I'm learning to knit continental

and loving it, largely due to this site and the videos therein. I especially love the caston method with no slip knot. Yayyy! The animated illustrations are neat too, but I'm a little too dumb for anything but video. I think I'll really love continental knitting if I ever get the hang of it.

Rosebud Actually

Okay, so I'm up late last night drinking wine and watching movies. The only hitch is, about six months ago my tv decided only to show color when it wants to. So it occasionally would show a few minutes of whatever you were watching in black and white. Kind of like everything was The Wizard of Oz And here I am, pauvre bebe (actually more like 'lazy bitch,' but I can't spell that in French), I do nothing about it. So about three months ago, the whole balance switched so that it showed about half color and half black and white. And now you only get a minute or two of color, lasting maybe 40 seconds.
And, of course, being a child of my generation, I am trained to think of anything shown in black and white as a "classic" movie (not that that means anything now that Rocky has entered the oeuvre), an experience in cinema, a brilliant work by a directorial auteur beyond compare.
Which makes watching Love Actually on this tv a little jarring. Not that it's a bad movie, it's plenty fun and great, but Hugh Grant boogieing down the stairs in the PM's Residence is no Citizen Kane. Y'know?
The other thing I'd like to talk about, concerning Love Actually, is the use of color to signify emotions, but it turns out everything is significant when seen only in less-than-a-minute flashes. Never mind.

I gotch'er knittin' right here...

There ya go. That's the back of a sweet little hoodie I'm making for Noah, my little third cousin. He's three, and I'm knitting the "6" size from the pattern, so maybe by the time I finish it he won't have outgrown it. I got the yarn on sale at (hey, a sale's a sale) Wal-Mart. It's Bernat Denimstyle, I'm doing the hoodie in "Batik" and "Jordache." Yep, that's right. Red and black. I also picked up plenty of "Indigo" and "Rodeo Tan," or as we in the real world call them, blue and beige. I initially bought them because they were $1.75 a skein, but now I'm working with the yarn, I really like the texture and the tweedy-esqe colorway. Hopefully I'll end up making myself a sweater of it, too. Of course, it being a sale, I did'nt find enough of any one color to make an entire sweater, so everything I make of it will be striped. Which is fine with me. I love stripes.

Weeee-haawwww!

I have reliable and free image hosting. Jeezly peete, what a trip. The thing that still kills me is that I was literally surrounded by refrences to different free image hosts, pretty much constantly when online, and it still took me weeks and weeks of trying everything that wasn't easy, reliable, free, or even appropriate before I tumbled to the real thing. Anyway, you can see I now have buttons out the yin-yang down the sidebar...I'm not done hunting them down and putting them up, tho. On the off chance any of the referents down there reads this and you don't have a button, or I've got one you don't like anymore, or you hate me and want me to stop mentioning you, drop me a line. I'd be more than happy to oblige you. Yayyyy! Buttons!

Okay, here's something...

a photo of my dad's nearly finished Broad Street Mitts from Knitty that I started way back when. Maybe by next winter I can finish the thumb and mitten cap (literally the easiest parts...I'm just bored) and actually give them to him. It's about 45,000 degrees here and the air is made up almost totally of water, with a molecule or two of oxygen in it, so he can't use them right now anyway. Maybe if I knitted him some swim flippers...
Anyway, I made a post a while back about how excited I was to be knitting these and I thought I'd show a picture...

Strange but True

For the record, what was messing up the blog was my visible counter, the one on the sidebar that everyone can see, from http://www.nerdsonsite.com (don't bother, they've dissapeared, which is why my counter stopped working and dicked my whole blog). The web-stat thingie has been working all along. I really, really like it and hope everyone who needs webstats will go to www.webstat.net and sign up. Don't go for the free one either, tho that's what I've got and I love it. Pay them. Whether you need the extras or not. (Think I made up yet for calling them dickholes? Even though I meant Nerds on Site?) My favorite thing about it is that it tells which searches resulted in someone clicking on your site. There are lots of odd things that people searched and then picked my blog to click on, like "kellye cash naked" and "kellye spam" (my blog was the first hit for that one, with the bonus that the summary included the line about, "why don't you ever get spam about thorazine?") but the weirdest thing is I got 36 hits from searches on "ElmorePisgah Inc." or some variation, or one of their yarns, because of my going insane a few weeks back over how I couldn't find a single bit of internet presence for the company or their products. And now I kind of am one. Oh, by the way, the website is now here. I don't know where they were all this time. The other high referrer I get is searches for "beastpaint." Go figure. I can't imagine that there are that many people out there looking for it, but more than that, I can't imagine that if you were searching for the real thing you'd click on my little ol' blog. Bizzare.
Oh, if you're scared of what sort of diabolical information I'm collecting on you, e-mail me from the link up there and I'll give you the info you need to look at my stats. I ain't got nothin' to hide.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, the 50 megs thing didn't work out. Why? I'm a retard. Yep, that's the reason. As I was browsing through the photo contests on Fark and B3ta, bemoaning the lack of a free, easy image hosting solution, the answer came to me like a...like a...like a guy on the message board talking about the free, easy image hosting at Photobucket.com. Why am I so stupid?

