The Big Time

My Dish service was upgraded today. (Surprised the sent a man on Sunday, but since he would have been working somewhere, I scheduled for today.) The technician was rather amused by our ten year old receiver and dish. We we first were hooked up, we had a fat old standard television, in our escape from rabbit ears. He could not believe our old style hookup.

Now that he is gone, I am marveling at the vividness of our HD televisions finally getting an HD signal. And now I can dvr programs as well. Big time for sure.

I can hardly wait till February and watching the Daytona 500 in HD.

Now back to knitting with some great television viewing.

And a little picture of my Little Farmer, with his favorite cat. Just because.

Posted with Blogsy

Adapting

Well. I had planned a nice chatty post, with pictures and overflowing with witticisms. I charged up the laptop, and was raring to go.

Unfortunately the said laptop was not.

So after updating virus definitions, doing a system restore and various other piddly things, I am leaving it to scan itself, after giving it a stern talking to. After all that is done, maybe I will try my email and Internet there. (Wish me luck.)

After that, I'm not sure how witty I can be, but here goes, on my tablet.

I think I mentioned that I am back knitting my previous projects, but I am also starting a couple new ones. These are deadline stealth or at least semi-stealth projects. One I can share up to a point and the other not at all. So I will need to find other items to blog about.

Which means there may be more non-knitting posts.

And, of course, incredibly cute baby pictures. Even a stranger at the band concert the other day, who saw me searching for Cow girl and Little Farmer in the bleachers, said to me "Is that your cute baby up there?" And by golly, it was.

Because he is. Cute I mean.

Posted with Blogsy

Growing a Perfect Fit

I think I finally have gotten through most of my techy issues for a while.  Once again I hear that Google e-mails and passwords have been stolen, so once again I had to go through and change my password, as well as update it on my various tech devices.  Hmmm...maybe I am too involved in modern technology.
Or not.  Anyway, now that I have that all done, onward.
I am really enjoying my Custom Fit experience.  The pattern is long, (10 detailed pages) but with shaping on each piece, geared to fit my "fluffy" shape, it is to be expected.   I have only started the back, but I also have begun the back waist shaping.

If you look closely, there are two decreases to the left of the green marker.  There are matching ones on the right side.  And in a few rows there will also be some in  The rows go faster because of each section being knit separately.  Sure, I will have seaming at the end,but I can block the pieces to shape as written better when I have just one layer to measure at a time.
I am enjoying this experience.  The only thing is when I start my next sweater, I will make sure to dry the swatch first.  The yardage estimated came out way high.  That is because I entered the "damp" weight of the swatch into the pattern wizard.  As a result, the wizard said I needed 12 skeins.  After using a bit of math to adjust the yardage to the actual dry weight of my swatch, I should have enough left over for mittens or a hat or two.   Next time I will be a bit more patient.

Berry Patch

After discovering that the neighborhood strawberry patch was open for the season, I paid a visit.  I also dragged along a friend who hadn't known where this U-pick farm was.

No, I am not that good at berry picking.  She offered to take my picture and at the same time had me hold both of our carriers.  I only got about 4 quarts.  This old girl just cannot bend over as much as I used to, without getting dizzy.  I had to quit before the end of the row.
Perhaps I can do better next time.
And there will be a next time.  Remember Lil' Farm Gal?  I offered to spend one day a week with her now that school is out.  She spends alternate weeks at her dad's during the summer, but when she is here, I will be spending time with her.  I plan to take her berry picking next week.   We will see how well we can do then.  She is bound to be better than Older Son was.  He ate most of the berries he picked when I took him, years ago.
I may also have found out why I kept finding links in the blog titles.  I hopefully have that problem solved.  As a result, I think I have a blog template I like and will stay with for a while.  I kept changing the blog template to try to correct the problem.  There should be a measure of stability in the background once again.

Goodbye Google Reader

I read quite a few blogs. Some are knitting blogs, some political or news, several are genealogy related. My friends do some blogging, although many are just on Facebook now. I had discovered the best way to follow them all was to subscribe to them through my Google Reader app, on my phone and laptop. So I was a bit upset to hear, a few months ago! that Google was going to abandon their Reader. The deadline is in just a couple days now.

With Google Reader, I could add a blog that I enjoyed and all their posts would be collected in one place for me to read. It saved me from having a ton of bookmarks too. It was a great timesaver.

So with the death of Reader I needed a replacement. I also wanted one that would work with my iPad. I tried and rejected several. There were pros and cons on each. Finally I chose Feedly. It worked on Android and iPad.

Best of all, I was able to import my Reader feeds so I didn't need to search for each and add it.

I highly recommend it to anyone who likes to follow several blogs. It can also work for news feeds and has suggestions and a great search feature.

So goodbye Google Reader. Hello Feedly!

Posted with Blogsy

Geek Alert!

I will freely admit.  Farmmom is a tech geek.  I love my smart phone.  Several years before that I had a PDA, with an auxiliary keyboard.  I used to take minutes att meetings, typing away into something not much bigger than my current cell phone.  I use my laptop often, when knitting doesn't get in the way.  I even have a Nook e-reader, which I also love.  I think I have read much more since getting it.  I blog (of course), read other blogs on  Google Reader, and I track my knitting online on Ravelry.
And now I have a new toy, an i-pad.  I loaded my pictures onto it, a couple reading apps, and even a knitting app.  I found a deal on a first generation tablet, that looks brand new.
And yes, I have some games on it.  Siege Hero, here I come.