Back in November of last year, I saw the results of a knitting project on Rhymes With Fuchsia and immediately I left a comment, begging for the pattern. Lucia was so amazing and put the pattern up rather quickly. I hunted for the perfect yarn, because I wanted to make a couple of these for my Mom. I finally found it at my loyal yarn store (which was in Savannah at the time).

Actually, I found two. One is called Maizy by Crystal Palace Yarns. And the other skein I bought is called Panda Cotton Print. And this, is the result:

That's my Mom's hair, adorned with her Snowflake Snood!

Thanks, Lucia! Mom loved it! I'm really sorry it took me so long to share the results of your awesome pattern.

Post drafting, Day 1: Well, it's currently around sunset on the 17th of February and we've slept in our new home two nights now. In the meantime, there's been some struggles... Grab a cuppa joe or your knitting, it's been a bumpy ride.

First, the movers arrived on Wednesday, the 8th as expected. They loaded (and loaded... and loaded!) us up and I messed around with some cleaning in the kitchen while I waited. This is our third move with Graebel, so I know the drill: I have to be on-hand for the driver and his crew of movers while they load and I have to sign off at the end of the loading on all they've done.

As I look back on the whole week+, I wish I'd worked harder that day, but I was exhausted... and looking at a week and a half without my Kingsdown bed. So, Wednesday afternoon, Randy took us to lunch when the movers were done and then I dropped him off at work. Next challenge: gather the most important elements which we'd be packing in our car for the 2100 mile trip and check in to the hotel.

Bluffton sucks. That said, I was extremely pleased with the Holiday Inn Express there in Bluffton. They are pet-friendly... and I paid less for a handicap-accessible (I guess it's called "an ADA room") room. We had enough space to set up the Marshall's playpen we've had for close to a year now. (Note to potential buyers of this pen/matt: The vinyl matt is safe against their constant digging/scratching but not against the pee/poop! If you must protect your floors, spend a couple dollars on a clear shower curtain, lay it under the vinyl matt and continue with a normal set-up. Worked perfectly for us.)

Back to the Townhouse from Hell: Nick and I got to work "bright and early" on Thursday with all the cleaning. And by Thursday night, I was beyond my limits, exhausted and truly no longer caring. Friday morning, the carpet cleaner came and did a really miraculous job on the carpets. I used ChemDry, which is now owned by HomeDepot. I was thrilled with the initial team that came out but they called their boss and he finished the job---sorta. The first team still had to go back upstairs to vacuum and the boss never did it. The only place I was truly disappointed was the stairs: they were soaking wet! The ChemDry machine was too big/bulky to really do the full job on the stairs.

Unfortunately, the incredibly clean carpets now revealed how much more cleaning we had to do on the baseboards. Ugh. More Work. A quick call to Randy had him on the way to pick us up and we dropped him off at work. I had errands: some ferret toys (I packed them all and the babies were bored!), new toilet seats (those were kinda cool but expensive) and a wrench for the disposal. While out, Nick and I wanted to get lunch and we found this place called "Blue Coyote" which we'd never been to before. Of course, in true fashion, it was amazingly good and we wished we'd known about them sooner. Really good and fresh guacamole. Nifty plates. Cool decor. Would have made living in Bluffton less painful.

Randy departed work early on his last day---what a cool boss he has!---and joined us at Blue Coyote. This meant we could get to work at the townhouse and finish early and get a good night's rest. Right. 11pm and the final straw: Randy couldn't get the dryer vent re-connected and needed to buy another one. He decided to do that first thing Saturday, bring the very last of the stuff we were packing in the car (!) and quit that place forthwith!

Saturday morning, I felt/heard him moving around in the hotel room and got up as he left. I began organizing and packing and trying to go through the room for any items belonging to us. While I was doing this, Randy called to tell me about his struggle with the dryer vent. We'd always had a bit of a humidity problem when drying laundry. The master bath backs the laundry room and the cabinets in the bathroom would get really warm and humid, as though the dryer was venting into it. I mentioned it to the D R Horton representative who did the one-year inspection. According to him, this well-built (note: sarcasm) D R Horton townhouse was designed that way.

Well, according to Randy, the vent in the wall connects to... nothing. So, after all the physical effort to get the darn dryer vent connected the night before and then buying a new connection kit on Saturday, he left the townhouse with the dryer sitting out in the hall.