I'm not as smart as the dumbest monkey.

I've been having a beast of a time getting my photos hosted without paying for it, as anyone who regularly reads my blog (read: me) knows, and the whole time I've had an active free account at 50 Megs. I wasn't using the 50 Megs account for this blog because Blogspot and Blogger are easier to use, and we already established that I'm not very smart. But I can easily use the many photos I already had loaded to the 50 Megs image manager and any others I choose to load there to illustrate my blog. God, I'm dumb. Thank you for your patience.

In which I abuse my (?) readers and bemoan my brother's car:

Sorry the blog was down awhile, I really didn't know. I wasn't checking the blog, but I was checking my e-mails. Sorry if the link is too hard to find, right over there above the sidebar. I checked when I realized that a drunken template "fix" had crashed the blog, but the e-mail link was still operative. Thanks for nothing, dickholes. All three of you, anyway. Yep, my high-powered web-tracker says I had three visitors this month. Oh, yeah, and the code I finally found that was dicking the whole thing up was the code that lets my high-powered web-tracker track my site. Which means I had to delete it, which means I have no more web-tracker anymore. Which means I have to go back to pretending I have the slightest idea who might be interested in this mishmash and why. Again, thanks for nothing, web-tracker dickholes. Oh, yeah, and here's a newsflash:

Non-Insured California Dickhole Totals My Brother's Audi, Nearly Kills Him, and Dissapears.

Check it out--

BEFORE:



AFTER:





I would show you pictures of his stiff neck and numb arms and hands, but those kinds of things don't come across as well in photos. He really is hurt, tho, he went to the emergency room after an hour or two and they sent him right to physical therapy. And they won't let him drive or go to work (he's got three jobs!) for a few weeks, then he can only work a few hours a day and only do "essential" driving. And they've given him all kinds of serious "has a street value" narcotic painkillers. Which he won't share. His neck is killing him, he has to take them so he doesn't scream continuously, and he hates taking medicine, so it must be really really painful, blah, blah, blah. He's so selfish (I kid! I kid!) Yep, he's really hurt for real. I know, I thought he was just a wussy at first too, but I found out different. I could show you a hilarious picture of my cousin Terri and I throwing french fries at his face and him not being able to duck (from before we knew his injuries were so serious, I assure you) but some total drunken idiot deleted them trying to take an evidentiary picture of the greenest hotel bathroom on Earth. Really, it was soooooo seafoam green everywhere I was afraid I'd driven through a time warp into 1953.

knitting knews

I've been away so long I can't remember anything, so I'm slowly reading my own damn archive to know what I've already said ad nauseam. I think I haven't shown this picture before, of the bottom 1/3 of the front of my Shapely Tank (visit the blog-along-pink button, over there somewhere) or the first strip of my afgan, so here they are:

  

Coming later today: a fascinating explanation of how my image hosting solution was literally something a monkey could have figured out all along; pictures of my brother's beautiful Audi before and after some total hosebeast from Cali totalled it and nearly killed him and disappeared with no insurance; pictures of several new and old projects with excruciating, link-ridden explanations of exactly how I'm knitting them; a discussion of Arizona's "The Thing?", and approximately three uses of my new favorite word, 'dickhole,' for which you can thank Jessica.

Anybody out there?

