Hello from the land of fried hard-drives

Dude, I just get caught up on blogging and reading blogs after our vacation and what do you suppose happens? Well, my nearly four-year-old laptop has developed a few, shall we say, "personality quirks" over the last several months, but if you could put up with a few minor annoyances, it was still doing fine. That is, until one evening last week when it informed me of an "unbootable system drive." I am not a computer expert by any means, but I was pretty sure this was a bad thing, so we took it in to the Geek Squad for a look-see. They say it is a "fixable" problem, but the price to fix it is almost as much as a new low-end laptop, so the laptop will be going to the big computer lab in the sky. We will probably take it in to see if they can retrieve the data first though, we just haven't gotten back to doing it yet. So for now, we move the big desktop (firmly pre-flat-screen-monitor vintage) down into the living room as an interim solution. It isn't even close to as nice as the laptop, but it works. We will probably be shopping cheap laptops in the not-too-distant future...

While the laptop was gradually dying, I discovered that I had been named a "Rockin' Girl Blogger" by KnottyKitty!

And then, when I started trying to catch up with blog reading, I found out that I had also been selected by KnittyMama. Wow, for a chick that does most of her rockin' either in a LazyBoy or to toddler tunes and who gave up on ever being one of the "cool kids" decades ago, I am extremely touched and honored! So now I am supposed nominate five more rockin' girl bloggers. There are certainly a lot of rockin' girl bloggers out there (and I read the blogs of a bunch of them), but since I am a fairly wimpy commenter, I will pick my top five that I read and comment on...which means that two of my top five are the two lovely gals that nominated me! So without further ado, my nominations for Rockin' Girl Bloggers are:

1. KnottyKitty Knits - Knitter, crazy cat lady, gainfully re-employed, what's not to love??
2. KnittyMama - A knitter, a Midwesterner, and a mama who's crunchy in all the right places
   
3. The Life and Times of Florence Knitingale - a very funny lady who knits and occasionally provides gratuitous kitty beefcake and cheesecake
   
4. Marianne's Knotminding - Lovely knitting, gorgeous flowers (my black thumb would be green with envy if it could manage it!), and an all-around nice gal!
   
5. The Toddler Whisperer - another former Hawkeye, Bug's first (and only regular) baby-sitter, and children's librarian. I don't think she knits, but we'll cut her some slack anyway ;o)
   

The littles still (and constantly) keep me entertained. Bug's new thing is telling jokes. In general, they usually include several nonsense words and the punch line is invariably either "A Cadillac and a beaver" or "A poodle in a dog house." The jokes never make any sense at all, but Bug amuses himself so much that you can't help laughing. Even though they don't make sense, the punch lines aren't as mystical as they sound. The first is misquoted from the movie "Cars," where McQueen says he "floats like a Cadillac, stings like a Beemer" and the second comes from the book "The Twelve Dogs of Christmas" where a poodle in a doghouse plays the role of a partridge in a pear tree.

Bean's vocabulary is blossoming and she is becoming quite the little conversationalist. I'm still about the only one who can understand most of what she is saying, but she is suddenly putting pretty complex ideas and concepts together in her discussions. She also our fearless, swimmy little fishy at the swimming pool. Our apartment complex has a pool and we spent time there both Saturday and Sunday when it was in the 90's. She loves to jump off the side of the pool and we basically just fish her out after she goes under. She could do this non-stop forever! Who says two-year-olds have short attention spans?? Bug loves going swimming too, but he is a little more tentative than his little sister.

In knitting news, the lace shawl continues on, though I haven't been keeping track since my über-geeky spreadsheet is residing on the dead hard-drive. I am on the fourth repeat of chart two (of eight, I think...to lazy to go look right now!) so things are cruising along and the rows are getting longer and longer! My Roza sock has been frogged. After knitting six inches of leg, turning the heel, shaping the gusset, and doing an inch or two of the foot, I got the bright idea earlier in the week to try it on. Ummmm...wouldn't go over my heel. Drat (what I actually said was a bit more colorful, but you get the idea). I am trying to decide whether to start over now or let the yarn sit in the stash and think about its sins for a while and start a different sock in the meantime. I need to decide, because I need to have a purse project! I also got my entrelac purse felted. Apparently, Cascade 220 and entrelac just love felting! As if entrelac weren't magical enough...add some felting! Whoa!