Tag: pony-bear friends

  • “Quick Takes”

    Well, it’s a good thing Rachel is awesome and won’t mind that I’m totally stealing her idea… ’cause I am. 😀

    Ah, hang on, backtracking a bit:

    “Quick Takes” are actually, as far as I know, Rachel’s and my mutual boss’s idea. To fill in the dead air between the longer “proper” weekly(ish) posts on his blog, we typically post a few Quick Takes over the course of the week, usually short responses to other bloggers’ posts (that we also post as comments on the originals).

    Rachel adopted the concept for her own blog, but with a twist: not responses or one-offs, rather, sometimes instead of a regular “full length” post on one general idea/theme, she’ll put up a “7 Quick Takes” post, containing seven sort-of mini-posts on whatever seven things are on her mind / going on in her life that week!

    Now, I realized, that’s perfect for me. See, as all 4 of you who read this sucker have probably noticed, I’m not exactly the world’s most consistent blogger. >.< I'll be all gung-ho about it for a while, but then silly things like work and even – *gasp* – actually occasionally having a life will keep me from writing for a while, and it flatlines. But the real blog killer isn't lack of time, or even lack of motivation (usually), but lack of inspiration. Scratch that, no, that's not really it either. It’s lack of a single item of inspiration that overwhelms the rest of the inspiration-bits flitting about my head. I always have things I want to write about or share with the interwebs, but I only very occasionally have a thing that I am sufficiently compelled to and have enough to say and think would be interesting enough reading to devote a whole post to. And while (clearly), I could set to rambling and make words on any gorram thing, I can never choose from amongst the 17 half-baked talking points taking up residence in my skull at any given time.

    So I choose none, and that’s just stupid. And then I spend the first bit of the eventual post-gap post apologizing for the gap and swearing I’ll be better about it (which we all know just isn’t true), which is even more stupid and pointless.

    I’ve tried trying to convince myself that there’s no minimum length for a blog post. I can, and on occasion have, posted very short posts, sometimes nearly tweetable. But I just don’t like it, most of the time. It feels like when somebody tells you they need to tell you something, but not here, drags you down five hallways past numerous perfectly acceptable places to have a private conversation, sits you down, and tells you something like, “I saw your mother in the grocery store last week!” or “You have a hair on your shoulder.” I’d rather not be that person. 😛

    BUT. Seven little tidbits of news? That’s more… conversation-esque. Granted, kind of a weird, one-sided conversation, so maybe more like a letter, but still! People like letters. (I like letters. Let’s be penpals?) Seven (or otherwise several) little postlets in one post is great, because I don’t have to come up with a whole post-worth of interesting things to say about any one idea, and I don’t have to prune the idea-sprigs quite so violently!

    Well, uh, now that I’ve rambled an ranted an intro long enough to actually be a decent blog post, I think I’ll save the actual Quick Takes for tomorrow or later this week! (I can’t remember what most of them were going to be anyway…) So in the meantime… uh… here, have a random sheep doodle:

    sheep

  • Gwenny’s Blanket

    If you’ve seen me for any length of time in the past year or two, particularly if it was a situation which involved sitting, chances are you’ve seen me working on it, either plotting and scheming with a notebook full of squares and trees, or actually crocheting the little beastie.

    The notion was to make a baby blanket, hopefully as a shower gift for Rachel, but the shower(s) came and went, and the baby made her debut long before the blanket did. About a year and a half before, as it happens. But it’s done now! (Well, actually a few weeks ago, but I didn’t want to show it to the internet before showing it to its new owner, and then when that happened I forgot to get a picture, and since I finally did, work has just been using up all my time and brain juice, so there’s been none left for blogging!) Anyways…

    The Idea

    I’m a nerd and a bit of a crochet rebel, and I knew this kid was bound to be awesome, so when trying to decide what to do design-wise, I knew I wasn’t going to be following anybody else’s pastel baby blanket pattern. It occurred to me that Fibonacci squares would make for a pretty neat blanket. You know, like this:

    Each unit would be a single crochet stitch, so I’d start with a 1 (which was actually a tiny little square of 4 single crochets around, so I’d have something with a little substance, but still a side with 1 stitch to start with. Into one side of that, I’d make another little square of side length 1. I’d turn it, and on what was the side of the stack, crochet into those two stitches to start a square with side length 2.

    Turn it 90 degrees counterclockwise, and I’d have 3 stitches on which to crochet a square of 3 rows of 3.

     

     

     

    Another counterclockwise turn and a 5×5 square:

     

     

     

     

     

    Turn, 8×8 square.

     

     

    Turn, 13 square. Turn, 21. Turn, 34. And so on, working outward from the center, following the Fibonacci sequence until the blanket was big enough!