I'm back! I've figured out my photo hosting problems, so there should be a couple pictures down there and more will be coming soon...of course, I pulled my old retard/boner act and accidentally deleted all my trip pictures, so you can't see any of those, (I'm banging my head on the monitor as you read this), but I've got some saved up from before that that I've been waiting and waiting to show you...see you in the morning!

Photo Hosting problems

My grand idea to host my photos for free isn't working out, so I'll be trying some other ideas for a while; in the meantime, some photos and links won't show up. Sorry. In other news, this might alarm you.

(thanks to Dave Barry)

New computer! Exciting pictures!

We got our new computer today! Yayyyy! Here is a photo of my tiny knit jolly roger and the huge collection of acrylic yarn I got yesterday at the thrift shop for $5! Yayy!

Sad/happy news

My friends' dad died. Early this morning. It is sad because everyone will miss him so, but happy because he was not even close to having any fun anymore. He didn't suffer long, and not at all at the end. He asked to be cremated and for his funeral to be on a Saturday, at least one week from the day he died, so that everyone would be able to come without upsetting their lives too much. That's the kind of guy he was. It also gives his family time to regroup and to plan the kind of sendoff they want to give him. This way they have more than a week to plan a really special bash, and get everything exactly as they want it. I think that's really great, and I plan to incorporate it into my funereal plans.

Evil fire escape as boring as old, nice fire escape.

Apparently, even I can get sick of looking around for worse and worse horrifying explicit pornography, so the evil fire escape will just take you to something evil from now until I get my horrifying explicit pornography surfing second wind. In other news, the computer guy worked on our new computer today to take his mind off of the below terrible stuff. And, I went out to Bonnie's Barnyard to visit a miniature horse colt that was born this very afternoon. It was cool. And a mini donkey named Charley tried to get into my lap for a nap. It is very cute when Bonnie goes and gets a baby donkey and holds it in her lap for a few minutes, but Charley is full grown, and bites. And was sporting a chubby. So that was a little uncomfortable. "Dude, I'm sorry. It's not you. It's me. I just don't feel that way about you. At all." People look at you funny when you talk to donkeys that way. Even if they're your mom.

Sometimes stuff sucks and you can't do anything about it.

I'm sure all my faithful readers remember that my mom's friend Rosemary, whose dad is dying, and our computer guy, whose dad is dying, are siblings. Mom is out at Rosie's house right now, trying to help with the stupid peripheral things that come up so none of the family would have to leave, because they think today might be the day. The dear guy is drifting away, and I can't put into strong enough words how good he is, how strong and wonderful. His family is terrific people too, and they are handling all this with so much grace and strength I can't fathom it. I feel so bad for all of them. I wish I could do something, but I can't, so I think I'll just go bang my head against the stove until I feel like taking a little nap.

Fucking Shitdicks

Hey, I actually have something to say today. I was doing my daily webcrawl and when I got to Defective Yeti he had posted about some stuff that pissed me off. He was on NPR's The Works to talk about blogs, and a lot of the stuff he talked about (as always) was both engrossing and amusing. But if you happen to click over there, the middle topic is "comments spam," and it is pissing me off. Not the way he wrote or spoke about it, but the fact of it. Jeez. There's a Wired Magazine article about it that mentions several people it has happened to, including Wil Wheaton (I swear I'm not obsessed, he's just everywhere online) where someone spammed his comments board for a post about his fear that his sick cat would die with links to an extremely legally objectionable pornography site. Which just makes me sick. And if I understood the Wired article right, the only real objective of sending out spambots to do this is to get whatever site mentioned on the most websites, whether or not anyone clicks on the link, so that whatever overseas pharmacy or porn farm or whatever gets to fool search engines into thinking it's really popular. Which also degrades the quality of returns that you or I get when using a search engine. That's just shitty, folks. I mean, I'm in no danger of it here in my little corner of the internet, as it seems to be targeted specifically to very popular blogs and web-phenomenon type sites. But I happen to love to read several of them, and anything that hurts them, therefore endangering my amusement and edification (besides being totally morally reprehensible and worthy of a quick rap to the nads for whoever thought it up) makes me really mad.

Ahhh, summer!

