kayray.org

Hooray for the Swiss Family!

The Swiss Family Robinson, Chapter 12 part 1 – 25:44

Hooray for the Swiss Family!

The Swiss Family Robinson, Chapter 11 part 2 – 21:49

Dan and I finally got around to watching Inglourious Basterds on the weekend. I had heard that it was good and really wanted to see it, but was also worried that it might be a Tarantino bloodbath and give me nightmares. But I really loved it! The story was great, the acting was top-notch, and it was beautifully filmed. Yep, there was some blood-and-gore stuff I covered my eyes for, but not nearly as much as I thought there would be. Great, great movie. I look forward to watching it again. Christoph Waltz deserved that Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor. He was amazing. But I’m shocked and appalled that Avatar beat Inglourious Basterds for Best Motion Picture. Avatar was pretty, but the story was shallow, heavy-handed, and 100% predictable; Basterds was a movie with real depth and artistry. And the Avatar won that Golden Globe. Bah.

We’ve been having a lovely stretch of stormy, rainy weather here in San Diego. Today it’s raining on and off and very blustery — a good day for soup, so I’m making a pot of beef and veggie. My cold is a lot better but I’m still slightly stuffed up, and soup sounds like just the thing.

Hooray for the Swiss Family!

The Swiss Family Robinson, Chapter 11 part 1 – 17:33

Hooray for the Swiss Family!

The Swiss Family Robinson, Chapter 10 part 2 – 23:14

Forgot to mention http://video.pbs.org/ in my long post below. You can watch full episodes of many great PBS shows — Antiques Roadshow, American Experience, Nova, etc. I discovered this wonderful resource when I wanted to share an eposide of “The Human Spark” with Chloe. The stream worked great — no stutters, no hiccups, no endless buffering (I’m looking at you, Hulu).

I may need to double my membership pledge.

It seems like forever that I’ve been waiting for NPR to become really accessible via the web. For years, hearing their content without a radio was difficult; if they did offer content on the web, it required Real Player or other proprietary and horrible software, or it was impossible to hear anything on a Mac (or linux) at all. Streaming content was spotty; podcasts were few. But it’s finally happened! I can hear pretty much any NPR shows I want to hear, anytime I want to hear them. I’ve got three NPR-related apps on my iPhone: “Public Radio”, “NPR”, and “NPR Addict”. All three have their uses, and I also find that the “Stitcher” podcast app is a great way to find new and interesting NPR shows. And they’ve updated npr.org so that it’s really useful and works well (even in Chrome on a Mac).

For instance, yesterday I wanted to listen to Weekend Edition Saturday but I woke up too late to hear the whole thing via my local NPR station’s live stream. So I found the show in the “NPR” app and looked for other stations that were live-streaming it. I chose a station in Alaska, reasoning that they’d be an hour behind, and they were. Presto! Weekend Edition from the very beginning! When I needed to use my iPhone for something else, I found that station’s website and listened to the rest of their live stream on my laptop. (Thanks, KMXT from Kodiak!)

If I feel like listening to Fresh Air but haven’t synced the most recent podcast episode, I can use one of the apps on my phone to find a station that’s streaming it. I can use any of those apps to browse through NPR shows to find something that looks interesting.

Or I can check npr.org on my laptop and hear pretty much anything. Here’s the Weekend Edition Sunday page: http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=10. So if I forget to listen to it live, I can play the whole thing that way.

Many of the NPR folks have twitter accounts which they use well. I like @nprscottsimon (Scott Simon) and @nprLiane (Liane Hansen). They tweet interesting little remarks about that week’s interviews and stories and sometimes a bit of personal stuff (hope that surgery goes well, Scott), but they don’t clog up my feed with a lot of baloney. It’s nice to have that tiny almost-personal connection with the voices I love so much.

Here are some of my favorite NPR shows: Fresh Air, Weekend Edition Saturday/Sunday, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, RadioLab (just discovered RadioLab!), and of course all the calm, non-sensational news reports. And the BBC News Hour. And I’m starting to get into This American Life. Ira’s delivery irritated me for a long time but I think I’ve gotten over it.

