yarn hiatus

Haven’t knit or crochet all week.  I guess I’m resting from my frantic knitting last week, I dunno.  I have been busy though, and I’ve got lots to share.

Firstly, if you are religious, please pray for my dad’s parents.  They’re my only living grandparents and they’re both in the hospital with various (serious) problems.  Dad’s actually on his way to Arkansas right now to see them.

And second, last night one of my car’s front tires got demolished when I slid on some ice and hit an embankment.  I have to get a new rim and new tire.  I’ll be contacting the junkyard tomorrow to see if they have a rim for about a fourth of the price of a dealership.   And, of course, ice means there was some wintry weather:

That’s the view from our buddy’s back porch.  Not a lot of snow, but enough to melt and make the roads icy, apparently.  So I’ve been sitting inside, where we haven’t turned our central heat on yet in an effort to save money, with my little space heater and my pretty mugs of cider and tea:

I’m collecting Fiesta brand tableware, like my mom does.  I only have 4 pieces and they aren’t as old and collectible as my mom’s, but they’re very pretty all the same!

In other news, I’ve been making a shimeji!  What is a shimeji, you ask?  Shimejis are cute little animations that walk around doing adorable things on your computer desktop.  I’m making one of Ron from “Harry Potter” because the only HP shimeji currently available is Snape, and there need to be more!  Here’s the program in action on my own desktop:

And since they’re not doing exciting things at the moment, here’s some of what the can do:

You can move them around and make new ones (they also self-replicate) and stuff.  They’ll be able to do more when I’m done.  And just so you don’t run away thinking I’m good at programming, I should tell you that I’m using the preexisting Snape program and just overwriting the image files.  Makes it seem way less cool, but let me tell you this is very time consuming and you have to be very precise!  I’m enjoying it though, and hopefully I’ll get to making other ones if this one works out.  So far so good!

Also you may have noticed that my foray into Photoshop work isn’t just with little shimejis — there’s a new banner for this site!  I know it’s pretty simple but I think it’s cute.

Well that’s all for now.  Sorry that I haven’t been knitting/crocheting this week.  Hopefully I’ll get back to it.  To be honest my arms are a little sore right now from all the wing chun martial arts practicing, haha.

Thanks for stopping by, hope to see you back soon!