Happy birthday to me!

I meant to write a post yesterday, but as usual, life got in the way. Things are busier than ever, but they continue to go well. I love my job, my social life is engaging (no, not that kind of engaging, sadly), and I’m happy with the way things seem to be going lately.

Another Year, Another Grey Hair
So, yesterday, July 18th, I turned 26. Twenty-six is not old. (It’s not.) But, like everyone else, I’m sure, I sometimes feel so at odds with how old I really am. Sometimes I feel so young - I’m the youngest person at work (that I’ve met, anyway), I’m only just now starting a “real job,” (working at eGM really just doesn’t count at all), I’m only just beginning to get things like a 401K package (wow, setting up a retirement fund? It’s kinda scary…!), and I’m still willing to do things like stand in line at midnight for the release of a children’s book. (Only a few more hours to go!) But at other times, I feel downright old. Like yesterday, for example, when I was so tired after work, I could do nothing but sleep. Or today, when my fibromyalgia was flaring up a little bit (the waiter at lunch accidentally refilled my glass with Diet Coke, I didn’t notice, and the aspartame is a big no-no for me, as it aggravates my fibro) and I was in a little bit of pain for the afternoon. What really makes me feel old, though, is my grey hair.

Only 26, and I’m already going grey! Can’t see it? Click the picture for a closer look - I promise, it’s going grey faster than I can stand.

I was complaining about this to mom last night, and she gleefully informed me that she didn’t have any grey hairs at 26. I dutifully reminded her that she was well on her way to a full head of grey by the time she was 27 (being the mother of a 2-month old on her 27th birthday). Oh well. Can’t fight Mother Nature and Father Time, two parents who don’t care how many hissy fits you choose to throw.

Birthday Celebrations:
My birthday was, all things considered, a pretty quiet day. I was kept busy by a lot of things at work, and I crashed for a 2-hour nap when I got home in the evening, followed by a 1-hour chat with my mom, and then I hit the sack for real and slept like a baby (yes, I was that tired). Still, I did get a nice surprise when my coworkers of all of 2 1/2 weeks presented me with birthday gifts! I received a beautiful basket of flowers, a cute card signed by the people on my team, and a goofy yard-stick of bubblegum (my boss is totally a little kid at heart, and he just rocks, as do all the other people I work with).

Birthday card and flowers from my coworkers and boss

(Also, I’m sorry, but after typing the word “coworker” so many times, I can’t help but help but share this goofy icon I made a while back to use over at Livejournal… For more information on what “orking” is, click here.)

Books and Movies
Work doesn’t leave me too much free time these days, but I’ve spent my evenings reading and watching movies when I can. I re-signed up with Netflix, after having gone without for a few years, and I’m really enjoying having it again. Tonight, for example, I watched The Princess Diaries 2, and last week I watched Pursuit of Happyness and Finding Neverland. There’s absolutely nothing on network television, and I don’t have cable, so this gives me something to do while I knit in the evenings. I haven’t been out to too many movies recently, but I did see Ratatouille and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, both of which I very much enjoyed (especially the latter, which I wasn’t actually expecting to like at all - how freakin’ awesome was Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange?!).

Reading-wise, I just finished a re-read of The Mists of Avalon, one of my all-time favorites and one that I haven’t read in quite a few years. (It was just as good as I remembered.) And having finished that, my plate is clear so that I’m fully able to start reading the final installment of the Harry Potter series tomorrow night as soon as I get home from Barnes & Noble. (A bunch of us are going to the midnight release party, of course, as is tradition, not to mention a whole lot of fun, even for an old, grey-haired fart like me. I may even dress up in my Tonks costume if the mood strikes me just right…)

And on the non-reading book front, I finally broke down and bought a copy of Knitting on the Edge by Nicky Epstein. I’ve wanted this book for ages, and now I finally have it. Yay! I can’t wait to start using it as a reference for all the wonderful design ideas I’ve got mulling around in the back of my head.