What a lovely day I've had. I've finished all but two of the books I've had out of the library, am down to the boring one I've tried to read in between each of the other 15 really interesting ones, and the sociological study of Amish culture. Strangely enough, these are two seperate books. The boring one is just an uninspired story about flat, uninteresting characters. I won't name the book or author, so's not to embarrass anyone, but it's called Sort of Rich by James Wilcox. Just terrible. It's like he's trying to write a book by Larry McMurtry, only the way McMurtry'd do it if he was in a coma. And was a terrible writer. Plus it seems like the author hates each and every character (for which, I don't blame him) and the reader too. Uhgh. The text on the Amish is still dragging because I'm still in the beginning where the author is explaining what he's changed since the last edition and defining his terms so you understand in what ways he means the Amish are a folk culture and in which ways they deviate from one. The only thing about reading about the Amish, a cultural group I've long admired, is that approximately every page and a half I have to put the book down and do something absolutely filthy. Drink a beer, leer at a teenaged boy, tweak my own nipple, it's terrible. The Amish are corrupting me! Help! This morning I read 6 pages without stopping and I had to throw the book on the couch and knit a Jolly Roger Flag. It turned out great. I used the yarn I dyed the other day for the field and a pure white for the skull and bones. Picture soon to follow, as if you believed me any more. As god is my witness, I WILL post pictures one day. It's just that the new computer is ordered, but it keeps getting delayed, (because our computer guy's dad is in the end stage of terminal cancer and he's just a little preoccupied with assuring his dad's comfort and quality of life in his last weeks on Earth) and it's not worth putting the $40 usb port in the old computer (except maybe it is, I don't know. We're going to keep this one running so I can still check my e-mail even when mom needs to play solitaire for 450 hours straight, and so other people can check their e-mail when I need to edit my blog template for 450 hours straight), and everytime I go somewhere where maybe I can save the pics to disk, something terrible happens. So screw it. I could have took the damn camera to Walmart or somewhere and had them put on a cd by now, for like 9 bucks. Jeez. Well, I did submit to doing it my mom's way, so I don't know why I'm surprised I've had the camera this long and still can't post fricking pictures to my blog. I even figured out how to host them without paying a million dollars. I just can't get them out of the damn camera. Oh, well.
Forget that. After I knitted the flag and read a little, I went to drink beer and mow the back lawn, which was fun (I know, that's nuts), until I ran over the cord anyway (it's an electric mower, which is why it's fun, that and the beer) because everyone in the house came out to "see if I needed help" (read: stand around looking at me and unnerve me to the point that I ran over the cord). So then I went to my room while they fixed the cord, and I drank more beer, and me and mom took Dad out to eat chicken fried steak for his birthday. We walked down to the diner, three blocks, and back, and it was fun. Overall, a good day. Mmmmm.

Hey, kids! Do you like the rock'n roll?*

I'm having a good day. This afternoon I dyed one of my favorite little strappy t-shirts, and my knitted flapper hat, and about 120 feet of plain cotton yarn bright red, except I made the yarn be a little variegated by skeining it and tying it off every few inches. And while it was soaking, I sat on the porch and played with the sweet boy kitty. And this morning I laid around in bed and played with my sweet girl kitty. And I'm just having a good day. Mmmmmmm. Except the "bright red" turned out to be more of a hot, hot, hot reddy pinky orange. I guess the packet said "poppy" on it, so I think I got the color they meant. I followed the instructions as exactly as I ever do. I still like the color, so that's good. I'm blocking the hat on my head right now! Whoopee. The only kinda bad thing is mom's friend Rosemary found out this weekend that her dad, a really great guy who survived prostate cancer and is her touchstone and has been diagnosed with a brain tumor and was given six months to live about two weeks ago, is probably going to die within the next week or so. She's understandably bummed. He and her mom have come to live with her until the end, and hospice has been visiting. It's pretty sucky. We're going out to take them breakfast tomorrow morning, so I'm hitting the sack early tonite so I can act human. That poor gal. I'm sure hoping she'll be strong enough to take this. He is such a good person, and I know he's ready to go, but she's nowaynohow ready to let him go. And her and her mom get along not at all, so he's worried about who's going to take care of his wife when he goes. I feel so for them and have no idea what to do or how to help or anything.
Anyway, I'm not exactly looking forward to tomorrow, but I feel like it's a good thing to do.
*where the hell does this phrase come from? I've been saying it for years, and I get a strong sense of David Letterman being the source, but I really have no idea. Please, if I have any readers at all, someone know where those words come from, and if you know, e-mail me and let me know, lest I die!