    The Actual Blanket

    Rachel already knew what crib set she was getting, and it was clear why – freakin awesome hippos.

    So I found the yarn to match – the two shades of green, soft brown, buttery yellow, pale sort of sand/stone color, white, and I threw in a nice dusty purple to add a little slightly-more-girly twist… and off I went!

    The first few squares were each a solid color, but I didn’t want to do just giant squares of solid colors, so I decided to make them striped. And to up the nerd ante, I decided each stripe had to be a Fibonacci number as well. I’d do a “random” looking assortment of stripe widths (either 2, 3, 5, 8, or 13 rows), but they had to add up to the right number for that square’s total! So it kind of turned into a puzzle for me as I made it, and I ended up with this (plotted out on graph paper and then MS Paint!:

    The crocheting up to that point went pretty quickly, comparatively. I mean, it was a large area all in tiny single crochet, but except for the first row of each square (which took a bit of concentration since I was working into the side of previous rows) and remembering to change colors every so-many rows, it was all just long rows of single crochet – requiring abosolutely no concentration. So I’d just tote it around to work on while listening in church, chatting with a friend, watching tv, sitting in a cafe, whatever. And thus, good progress was made.

    When I’d finished crocheting that chart – up through the 89 square, it’s long side was a pretty good width for a little kid’s blanket, so adding one more square (144) would make the blanket big enough, give or take a border around the whole thing, maybe.

    However, a square of 144×144 single crochet, even striped, was just too boring for this blanket…

    So I decided to put a tree in it!

    …uh, sure, why not?

    So I spent the better part of the next year trying to draw the tree I saw in my mind. Eventually, I came up with a decent sketch, and gradually shrunk, converted, re-colored, pixel-by-pixel adjusted, begged, pleaded, and beat it into a 144 pixel by 144 pixel square (one pixel per stitch) in MS Paint – a rather elaborate 8-bit tree, with the two shades of green strewn among the leaves – and in a fit of lunacy, even arranged the striping non-pattern pattern to continue as the backdrop, trying not to the greens or browns muck around too much with the visibility of the tree:

    Frankly, at that point, I was pretty darn proud of myself! …Until I got a few rows into crocheting the leaves (working top down, since I obviously wanted the tree upright, and decided the smaller squares should be the top of the blanket). I still just kept toting it around everywhere I went, but now also had to tote a giant, taped-together, blown-up printout of the chart, and mark each tiny little square so I knew what came next!

    It was a little absurd, but by this point its intended recipient was almost a year old, completely adorable and funny and sweet and smart and absolutely worth it. So I didn’t mind at all. 🙂 And then I finished it! Wove in a thousand little yarn ends, added a border, gave it a good wash so it’d be nice and soft, and gave it to lovely Gwenny!

    The Finished Product

    Gwenny inspects her new blanket
    Gwenny dances on her new blanket

    Its funny, the design is actually more fitting than I realized (until it was very nearly done. Gwenny’s full name is Gwendolyn Shiloh which means “beautiful peace” – and so does this blanket, in a quirky, nerdy sort of way! To me, and I’m sure I’m not alone, trees represent both stability and growth. They’re sturdy and strong, full of life, and calming. They represent peace.

    They’re also beautiful. But part of what makes them beautiful, visually, along with so much of nature, is – oddly enough – directly related to the Fibonacci sequence and that arrangement of squares!

    The way a tree’s branches divide and where they are placed around the trunk, how the leaves are arrayed, flower petals, a sunflower’s seeds, the spiral of a snails shell or a hurricane, even the relative lengths of the bones in your finger, all of these patterns can be described by the golden ratio (the ratio between to adjacent numbers in the Fibonacci sequence – or the length and width of this blanket) and/or the spiral formed by the squares. So much of nature, and so much of beauty, shares this pattern. It’s beautiful. The tree is peaceful. It works. 🙂

    The End. 🙂

  • 134 TweetUp, Take 2!

    On the Monday the 9th, they announced the new launch date would be Monday the 16th, around 3 in the afternoon. Daddy said he had to help the sistercreature move home from school right around then, so wouldn’t be able to go. (Somebody got their priorities on wrong! 😛 )

    I still wanted to drive back down so I’d be able to get around without begging my aunt/uncle or the tweeps for rides, but the parents were none too keen on me roadtripping with other tweeps, (even though I had been talking to them for ages, spent a few days with them in person now, and everyone had to pass a Federal Government background check to get into the tweetup!) and even less amenable to me driving alone, and no friends from home were available for a random vacation that week, so I talked my aunt into letting me borrow their extra minivan once I got down there, and started scrounging for cheap flights.
    "Baby Party" Invitation

    The plan was to fly down either Sunday evening (or super early Monday morning if it was significantly cheaper), since I’d been co-planning a “baby party” for Rachel and Elliott, to be held Sunday right after church, so wanted to stick around for that. (You’re not hallucinating, the last post did say I rushed home from the first one for Rachel’s baby shower, and now I’m talking about another one… sort of. That was a small family-and-close-friends sort of shower, this one was a bigger church-wide celebration for almostMama AND futureDad.)