Things I Love, Love, Love
There are quite a few new technology things out there that I’ve completely fallen in love with. Google’s come out with some nifty stuff recently, and there are other things that’ve been around for a while that I’ve only just recently discovered and started utilizing. One is some of the new Google Maps tools - they’ve finally implemented “My Maps,” which allows you to save maps, set a “home location” as your default starting point, and add notes and markers to frequently-used maps. This is tremendously helpful. Another is the Google Calendar. So easy to use, so simple to plan events with other Google users, and so clean-looking. It’s even easy to sync with other calendar programs like Outlook. I use both of these tools multiple times every day.

  
Goole “My Maps” and Google Calendar, both of which I use obsessively every day

Things I Hate, Hate, Hate
Ok, I don’t hate these things, but I strongly dislike them. Microsoft Outlook, for one. It took me a while to get used to the odd way GMail handles organization of emails (namely, tags instead of folders), but once I got used to it, I was hooked. I’ve used GMail almost exclusively for a number of years now, and so to go back to using something like Outlook, which is, at best, an overly clunky, archaic piece of software, is just excruciating. I get hundreds of emails at work a day. Not spam, mind you - my account is far too new for that. These are actual work emails. And I have to keep up with them, because about 70% of them contain crucial information for tasks that have been assigned to me. I keep finding myself wanting to put emails into more than one folder, because often they don’t fit into just one place. And searching is a pain in the ass. I want my tags, and I want my Google search algorithms.

You can have a GMail account pull in your other email accounts, so long as you can provide it with a POP or IMAP address and account login information… But we use Microsoft Exchange Server at work, so I’m not sure how easy (if not impossible) it’ll be to set up. There’s a really awesome new thing Google’s just released, though, Google Apps, which, in part, allows you to use a GMail setup for your own domain’s emails. It’s spiffy. My boss was showing me some of the stuff he’s already done with it on his own website, and he said when he found time (which will likely be in like 2009 - we’re all so swamped right now), he’d show me some more stuff and show me how he’s got it all set up and working. I can’t wait to find time to look into this more.

Obligatory Knitting Content
Ok, so at this point, I know you’re thinking, “Gee, she’s gone off the deep end, and I think she’s completely forgotten that this is supposed to be a knitting blog.” Well, fear not, there is going to be at least the teensiest bit of knitting content in this oh-so-obnoxiously-long post. Work keeps me pretty busy, and I’m so far behind in all my knitting, it’s not even funny. But I have finished one project… I just barely finished it tonight, in fact. (And that’s why I’m posting so late, too - I really needed to finish this project tonight, and I really wanted to post tonight, too, since it’s been so long since my last update.)

Magic wand sheath

Two years ago, in July 2005, I had a costume birthday party, and I decided to go as Tonks. Now, every good witch/wizard costume needs a good wand, so I ordered one from Alivan’s. My friend Laura was jealous and wanted one of her own, so she, too, bought a wand from Alivan’s, only hers was bigger and better than mine (she being willing to spend more money on it than I was). Laura loves her magic wand. She pulls it out all the time and waves it around. She recently even bought a mini one and brought it to the theater when we saw the fifth movie last weekend.

Anyway, so I knew Laura was going to want to bring her wand with her when we went to the Harry Potter book release at Barnes & Noble this Friday. But we’ll be there for a few hours, and as much as she loves waving that thing around, I know she’s not going to want to hold it the entire time we’re at the book store. So I decided to knit a sheath for Laura’s wand. It’s knit from fingering-weight cotton, is 12″ long, not including the tassel, and sports a few charms and a D-ring that she can attach to a carabiner, which she can then attach to one of the belt loops on her jeans. Perfect! And yay, I finished, just in time!

So now, it’s nearly 2:00 am (I had to photograph it after I finished knitting, and then I decided to iron the linen shirt I wanted to wear tomorrow to work, since I’m pretty sure I won’t wake up early enough to do that tomorrow morning, it being so late now and all…) And it’s well past my bedtime, so… To bed with me.

(And I still haven’t caught up on my blog reading. The unread list currently sits at 405. I fear I may never catch up at this rate.)