Dudes, srsly who turned off the lights?

G'day all!

It is a remarkably dull day here in Seattle today.  Seriously dull to the point of wondering who turned off the lights?  Even our new monstrously bright light is struggling to cut through the gloom.

Maybe I just moved to Mordor or something.  With sights like this around the place (clearly taken on a non-gloomy day) it is possible

Gruesome gibbet

Someone has had fun decorating

I have had an interesting time recently in the Confucian sense.

Two days ago this laptop shut itself down in the middle of a hangout (google video chat).  I have detected a serious disk error!  Goodbye!

But it restarted ok and my boss and I had further discussions about it and he decided that either it goes to be fixed or he just gets a new machine (he's making the assumption that it is going to be pricey to work out if it is the hard disk or not) and ships it to me.

So yesterday I sat nursemaiding it through a BIOS disk check and a Windows disk check.  Neither of them noticed any bad sectors or really bad stuff.

So we decided it was fit to go again.

BANG!  Shut down in the middle of another hangout.  This time really bad stuff - when it came back up it said it didn't recognise the disk.  So I shut it down again and brought it back up in safe mode when it started booting.  And ran out to buy a backup disk cos despite what I thought, this particular machine was not being backed up.

My car needed petrol (gasoline) so I stopped at a servo (petrol station aka service station aka gas station) to fillit up.  In the US, they have the clicky things on the pump trigger squeezy thing so I clicked that on and filled up the car.

Then my finger got jammed in the trigger mechanism.  Petrol is still pumping EVERYWHERE - down the side of the car, on the forecourt and I can't get my finger out and I can't switch off the pump because the hand in the trigger thing is the one close to the pump and I can't swivel around far enough to get to the emergency off thing or just switch the pump off.  I get my finger out and it is still pumping fuel!

ARGH!

I manage to reach the hanger up thing and flip that down and it stops pumping.  Ok, it was only probably a gallon or less lost but ARGH!  a) getting my finger stuck and b) stupid design that lets me get my finger stuck and c) this is dangerous stuff and I've just sprayed it all down the side of my baby car - he's only four months old.

So I tell the guy inside and he's like yeah, ok, are you hurt?

No, only jammed my finger and lost a bit of skin.  And spilled gas all over the place.

And he's like whatever.  I'll tell the boss.

So I go outside and wash off the side of the car as best I can whilst trying not to stand in petrol, and then get in, expecting to blow us all to kingdom come, but I don't obviously because I'm still here telling you all how I became a total environmental hazard.  But how embarrassing!  I've never had that happen before, and all because my hands were cold and the trigger needs you to squeeze as hard as you can to start pumping but to stop it, needs to be as far in the unsqueezed position as it can be... stupid!

And it was only the second time that I've had my fuel discount card actually work.

And I forgot to say whether or not I wanted a receipt I was so frazzled, so now I don't know how much fuel I put in the car (nearly nine gallons, I think).  I hope the transaction went through ok.

I don't think I'll go back there and buy more petrol.  I'm already too embarrassed just thinking about it.  I've been filling petrol tanks in whatever car I've been driving at the time for 25 years or so and this is mortifying to me.


I am most pleased to say that the backup disk seems to work ok, that the laptop has survived installing two lots of software (for the back up disk and for my tax return) and is still going at the moment.  This is a good thing because I killed my old laptop two months ago by upgrading the software, only one bit didn't upgrade properly and now the fan control doesn't work and it gets stuck in a loop until it overheats and shuts down.

I seem to be extra good at breaking things.  My phone has its own quirks too.  At least my reputation has not gotten to be that of a friend, who used to walk into a computing lab at his uni and the whole room full of PCs would shut down.  His local Apple store got to know him quite well because of the number of times he went in with a product under warranty that had died.  LOL

And I still haven't caught you up on all the fun things I've done recently.

Let's start with some recent stuff and see if I ever get back to stuff that happened in September... in another post or three.

On Saturday, DH and I went off to Fibre Fusion, a little festival in Monroe, about an hour or so northeast of here.  I was surprised that he wanted to go with me but that was ok.  The fairgrounds had a canary show, a gun show, a swap meet and Fibre Fusion all on at the one time, which made for an interesting mix of people!

At the swap meet, we found this amazing old trunk.  $45 - we didn't even haggle, we just bought it.  It is a bit musty/mildewy inside so we may end up taking the wallpaper off the inside and making sure it isn't bad underneath.  If it is ok, we cna clena up the insides, then it will end up as quilt storage.  It needs some cleaning up on the outside too - it's a bit rusty and the wood is dry dry dry - but it is totally amazing.  And flat on top so that when it is all fixed up we can use it as a coffee table too!

A trunk in my trunk!
(Sounds better than a trunk in my boot or in my hatch...)
(You can see my loot too and stuff we got at home despot)

I was very restrained at Fibre Fusion.  I only bought two lots of stuff - some CVM roving after I missed out on buying an excellent CVM fleece (silly me told someone what a nice fleece was but did not take it then and there myself!) and some norwegian sheep roving and pretty coloured BFL top from Crown Mountain Farms, who just so happen to be in Yelm.  Yelm is not far from Seattle, though the only things I remember about it are a) it was small and b) I got stuck in a horrible traffic jam and it took about 20 minutes to get through one set of lights.

I showed DH how to use a carder after he expressed interest in how they work.  He then asked me if I want a carder (!!!), and I said well I already have one but it isn't very good and is 8,000 miles away, so a new one would be nice.  My old one is ancient and crabby and needs to be jollied along.  A new one would be grand.  I discovered Mr Fricke, who makes Fricke carders is a nice old gentleman and local to boot (well he lives in Washington state which makes him local).  But now decisions, decisions!  Which to buy and why?  Not Ashford or any of the big brands - I'd prefer one locally made but US made would be ok.  And a new one so I don't have to make the blasted thing work.  It took a lot of fiddling with the old one to get a reasonable result, not even a good result, and every time I used it I had to fiddle more.

As it stands, I think a new computer trumps the carder and I can only have one or the other.  Then again, I might be able to do a deal with the boss if I get a new work computer and the disk out of my own laptop can be fitted to this laptop, assuming it is the disk that is wrong with this one.  (Why not just put my disk into this machine anyway?  Because it doesn't run Windows and I'd have to install it and swap licences over, etc plus I want my work stuff to be separate from my personal stuff.  And I want to run linux/ubuntu so that I am much less fussed about viruses.)

DH also blew a wood worker's mind away by telling him how he could do a particularly nifty trick with his wood turning.

I have had a lovely time this week doing some free motion quilting.  I bought two books recently and read through them and decided to play around with a new quilt.  Plus I bought some quilting gloves and an extension table for the bed of my sewing machine (plus if I really need it, I have a teflon sheet to put on the flat bed).  OMG, what a difference it makes!  I have had so much fun putting leafy swirls on this new quilt.

Free motion quilting - fun!

I now have two quilts with their binding ready to be sewed down.  I am a quarter of the way through the big quilt.  It is taking a while but it will be excellent when it is done.

I've also been doing a bit of spinning - this stuff is glorious to spin, but alas I've spun it all up.

Blissful spinning

  60% BFL, 20% silk, 20% sparkle from Woolgatherings.

Knitting is also happening but slowly.  I'm working on a humble scarf and it is taking forever, though it turns out it is quite long, plus it is a mistake rib sort of pattern and they take forever.

Hmm, now I have myself in a fuss because the transaction for the fuel hasn't gone through yet and I'm worried that they will think I've done a drive off and will end up in trouble over it.   Off to Ravelry to fuss there!

anon!