Then, after a good Holiday Inn Express breakfast, we began loading the car. While doing that, in the wild-and-wooded area off the parking lot, a fire started. I was about to call 911 and report it, but Randy thought it might be smarter to go in and have the hotel call it in. After two years in South Carolina, he still hadn't adapted to their slow-and-casual way of doing things. In Arizona, the threat of wildfire is serious business---and with recent fires in the southeast, one would think it was similarly serious in Bluffton as well. Several minutes later, as I headed back to the room for another load, a hotel employee was coming to the door.

"Yeah, John, there's a fire out in the wooded area." Her demeanor was real nonchalant. I heard through her radio John's reply: "I'm calling it in now." That ended up being about 5 minutes after I was set to call 911---and in that time, the fire had doubled its width in one direction. An employee came out with a large fire extinguisher, but the time for that was long past. We were finally loaded up and heading out as the first fire engine showed up on-scene. We passed another one headed to the scene as we left.

Two hours and change later, we arrived at Mom's. Randy and Nick needed showers and I needed to get to a Jiffy Lube before we hit the road the following evening. Mom went with me and managed some Knitting In Public, but my hands were too sore from all the cleaning I'd been doing. One oil change and tire rotation later, we headed back to Mom's and piled into her car (we had the moving guys take the back bench and the second captain's chair in the second row, so we could put a platform Randy built for the last move) and went to Al-Amir's for a late lunch / early dinner.

We visited with Mom and her friend Ron, had a wonderful meal of ham-and-pineapples-with-cherries, lima beans, carrots and Irish potatoes (yum!) and finally, it was Sunday evening and time for us to hit the road. We planned to travel from Columbia, South Carolina to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (well, Chickasha, OK actually...) in one massive push across the country. I'm not sure how, but we did it. We checked in to the Holiday Inn Express in Chickasha, OK... and found the room hadn't been cleaned yet. sigh We were so exhausted and just wanted to set the furbabies up in their playpen so we could clean up their cage.

Randy and I finally grabbed something to eat at some place called A&E Grill, which was so-so. We took dinner back to Nick, who'd been too tired to go out to eat. A quick night's rest, breakfast, pack the babies and luggage back into the car and get on the road. This time, I took the wheel and drove us across the rest of Oklahoma, the narrow part of Texas and just shy of Albuquerque (about an hour east of it). It was a very windy drive, but some MadLibs and a fun word game which Nick suggested helped. (The word game: Start with a word, each player makes a single change to the word, go until there's no progress to be made.)

Randy took over before we reached Albuquerque and we grabbed some DelTaco in Albuquerque itself. I would have liked to just crash then, but we had a reservation we couldn't cancel in Scottsdale, Arizona for that night. So, we pushed on. And on. And on! Finally, at about 2 in the morning of the 13th, we made it to the Holiday Inn Express in Scottsdale... only to learn that our reservation was for the following night! And she was booked. And surly. Finally, she found a double-booking she could clear up and got us into a two-queen suite. We got the babies in, got them settled... and crashed.

I didn't sleep well and Randy had been feeling the edge of a cold since Oklahoma. But we were up bright-and-early. A breakfast---the worst Holiday Inn Express breakfast so far, despite the $180/night room fee---and Randy and I hit the road to handle business. We drove out to the house we were about to sign lease papers on. We finally got in touch with our rental agent and he agreed to meet us at the house. We had time for lunch----yum, Garcia's! Adam let us in the house (which has a for-sale sign on the front lawn and two lockboxes on the security screen door) and we walked through it for the first time. Frankly, I'm no longer surprised this place didn't rent sooner. It was poorly represented and the massive spaces were ill-described.

From the entry (which is a double-door entry), there's a sunken room to the left (two very tall steps down) which measures 18 feet by 13 feet. It's just long enough for our two Galant desks (minus their half-round ends) and we're hoping to put a futon up against the long side of the desks, to create another seating area for watching tv in here.

From the entry, if one passes the sunken room we've dubbed "the office", there's a very large half-bath with an old-style toilet (the kind where the tank is mounted up on the wall way above the toilet). Then, past the half-bath is a double-door entry to the master suite. It's huge. One wall was designed for a king-size bed: it fits just between two wall outlets which are each followed by a narrow vertical window.

(Most modern houses I've seen stick one outlet on each wall and that's it. Now, if two people sleep in the same bed, that's at a minimum, two clocks and two lights, which is four outlets, right? Sheesh. Planning people!)

