I really despise feeling ill. I had a pretty good streak going for about 10 years when I can honestly say I don’t think I ever felt sick from a cold, flu, or headaches, or any of the common ailments that strike most people.

I can gloat no more. Tonight I am fully SICK and I had to work and be cheerful and sing and it was incredibly taxing. The worst thing is that when you’re sick with a cold, or at least when I am, it always seems to get 4800 times worse at night. As happened tonight, right during the biggest customer rush I’ve had in several months. Sucky. I took two Sudafed and 1 Tylenol-3 and still just want to lay down and die so this will all be overwith.

Now it’s 3:18am and I have to be up around 6:30am because I am leaving for SoCal (Southern California, I suppose I shouldn’t make any assumptions about my reader base, although I think I can keep track of you all on one hand and wave at you with the other) at noon and have done zero preparation for the trip. I am going down there to take dance workshops for three days; isn’t that exciting?

No, it is not — not if you’re as SICK AS I AM.

In good news, however, I did get the Movable Type server up and running, and I am in love. I will give you the links to the new journals when I get back from socal (Monday). After tasting MT, I now analogize (is that a word?) (yes it is, i just checked) Blogger to stomping through Windows, and MT to gliding through the ever so sleek and lovely MacOS. Obviously there is no reason to continue using Blogger (well, until I mess something up with all my MT tinkering).

I hope you all have a lovely weekend and I will miss lurking through your journals for the next few days. How will I live without internet access? I SO need a powerbook.

I am having a major blogging crisis because I am superlatively anal and can’t deal with the fact that categories are non-existent in Blogger. Every time I try to write, Blogger dances around and sticks its tongue out at me and infuriates me and then I get fed up and spend hours trying to (unsuccesfully) modify things so that it will do what I want (and in the meantime I get distracted and modify pointless things as well).

And I have so many lovely pictures to post and so much yummy food to tell you about (yellow curry last night, mmmm) and I JUST CAN’T DO IT!!

Sorry that I am such a freak.

Anyway, this update was to tell you that I am trying to set up a new journal but since I am poor (and cheap) I don’t want to pay for the easy service that does what I want. Instead I am trying to mess around with perl servers and cgi and all sorts of things about which I know nothing, and hoping that it all comes out happy in the end, because I can do all that for free. And it’s soooo much less work than messing with Blogger (no, not really…).

So bear with me! I guess if it ends up not working I will suffer through blogger, which seems to be good enough for everyone else anyway, so why should I demand anything different?

Not thinking things through.
Holy hell! How did it get to be 7am?

I know you are dying for me to write more more more about my exciting life and/or knitting, but I am totally swamped with work.

Somehow when I volunteered to take on all the financial and administrative responsibility for our little business, I ignored the small fact that I don’t actually know that much about accounting. Bookkeeping - simple; accounting - not as simple as you or I think.

Soooo, I have been spending a lot of time trying to force Quickbooks to print out 1099s for our subcontractors. (These are LATE, by the way.) I think Quickbooks would be much more cooperative if I had already entered any of the relevant financial transactions into the database. I mean, entered any information AT ALL. This, in turn, would have been easier had I decided to use the program sometime during 2004, instead of, ohhhh, last week.

A couple weeks ago I broke down and started looking for an accountant to help me. But I came to learn that they would charge far more money than I am willing (read: able) to spend. I am sure that my little brain can handle reading lots of IRS publications and Quickbooks manual pages for that amount of $$.

So that’s what I’m doing. Reading lots of stuff and forcing other people to hold off on filing their taxes while I drink Red Bull and smash Quickbooks into submission.

The silly thing about it all is that I’m sure I could use Excel or even Word to simply print the dollar amounts onto the 1099 forms. But instead, I have to do it the anal way and have the accounting to back it up.

Anyway, I needed to take a break so I thought I’d say hi. Break over.

p.s. I forced myself to go back and use proper case in this journal entry. I hated it. I am going to be liberal with my use of capitalization and I don’t want to hear any complaints about discrepancies. Thank you.

So, I learned to knit from a book I bought at Wal-Mart, back in the fall of 2002. I don’t even know how that is possible, because the nearest Wal-Mart is nowhere near me and the only times I remember going out of my way to visit it were once when I needed to buy snow chains at 2am for a trip to Tahoe that morning and once when I needed to buy a lighted star tree-topper for my xmas tree (I swear Wal-Mart was the only place that had them, trust me, I looked everywhere else before resorting to the big, dirty WM, and I needed that tree-topper).

But I do remember that this book came from the bdWM, even if I don’t remember the trip that resulted in the purchase. It’s called I Taught Myself KNITTING and it has, until now, been the only reference I have ever had in knitting. I still carry it around with me. Not because it’s great (it’s not) but because it’s all I ever knew.

For some unknown reason, it never occurred to me to look ONLINE for knitting information. How this resource escaped me, I will never know. Especially because I spend about 40% of my waking life online. Maybe more, even. Probably more. Now that it has occurred to me, it is looking as though I’m doomed to spending more like 80% of my waking time online. And another 10% inside this store, which I discovered (in person) today and where I nearly went insane with giddiness.

But back to me and knitting. After the requisite practice blobs were done, I decided I was ready to make my first real project. I chose to create a scarf in 4×4 ribbing out of sportweight black chenille.

Yeah, not real bright. First of all, sportweight? Scarf? It took a VERY long time to finish that scarf. Secondly. BLACK. CHENILLE. In case you don’t know, black yarn is difficult to work with, especially if you are a(n anal) beginner who makes tons of mistakes and cannot continue until those mistakes are fixed. If your black yarn is chenille - very thin chenille - I’d be surprised if you finished and ever looked at another knitting needle again without wanting to poke your eye out with it.

I can be an excitable kind of girl, though, especially when it comes to learning new things. So I stuck it out and finished the scarf, and gave it away as a gift. Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of it. I hope it still looks like a scarf, since I realize now that at the time I didn’t have a very good grasp on weaving in ends (just one technique that I got a shoddy education on from I Taught Myself KNITTING). It did turn out to be a very nice scarf, when all was said and done.

(to be continued, because if I don’t post this now I likely never will, and I have to go watch 24 now…)