As will soon become apparent, November has been a helluva month. That’s all I’ll say about that.

• Although I appreciate the pop-culture phenomenon that is the LOLcat, I’ve never much been a fan. The only in-that-vein site I consistently find entertaining is the Fail Blog, from which the image above comes (via my friend C., who loves her some LOL blogs and really I only pay attention to them when she tells me to.)
  • I imagine one might thus conclude that cute animals don’t make me happy, but making fun of the failures of others does.
    • If you’re inclined, do feel free to discuss the greater meaning of that. I submit there is no such greater meaning.
• I freaking hate it when people use quotation marks to emphasize text. It’s inappropriate, people. No exceptions.
  • If you need to emphasize something and you can’t use rich text and you don’t want to shout (as using all caps would have you do), might I recommend the asterisk? Making something *bold* this way can be mighty effective. Pass it on.
• The winter issue of Interweave Crochet is done. There are some very, very nifty patterns in there, the likes of which I’d never seen before. I hope you like it. The preview will go up online in about three weeks.
• Loveland, CO, occasionally finds itself downwind of a town that plays host to a massive beef processing facility. For two full days of my stay there, the town smelled bad. Very, very bad.
• For two days of my stay (a different two days, I might add), it was so warm, the only way I could describe it was “end of days warm”. It’s just not supposed to be 26 degrees C in mid-November. Creeped me out.
• I’m reading We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver, for book club. I was tempted to put it down because I’m severely bothered by it, due entirely to personal issues that have nothing to do with the quality of the book. I’m not putting it down precisely because of those issues; I might gain more from reading it than I’ll lose to discomfort. I don’t think I’ll be able to finish it in time for book club, but maybe I’ll surprise myself.
• In case it’s not obvious, I’ve ditched NaNoWriMo in favour of editing the interview recording. My mic worked great; Joss’s phone, not so much. He’s totally understandable, but I’m trying to make the whole thing go down easier. I’ll also transcribe it.
  • I’m enjoying playing with Audacity. It’s possible my text/image-only time on the web is over.
• Still, I’m so glad I even started in on NaNoWriMo. I’ve now written more fiction than I ever had, save for that one time I was forced to in high school. I’ve said before and assert here again that the crap I’ve written makes me extremely happy, and although I’m sure none of it will ever see the light of day, I did accomplish quite a bit in thinking through this story. So just because I’ve ditched the novel-writing challenge this month doesn’t mean the story is dead. Au contraire.
• For the first time in many months, I did some spinning this weekend. That’s really all I have to say about that.
• We went to the One of a Kind craft show this weekend. Although the stuff there was great, I wasn’t terribly impressed with the show overall. The array didn’t seem very original and the number of vendors was small for the hefty admission price. I wonder if I’m getting craft-fair fatigue; everything’s starting to look the same to me. Sigh.
  • I’m tempted to start thinking about this in the context of handmade gift-giving being an answer to the bland overcommercialized mass market, but it’s too late and I should go go sleep.
• Yay, short work week ahead!

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Time to run down where I’m at on various fronts:

• Status of the winter issue of IC: Goes to press next week. Soon I’ll embark on the frenzy of making sure I have enough clean clothes for a work week in Colorado.
• Status of my Gathered Pullover: Finished the first sleeve. Instead of starting the second sleeve I cast on for a February Lady Sweater. I consider this to be the most responsible creative decision I made on Monday.
• Status of my 365 photo challenge: I’m back on track.
• Status of my NaNoWriMo word count: I’m extremely behind. But there’s a but.
  • But I don’t care. I have gained tremendously from participating so far. I kicked myself in the ass to start writing a story I’ve been thinking about for a few months, and I did so without caring if my writing was any good. In fact, my writing has been downright awful. But I’ve gotten further into the story than I ever would have if I’d continued treating it as preciously as I had been. With press coming next week, I doubt I’ll do much more work on it in the coming days, but I certainly will do more work on it someday soon. I’ll continue to force myself to blather relentlessly, and then I will put it aside for a while. And after that, I’ll go back to it and will likely rewrite the whole damn thing. Because however happy I am with my crap writing now, I’d actually like to write this story well.
• Status of the United States: In good hands now. I feel much relief. It’s going to be a stressful, difficult four years, and I trust completely that Barack Obama will face the challenges head on and will lead us all to contribute as needed.
• Status of my knowledge of podcasting: Increased dramatically in the last two days (due in great part to the generous help of Sister Diane). I’ve wanted to dabble in audio production for a long time, and finally had to dive in. It’s a very satisfying way to learn, by biting off more than you can chew. I highly, highly recommend it. Seriously. Go do something you think you’re unprepared to do. If it’ll help, promise lots of people that you’ll deliver.
• Status of the online-crafts-world effort to get an interview with Joss Whedon: The impetus for my crash course in podcasting. The interview is tomorrow morning. (See how calm I seem? I’m faking it.)
• Status of my love for the internet and all the lovely people that make it so much fun: Stronger than ever.
• Status of my interview with Marly on her podcast: Listen here. Listen not for me, but to meet the delightful teen crocheter Chelsea, whom I had the pleasure of working with for an article she wrote in the fall issue of IC.
• Status of this post: So finished.

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• I had a great chat with Marly about the fall issue of IC last week, which should go out in her next podcast.
• Massive kudos to Apple and Google for seeing the issue of gay marriage for what it is: a question of civil rights.
• Speaking of Apple, I’m digging iTunes’s Genius. It’s playlist-making for the lazy or uninspired. What do you think of it?
  • Know what I’m not digging? Bad bad bad DRM. Did you know that if you buy a movie through iTunes you can’t (without use of 3rd-party software) burn it to a DVD so you can, you know, watch it on your television? This is wrong on so many levels. I’m stifling a rant right now.
• I finally finished reading Watchmen. It is brilliant, though I didn’t enjoy it very much until the end. Despite thinking hard about it over the last few weeks, I can’t figure out exactly what it is that didn’t click with me. It might be as simple as the annoying bit that I didn’t like the art very much. The story is brilliant, and I highly recommend the book.
• I jumped from that into sci-fi in the form of The Ghost Brigades, which I didn’t enjoy as much as Old Man’s War, but which is worth a read. Scalzi goes deeper into the nitty-gritty of consciousness transfer and how stuff in his universe works, and I’m not so much a details person when it comes to reading sci-fi, favouring plot advancement and character development. That said, he did a bang-up job of fleshing it all out, and my failure to geek out on it is my own, not his. Not to let a storyline run dry, I’m now reading The Last Colony, which is thoroughly enjoyable so far.
• I’m using last.fm more (painted black, thanks very much). Are you on there? Be my friend!
• There are two constant themes in the Werker home right now: Halloween and the U.S. election.
  • I love Halloween, but I find it almost unbearably stressful. I don’t know why, and it’s not important enough for me to spend a lot of time figuring it out. The man feels no stress about it, and so I pretty much follow his plan. This year: late-’80s movie pair. I’ll let you guess.
  • I might die from anticipation before next Tuesday. I’m less and less able to keep calm about it. On the one hand, a two-year campaign is obscene and it’s bad for democracy. On the other hand, without such a long campaign, Obama wouldn’t have become a contender. Regardless, I very unreasonably feel like the fate of the world is resting on this election, and I can’t talk myself down from it.
    • Time has a photo slideshow behind the scenes of Joe Klein’s interview with Obama. It’s short and powerful.
• Joss Whedon wrote about Dollhouse. So. excited. for. Dollhouse. And also for the last half of the final season of BSG. Time to wrap that baby up, already!
• Speaking of television, we’re into the second season of The Wire. Good good good.

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I spent several hours yesterday trying to find a WordPress plugin that will automatically generate a daily digest of stuff I post on Tumblr. It might be that Tumblr is too new. Dunno. Anyway, I found one plugin that will auto-generate a daily digest, but the lines in the digest didn’t actually link to the Tumblr posts, so. Yeah, that was a waste of time. Anyhoo.