    This is the invitation I drew (pretty adorable, if I do say so myself!), which we snuck into church bulletins on a Sunday we knew they wouldn’t be there:

    Conflict! D=

    Then, we tweeps were informed that we might be able to have another shot at seeing the RSS retraction (well, re-retraction!)… which was scheduled for noonish the day before launch – AKA, exactly when the party was happening! The real trick was “might”. Being there for RSS retraction and getting to be that close to a shuttle on the launch pad would be an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, if it turned out we could, especially since there will literally only be one other space shuttle on a launch pad ever again… but did I want to miss a party I helped plan for my best friends for a maybe? A long-shot, even? Dilemma! (And we didn’t even know when we would find out if we could go, to at least decide if I could wait to find out before finalizing plans!)

    The more I thought about it, the more I was leaning towards taking the chance that the maybe would pan out, skipping out on the party to get to Florida in time to make the RSS retraction if we were allowed to go. I mean, logically, seeing RSS retraction up close and unobstructed would be a literal once in a lifetime opportunity, while baby showers are clearly not, and in this case, not even limited to once for this baby! And I did technically fly a thousand miles to make it to that one…

    Besides, Rachel is almost as excited about all my crazy NASAtweetup adventures as I am!

    BABY SHOWER vs. SPACESHIP

    Ultimately, no matter how awesome the friends and anti-cheese the shower, that right there should have made it a no-brainer. But, after all, I am the master of making simple decisions way more epic and convoluted than they have any right to be… and then the maybe did solidify into a yes, I saw a picture from a previous tweet-up of how close we would actually be, and I was sold. I found a super cheap flight on Spirit airlines for early Sunday morning, arranged a ride straight from the airport to Kennedy, and told my fellow party planners I wasn’t actually going to be present at said party.

    Meanwhile, it occurred to me that I was going to get a new camera. Not so much a decision as a realization – I’d wanted a nice digital SLR for a couple years, but my inner cheapskate would always slap me upside the head, point at the price tag, point at my bank account, and laugh. “Someday…” I’d think, wistfully. And then, an epiphany of sorts:

    If you are EVER going to spend THAT much money on a camera,
    it BETTER happen in time to take some pictures of that frakking space shuttle.

    Instinct had always said wait until I was a “grown up” with an income I could actually survive off of outside my parents house… but honestly, the value of a camera is not in the camera, it’s in the pictures. What makes it worth the money is how you use it, and I did want to get a nice camera eventually, so in a sense, I would be being a bad steward of the hypothetical future camera if I missed my chance to photograph one of the last space shuttle launches and a ton of other cool stuff, just because I waited too long to buy the camera.

    I thought about going with one of those in-between sort of cameras, with a decent optical zoom and more manual functions than a point-and-shoot, but without interchangeable lenses, but then my mom agreed to chip in a couple hundred bucks as my slightly-early birthday present, so entry-level legit dSLRs were a bit more doable. So I perused the interwebs a bit, asked twitterfolk for their opinions, and ran around to every store I thought might have a decent camera trying to figure out which to get. It would have been nice to get another Canon, so I could use the lenses on my film camera too, but I was ultimately wooed by the Nikon D3100 (plus 55-200mm lens for some nice zoom), which seemed like a better camera than the Canons in the same range – and then was on sale at Best Buy for a hundred dollars less than that!

    And then there was panic.

    Spirit Airlines is cheap, in every sense of the word. The ticket price is very reasonable, comparatively, but/because they charge you extra for everything other than getting your arse from Point A to Point B. For a hopefully 2 day trip, with access to a washer dryer if needed, I didn’t need a lot of stuff, and Spirit wanted at least $28 for even a carry-on, so I figured I’d try to avoid that, and just cram everything in my purse, but I needed to clarify that I could have both my rather large purse and camera bag without paying anything. Spirit’s website was not helpful, so I tried calling them, which was less helpful. (Automated menu was broken, no matter which button you pushed, when you finally got a human, it seemed to be the same guy who barely spoke English and couldn’t understand my question!)

    So I turned to the rest of the internet… which just made it worse. Not only could I not find an answer to my question, I could not find a single positive review of Spirit Airlines. Besides complaints about nickel-and-dimeing, which I was okay with because the total still ended up cheaper than any other ticket, last minute anyway, there were horror stories about planes getting delayed for days because of weather or mechanical problems and Spirit refusing to put passengers on alternate flights or refund/compensate or do anything to help, cabins being horrendously dirty, seats being even more crammed and uncomfortable than usual, and the staff being generally unpleasant.