So thank you, NPR, and my local station, KPBS. I’m one very happy contributing member :)

*************************

Yesterday Bob and Chloe came over which is always such a treat. I grilled chicken and bratwurst and made some delicious sautéd greenbeans-and-onions and a salad with tender delicious homegrown lettuce and the handful of cherry tomatoes which my tomato plant finally produced. Biggest harvest since I planted it last summer. (The regular tomato plant still hasn’t fruited. What’s up with that?)

Anyhow, we ate and talked and watched TV and played Farm Frenzy on our iPhones, and I helped Chloe with her Knitter’s Handy Carry-All bag. She finished up all the knitting and we blocked it. It’s still drying but I hope to help her sew it all together today. It’s a pretty good kit but has a few really bizarre instructions, such as working the handles as 8-stitch i-cord (awkward!) and sewing the inner layer to the outer layer wrong-sides together, with backstitch, as if they were made of cloth. I showed Chloe how to work the handles in double-knitting, and I’ll show her how to seam the layers together without having a big stupid thick seam allowance.

Hooray for the Swiss Family!

The Swiss Family Robinson, Chapter 10 part 1 – 23:58

Henry has a cold so stayed home from his classes yesterday. I did the Trader Joe shopping in the morning, plus other errands, and then finished my new wrap skirt, which I started on Monday. It’s cheerful red plaid fabric with some metallic threads running through it that I bought on sale a couple years ago after Christmas to make more Christmas wrapping bags with. Except I didn’t get around to making bags yet and I needed a new skirt desperately. So now I have one!

I read Henry three chapters of Dracula (Dr. Van Helsing has just shown up) and we watched a few episodes of “How It’s Made” (I think you can watch online here: http://science.discovery.com/fansites/howitsmade/howitsmade.htm) Wonderful show! We learned about Swiss army knives and cheese and rollerskates and colored pencils and other things.

Henry’s iPod Touch somehow got a parental control password set but none of us remembered setting it, and it was preventing him from making in-app purchases that we wanted to let him make. So Dan cracked it! He’s amazing. Here’s what he tweeted about the process:

Forgot your Restrictions password on iPhone? Jailbreak, ssh in, look at /var/mobile/Library/Preferences/com.apple.springboard.plist

Specifically, the key SBParentalControlsPIN. use ‘plutil -convert xml1’ on MacOS to convert the binary plist to xml

He sniffed out the password (which is one none of us would ever use, quite a mystery how it got there) and now Henry’s iPod has no stupid restrictions.

Hooray for the Swiss Family!

The Swiss Family Robinson, Chapter 9 part 2 – 34:04

Hooray for the Swiss Family!

The Swiss Family Robinson, Chapter 9 part 1 – 30:36

Last night I sat in the parking lot behing Henry’s kung fu school and watched the Lion Dance practice. It’s so cool! Here’s a video:

Henry is the head of the white lion on the right, in the back row. You can see his white tunic when he raises the head. Here are a few photos:

Preparing to march into the performance area:

Chasing each other:

The lion rears up!

Miss Strosser reminding the lion to look DOWN:

Lion heads:

The lions dance to the beat of a huge drum. Miss Edwards is drumming:

The team has several performances lined up for February, and Henry will be performing with them for the first time!

Hooray for the Swiss Family!

The Swiss Family Robinson, Chapter 8 – 37:41

I love my new purse! It’s the Arden Bag kit from knitpicks. I over-felted mine by accident so it’s a bit lumpy but oh well. Just finished sewing the lining in last night and used it all day and I just love it. I wove the straps on my inkle loom. Here are pictures! And a Ravelry link.

I sewed a special iPhone pocket into the lining so my phone will never sink to the bottom and make me panic. There’s also a larger pocket for keys, pens, pocket knife, etc.

