If this is all I have to be bugged about...

Don't you just hate it when that woven strip in the towel shrinks up the 2nd time it's washed? It makes it harder to fold them, and it just looks bad. The towels in this group all did this except the one that was being used that day. This happened 5 years ago and I'm still pissed about it. Damn dryer in my rental apartment, anyway.

If this is the biggest complaint I can come up with then I'll take it.

Our annual drought.

The lake behind my house is freakishly dry. We are not supposed to have a beach on it AT ALL. Although it is fun to see the birds on it sometimes. The same birds are not so visible when they have to be on the grass.

They don't talk about our usual drought on the news these days because the DCF screw-ups, the economy, and the tsunami in Japan with the atomic disaster are out-shadowing our little water issue.

Dress shopping, an exercise not enjoyable yet.

Bealle's only had one dress in my size appropriate for an afternoon wedding. ONE. So I moved on to the mall.

Penney's was remodeling and the women's department was not well labeled. They had rack after rack of dresses. OMGZ they were so cute! So many in my colors, too! Wait, where are my size? I wandered around for 15 minutes before finding the one rack with 5 different dresses in my size range. Only 3 of them were in my colors, so off to the dressing room with them. Yeah, I know I need to lose the socks, but my last shopping trip in dress shoes ended with a blister, so I wasn't going there!

There were only 3 fitting rooms, so I got to wait in line for a booth. Once in I decided I kind of liked all three dresses, but one was somewhat better fitting than the others and wasn't so revealing of underwear etc. so it was the winner. DING DING DING!

The encouraging or discouraging thing is that I am only one size away from being able to shop from the hundreds of dresses instead of the five. Not that i wear that many dresses, but the ones in my closet have been there since I was married, that's how old they are. Sometimes you gotta update your stock, ya know?

I didn't get the memo.

But then, sometimes I am not that sensitive. Sheeesh.

I had a health scare a couple of weeks ago and after it was all over I went out and joined a gym. Yay me, finally doing something about this out-of-shape body instead of eating cookies.

I have been to the gym about 10 times total so far, and I have only once seen people wearing colors. That was on Friday night. Seriously, there's black, navy, gray, white and khaki. There were probably 60 people in there on Friday evening around 6:30, and 7 or 8 women and about that many men had on colored tops. No one had on colored bottoms at all.

I had purchased workout clothes in navy and coral, so when I wore the coral I REALLY stuck out. By the way, my gym is really big like the one above. But that girl in pink in the picture I snagged from the 'net must be on her Friday night date, ugh I mean workout.

Notice how I'm carefully not mentioning my workouts? Let's just say getting out of chairs has been a challenge for me since Wednesday. So I must really need it.

Just when you thought it was exciting enough...

After writing the piece about my embroidery machine and coordinating software I started exploring on the "box's" website and discovered there is an upgrade, and the upgrade supports sub-directories. Yay!

I downloaded the upgrade and attempted to install it according to directions. Well, sometimes no good deed goes unpunished, and in this case it did not upgrade according to the printed instructions. Not to be discouraged, I uninstalled it and did it again. And again.

You know the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Just call me certifiable by this point. Now it doesn't connect at all. I am officially stuck with the 6 designs I put on there Saturday until I can get this straightened out.

Somehow I suspect this won't come free.

Machine embroidery, starting over, again

I had forgotten how much I had learned before and it had to be relearned. I got my embroidery machine in 2002 and had a great time with it, but didn't use it from 2005 to 2009. My friend Sam wanted a special embroidery job on his new lab coat, and I was glad to help. But Murphy assisted in the design of this one. He wanted the snake on a stick portion of the paramedics' symbol, but all the designs I found had the star of life with it. He picked a good one and I was able to edit out the star, then put his lettering around the stick. As it turned out, he liked the star but the lettering wasn't what he envisioned. We worked up a sample piece with brief lettering and I decided we needed to use my computer to adjust the lettering, rather than rely on the built-in letters on the machine. You can never tell on the machine how the kerning is going to work without actually stitching it out first.

I only had one font on my software, so I went to the website that sells them, thinking it would be a simple operation to add a couple of fonts. HA! Not so fast sister. The version of software I had was the 2004 version and I needed to upgrade before anything else could happen. So I did, and $235 and an hour of fussing with the installation later we were designing the lettering. Sam did most of the adjusting because he knew exactly what he wanted. How fast he picked up how to run Embird was amazing.

The embroidery machine uses a memory card that is similar in size to a Compact Flash card, but wider and flatter. The card can only hold 6 designs at a time, even though each one averages about 50 kb each. That's KB, not MB. Wow. That's how designs get from my computer to my machine.

The card reader/writer has a usb connection but I can't just use Windows to copy the files over because Windows does not recognize this device as a drive. So it requires proprietary software to do the actual transfer. But, the software does not recognize sub-directories (how primitive is that?) so designs have to go in a top level of c: or in the top level of a jump drive before I can even put them on the machine's card.

This is one of the main parts I forget each and every time. Oh, and the card reader with the card in it has to be plugged into the computer BEFORE the computer is booted up, or it chokes on a com connection which it doesn't even have. So after 9 YEARS I got smart and wrote these things on top of the Amazing Box. That's it's name, really!


We worked over 6 hours on this, and it looks great! But friends and family, know this, I will NEVER do this for money. It's so slow for me I could never make a profit! Plus, as everyone might guess, once you have to do it, it's no longer fun. This was fun, thanks for a great afternoon, Sam!

Teaching myself to fidget

So, in addition to doing some actual, real exercise, I'm trying to teach myself to fidget. I've heard fidgeters burn a tiny bit more calories and raise their metabolism (a tiny bit). I don't know what the science of this is, but I like TV and reading, so I am trying to add leg wiggling and toe tapping to my habits.

So, if you are sitting next to me and I'm jiggling your chair, know that I meant to. Tell me to stop, otherwise I won't.