I find myself writing “anyhoo” lately. Maybe it’s time for that one to come back.

• I did keep a plugin that generates a lifestream. I hate that term. A “lifestream” is a page that aggregates somebody’s (in this case my) activity on several social media sites. I created a page of mine and simply call it Daily Life. It’s not my lifestream. Much of my life is lived offline. That said, with my Twitter habit, you likely could get a bit of a glimpse into what my daily life is sort of like. But only sort of.
• I finished a whopping two yarn projects this week. And I’m back to knitting the first sleeve of my long-in-progress Gathered Pullover [Ravelry].
• Happy Canadian Thanksgiving, one day early!
• Crocheted lightsaber pattern.
• I’ve had the house to myself this weekend; just me and the dog. Last night I went on a Gary Oldman bender and watched, back to back, Dracula and Immortal Beloved. And I knit.
  • Know how I’ve wondered why oh why they made poor Buffy Summers sleep on an Irish crochet pillow sham? Go watch Dracula, kids. Lucy’s bed is covered with them. I’ve decided Buffy’s shams are simply an homage to the great 1992 movie.
    • Except oh. my. god. the bad accents in that movie. (Not Gary Oldman’s. That man can do no wrong.)
    • I’ve been noticing a lot of bad accents lately. The first season of The Wire was nearly ruined for me by Dominic West’s appalling American English. And the woman who plays the lead on Fringe? Bad accent. (But I’ve already publicly announced I’m only watching Fringe because Joshua Jackson is so great.)
      • Zip just sent us the first two discs of The Wire season 2. So. excited.
    • Ok, though. A really great faked American accent? Hugh Laurie’s.
• My plan for this sunny Sunday is to take the dog into the woods and not leave the woods for at least an hour.
• That’s my only plan for the day. With the rest of the day I may or may not:
  • Finish that first sleeve and start the second and then oh man I might just have a finished sweater for sweater-wearing season.
  • Do some laundry. I still haven’t caught up from my long trip.
    • Dude. That long trip completely screwed me up. I’m behind on almost everything and I’m having a hell of a time focusing. I’m hoping doing a whole lot of nothing this weekend will knock that right out of me.
  • Read. I’m still only halfway through Watchmen. I’ve started dabbling in Made to Stick. And on my nightstand now is The Magus, but I might put it down for a time when I’m more interested in getting sucked into a seriously twisted good story. Oh, and I have the new politics issue of The New Yorker.
    • I’ve been very, shall we say, focused on politics.
  • Cook up a big batch of pasta sauce from the tomatoes I’ve picked from the garden.
  • Well, it would seem my “whole lot of nothing” could end up being quite a lot of something.

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I’m bumping up against the too-long-away-from-home mark. Can I have a collective sigh? I’ve done it to myself; I’m not complaining. Just a status update. So, here we go:

• I gave my presentation at the Folio Show this morning. I had no idea what people would be seeking from the session, so I edited my slides pretty much until I loaded them onto the computer at the podium. In the end, I forced myself to remember I’m far better at speaking extemporaneously than I am at preparing notes, so I took a deep breath and winged it. And although I’m not sure my actual presentation covered things deeply enough, the question/answer period was great. I certainly prefer interacting with an audience over speaking at one. If it didn’t require traveling, I’d look to do more speaking gigs.
• A few people have come up to me to tell me they enjoyed the session. Each made me smile.
• This speaking gig was so totally different from the one at Threadbear on Saturday. Allow me to list the ways:
  • Costume at Threadbear: Black dress, grey cami, purple tights, boots.
  • Costume at Folio: Pink button-down, black vest, black skirt, black tights, boots.
  • Setup at Threadbear: Lots of crochet that I held up and waved around and handed out.
  • Setup at Folio: Darkened room, projector, microphone, remote control, PowerPoint (I loathe ppt with a simmering, dull ache that doesn’t produce rage but does numb the mind).
  • At Threadbear: Mostly women, puppies.
  • At Folio: Lots of men and women, no puppies.
  • Chats at Threadbear: About yarn and crochet and knitting and projects and fit and creativity.
  • Chats at Folio: For the most part, web people came to chat with me, so there was less talk of formal business than I’d feared. I have managed not to encounter the words leverage or monetize and so am quite relieved.
• A thought about how I just seemed to contrast web people with formal business people: To oversimplify (or maybe not), it’s like there are three types of people working on the web in publishing: Web folk, print folk, and business folk. Web folk move fast, think fast, are risk takers and community builders, are enriched by their online experience and value said richness, and are comfortable with experimentation. Print folk are apprehensive about the fast pace of the web, they’re wary of the things users might say about their brand or their advertisers, to varying extents they don’t understand what consumers value in web-based content, and some feel threatened by the web (for one or both of two reasons: they fear people will stop buying print and/or they aren’t interested in producing content for the web and so feel a bit personally threatened). Business people speak in tongues I rarely understand; think of the web in terms of visitors, click-throughs, sell-through-rates, and conversions; and baffle me by their keen ability to make lots of money while seeming never to fully get what-all the web is about.
• The event at Threadbear. I’ll sum up in sentence fragments. Forty people. Awesome chats. Sandi rocks. Matt and Rob: incredible hosts and good friends. Puppies: so cute. Yummy eats. Magic.
  
• Knitting Daily TV taping was awesome. By the end of the week, it was like summer camp. In a good way. It’s what happens when people pass a threshold of lots of concentrated time together in a small space. There was a lot of laughing. And some really good television made.
  
• I posted a ton of photos and some audio clips from the taping on Tumblr. I still have one more audio clip to edit and post.
• What do you think of the audio? I’d never produced audio before, and I’m really enjoying it. Should I keep it going, in some better-planned, more creative ways? Lemme know.
• I’m going to hunker down with the Tumblr API and try to figure out how to automatically pull a daily roundup of my posts over there into this blog. I love using Tumblr, but really want to integrate the content over here. For (shh, don’t tell anyone) I love this blog more.
• I’ve barely read fiction during this trip. I’m not even halfway through Watchmen. I think it’s partly that, although I love the story, I haven’t gotten sucked into it yet, and partly that I had a hell of a time kicking jet lag and ended up staring at the television way more than usual.
• Speaking of. WTF is up with Heroes? Gossip Girl was way more entertaining than their weird pre-launch televised party. And then the plot suddenly seemed so… contrived. Is this what television is now, post-writers-strike? So obviously formulaic?
• One formula I’ll stick with, though: Fringe. Why? Because I find Joshua Jackson, like, totally dreamy.
• I went to visit Lorna’s Laces yesterday. I loved seeing how they work. Beth walked me through their dyeing process, and she just so happened to be making Amy Singer‘s colour. Special.
  
• I rode the elevated train here in Chicago to get to Lorna’s and I only thought it would fall off the track twice. It’s cool to ride, but I prefer a proper buried subway.

A couple more pics for you, and then I’m heading to O’Hare to finally go home. Later, ‘gators.

Float Away Scarves we showed on the show:

Sandi and Bertha:

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I do have some ideas brewing for proper blog writing. But for now, another roundup is where it’s at.

