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Although a small earthquake jolted me awake at 5:45am today, I intend to make it to midnight tonight so I can assist 2020 out the door none too gently with my foot. The year threw the family one last curve a few hours ago, and I for one am ready to see it go. Movies and booze are in order. I have “The Rise of Skywalker” to start off the evening, and pulled out some other entertainment to keep me going the remaining hours:
This was the only little bottle of screwtop champagne the store had; I have no idea whether it’s any good but a screwtop is a must. I am averse to pulling champagne corks since The Incident that ended 2017…
I wish you a 2021 full of many happy hours of creativity. Cheers and Prosit!
Here’s what the holidays look like when it’s 80 degrees outside, and with all the plant life browned due to lack of rain. My mom and I were roasting on this walk.
For those of you who celebrated Christmas today, I hope it brought you lots of joy!
The rare coastal snowman…
My mom thought I was kidding when I asked her at Thanksgiving to keep an eye out for a glass head in secondhand or antique shops; she had never heard of such an item. She went to an antique store near her house about 10 days ago and there one was! It made it to me in one piece:
Why, yes, I did decorate for Christmas this year. That’s not a propeller, it’s a Weihnachtspyramide.
Hollow, so it’s not too heavy. A little greenish, so it’s not too boring. Smooth, so it’s easy to dust. Now I can block hats, take photos without having to walk all the way to Don & Sancho in the park (good for when I’m in a hurry), and do crown design without getting a crick in my neck trying to see a hat in progress on my own head in the bathroom mirror. Hooray all around!
Grape retriever:
Grapes can really roll far when the floor is made of wood. Usually they skitter from the dining table into the project room; this one sought refuge way back under the sofa. I like it when tools have more than one use, don’t you?
Wave farewell to 2012, because it’s gone soon! I have booze and movies and knitting lined up to tide me over until midnight:
I had 11 days off work (4 weekends + 4 holidays + 3 forced vacation days) in which I had planned to write up some more project notes for Mmm… Yarn and Ravelry. Instead, I spent 6 days visiting my parents and on the other days read books, knitted and watched TV, and went for walks. The last precious day off is tomorrow and I’ll be getting together with my Monday night knitting group to welcome the new year; it’s back to work on January 2.
The visit was ocean-centric. Here was Christmas Eve:
(In the evening, Netflix was out so we watched “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” instead of something holiday-ish; watching my mom afterward trotting horse-like while clapping her hands with pretend coconuts was an added bonus)
And here’s Christmas Day (whale spouts were far too far away to photograph):
And the day after that (no, none of us donned a wetsuit):
Tonight’s goal: finish the above-pictured baby sweater. All that remains are some tails and to sew on its buttons. Cheers!
No knitting, but a bit of nature for you. When I visited my parents last weekend, I found lovely tiger-striped caterpillars resting in the parsley. A quick Google Images search revealed these are monarch butterfly caterpillars.
Yesterday I went to the park where I went on the bird walk (first time I’ve ever been and the last one for this year) and also spent some time looking at the herons in their tree. I saw 6 adults and 2 juveniles and managed to get a too-far-away picture of one of the juveniles. You’ll have to click for the big version and even then the bird is small.
Two families of geese, one with 8 goslings and one with 4, paddled around in Stow Lake in a group:
Then came out of the water to eat tufts of grass:
And were so enthralled by their snacking that they came nearer and nearer, until a couple of the older goslings got close enough to brush up against my shins.
Of each pair of parents, one kept watch and the other snacked along with the youngsters. An adult gave a brief quiet honk once and 15 birds hustled for the edge, ready to jump in the water to get out of the way of an approaching dog. Dog was on leash, though, and passed quickly, and all the birds went back to feeding.
Tonight I went up on the roof to look at the solar eclipse. I was oddly excited to see that little crescent reflected on my piece of paper, perhaps because it’s one of those things I’ve never managed to see due to unfortunately-timed cloud cover.
That’s all for nature, folks. Back I go to watching bad TV, plodding away at a couple of knitting projects, and wishing tomorrow wouldn’t be the anniversary it will be.
Only 3.5 hours of 2011 remain. I got my entertainment for the evening lined up while ago:
Yep, drop spindle is in the picture plus a couple of projects I’d like to mark complete in 2011.
Two weeks ago my work held its craft fair. My table was very successful; I brought 101 items and sold 33, just under one third of my inventory. Very nice. The finished objects box actually closes now and I had cash enough to buy “Vintage Baby Knits” and to take the intermediate spindling class at A Verb For Keeping Warm on 12/18 and have been practicing since then. Another practice session is a good way to wrap up the year.
Christmas was good, too. I visited various family members along the Central Coast. I figure if you can’t have snow you must enjoy the sand.
Today I went to the farmers’ market as usual for a Saturday, then because the music in the car was so entertaining (I’m on a Joy Division kick and the car is great for singing along) I drove to Ocean Beach and watched the waves awhile before going for a long-ish walk, encountering dozens of the happiest off-leash dogs I’ve seen in a while. Lots of jellyfish were washed up on shore plus the largest shark egg case I’ve ever seen:
Lots of bloggers I read have done their year-end accounting for knitting and spinning. Mine’s not done yet so I leave you with an ocean photo instead:
Celebrate well tonight!
