch it, and he ends up watching it and wasting ridiculous amounts of time on it), somehow we ended up upgrading to getting a DVR after we discovered that our cable box's power supply had cracked. I guess it ended up being something like $7 more expensive than the package we already had... so, I guess might as well. I remember from the last time Matt had a DVR it did make our TV watching habits actually go down seeing as we could just pick out what we wanted to record and then watch it whenever.

It's also an HD box, so we've been having fun finding out what exactly was shot in high def... and I guess we have a preview of Showtime for a few days, so we ended up recording an episode of This American Life last night and watching it during dinner today. Oh my god does that show have amazing camera work... and Ira Glass didn't look anything like I expected... Well, except for the nerd specs. I guess I'm going to have to snag up the DVD for season one.

For once, I actually went grocery shopping. As in... made a menu plan, made a list, went to the store and bought things.

In our house, going to the grocery store is one of those things that should happen on a weekly basis, but often doesn't. More often than not, what ends up happening is we end up going to Target to pick up the very basics of eat at home type food... milk, spaghetti, cereal, soda, Kraft dinner (I'm ashamed to admit how much we actually do eat Kraft dinner)... OR we end up just saying screw it and going out to eat.

The simple act of grocery shopping itself just seems to be one of those things that's difficult for us... Doing it effectively requires beforehand planning. Making decisions on what sort of meals you want to eat for the next several days, figuring out what you already have and what you need to buy... all before you get in the car to go to the store. Doing those preliminary steps just seems to be difficult for us, and often we've skipped doing them... which generally leads to frustration at the store because we don't know what we want so we either over buy or under buy, or forget to buy that one thing we really really needed.... and when you're constantly doing something wrong like that... your inclination to go to the grocery store AT ALL kinda falls by the wayside.

But... It's becoming more and more apparent that something has needed to be done in this department. The way we've been doing things isn't exactly financially prudent, and it isn't exactly healthy either.

That's why there's a second reason why you should probably be shocked about my trip to the grocery store yesterday. I proceeded to buy everything I needed for the recipes I picked out from the vegetable, organic and world sections of our local supermarket. With the exception of organic milk and a bottle of white wine which happened to be at the other end of the supermarket. I bought no meat. All the recipes I picked out were vegan and from The Post Punk Kitchen.

Why is this shocking? Here's a hint... I am deathly afraid of most cooked vegetables. I wouldn't say I hate them... because at this point, I really don't know. I'm just afraid that I am going to hate them if I try them and I'm not going to be able to get the taste out of my mouth regardless of how much milk or soda I drink and how many times I brush my teeth after consumption... and I'm afraid I'm going to offend someone if I have a bad reaction to something I've eaten... If I try something new and dislike it, I tend to have horrible anxiety attacks.

Having a food related anxiety issue is probably one of my more socially difficult problems... I have a hard time explaining it to people, especially since I feel like I'm going to be judged harshly for it. If you do any google searches for "adult picky eaters" you're eventually going to trip over somebody's nasty blog entry about so-and-so's girlfriend who threw a fit because she was too picky to eat anything served for dinner even though it was all perfectly normal food that 90% of the population likes and how said girlfriend needs to grow the hell up and eat it anyway.

I'm almost terrified to look for help online just because any time I come across one of these bitch rants, I'm reduced to tears. There have been times in my life when I was at someone's house for dinner, was extremely hungry, and sat down to dinner only to discover that everything on the table was something that I didn't eat.... and I didn't handle this discovery gracefully. The reaction was a look of horror and then running off to sob in the bathroom because there was nothing I could eat, and now how everyone would know my embarrassing secret of having the eating habits of a three-year-old. How utterly utterly unfair it is not to like some very normal foods that people eat...

If I try to eat it, the reaction is far worse if I don't end up liking it... The running to the bathroom to throw it up, the trying everything to get the taste out of my mouth, the panicking because it tastes unpleasant.... and crying because the whole ordeal is just so goddamned embarrassing, and feeling like you've failed everyone because you just can't seem to do this without causing a bit of a scene...

I wouldn't be like this if I could help it. If there's anything I wish, it would be to like this stuff. To not be afraid of this stuff.

But the message is clear, it's shameful to be a picky eater. Shame on me for being such a bad bad horrible person.

I'm trying to be better about it.

The interest in veggies is somewhat inspired by the fact that meat just doesn't seem to be settling very well with Matt anymore. We need to be eating a less meat-heavy diet for his sake...