The master suite continues with an amazing walk-in closet with a skylight. This closet is set up galley-style: a rod on either side. There's a lower shelf across the end and really deep shelves above the two rods, plus some corner cubby things and a really neat shoe-shelf for my shoe-whore of a husband. grin It was really humorous seeing his shock at the quantity of shoes he has!

The master suite wouldn't be complete without a bathroom. This one is your basic two-sink, toilet and shower/tub. Only, it was last updated in the 70s or 80s sometime. At least it's a tile floor and not linoleum. Yeah, the whole upstairs is tile, except for the master bedroom/closet and the sunken "office".

There's a dining "room" just off the entry, which faces the french door to the basement. The kitchen/breakfast nook/great room is beyond the dining room. The kitchen has been upgraded recently with granite counters (the kind with an annoying mirror-particle scattered throughout) and features a really tall "turret" roof with three windows at the very top. Puck would love it if we mounted stepping shelves for her to get up to one of those windows! There's a ceiling fan over the kitchen, which I'm sure Randy will love once he's recovered enough from this cold to cook.

The great room also has a ceiling fan... and a really attractive beehive-type fireplace set up on a tall hearth. There's a shelf which runs the width of the room which Randy thinks the ferrets will be able to climb up on, but there's a fireplace screen which sits right in front of the opening and should prevent problems. There's a laundry room just off the kitchen, which connects to the two-car garage. My washer and dryer will be here on the 18th.

There's a small pool in the back yard, orange trees in the front and back yards, a storage shed in the back yard and an RV gate with room to bring one in and park it.

The downstairs has 3 bedrooms and a bathroom, all cleverly dealing with the need for two exits in the event of a fire or other emergency. One of the bedrooms is carpeted and has a pretty low ceiling with a ceiling fan. The other two bedrooms lack ceiling fans, but their ceilings are still too low to assemble Nick's loft bed. For now, his mattress is on the floor and he loves his new room.

Post-drafting, Day 2: I've kinda blended the tour with the move-in, which happened on Friday. And here it is Monday, the 18th and I'm writing this up, wondering when I'll be able to post it.

Yes, UPS screwed us again. I had my Qwest DSL/Broadband/whatever it's called set up to be on and here by the 13th. By the time we had our stuff delivered and our desks assembled and computers set up, I wanted to be able to jet online and catch up. Well, thanks to the three (yes, one got added...) lockboxes on the front door and the place being vacant, the UPS guy decided we'd moved, so he sent the package back to the sender. And we couldn't intercept it. We picked up another modem at Fry's Electronics... and can't get it to connect to our service. So, I'm sitting here typing this up, having gone very close to two whole weeks with no internet connection... I'm in major withdrawl here. I have no clue what's going on in the world.

There's only a ga-zillion things I want to check out right now. The tax assessment for this house. The locations of various preferred restaurants of choice. The nearest ATT store, so I can bitch someone out about changing my contract without giving me a choice to tell them to f-off! The release dates for the next book in about 5 or 6 series (I'm plowing through books right now). I feel like crap (spent the night fighting a fever and trying not to hack up a lung), am sick of take-out/eating out but no one here feels up to hunting down real plates, let alone cooking. The 1700 books I've catalogued and boxed are sitting in the great room, still in boxes. Hell, my keyboard tray still isn't installed on my desk yet. And I want to install some lights under my desk to light up my keyboard 'cause I still haven't seen a lighted/wired keyboard I like as much as the cordless one I have now.
(Well, perhaps one, but it's $80 or $100!)

Post-drafting, Day 3: I've been working up this post in bits and pieces, as I feel up to it. My keyboard tray (only recently lamented as un-installed) is now in place. My sinuses are driving me bat-shit-loco right now, between the sneezing, the runny nose and the nasal congestion.

There's one other thing I'm looking forward to my internet connection for: checking out the records on the house we sold in Queen Creek... Yeah, we stopped by there on...Saturday, was it? (The days are running together with this damn cold.) Get this: vacant. Not only vacant, with a lockbox, but stripped. Every light fixture, every appliance is gone. Even the mega-sized peephole we installed in the front-door is gone, leaving a gaping hole in the door. The yard looks like it hasn't been maintained in a number of months. I must admit to a high degree of curiosity here... What the hell happened?