• My parents are here for their annual visit and we’re having a blast. A chill time, which is just lovely.
• It looks like a summer of Shakespeare is in full swing. We saw the Bard on the Beach production of Twelfth Night on Friday, and laughed so hard it hurt. It’s the funniest production I’ve seen, and was clever to boot. Physical comedy through the filter of 1920s cinema, on the stage.
• On… a parallel spectrum (can you have one of those? Discuss*), we also saw X-Files: I Want to Believe. I loved the show, of course (though I did lose interest toward the end). I was hooked from the start, and fell in love with my college boyfriend over it. David Duchovny was my late-adolescent famous-person crush. So know that when I say this movie isn’t worth seeing, I mean it. And that I don’t even have a tear in my eye when I say it speaks even more to its mediocrity. Everything you’ve read about it is true: it’s like a long, stand-alone episode of the show. So, okay, yes—it’s a good episode. But not a good movie. There was no taking advantage of length, presumed budget, or anything else uniquely cinematic. It would have been fine as a two-part television mini-series. There’s a funny bit when they poke fun at George W., and for us hopeless romantics there’s some oh-my-they-really-do-acknowledge-their-relationship yumminess. Aaand… that’s it. But I am left wanting to revisit the series on DVD. So, you know. In the sphere of long-term merchandising, I suppose the movie was a success.
• Um, Internet Explorer? You suck.
• SiteMeter did some work on their back-end yesterday and broke the internet. Which meant sites that use the most excellent traffic meter didn’t work on Internet Explorer. Lots of IE users consider IE to be equivalent to the internet. I blame Microsoft for that. (Because I can.) A few people emailed me that they couldn’t load CrochetMe.com, and of course I couldn’t replicate the issue. But Sitemeter fixed the problem before I could work myself into a tizzy over it, and, well. (Big thanks to Rachel at Crochet Pattern Central and to Kim Guzman for their help re: this glitch.)
• It was Internet Explorer’s fault, not SiteMeter’s. How do I know that? Here’s what SiteMeter posted was the problem:
  “The error occured [sic] when the SiteMeter tag was not a direct child of the body tag (e.g. if the tag was within a table or div). Recent changes we made created a failure for visitors viewing sites using Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 6.”
  I reckon very few sites don’t nest nearly everything in a a div tag. (Tables, bleh.) There’s nothing wrong with doing so. Which means that IE’s failure to play with whatever SiteMeter did was because of its habit of not playing nice with web standards. (Yes, I’m assuming the SiteMeter changes were standards-compliant. Because I can.)
• So, you see. IE = teh suck.
• Install Firefox. Thank me later.
• I started a friendfeed. Neat concept, but I’m not sure how I’ll use it. How do you use it?
• I also joined Propeller, what with Wil Wheaton going on about it. Are you on there? I haven’t really jumped in yet.
• And while I’m on this web-app kick, I’m still much in love with the Twitter.
• Part of my loving of the Twitter is because of the tweets I awoke to the morning the Entertainment Weekly Popwatch blog picked up the crafts-community-wants-a-Joss-Whedon-interview story.
• Speaking of, I’m moving on from pushing it. I’m reasonably confident the crafts love got at least to within one degree of Joss Whedon from two different sources. Which doesn’t mean he heard about it, since those two sources might not have thought it was worth passing on. But I’m not a fan of being pushy, and all along I’ve thought it would be more effective if fans of Whedoncraft did the contacting (more on this in the next bullet). So the story might die. But if it doesn’t die, it won’t die because you, gentle readers, won’t let it, and that would likely be the only thing that would work, anyway.
• Within the small (but really, it’s not that small, is it?) sphere of yarncraft, I find myself occupying a slice of celebrity these days. It’s never been my goal, and to be perfectly honest it fairly frequently freaks me out. But alas. It has come to pass that I am unable to fulfill all the requests made of me, and I know what it’s like to have someone I know and trust ask me for a favour and how that’s often very different from someone I don’t know asking a similar—or even more minor—thing of me. And I’m also keenly aware that no two requests from strangers are alike, and my reaction to a stranger’s request is informed as much by my mood and my to-do list as it is by the tone and other intangibles of their approach. So I’ve been conservative about my request to interview Joss Whedon given my lack of industry contacts. If, say, a foosball site or a Hannah Montana site (both of which I know nothing about) wanted to interview me, I’d be way more attracted to doing the interview if there were strong grassroots support for it instead of just some pleading by the site owners.
• I’m not sure if any of the blog posts I alluded up at the beginning of this post will materialize (like magic! Straight from my brain to the internets!) this week, since we’re going to press on the 13th. But, you know. You never know.
• Finally, the bounty of the garden is beginning to be bountiful.
• First plum:
  
• Tomatoes:
  
• And really finally, some Cleo love for you (that’s my dad in the hammock in the background):
  

* In this sense, yes, I think you can have parallel spectrums. What I mean is, The X-Files is not on the same spectrum of characteristics as Twelfth Night. I mean, they could be judged on the same spectrum of, say, goodness or entertainment value. But I don’t think they should be. Not in the same league.