Fruits and vegetables have always been my nemesis. I generally don't have the same sort of food issues with meat... which is why my diet has been so heavily carnivorous, I'm totally fine with trying different kinds of meat, trying meats prepared different ways... Fruits and veg? They're absolutely panic inducing.

Growing up, there were three acceptable veggies... Only to be served raw. Celery, green peppers and cauliflower. Everything else I couldn't eat. Mostly, I ate a lot of celery and green peppers because I usually would only eat half of the cauliflower. As I got older, I started eating a few other things... Lettuce, spinach, carrots, onions, the occasional radish... Enough to eat the majority of your average restaurant salad.

Cooked veggies... Not so much. As a child, I could do tomatoes, so long as they were in the form of tomato sauce, fully pureed, no tomatoey lumps. I grew less picky about the lumps as I grew older... and I started eating salsa without complaint... but I still can't eat a tomato by itself. Potatoes are okay, so long as they're mashed or french fries.. but no other preparation is acceptable. Most other veggies, not acceptable cooked if alone. Sometimes they can be acceptable in soups or casseroles where the main ingredients are stuff I eat... Usually because undesirables can be easily picked out. It's less scary that way.

Beans seem to be the thing that's most quickly growing on me... Lentils are the only one I can say definitively that I like. I'm learning to like garbanzos (aka chickpeas)... Tonight's dinner was Brown Rice and Garbanzo Beans. I wouldn't say I was 100% thrilled with it, brown rice has this tendency to cook up crunchier than I like... I'm not sure if it's cause we're cooking it wrong or just because it's that way... and I sorta felt like the can of garbanzos it called for was too many garbanzos... but I ate a bunch of them, I can't say I really liked them... but they weren't horrible, I probably could learn to like them with repeated exposure.

It's going to be slow journey, I think...

We've wanted a new TV stand/entertainment system pretty much since we moved in to our new apartment... but seeing as buying a new couch and a new kitchen table were more of a priority at the time, we decided to hold off on it. This past week, someone suggested to Matt (I think it was his father) that we go down to Ikea to see if they had anything suitable.... so, we decided to go down to Stoughton, MA yesterday morning to see what they had. We ended up with this Besta/Inreda setup, which when you break it down into pieces is comprised of two Besta bookshelves (the two sides), the TV stand (in the middle), and two doors that slide on tracks, and the tracks hold the three pieces together.

The shopping experience itself wasn't too bad. One of the things that somewhat surprised me was the hands off approach of the staff on the display floor. There are people available to answer questions, but they mostly stick near information desks that are scattered throughout the display floor. If you need assistance, you go find them. This doesn't really bother me considering that I am a New Englander and there are unspoken rules about customer service here where you are allowed to greet a customer with a hello and inform the customer that you're available to help, but you give the customer space to browse... and you only approach and ask if someone needs help when their body language is signaling "Okay, I'm lost. I want help but I don't want to ask." I just was kinda taken aback when I was giving off my "I'm lost" body language and there was no employee response because unlike every other furniture store on the face of the planet, there was no employee ten feet behind me stalking.

For those of you who haven't been to Ikea, the process of shopping for furniture goes like this... You pick out what you want, and write down the model number and row and bin location down on the back of a brochure containing a store map and a "what I want list". When you're done, you go down to the warehouse area of the store, and find all the pieces you need from the location numbers you wrote down, and take them to the checkout. Again, not an entirely bad experience... except for the fact that we ended up getting a cart with a busted wheel that didn't drive straight... and it would have been really nice if there had been more employees working the warehouse area, some of the boxes are quite heavy and would have been easier to get on the cart if there'd been some employee assistance.

Overall, not a horribly bad shopping experience... If everything was based on that, I'd shop there again.

Unfortunately, no. Once you get home, you still have to build this stuff.

My parents and aunt and uncle came over for a few minutes once we arrived home to help bring the boxes inside, and my first clue that this was going to be a bad afternoon occurs. While Matt's bringing in one of the boxes, it slips and he gets a paper cut on one of his fingers... and the reaction was quite over dramatic. You'd thought he cut his finger off. My family, wisely, left us to finish the task at hand once all the boxes were inside.

The first step, building the physical TV cabinet and book shelves wasn't so bad... Yes, the Ikea instructions are as horrendously bad as everyone says they are. There are no words, only pictorial directions... however, if you've ever bought prefab furniture elsewhere, it's more or less the same sort of construction, you've done one.... you've done them all, and those went together fairly smoothly and without much complaint.

Then it came time to put the rails on.