Inside-out to show lining and pockets:

It’s not huge but it’s bigger than my old purse, so I’ll more easily be able to carry along my camera, mouse, laptop power cable, or even a sock-in-progress.

Hooray for the Swiss Family!

The Swiss Family Robinson, Chapter 7 part 2 – 26:06

Hooray for the Swiss Family!

The Swiss Family Robinson, Chapter 7 part 1 – 23:44

Finally got a photo of Henry in the vest I made him for Christmas. He seems to like it a lot, wears it all the time and even to bed in our chilly house.

Here’s what it looked like blocking and before the buttons were on:

So hard to photograph reds — it’s a lovely dark red, not orange or pink at all. The argyle panel continues over the shoulder and down the back.

Yarn: KnitPicks Wool of the Andes, Cranberry, 6 skeins. Needles size 4 (3 for ribbing). Quick pattern notes:

Starting with 75 stitches CO at neck (provisional)
divide in 3rds
4 sets of shortrows each side, every 5 st
argyle pattern on one side, 4 plain, 17 for pattern, 4 plain (obviously, add on st to left side of pattern to balance)
46 rows (at armhole edge) down back, then pick up fronts.
same short rows.
inc at neck edge until 29+29 then add 5 each side (68 total, remaining 7 will be button bands later)
(Add some stitches at underarm when joining in round, forgot to note this info)
vest is a total of 120 rows (near armhole, more down center back).
24 rows of k2p2 ribbing on size 3 needles
pick up 2 out of 3 stitches for front bands and collar
(inc 2 stitches at front collar corners every other round)
pick up 3 out of 4 stitches for armhole ribbing
8 rows ribbing for bands

More pics on my flickr or the project page at ravelry.

On Wednesday morning (Dec 30) Henry and I (and, apparently, everyone else in San Diego) went to the zoo! We had free bus tour passes that expired at the end of 2009, so we braved the long lines and took the tour. It really didn’t take that long to get onto the bus, and the tour was great — really long, and, since it was chilly, there were lots of animals out playing and doing their thing. Here we are waiting in line:

Here’s my handsome boy reading while waiting for the bus to start:

And then after the bus tour was over, we walked over to the Orangutans and Siamangs and watched them for a long time. Clyde, the 300-pound male, was resting under a burlap poncho, but two of the females were playing right by the glass!

Had a great New Year’s Eve yesterday with Henry and Dan. I went grocery shopping in the morning, and then I spent a long time cooking a big lovely Shepherd’s Pie for lunch/dinner, with tomato sauce from scratch and all, while Henry and Dan worked for hours on another of Henry’s adafruit.com kits. Dan says that Henry’s getting to be really skilled at soldering! Then we all lay around in the living room and watched the Victorian Farm Christmas Specials, which were marvelous, and even more interesting, I thought, than the main series, because they went into way more depth and detail.

And then I put on the 1951 Alastsair Sim version of A Christmas Carol, which was great! And then Henry and I goofed around on npr.org until midnight and then we all three sent Chloe simultaneous Happy New Year text messages because we were feeling silly, ha! And then we all ran out into the back yard and looked at the beautiful full moon and listened to the drunken neighbors setting off illegal fireworks, and then we went to bed.

I finished all the knitting on my Arden Bag kit and will felt it today.

I have still not blogged about Christmas, darn it. We had a wonderful time with Chloe and Bob and Kirsten and Marcos in the week before Christmas — ate, talked, played hours of Beatles Rock Band, and saw Avatar; and then we had a nice quiet Actual Christmas with just the three of us. Henry gave me two of my long-wished-for Betsy-Tacy reprints and Dan gave me a beautiful new digital camera, which is super-cool and suits me perfectly. And Dan liked his Christmas socks and nixie clock kit, and Henry liked his books and knitted vest and electronics kits. Here’s Henry doing some soldering:

And peeling apples for the pie he made to take to his Temecula Grandparents’ house

We had a very Merry Christmas and hope you did too!

Hooray for the Swiss Family!

The Swiss Family Robinson, Chapter 6 part 2 – 20:44