Monday, July 28, 2008

Domestic Miss - A Sweet And Sour Slice of Life: Knitting Give-Away

Domestic Miss - A Sweet And Sour Slice of Life: Knitting Give-Away

Domestic Miss is having a give away on her blog. Addi Lace Turbo needles and some very cute cupcake buttons. Check it out by clicking on the link above.

Friday, July 18, 2008

Having fun is soooo exhausting!

I've been busy as usual. Take yesterday for instance...we left the house at 10:30 am to go do a demo dance at a "retirement community". We danced from noon until 1 pm. Then they fed us lunch (hot dogs and watermelon, but I only ate watermelon. I just don't care for hot dogs). Then we danced a little more. When we left there, one of the other couples invited us all over to their house for wine, snacks, margaritas and visiting. Fun, fun. We left there around 3 pm. I made a quick call to some other friends whom we've been intending to go visit. We figured...hey we're on a roll. Might as well do it. Yes, they said, come on over. So, another hour or two was spent visiting with friends. Got home about 5:30. There was a message on the answering machine from another couple. Hey we're going to take the boat out for a cruise this evening. Want to come? Sure! Gulp down a quick South Beach dinner (nasty things but they do come in handy). Change clothes, grab a bottle of wine and we're off. There were 7 adults and 4 kids and one dog on the cruise. It was really nice. We cruised over to Rick & Cheryl's "manse" and played in the pool for awhile. The return cruise was really great....full moon and Camp Champions had a gorgeous fireworks display so we just sat out on the lake and watched. We pulled into our driveway about 11:30 last night. Whew! Being retired is hard work!

So, I have been knitting a little. The Myrtle Leaf Shawl from VLT was cast on a week or two ago. I'm using Claudia's Handpainted Laceweight in DF Green. Love the yarn! I'm not sure about the shawl though. It seems too holey and I don't know that it's worth the time and effort that it will take. It is patterned on both sides with SSP and P2tog on the WS. SSP is a PITA! There are so many other shawls that I love...Icarus, Adamas, Fir Cone, Swallowtail, Highland Triangle....why should I spend time doing this one if I don't love it? Anyway, here's a picture. I tried to smoosh it out so you can see it. This is after one repeat. Oh yeah, another thing that I don't like about it is that on row 13 the first stitch of the first repeat is done as a K1 and on all the other repeats on that row the first stitch is a k2tog. The last stitch is a k2tog. So that totally screws up the markers for that row and the next row. PITA!

Myrtle Leaf
The Featherweight Fantasy is coming along very fast. I am more than halfway done with it. I'm using Zephyr DK in Ebony. I LOVE Zephyr DK. It has such awesome stitch definition.

Featherweight Fantasy 2

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Rescue and Recovery? NOT!

This post is very unusual for me and I promise not to make a habit of things like this. But....I am just amazed and stunned by this whole ordeal and have to share it with somebody. Lucky you!

I have a Lenovo 3000 series desktop computer that I bought about a year ago. It has Vista on it and 225 gb hard drive. It came pre loaded with some Lenovo software called Think Vantage, Rescue & Recovery. I went through the tutorials when I first got the computer as we all do (right?). I found out that the system is set to automatically make backups of your ENTIRE system so that in case of a failure you can recover. Sounds good huh? One glitch, the default is set to make the back up to your hard drive. Now, excuse me, I'm no computer genius, but doesn't it seem a tad bit let me think...how to put this fairly....IN-FREAKIN'-SANE!! to backup your hard drive that might go bad to your hard drive. Somebody please explain the logic to me!

So, I went in to the program and turned off the automatic backup and assumed all was cool.

Fast forward to this spring...I began noticing that my hard drive space was down to about 50 gb. And everytime I would look at it, there was less space. Last week I finally got really concerned when I saw that I only had 11 gb free. I went through all the files and could not come up with anywhere near the 200+ gb that I must be using to only have 11 gb free. I downloaded a program called Treesize (freeware) and it didn't show any unusually large files.

Enter google....I googled "lenovo disappearing hard disk space". And found some information that said the Rescue and Recovery program was the culprit. No way, I thought smugly. I turned that backup off. Hmph! But what the hell, I'll check into it. As it turns out, there are two different places that you have to turn off the scheduled backups. One in the Rescue and Recovery program which I did and another in the Maintenance program which I did not. So, it was making backups to my hard drive of my hard drive. Genius!

So, I opened the Rescue & Recovery program, clicked on the advanced tab, clicked on Delete Backups....and it gave me a list of the backups. There were six and they totalled 150+ gb. Can you believe this?? So, I went through the list and deleted them. A word of advice here...start with the most recent backup and delete in that order. In other words, start at the bottom of the list and delete up. Any other order takes forever. Trust me, I tried.

I am so happy now. I have 160 gb free!!