The thing about the Besta line of Ikea is a mix and match set... For the meat and bones of it, there are pre-drilled holes that you put dowels into and screw things into it and whatnot... but when it comes to stuff that's an option extra, like the rails the sliding doors go on, there are no predrilled holes because it's not something that everyone who buys things in the Besta lineup uses.

Matt put one on by hand without pre-drilling holes before it occurred to him that it would be a good idea to pre-drill them. Then realized, "Hmm... It would be a good idea to pre-drill these." He digs around in his tool box for his drill bits. The smallest one he has is much too large for this application that has extremely tiny philips head screws. This is when the first temper tantrum ensues. He was sure he had one, but where is it now? Gone. Yelling, cursing and general angriness ensue.

Now... the logical thing to do in this situation is tuck your tail between your legs, get in the car and drive three minutes to Home Depot and buy a new drill bit. However, this is my husband... so mumbling, grumbling and more swearing ensue and he sets out to put on the second bottom rain by hand. He almost strips several screws in this process, which leans to more yelling, swearing and overall angriness. All the while complaining that he's "too hot". This whole scene takes about two hours.

When he finishes, still quite angry, I tell him that he's NOT putting on the top two until he goes to Home Depot and buys a drill bit because I am not putting up with the theatrics any longer. He relents, takes a shower, and we go to Home Depot and buy the drill bit, go out to dinner and then come home to finish that top rail. It takes a total of fifteen minutes to attach the two final rails. With no complaining.

We decide the shelves on the two sides can wait until later and he decides to start putting away the electronics in the middle. In this process, we discover that the power supply to the cable box is cracked, which is probably not exactly safe to be using. My husband throws another temper tantrum, because you know... Broken cable box means he wants to watch TV right this minute.

He then decides he needs to go to the bathroom for awhile, which is a detail I only share to explain that in that process he got sucked into a Final Fantasy game for the Nintendo DS, and when he came out of the bathroom, he contently crawled into bed and kept playing. I mistook this for a sign that it was safe to go take a nice long hot bath. Why I was in the bath all of the sudden, I hear another string of swears and stomping of feet and boxes being kicked around the room, and him trotting into the bathroom to tell me that he scratched the TV stand when he put the TV in and it's really really noticeable. At this point, I'm extremely frustrated with him, because if he'd waited fifteen minutes I would have happily helped him carry the TV and put on the stand, and nothing would have gotten scratched and I'm extremely tired of the three year old style tantrums. I tell him to not touch another thing and go play video games. He protests, because he wants it all done now, but eventually resigns to going and playing Final Fantasy and then going to sleep.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that throughout the entire day every time he would stop to look at the instructions, he would lose a tool he needed to complete the next step. I must have had to get up to look for screwdrivers hundreds of times yesterday because he'd yell and whine until I did.

When he crawled into bed, I locked myself in my office and told Outlandish Josh that "Ikea makes me envy you single people!" and vented about the day's events. (Thanks for listening, Josh. It made me feel better.) Thankful, that the worst was over.

I'm torn on whether I'd buy Ikea again. It certainly was a painfully frustrating day. Maybe if I do, I make sure father-in-law helps to avoid all the irrational crisis that will likely ensue if my husband does tries to do it alone.

That said... I have before and after pictures.

This is what we started with:

This is the end result:

I am quite pleased with how it did turn out, and how much nicer and less cluttered that area of the living room looks now... so I guess it just might have been worth the pain.

If you're not married to a wellspring of video game news, the new Grand Theft Auto came out today. I can't tell you if it's any good or not, because I don't really play games like that... but as an observer of one... It's pretty impressive.

By impressive, I mean when it comes to all the mundane details... Like the people randomly walking down the street or jogging in the park... the street lamps... the fact that you can go to the bowling alley and actually bowl, and the music playing is the sort of the stuff that you'd hear when you'd walk into a bowling alley... the radio stations in the car complete with realistically fake ads... I heard there are full television shows that you can watch too. It's all strangely realistic... and I keep finding myself wandering in the other room to watch him play the darn game.

I also did a couple of pages from my photos from DrupalConBoston2008!

Amy Teets - Sleeptight Sampler

Scrap-shop.fr - July Freebie
Melany Violette - Shining Star Mini Scraps
Lauren Bavin - Scrabble Alpha
Go Digital Scrapbooking - Ready For Spring

Aja Abney - My Wish For You
Amanda Behrmann - Diva Page Kit
Be Audaicious Designs - In This Moment
Jeanette Bollinger - Feb Color Challenge
Leah Riordan - Blog Freebie Kit
Melany Violette - Felt Alpha Turquoise Blanket Stitch
Melany Violette - Metal Fasteners
Melanie Willmann - Dotm

Here are the layouts that I've done with some of my wedding photos.