Use your sock needle to poke the plastic tab on a zip tie to release the tie without cutting it! Advantage 1: don’t need to rummage through the toolbox for the sturdy yet slender clippers, whereas sock needles are always lying around nearby. Advantage 2: don’t need to try to weasel the tip of said clippers into that tiny gap without damaging the lights’ cables. Advantage 3: can re-use the tie when it’s time to put the lights away again.
Yes, for the first time in 3 years I’m actually hanging lights. I also got out O, Plastic Tree and even the Weihnachtspyramide, on which I’ve lit the candles so the wise men are racing in clockwise formation.
Note to self: do not walk away from the Weihnachtspyramide while the candles are lit even if it’s in sight. I had just finished the previous paragraph when I heard a crackling noise, looked over toward the table and saw one of the candles had gone berserk. Ran over and put it out. All is well; however, now the windows need to be open so my smoke alarms don’t go off. Brrr. The wise men will live to rotate another day.
Non-knitting content post today, readers, but important for fiber folks to read especially if you’re not a techie. I learned this afternoon that Ravelry, our very popular knitting/crocheting/weaving/fiber-ing website, got hacked recently. Ravelry user names and encrypted passwords were stolen. Even though passwords were encrypted, Casey (Ravelry’s code monkey) recommends you change your Ravelry password as soon as possible. I have changed mine. My old password was and my new password is Ravelry-specific; I don’t use them anywhere else.
I am grateful that Casey announced this soon afterward and was open about what happened. Some of the companies that were recently in the news delayed their announcement(s) or were not so open, making their and consumers’ problems even worse than they already were.
Lots of Ravelers in the forums are asking why anyone would want to hack a knitting site specifically. To learn about our yarn preferences? To put himself or herself in danger of being attacked by a million users armed with pointy sticks? Lots of theories are proposed; however, from what I’m reading some folks don’t seem to understand that it’s unlikely the data thief is after our knitting content. Thieves typically look for something juicy to steal, something that can generate financial gain.
It’s most likely the thief got user names and encrypted passwords and that’s where this ends. We’re relatively safe. It’s also a little possible the thief can unencrypt those passwords or stole more than what Ravelry’s Power That Be have yet detected (I’m definitely not accusing anyone of anything here, just saying it’s something to consider). Assuming the thief is able to unencrypt the passwords, he or she now has a known working user name and password combination that you may have used in another area of your online life. Our Ravelry accounts also have the potential to contain information that can readily allow someone with bad intent to really mess up your life, were someone else to log on there as you:
– Your real name (if it’s anywhere in your profile)
– Your spouse’s/kid’s/pet’s name
– Your country/city/state of residence
– Your birthday month or day or year, or combination thereof
– Your blog address
– Your email address
– Your favorite colors and curse words
– Everything you’ve written in your “About me” section
Fortunately for us Ravelers, Ravelry doesn’t store financial information; a hacker couldn’t get your credit card number from Ravelry. However, if you’ve used your Ravelry user name and password combination on any other site (your bank or PayPal or Amazon, perhaps?) and if this thief has it, he or she has a means of obtaining access to those and having a field day. Those things I listed above? People commonly use family members’ names or favorite things to create their passwords so you may have some easy-to-guess passwords. If you use the same password for your email account or your blog or your business that you’ve listed in “About me,” change those passwords too. Obviously, any fellow Raveler has access to all our profile information and we should use a little discretion in what we put there. I like to think I can trust all Yarn People but I know that’s an unrealistic assumption.
The other big potential problem I see is that the thief who took this data knows we’re all Yarn People and if he or she got our email addresses (or can guess them — is your email address your Ravelry user name followed by @yahoo or @gmail?), can now send targeted email. Possibilities:
– a malware link disguised as an enticing cashmere promotion
– a spearphishing (targeted phishing) message saying your account at Ravelry or Favorite Local Yarn Store or PayPal is suspended, “click here now to verify your account”
– a message from a fellow Raveler saying “I’m on vacation and my wallet got stolen, I need help so click this link to send me money”
So… be careful out there. Don’t use the same user names and passwords for everything. If you have, go change some of them, especially financial ones. Be cautious what you click on in an email even if the source looks like it’s from a friend or reputable vendor. If the email is something financial (esp. from a bank or credit card company), don’t click on any links in the email. Open a browser window, browse to the bank’s web site, then log in and look for any messages. All that stuff is spoofed so easily that it’s better to be safe than sorry.
And the last thing we want is for someone to get our yarn money.
One more thing: anything that pops up that says “your computer is infected!” and it’s not from the anti-virus and -malware software you installed on your computer and pay an annual subscription fee for, don’t click on it, not even to close it. Restart your computer, launch your anti-virus software, and run a complete scan.
My apologies for long-windedness. Information theft is something I feel strongly about, too many people I know have fallen prey to one or more of these, and data thieves and malware writers should be locked up in windowless cells without a computer.
Not even five hours to go, west coast-ers. I don’t have the wherewithal to process project photos and write a proper Mmm… Yarn post, plus I want to watch a movie, so I thought I would let you know I have a way to while away the few remaining hours of 2010 (booze won’t be poured until 10pm or so):
Yep, more spinning. It’s really cutting into my knitting time.
My best to you all for 2011.
Mmm... Yarn 