I'm a little behind...

and a lot up front! Harr, harrrrr, har! Ummm, I haven't posted a lot the last few days. I got about 15 books from the library Monday and have been rabidly reading for days. And actually, I have a great big ass, too. Tee hee.
I'm making slow, painful progress on the shapely tank, I've just started the increases after the waist and am contemplating where to stop the variegated and start the solid white. I'm really excited about it, but I'm losing my steam all the same. I was sitting there deciding whether to do the increased by knitting in front and back of a stitch or doing a make-one, and I started thinking, 'ohh, my feet are cold, maybe I should start those socks.....or I could work on the afgan...mmmm....Dad's hands look cold...I should finish his mitts.' So pathetic. Anyhoo, I'm doing really well, if you discount the extreme moodiness and the blinding flashes of murderous rage and the momentary depths of suicidal depression, and the entire sloughs of despond...no, I really am doing okay. Not that I'm completely kidding about all that other stuff, but I'm pretty good all the same.

Everybody is talking about you.

Find out what they're saying here. It's called Googlism and it uses Google to compile a list of statements that have been made about people with your name. Try it out! Selections from mine are below. Of course, I ran a couple of friends through, too. My favorites from theirs:

Jessica is not a substitute for counseling.
Kathey is new to the organic produce aisle.
Mary is looking to hire hundreds of monsters.
Mac is an old hound that can't hunt.

And there are so many more. Feel free to put your favorites in the comments for this post if I missed them.

kellye is:

• convinced that she single handedly saved hip
• one and so is my daughter chloe
• leading the red team
  
• 5 months pregnant with a baby boy
• easier
• honored to have been selected to play country legend patsy cline
• sales manager for broadband ip
  
• a true treasure hunter & expert at finding bargains on good used books
  
• shy
• actively pursuing her christian music
• better than the last one
  
• definitly my most treasured friend
in demand as a performer and for public appearances
• the great niece of country western singer johnny cash and a former miss america
• currently the vice president
• my daughter and partner in ministry
• getting some dinner guests this evening
• there and tells charles that they have to prep the patients
• a soulful balladeer with a deep rich r & b sound

The sick part is that there are so few people named "Kellye" that I already know who most of those are referring to due to having Googled my name about a dozen times. Most of them are from Kellye Cash or Kellye Gray. On the bright side, at least I have some. I tried to Googlize my mom, Bonnye, and there wasn't even one statement.
You can also Googlize a what, where or when. Here's a when for my birthday. Fun stuff. Thanks to Sonja of Whimworks and Jen of Monkeyknits and Alison of Brainylady whose blogs I found it in.

VINDICATION!

At any cost! I drank a bottle and a half of Gallo Shiraz tonite. And we had two bottles. And my mom drank the other half. And now she is writhing drunkenly in her bed, calling for my help occasionally to make it to the crapper for diarreha or vomits, and she has said to me:

• I've never been this drunk before!
Twenty-four times.

• I feel so sick!
Seventeen times.

• Why do I feel so sick?
Seven times.

• I think I'll die!
Twice.

• I'm almost sixty!
Once.

• I want to be your friend, but not this bad.
Twice.

• How do you live like this?
Once.

My dad had to get his own dinner, since I "went to bed" when she got offensively drunk. And then I had to get up and make sure he got dinner and make sure the cats got their ear mite meds, and make sure I got dinner, and help her throw up and make it to the toilet, and take Immodium. Yum!
Keep tuned for the morning after! She's lined up for a doozy, and she'll be sick all day if I'm any judge. And it's not yet nine! I may still decide to get drunk, in which case she's in for a long morning of getting herself taken care of all on her own, just like I do. In fact, I think I may go get a six-pack. Mmmmm. Justification.

Tink! Tink! Tink! TINK! Tink!

I just figured out short rows!
Da da da da SHORT ROWS!
I just figured out short rows, because I'm really smart!
Oh, yeah, and I'm knitting the shapely tank for the tank-along over there in the sidebar, that lovely pink button, go check it out! I haven't posted anything to the tank-along blog, since I haven't really done anything special with my tank. I can't wait to finish it, or at least get significantly done so I can post tho, and show off with pictures. There are a lot of knitters on there much, much more experienced than I, so I'm tickled to be included and eager to show off how much I can do so far. Heeee.