Attacking My Day

It’s Monday and I am touring the facility and taking up slack. My to-do list is at my mercy. Today’s post is a roundup of miscellany.

Back in the dark ages when I still had to print hard copies of my knitting patterns for sale in stores, I bought an HP LaserJet color printer. Silly me, I thought that because I had—and still have, going on 23 years later—an HP LaserJet 1200 that is an absolute workhorse, a second HP would be a wise investment. Nope. That printer lasted all of two years. I replaced it with a Xerox Phaser 8560, which was a good printer for half a dozen years until it decided to throw an error code and stop working. It has sat here on the desk serving as a large paperweight for nigh on two years now. In December, when I bought the new iMac, my computer guy offered to look at it for me an attempt to fix it. We have had some trouble coordinating our schedules, but he was here for a couple of hours this morning and now I have a working color laser printer again. I can print all those bag patterns in color instead of black and white. Yay. I have also dearly missed the automatic two-sided printing.

The shop walls are getting sheathing today:

We are under yet another winter weather advisory; the guys are trying to get as much done as they can before the next round of wind and snow. We are still way below average in terms of temperatures. According to the weatherman on the local TV station, it appears that trend will continue until at least the second week of March. I did see a long-term forecast, though, that is predicting higher-than-average temperatures for April, May, and June. We can only hope. It would be lovely to have a warm spring.

I have been having conversations with the tech people from both Squarespace and MailChimp. The MailChimp tech person sent me an e-mail with a note that they ran my RSS feed through some analytical software that showed an error, and that if I looked at the code, I would see where to fix it. I forwarded that e-mail to the people at Squarespace and pointed out that I was not a coder and wouldn’t know what to do about this problem even if I could locate the problem in the code. I also suggested that they get together with the MailChimp people instead of bouncing me back and forth between them. Squarespace got back to me and said that I had copied and pasted something into one of my blog posts that triggered the issue and that I needed to remove the bad text formatting. I don’t generally copy and paste anything into my blog, but I went through all the blog posts I’ve written since this problem arose and removed any potential bad formatting. That hasn’t resolved the problem—MailChimp still won’t recognize the RSS feed—so I am waiting to hear back from Squarespace. Personally, I think it is really dumb that something like text formatting can mess up an RSS feed, but what do I know?

Our friend Elysian is working on getting her teaching certification in Montana, and part of that process includes taking a test. The first time she tried to take the test, she had to drive to Salish-Kootenai Community College, about 50 miles south of here. When she got there, she discovered that they had forgotten to schedule the test. She and eight other people had to have their testing dates—and sites—rescheduled. She texted me last Wednesday and asked if I could meet her son when he got off the bus from school on Friday and keep him until she got home, because she had to go to Missoula to take her test. I responded that I was going to be in Spokane, but I checked with the husband and he said that yes, he would be here and yes, he would meet the bus. (As he reminded me, he has plenty of experience waiting at bus stops.) The two of them came inside and watched Toy Story until Elysian got back. (And she passed her test!)

I ran into my friend Debbie at Costco last week. She is a special ed teacher at our elementary school and she was also instrumental in getting a gardening program started there. A few years ago, she wanted to build a greenhouse—a very nice greenhouse that cost somewhere around $30,000. The school administration humored her even though they were convinced this was an unattainable goal. Word got around, though, and the money came in. Now the school has a greenhouse as well as several raised beds where the students learn to grow vegetables that they prepare and eat. Her latest project has been a hydroponic system. My friend Tera wants to start a hydroponic system, too, so she went and looked at the one at the elementary school. She was very impressed. It is a completely self-contained system and they are growing lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers in it. One of my goals, now, for the current garage space—after the husband moves all of his stuff over to the new shop—is to set up a hydroponic system in there to grow salad fixings over the winter when we can’t get to the greenhouse.

My good intentions not to start anything else until I get some of these other sewing projects finished went right out the window on the way home from Spokane. I came home through Bonners Ferry, Idaho, and noticed that a small quilting store there had a sign up advertising a retirement sale. I only bought two charm packs, but they got added to the lone charm pack of the same fabric that was already in my stash. I’ve been wanting to make a quilt specifically for someone I know, and this fabric will work perfectly.

My windshield has two rock chips in it that need to be patched. I made an appointment with Safelite today and will head in later this week to get that done.

I finished the new church website today and took care of some other church-related business.

I refilled the woodbox. A fire in the fireplace will be most welcome tonight.

Now it’s time to sew, or at least press some fabric.