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It’s not a race*! I won’t rush this week. Here’s my roundup, in no order, with a photo of me writing this post (at right).

• I’m 32 now. I don’t feel any different. As a surprising part of an epic Wednesday-night birthday party, I danced my brains out in a packed bar downtown. Even when I was a younger person, I never danced like that. I hate dancing, usually. But it was wicked fun. Also, we were old, we 30-somethings in that bar. Children these days wear an awful lot of no clothes.
• On a related note, congratulations to my friend Ian’s band, Werewolves of Creston—perhaps the most creative and kickass cover band in all the land—for winning the Wednesday-night slot at the Ceili’s Irish Pub (Granville & Smithe) for the rest of the summer, and for managing to smoosh The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald and Stairway to Heaven into one medley. They rock. Literally.
• The man gave me the best birthday present, ever. He searched all of Main Street for a dress dummy for me, and came home with this gorgeous creature:
  
• I love my desk on Granville Island. I like my office-mates very much. You might have noticed a difference this week if you were needing an email from me; there’s a good chance (though not a certainty—I still have a lot of catching up to do) that I wrote you back.
• Being in a tourist attraction all day long is fairly absurd, in a good way. Except when the pan flutist is the busker of the afternoon. Then it’s a nightmare that can only be handled with in-ear earphones and the constant surprise of shuffle songs.
• There was not one moment in the last nineteen months that I didn’t have a feel for what was at stake if I were to fall behind in my job. I was right. Having fallen behind is a nightmare for me and for those I work with. There are two things I’m extraordinarily grateful for at this time: That the people I work with and for have not brow-beaten me; I have felt comfortable expressing the tough time I’ve had, and, despite the challenges I’ve created, I have felt respected. If this weren’t the case, I imagine I’d be in a far deeper rut and would have a much more difficult time catching up. Second, some of the freelancers I work with, some of whom read this blog, have indicated they’re taking on a tighter deadline than would be desirable in part because of our relationship. I consider these to be favours I will pay back whenever called upon, and I thank them from the deepest depths. To those freelancers who might not think the deadlines I’m asking of them are tight, well, I thank you for that, too. And I’ll do my best to give longer deadlines in the future.
• Perhaps my next On Editing post will be about the timeline of an issue of the magazine.
• Most fascinating to me about the Rogers Wireless iPhone debacle here in Canada has been the evolution in concessions Rogers has made in response to the PR nightmare of the massive public outcry against their announced iPhone plans. (I’m fascinated by PR.) Although far from perfect, the concessions made have dulled the pain quite a bit, and I’m now back to planning on getting an iPhone**. Likely not tomorrow, but who knows. The following bullet contains a shocking confession about why (not really).
• The thought of watching Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog on an iPhone when it debuts online next Tuesday was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
• Though I’m a through-and-through a geek in many respects, and though I certainly knew all the words to a couple of their songs when I was in high school, I’ve never had a deep love of They Might Be Giants. My lack of love for TMBG might be overshadowed in the geek-cred department by my adoration of Common Rotation‘s cover of Don’t Let’s Start, which I’ve listened to nonstop for several weeks. You tell me why that’s geekier. I dare you. (And yes, that’s how I found out about Common Rotation.) (Also, I really like their music. For shiz.)
• I sent in the paperwork to renew my Permanent Resident Card. This is a huge relief***. Except I learned that Canada Post doesn’t offer overnight service from coast to coast. The fastest I could send it to Nova Scotia was 3-day. Canada = big.

* Funny movie = Rat Race.
** Assuming there isn’t appalling fine print and my questions are answered adequately by a human at the Rogers store.
*** In part. It will be a further relief when I track that the package has arrived. It won’t be total relief till I have a replacement card in hand before my next trip (in August).

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