Credits: Melany Violette - Timeless Mini Scraps
Melany Violette - Tropical Dreams
Shabby Princess - Sweet Serenity: Alpha
Background Unknown

Credits: ???

Credits: Jeanette Bollinger - Feb Color Challenge

Credits: Aja Abney - My Wish For You
Melanie Willmann - Dotm
Scrap-shop.fr - Little Flower: Copain
Unknown cardboard corners, carboard and staples, flower and scrap paper

Retro Diva Designs - Be Mine

QuickPage Made by Sya (syapotter), using Summer Sherbet by Becki Kress
Vicki Stegall - Rock On
Amy Fenner - Girls Night Out

Awhile back I put myself in to try out Woopra, this fancy web stats app thing. I finally got my approval yesterday.

I'm impressed. Sort of.

The "sort of" part being the only operating system I was actually successful at installing their stat viewing software on was Windows (running in VirualBox on my Ubuntu machine).

On Mac OS X, I installed the beta of Java 6 and was able to install it (after finding a tutorial on how to install it on someone's blog), but upon trying to load the program... errors.

On Linux, the shell script to install it appears to be borked.

Windows... Works fine on install. At least I had a copy of Windows I could try it on. Grumble.

It's neat to see your live stats... but after all the pain with fiddling with Mac and Linux only to give up and install it Windows? Didn't really make it feel very worth it.

After something like four months, the LaLa Mittens, a pattern by the wonderful Gina is finally complete.

While I adored the pattern and yarn, I'm not 100% thrilled with the way they turned out. My gauge changed from the first one to the second one, likely due to the fact that in the course of the past four months I've shifted from using DPNs to using 2 circs for most of my smaller in the round projects. It's not largely noticeable, but the right one is a wee bit looser than the left.

I use WordPress to power one of my other blogs, and since I had some free time today I decided now might be a good time to upgrade to 2.5... and then I remembered one of the most irritating differences between WordPress and Drupal.... How the distribution of plugins/modules is handled within the community.

In Drupal, all available contributed modules have a home on drupal.org. It may not be the best laid out section of the site, and it might not exactly tell you want the best modules are for what you want to do, but two things hold true... One, if a module is abandoned, the code is on drupal.org and thus available. Two, the modules section is extremely clear about what version of the module to use for the version of Drupal you're running. Also, with Drupal... usually every release has major changes to the Drupal API, which usually insures that a module for 5 isn't going to work for 6 without changes. This, at least to me, seems to be an area where Drupal is pretty clear cut.

WordPress, on the other hand, hasn't historically been so organized. It used to be that WordPress modules were mostly hosted on personal websites of people and linked to from the Codex. Though, recently, they seem to have moved to a plugin directory where code is hosted in a centralized spot... which is definately a move in the right direction, but there's one problem.... It's still remarkably unclear what versions of WordPress any of these modules run under. Granted, I have the knowledge with WordPress that generally there aren't the sort of large changes from version to version in the plugin API that there are in Drupal... so most of the time, plugins tend to work when you change versions... but I'm a paranoid sort and the fact that I'm not being explictly told that this module has been tested and works with 2.5, it means I have to take the extra time to test it... and that makes my whole upgrading process a whole lot more painful than I'd like it to be... Well, actually, to amend that statement... SOME of the plugins list what they're compatible with... but many haven't been updated recently so it's hard to know if they actually are compatible with 2.5 or not.

These are the scrapbook pages I've done with pictures of cousins Willa and Wyatt on our trips to visit them.

Credits: Aja Abney - My Wish For You
Shabby Princess - Express Yourself

Credits: Scrap-shop.fr - Little Flowers: Addon Lilas - Photo borders
Scrap-shop.fr - Little Flowers: Copain (I think?) - brown bg.
Go Digital Scrapbooking - Welcome Kit - Love
Background - Unknown

Lauren Bavin - Bottle Cap Alpha
Valeri Brumfield - Sweet Page Kit

Lauren Bavin - Gold Page Pebble
Marcee Duggar - Give Thanks Freebie
Frames are form iScrapbookWorld (I think?)

Credits: Scrap-shop.fr - Magical Harmony
iScrapbookWorld - Red Letter Vellum (alpha)

Digitreats - Skip
Leah Riordan - Blog Freebie Kit
Amy W Designs - Touch of Love

Digitreats - Skip
Leah Riordan - Blog Freebie Kit
Amy W Designs - Touch of Love