The Ongoing Conundrum

I still haven't found a way to access all my photos in Blogger but I do think I've found a backdoor. Meanwhile, this is my newest piece of weaving equipment.  It's called a hoop raddle and it's made by Glimakra, the same folks who made the lease sticks that I bought last year and love.  I called Patty Huffer, our weaving guru, and asked her how to assemble and use this, as it's quite a bit larger than the one I'm replacing.  She had me put in on the front beam, and voila, I had the loom dressed in record time.  Worth every penny!

I'm weaving Overshot in these two colors.  The whole warp is for table runners and each one will have a different colored weft.  I misunderstood the directions and the first runner is a dud. I'm weaving a corrected pattern now which is stunning. 

Any photo I want to use I have to "heart" on my phone and in a couple of days it shows up in a folder I can access in Blogger. I figured this out earlier this week and it will be a while before I can post.  At least I'll know how many days I have to allow between taking a photo and being able to blog with it.  Microsoft and Apple do not play well with each other, but I'm not dead yet.

February was warm and dry, and although the Cascades have gotten a fair amount of snow this snow year, we are being warned to prepare for water rationing if we don't get some healthy storms.  Plants were fooled into thinking it was an early spring and then it dropped to 19 last night and now they have to start over.  Such is life in the High Desert.  Being a volunteer at the High Desert Museum has given a fresh appreciation for the struggles homesteaders had to overcome in order to merely live.

We've had a couple of days in the mid-50s and were able to enjoy the outdoors.  Delaney and I went out for about a half hour to keep Grandpa company while he cut firewood.  I know the winter sun is cooler but I don't want to be the one sunburns my granddaughter.  The breeze ruffled her hair which perplexed her and she kept reaching for it.  So many new experiences await her.

That's not all I have to say but that's all the pictures that I've been able to access.  If my theory is right, I'll be back to bore you again shortly.

Learning Curve

So this happened last week.  For years I have hated my laptop, even my new one which is now five years old, and I have regretted not paying the extra and buying an Apple instead.  I was paying bills one morning last week using our Credit Union's app and fighting with Microsoft uploads.  I realize some of my struggles are of my own making since I only use it to pay bills, to blog and use my weaving software.  Ian left me in my misery to go to Costco and when he returned, he brought me this MacBook Air.

The learning curve is just an adjustment in some areas and pure mystery in others.  I'm president of our weaving guild for the next two years and in that capacity I am required to make agendas for the general meetings and the quarterly board meetings.  Last month I fought through the process to get a reasonable product, though if I edited after I had finished, it threw the tabs helter skelter. I learned pages in about a half hour and the agenda looks sharp, plus I feel confident using the program.  Sheets is Apple's Excel equivalent and that took me quite a bit longer.  For one thing I needed to copy and paste our expenses into each month.  It's done for 2020 and I only need to open each month and record our bills as I pay them.  No more waiting for Excel to open or get the message, Sorry - Microsoft is not Responding.  No more!

Capturing photos for blogging isn't as a easy and I absolutely can't find them for Facebook, which is fine since I mostly check FB on my phone.

For instance, if I hadn't checked FB on my phone last night I would have missed this photo of Delaney from yesterday when she turned 10-months old.  She and I are going to have our first adventure this Thursday.  I'm taking her to a program at our church.  We can leave whenever we need to but I think it's time we test the waters.

Only about half my photos are visible this morning to Blogger so I'll keep fiddling, but for now this quick post is to let you know we are alive and cold in Central Oregon!!

In with the New

I killed my computer Tuesday so Ian and I gathered information and by Wednesday had selected my replacement option.  Kevin Kelly, the editor of Cool Tools, says he considered Costco to be his personal shopper.  He trusts their research so when he needs to buy something, he buys it from them and that's exactly what we did.  We ordered this Toshiba with a terabyte of memory and 12 gb of Ram on Wednesday and UPS delivered it Friday after lunch.  There were absolutely no instructions included and since this is the new Windows 8.1 operating system with touch screen and all new menus, it's been an intense past couple of days.  Ian succeeded in recovering all my photos from the back-up drive and they're now installed here.  I bought a new back-up drive too.

The disappointing thing was that Office 2013 does not include Outlook.  It did come with an email account through Outlook.com but it only supports an iMap but not a pop account.  I have had the same pop email account for 12 years and was not interested in replacing it in the middle of this mess.  I only learned this after I called the Costco Concierge service who connected me with an Microsoft tech.  I had to buy Outlook for $109.99 or replace my email - those were my options.  So I bought it and she logged on to my computer and installed it for me.  When it didn't work, I called my ISP's help line and he corrected the ports and logged in as me, cleaned up the misinformation and now I finally have email.  I wish I liked the operating system as well as I like the computer.  The most annoying thing is the virtual keyboard that pops up every time I touch the screen to identify the spot where I want to type when I'm making a correction.

About weaving - I cut the warp off Arthur.  Now is not the time for an ugly frustrating warp.  I also finished the towels that were on Maudie Mae so have two naked looms again.  Meanwhile, somewhere in the middle of all of this, my contract arrive from Handwoven which I was able to print from my iPad and return.

Now I'm going to spend some more time trying to figure out the things that befuddle me about this computer, like how to highlight, copy and paste and especially how to get rid of the annoying virtual keyboard.