Considering how much Queen Creek has changed, they might as well have re-named every street. They ripped out Rittenhouse Rd, which used to be a very straight NW-to-SE running road. It curved a slight bit to the south as it neared it's end, but not much. Now the damn road looks like a freaking spaghetti noodle. And the number of major chain stores going in mere miles from our old home is nothing short of stunning. It doesn't bode well for my own hunt for a piece of land to "get away from it all" (while still being local enough for Randy to work).

And finally, at the near-end of Day 3 of drafting this darn message, I'm actually in the form on my blog page, adding this last bit in... The modem arrived this afternoon and it took Randy over an hour on the phone with Qwest Tech Support to get it running. Fortunately, it seems to be quite the speed demon. Now, if I can just stop sneezing (and blowing my nose) long enough to type and do some web searches...

Of course, should I mention the expected secondary absence as I catch up on Ravelry? grin

Well, with a little hardware switch-over, our second server is back in operation (the fan on the North Bridge failed....). And the long-overdue move from the first server to the second server is now in progress. Perhaps obvious (since I'm posting a blog entry): we are connected to teh internets again. ::wink::

And thanks to my uber-cool husband who knew what I needed, he gave me the command that I'd need to read up and configure to get my email to start coming down to my home computer again. Woot! And it's coming every five minutes now! That's awesome! I no longer have to go to the server to shutdown mail downloads if my computer is down---my computer is the one that does the downloading for me! That's one less thing to worry about.

Very soon, Randy will have the monstrosity that is the first server (it's almost the size of an end-table!) out from under his desk. When we turned it off last night, we couldn't believe the difference in the noise level in the room. Wow, that thing was noisy!

In the meantime, I finished the second sock to Randy's Midnight Rainbow pair. I was a bit slower finishing these socks 'cause my time was divided between two other socks I've got on needles. Plus, there was a week or two where I actually didn't do any knitting. *gasp* I'll post pictures as soon as he gets home....I finished them at 2:30am and he was wearing them when he left the house. He's already said that when he gets home, he wash them and hang them so they'll be dry for tomorrow. *grin* I think he likes them! ETA: He just called me from work to tell me how springy and comfy they are. Every step is comfortably cushioned. I may have to cast on another pair of socks! *grin*

But, I promised myself that once I finished a pair that was already cast on, I could start the Diamond Sock pattern I created from an image in the Gelderland catalog Claudia pointed out. As soon as I get that one finished, I'm hoping to put the pattern together in a nice PDF format with a photo and perhaps offer it in my Etsy shop. Or here. We'll see.

No pictures of this yet, but the ferrets have the cutest pile of Randy's white tube socks and their toys piled up in the corner by my bed. If I try to toss things back into the room, Sebastian comes along and brings them right back into that corner! And don't even get Octavia started on moving her ball around. Darn it! That goes in that cabinet, Mom! And she has a whole method for getting it in there too.

Poor girl. Wait until the new cabinet latches for upstairs get installed....that's going to suck.

For her.

There's a bowl of Texas-style chili calling my name---and with all the ferrets finally tuckered out from their AM romp, I might have a little bit of peace to eat it in!

Today, one of our servers appears to have finally given up the ghost. We're hoping it's a heat thing, since we've had the house open and it got a little warm today. In the meantime, we're on our second server, which wasn't fully set up when this happened. So, email will be slow getting to me (I'll have to check our host for email and then manually download it until we've got things re-settled).

Rest assured (for all three readers out there *grin*) that I'm here and alive....just dealing with even more computer issues!

I guess this is just the time of year for computer problems. First, my Mom's computer has been acting kinda weird---it won't power up. When I worked on it at her place a couple weekends ago, I opened it up, did a thorough cleaning and checked all the power connections and card seatings. Then, I powered it up and it POST'd just fine. (For the non-geek readers, that's Power On Self-Test and causes the first little beep most computers make. It's a good beep.) Okay then. The next day, when we tried to put it back together (monitor, keyboard, et cetera), it wouldn't POST. Moved it to another outlet, no POST. At one point we thought it was her UPS (Universal Power Supply) and we purchased a new one. Nope, not the UPS. We're guessing (!) it's the PSU (Power Supply Unit)---the second one this computer has had. I've ordered number three.

In the meantime, she continued to try powering it up and a few days ago I heard it was working again. Go figure. I'll probably still replace the PSU.