    Also, in the midst of this, I discovered I didn’t know where my drivers license was, which I’d need both to get on the plane at all, and to get into KSC. Spent the better part of the day before I’d leave looking for it, getting yelled at for not having it with me at all times (it’s not like I need to see it regularly, so I just hadn’t noticed it wasn’t in my bag), trying to pack, and generally freaking out. Eventually my dad found it under a seat in my car, where I had looked, but apparently not well enough.

    Getting there: AKA, more panic.

    The flight was to leave at 6am, from the Atlantic City airport, so I figured we should leave around 3am to have time to get there and get through the airport… and since I rarely get to sleep before then, just didn’t plan to. That evening, I went over to church to help set up for the baby party I wouldn’t be at, and then came home to finish packing (and conceded to maybe having to pay for a carry-on backpack, if they wouldn’t count that as the personal item in addition to purse and camera bag… the rules were really confusing!)

    I knew I had told my dad when and where I had to leave from, so when I went to wake him up and he said we didn’t have to leave for an hour yet, I figured he knew what he was talking about… but when we were getting in the car close to 4:30 and I asked him if he knew how to get there or needed the GPS, and he looked at me like I was a moron, I realized he thought I meant Philly, and had forgotten the flight was from AC, and I had been right with my original time estimate, so now it was going to be a miracle if we got there before the plane left at all.

    Thankfully, traffic at that hour is pretty non-existant, the airport was slightly closer than Dad thought (he was thinking of a different one another side of the city, apparently), and I was able to call the airport itself, who had no way of getting in touch with the Spirit people at the gate (???) but did assure me our ETA would leave me enough time to get through security and to the plane in time, which I did. *phew*

    Spirit’s lines were confusing as crap, and the lady directing traffic was bitchy and condescending about it, but I had ditched even more of my stuff in the car so I could get through faster, so with just the purse full of clothes and camera bag, 1 Days to LaunchI got through security pretty quickly, and ran frantically through the airport, only to discover there was still a frakking line at the gate! >.<

    The plane wasn’t nice, by any stretch, but it wasn’t disgusting or noticeably more uncomfortable than other coach seats, and did manage to leave on time and arrive in Orlando in one piece and on schedule. My ride’s flight was not, and rental car confusion added further delays, so I had a nice long while to sit in the parking garage waiting to leave, but we still made it to KSC and the press site a few minutes before we needed to be on the bus to the launch pad!

  • Intermission

    This post may make more sense if you read the #NASAtweetup posts first. (Part 1 & Part 2)

    So launch was delayed until Monday at the earliest, and the tweeps were all scrambling to see if they could stay. For most folks, it was a matter of seeing if they could get another day or two off work and rearranging flight/hotel reservations to accommodate a few extra days on the space coast to see the launch.

    For me, however, there was no question of if I could/would stay to see the launch. There is absolutely no way I’m missing a chance to see the space shuttle launch from this amazingly close! With a portable job and relatives to crash with, I’d stay til Christmas if I had to.

    No, the question was, “Hmm… not launching til at least Monday, eh? Well, it’s Friday, and I’d like to be in Philly for Saturday afternoon… that’s enough time to fly home and back, right?”

    Yep, you heard me.

    Remember what I said about not having a reasonable bone in my body?

    See, my dear friend Rachel is having a baby, and her surprise baby shower was Saturday. I wasn’t expecting to be able to be there, once the tweetup date had been moved from mid-April to the end, since the launch was supposed to be Friday afternoon, and with a couple gazillion people there, traffic would be all sorts of impossible getting out of the area afterward… and since we drove down, there literally wouldn’t be enough hours between when we could leave and when the shower would start, even if we drove straight through…

    But with the delay, it occurred to me that this trip really hadn’t cost me much, so I had just enough time and money to fly home for the shower and fly back for the launch, and drive home with Daddy as planned.

    He, of course, thought I was insane. But when I get an idea in my head, it’s hard to stop me, and I had decided I wanted to go to Rachel’s baby shower!

    Surprise!

    I found a reasonably-priced flight for Saturday morning that would get me back just in time, and my mom volunteered to pick me up at the airport. It was pretty funny, because I talked to Rachel via email Friday night, so she knew about the delay and that I was still in Florida… then.

    So when I turned up in her house the next day, she was pretty surprised! ^_^

    It was kind of epic, and just as well that I came home for it, because now it sounds like it’s going to be a little while before the next launch attempt. They’re not setting a new date yet (until they make sure the part they’re replacing fixes the problem, I guess), but not before the 8th, they say, so Dad’s driving home, and once we get a date, we’ll see if he can go back, and if not, I’ll find a flight back! One way or another, I will see Endeavour fly!