January 31, 2016

Good morning everyone! I'm back! Not daily like I used to be, but hopefully weekly from now on. I have a new schedule & a new plan & I'm REALLY excited about it! Normally this happens to me on New Year's Eve / New Year's Day, but this year there was nothing. I wasn't feeling it like I used to & thought maybe I was just getting older. It was kinda depressing not being as excited as I used to be ... but here I am, at the end of January & NOW it kicks in. Just a little late this year, but it did come. Friday was the big day of change & inspiration which also meant the day of rewriting / recoding my entire schedule in HTML grid format. As usual, I wanted to go to bed early & get a bright & early start to my "new life". And, as usual, I was so excited that I couldn't sleep & then overslept until much later than I normally wake up. ::: sigh :::

I watched a couple movies:

I checked out a work-from-home site called Elance. The trouble I have with these sites is that I'm not a salesman. I was there looking for other types of work, yet what do you need to do 1st? Sell. You need to sell yourself. Come up with a "professional title" & then write a nice bio about yourself & of course, the better the bio, the more work may come your way. What am I supposed to say? I'm an almost 50-year-old gamer that has cats? Seriously, what the heck am I supposed to say in a bio meant to get me paid work? I sat there & stared at the blank screen for a while & then just gave up on that whole idea.

I bought a few games:

Worked on a kit afghan I've been crocheting for a while called Ripple Afghan:

My personal Website has been offline for a while. I still own the domain name, but it was blind forwarding to a Wix site that I had build for my Minecraft server a while back. I just found out yesterday that the blind forward was only half working. The page was blank white except for a Wix ad at the bottom. That version of my server has been gone for a long time, so I removed the forward & tried to get my personal Website online again. Well, to do that I need hosting for it, which I currently don't have, so that's going to have to wait until Monday at the earliest. Besides that, I ran into other snags too related to my Website. I still have Paint Shop Pro, but Animation Shop was lost in a hard drive transfer (along with a ton of other files) & I have no way of making animated graphics now. I have to look into a whole new way of doing it other than how I used to & I don't even know where to begin looking. This is also going to require money since I'm sure I'm going to have to buy the software & those 11 years of Paint Shop Pro are out the window now. When I said I wanted to start over, I didn't mean I wanted to have to purchase all new software. :/

Of course I'm still playing Minecraft! Although my new plan won't allow for as much of it as I'd like. Raw Fish. Go kill some spiders, gather some string, make a fishing pole, find a nice spot on the edge of a lake, & go fishing! This is my favorite way to obtain food in Minecraft. I hate killing all the animals I come across because once you kill them all off, then what? I prefer to go fishing for my food, as that supply never runs out & then the animals can later be caught, fenced, bred, & their numbers increased before killing any.

This is the Streamwave afghan. My take on it anyway. This is one of my favorite patterns & I've crocheted several already with 2 more currently in the works. This rainbow version is my all-time favorite of any of them I've made though. 1 of the new ones I'm currently working on (no photo yet) is made with Simply Soft yarn & is solid lavender with black edging. There will be a photo ... eventually. :)

This is my temperature afghan for 2016. It's worked in Tunisian crochet & each row is a day of the year. Each row is 3 sections: The low for the day, the average temperature for the day, & the high for the day. The section you're looking at is the high temperatures for January up through January 30th. The rows that appear white are actually pale yellow. I'll get a better photo when I finish today's row & then I'll post the entire month of January on my Ravelry page.

Besides my own Minecraft server, I also enjoy logging into other servers. One of those other servers is called VitalCraft. Check them out! They're a friendly bunch & the owner was online along with a Moderator, so if you have any questions, staff is usually available to help.

Well, that's all I've got for this week. I'll be back next week with a WHOLE lot more to say. Have a wonderful week!

January 17, 2016

Good morning everyone! Only 2 months since my last entry ... not too terrible compared to the last time. So how is everyone? I'm going great! I stopped smoking!! Stopped, not quit. I have decided that there's a definite difference. When you quit smoking, it's a conscious choice you make. You decide that you're going to quit smoking & you set a date & on that date you hide all the ash trays, throw out your cigarettes, give away your lighters, etc. Then you stop smoking & usually take it out on everyone around you, much to their horror. I didn't do that. I enjoyed smoking & had no plans to quit. This whole thing happened over 3 days & went like this: Day 1. I woke up, had a cigarette & it didn't taste as good as usual. Kinda like they were a little bit stale. I just assumed I had a cold. That night hubby & I sat down to watch TV like we always do & I made my usual bag of microwave popcorn. It didn't taste quite right either. Now I was almost certain I must be coming down with a cold. The next morning I woke up, again lit a cigarette & it tasted worse than the day before. Yep ... I have a cold. Strange though, I felt just fine ... but my taste buds were definitely "off". That night, TV ... popcorn ... tasted worse ... confirming this cold that I didn't "feel". Day 3: Saturday ... we went out, I lit a cigarette & it tasted FOUL! I mean horrible, nasty, licking an ash tray foul! It gave me a headache that lasted for hours & it took me a long time to get the horrible taste out of my mouth. That was the last cigarette I ever smoked in its entirety. That night I made a bag of popcorn & it was also horrible. That was the last bag of popcorn I ever microwaved. So you see, I didn't "quit" smoking ... I just stopped. Since that happened I have tried a couple of times to have a cigarette. I take a single puff & out it goes. I just can't do it anymore. Cigarettes & microwave popcorn are forever out of my life. Definitely a healthy thing for me! I have no idea what happened. Divine intervention? Your guess is as good as mine, but I'm not complaining. We've saved a fortune by not buying cigarettes anymore. As for the popcorn, another snack food has taken its place. Apparently I'm now completely addicted to Cheesy Poofs (Cheetos). They cost more than the popcorn! Ugh. Well, that's my huge news for the new year. I hope all of you are doing well. Until next time ... stay safe & be happy. This is the only life we're given, don't waste it being angry or sad.