Tuesday afternoon, there was a brief power blip at our house. I only noticed 'cause I had the tv on at the time and it went down. I've got my Linux computer on a UPS, so it never lost power. My Windows computer did power down but I wasn't using it at the time, so I didn't notice until later. I didn't think anything of the power blip until Randy got home that night. His UPS died a while back, so he's been running on surge protectors only. He tried to boot his Linux computer....nothing.

After several tries, I had the guys disconnect all the cables and bring it to my ottoman-turned-workstation. I cleaned it out---holy cow, this thing could have rivaled some of the Angora bunnies I've seen online recently! I pulled the front faceplate off and the front fan intakes were covered in a matt of dust and dirt (and probably pet hair!). After the fans were cleaned (a combination of my Dyson and an air can), I went down into the case further to the board. Once the dust and dirt was blown and vacuumed off, it looked okay. I re-seated the power connections, pulled the video card cooler and cleaned it, pulled the video card and cleaned it. I really don't like to pull memory---and hate to pull the CPU, if I don't have to, so I didn't this time.

Sealed it up and handed it back to Randy. No POST. Crap. I decided I need to try the two things I hate. I checked the memory---looks good. I released the CPU heat sink clamps and pulled. Nothing. Pulled a little harder....and out came the heat sink with the CPU stuck to it!

Not good.

At this point, where the failure is, is anyone's guess and lots of shipping of parts to figure out. I immediately went to NewEgg and started looking for the "sweet spot"---that point in technology where the price is lowest for the most tech. Sometimes, you can go a little lower, but the difference from one to the next is worth going up a little for. Now, $300 later, Randy has a new MOBO (motherboard), CPU, RAM (2 GB!!!), PSU, and video card coming to him. And I get to put it all together! *grin*

In the middle of all of this, Nick (whom I've been trying to teach the art of building computers to) decides that he's positive his CPU is the same socket type as the one Randy had. I was reasonably sure he was wrong, but I need to do things in a logical order or I get confused---and having Nick's computer parts and Randy's computer parts mingling was definitely a recipe for confusion. So, anyway, Nick gets into his computer and pulls his CPU. Now, keep in mind I've been stressing verbally how much I dislike unseating and reseating a CPU. Also, Randy, who leaves the hardware maintenance to me, has been emphatically agreeing with this dislike---it's hard on the CPU, it's potentially disastrous (as we've just learned) and it's the last place to look for a problem!

So, out comes his heat sink....with the CPU stuck to it. *sigh* I'm so not paying for that!

Anyways, Wednesday was all about cleaning out the other computers and making sure they weren't as clogged up as Randy's Linux box. I didn't clean either of our Windows boxes, but I did get one of our servers cleaned out. I'm not looking forward to doing the other server which probably hasn't been cleaned since Arizona and likely has a dead scorpion or two in it. Gives a new meaning to computer bugs. Oh, and yuck!

Once we'd powered down all the computers (6 under two desks!), we moved them all out and cleaned up all the junk the ferrets had drug back there, plus all the ferret toys hidden back there. A really good vaccuuming later, we were ready to start putting computers back under the desks. I arranged the first three (2 servers and Randy's Windows box) under his desk, with the Summera computer holder from IKEA next in line (to hold his Linux computer).

Now today, I need to clean up the rest of the living room, put away my yarn buckets *sob* and see if I can make this room habitable again!

What've you been up to? Wanna buy some of my stuff?

I think I mentioned that last weekend we went to visit my Mom. (Remember, her computer wasn't working and I spent the weekend cursing at it? Oh, yeah....and it's still not working. I found that out Tuesday....but I digress.)

Mom is the one who got me hooked on ferrrets. so of course, she has two babies of her own. It's a very different scene though, when I bring my eleven ferrets to her house. She's got a number of cats (some indoor/outdoor, some indoor-only). And this time, she had two new kittens, which my ferrets thought was a hoot!

I didn't get any pictures of the ferrets terrorizi---I mean playing with the kittens, but I did get a few of Mom handing out Friskies Dental Feline food (which my crew *loves*!). Take a look....

Cody is her seal-point Siamese cat. The grey/black tabby with the white legs is Scruffy. I don't think either of the kittens or any of the outdoor cats showed up for this treat session.

Please note that when we get our two groups together, that's thirteen ferrets in one place! *grin* And how many messes happened outside the cage in the whole weekend? Mom counted only four, but I'm not sure that includes Theodore not feeling good. Yay, babies!