Ravelry!

How did they know I was going to try to organize my crafty projects this weekend? I got my invite to join the Ravelry community, and I’m a-rarin’ to go. I don’t have a large stash, nor many projects on needles, but I would like to keep track of them in some way other than scraps of paper tossed along with needles and yarn into the baskets.

They’re in the process of moving it from beta to the “grown up” servers and whatnot. I’m glad I wasn’t invited earlier, because I don’t think I would have had the time nor the focus to help beta test as all the others have. It’s a really neat idea, and I hope it keeps up its momentum and turns out to be super wonderful. It’s had a huge response so far and the waiting list has been months in the making. I put my name down sometime during the first week of June, I think, and I got my invite this morning. One of the many cool things about Ravelry is that it’s for crocheters and knitters alike. It’s for yarny people in general and is trying to bridge the rift between the two crafts.

I’ve got to take care of a few things that have been on my to do list for ages, and then it’s off to Ravelry land for me. I’m going to The Knitting Librarian‘s going away party this evening, and staying at the Spinstah‘s, and then there’s the Creative Sugar meeting tomorrow, but I’ll have to find some crafty time in the middle of all that. Should be a fun weekend!

catching up

Lion head drool

Today has been a catch up day. I spent the morning catching up on sleep. I spent the afternoon catching up on photographs. I’ve finally uploaded all the photos that have been sitting in the camera since May.

I uploaded them in order, so that the most recent are the photos from Harry Potter day, and the earliest are from the End of the Semester party. There are photos of flowers, friends, family, all sorts of things. There are photos from our summer holiday in Maryland, too. I don’t have any photos from M’s wedding, though, as I didn’t have my camera on me all day. (See previous post for links to those photos.)

The photograph featured here is one of the drooling lion heads on mum’s new fountain. She wouldn’t call it a drooling lion, though. For some reason, JeT thought that particular sequence of events quite interesting, as there are many photos of my brother taking down the dead trees where this fountain was to go. Fascinating, eh?

Click through to see what else we’ve been up to.

SMRT

Have you ever planned for something in such detail that part of your brain assumes that you’ve actually done it, but then you find out, a week after you were supposed to have done that thing, that you didn’t actually do it, and then are completely surprised and horrified, have a wicked panic attack, cry a million rivers, and then have to come up with a new plan in about five minutes?

I thought I registered for the fall semester last Tuesday. But I didn’t.

I just registered a few minutes ago. Now I have to go to Mt. Holyoke on Saturdays for one of my required courses, and I have to take a different elective than I wanted. Luckily, I found classes that would meet my requirements, but I really, REALLY, wanted a particular course with a particular instructor.

I feel so stupid. And a little freaked out that my brain totally invented something that didn’t actually happen. I think my brain created a memory of having already registered, because I had gone online and selected my classes in preparation for registering. I’m so angry at myself for having done something so completely stupid. Argh.

Oh, well. Nothing I can do about it now. No use crying over spilled courses.

UPDATE: I am now registered for the main campus section of one of my classes, so I don’t have to go out to the Wild West every Saturday next fall. Thank goodness for waitlists Though, I doubt I’ll be allowed in the other waitlisted course, since I’m number twelve in the queue.

“Your snack selection is more than disappointing!”

I was playing around with Netvibes.com, setting up a homepage. I’d been meaning to do this for ages now, so I’m finally getting around to configuring modules and whatnot. Something caught my eye in the video search module: “Andy Duncan” in the tags. I had to see what it was. Consider me amused.

Four weeks, more or less

I had to write out, in excruciatingly minute detail, my work schedule for the next four weeks or so. That’s all that’s left of school for this semester. I still have an ass-load of stuff to do, though. Three assignments for archives, and two for technology, including two research papers, and a crazy exam. Seriously, that technology exam is going to kick my ass. I understand everything, I’m just not up to regurgitating it for an exam. Didn’t I have enough of that as an undergrad? If the instructor wanted to assess our comprehension, I would have rather taken a series of short quizzes after each section, than this monster of an exam. It’s worth 60% of our grade, to boot. I’m not happy about that at all. But after Friday, it will be done with. I just have to make it to Friday.

Anyway, I made the schedule in Xcel. It’s a sort of chart-thing that says what I should be doing when and how long I have to work on things. It took an hour to make, but I think it’s worth it. My brain was getting jumbled with all the things to keep track of.

I’ve finished collecting sources for my papers, now I just have to read all of them. Argh. I think I’m on the right track, though, so I’m happy about that. I’m not really sure what my angle is yet for the Archives paper. My topic is loosely this: the history of the principle of provenance, and new developments. I can’t seem to get hold of any of the classic theory writing, but I have plenty of “rethinking the classics” type stuff that addresses the theories back in the day. I should be all set. It’s not really a research paper, anyway.  It’s more of a literature review type thing. I’ve selected several articles from a few different journals, three of which are published by different countries (Australia, Canada, and the US). I think I’m going to address their differences in approach to archival theory.

Interesting? Of course it isn’t. But I panicked when we had to choose a topic in the first couple of weeks of the semester, and I didn’t have any other ideas. I’m sort of stuck with it, and have to make the best of it. I’m sure it will be fine, I just have to get reading. Blargh. Papers.