Friday, February 6, 2009

Something about washing sweaters is just extremely appealing to me right now! All this talk about lanolin and soft and fragrance and I want to get everything nice and clean. The temperatures have finally gotten up to freezing levels here, instead of single digit, sub-zero land and I think I have a pre-season attack of Spring Fever.

Last weekend, I washed all my curtains and windows and just glorified in the light and cleanliness. I hope to continue with bedding and rugs and such this weekend. To me it makes more sense to do *spring cleaning* when you’re actually trapped indoors and can be refreshed by it then when in a season where you can actually romp outside ;p

And I’m going through my closet and armoire and dunking lots of stuff in the sudz.

Here’s something that made it into a warm bath:

Actually, the Right Front and Back were washed THREE TIMES! They were significantly different in tone from the Left Front and it appears a lot of that shift was due to D.I.R.T. (and maybe spinning oil). Right after they were immersed in the sink, the water turned brown! This gave me HOPE!

Maybe I’d be spared from a frogfest? So I dunked again. And again. Rinsed well and rolled ’em all up in a towel.

And I think they are, as inspected in daylight, right about the same color, so, WOOhoo! I am not going to rip and re-knit! The one skein was definitely different; it seems very very slightly heavier. But this to me is A-OK!

Invoking the Galloping Horse Rule: “If you can’t notice a mistake at 50 yards from the back of a galloping horse, there is no problem!” I’ll be moving along now to the sleeves. Bonus: the fronts are separated by a button band as well, so there’s more neutral vision breaking up any discrepancy.

More Clean-Up Squad: As a stone cold geek, I love to jump on the software upgrade wagon. Wave a version change in my direction, and I sit up, excited, paws padding air. Gimmee. N.O.W.

However, I was almost cured of the Early Adapter Virus back in the Summer of ’07 when I tried (and failed miserably) to upgrade my blog with WordPress 2.5. Not only did this wipe out the version on my server, it totally hosed my RSS feeds so it appeared I disappeared.

This time I was ready. I backed everything up within an inch of its life (learning a lot in the process, like my web host has a copy of my site archived if needed in a worst case scenario and to burn a DVD with the entire thing, etc.). Then I followed their extended instructions line by line and prayed.

Apparently, last time around, my chief mistake was that I was sucked in by the rhetoric WordPress has on its site promising a trouble-free 5 minute pain-free installation experience! That could be true for perhaps a first time user of the platform with no archives, but for me, with usable database activity going back five (!) years, not so much.

Not only was it painful, it was time-consuming to fix it, ultimately taking days to sort out (weeks if you count the RSS feed thingie which still isn’t right). So this time I was ready to try the upgrade and if it tanked, immediately whack the original files back on my server.

But YAY! It worked, with one minor glitch: I didn’t delete a folder as I should, being confused by their instructions, which was easily fixed. So today, the blog sits all fat and sassy with their new Dashboard onboard (if you have not updated the address to ye olde blog, it’s now https://bigbrainmultimedia.com/rambles/ and you can subscribe here.)