General

Don’t forget to change your clocks tonight. I’ll be dragging my sorry self out of bed at what feels like an ungodly hour to go to church tomorrow. (This is when playing piano at the 8 AM mass really, truly sucks.)

I finished a whole bunch of stuff today, but the weather and lighting weren’t cooperating, so no pictures until at least tomorrow. Of course, I also started something new – well, swatched for it, anyway. Again, though, no pictures yet. It’s very springy, and from the new Knitty… (I’m such a tease!)

To all those who leave comments advertising pill suppliers, adult sites, and yes, even zip code look-up sites on my blog:

Don’t you have anything better to do with your pathetic little lives than to leave strange comments with inappropriate links on my personal blog? My blog readership isn’t that big. And I sincerely doubt any of the people who actually read my blog are stupid enough to click on your links. As far as Google ranking goes, I delete the comments long before Google could ever possibly see those links. All you are doing is wasting your time…and mine. And I honestly don’t care if you waste your own time, but I have better things to do with my time than to clean up the graffiti you post on my site.

So, I’ll ask nicely: stop spamming me. I’ll find a way to prevent it anyway, even if you don’t.

Sincerely,
A Frustrated Blog Owner
————-

Now, to all those who leave nice, friendly comments on my blog – or even unfriendly comments, as long as they are relevant:

Please don’t stop commenting! And thank you for letting me vent! Since I delete these things before most people see them, you have no idea how much of this goes on – and I intend to keep it that way – but to give you an idea, I have deleted hundreds of comments with inappropriate content from this blog.

Movable Type 3.0 is going to come out soon, and I am probably going to implement a registration system. That doesn’t mean you can’t comment if you don’t register, but your comments will be queued for review. I really hate to do this to my regular visitors, but I’ve got to stop this somehow.

It’s two weeks earlier than I’d planned to blog about this, but I couldn’t resist – after all, this is my journal!

Drum roll, please…

The Reillys are proud to announce the impending release of their latest edition, Reilly 2.0!

Reilly 2.0, due to be released in late October, is a total re-work of the original Denis 1.0 version, with equal contributions from the award-winning Sarah 1.0. The feature list is not yet complete, but is expected to include the Cry, Poop, Eat, and Sleep modes. Future upgrades will include the Crawl, Walk, School, and Car Key modes.

More information on this exciting new release will be available in the coming months.

This just proves that we’re total geeks, doesn’t it? Our poor child is doomed to spend his or her adolescence pretending that we don’t exist.

Anyway, my “official” due date, which really means nothing, is October 30th. I would argue that it’s actually October 29th, because their little wheel-gadget-thingies don’t seem to take into account the fact that it’s a leap year. Either way, I’ll probably end up with a Halloween baby!

I’ll be 10 weeks pregnant tomorrow, and aside from all-day-long sickness (whoever called it morning sickness couldn’t really have had it) and needing to go to bed by 9:30, I feel pretty good. My new bedtime explains why I haven’t really been blogging or knitting very much, doesn’t it? I’m also stuck on all the projects I had started or planned to start for myself, because I’m certainly not going to be able to wear them anytime soon!

Oh, and pay no attention to the date, really. :)

My cousin’s new baby (what does that make me – first cousin once removed?) arrived this morning: Benjamin Rowan C., weighing in at 7 lbs, 6 ozs.

He’s a cutie, but you’ll have to take my word for it – I was on the way to a doctor’s appointment in the area when I heard the news, and of course, since I was going to my doctor, I didn’t have my camera with me. Hmm. Maybe the camera cell phone wouldn’t have been a bad idea?

Anyway, I’ve got to finish up his birthday present still! Just a couple of side seams, a bit of embroidery, and buttons. Guess what I’ll be doing after my concert tonight!

It took me a while, but I finally have the pictures up from our trip to Italy. I’ll warn you in advance – there are quite a few, but I took about three times this many!

Venice was lovely. We were there for two whole days and parts of two travel days. We didn’t really have any plans to see anything in particular, so we spent a lot of time exploring the canals and visiting churches. The main form of transportation is by water bus, so we got our hands on three-day passes which also had other bonuses: discounts to get into museums and churches. The two main museums we used that for were the Doge’s palace and the glass museum on Murano. It was a bit on the chilly side, and it rained for the last whole day we were there, but we were able to take a late-night gondola ride the last night once the rain stopped. The next morning, there was a water bus strike, so we arranged for a water taxi to the train station. I think we could have spent the whole week just in Venice, but since we’d already made arrangements to head to Rome, we hopped on a train… Venice album (60 photos).

The train ride to Rome included some beautiful scenery of the Italian countryside. We got to Rome while it was still daylight, but we just unpacked, found a nice place for dinner and spent the rest of the evening relaxing and planning the rest of our time there. Saturday morning the first stop was Vatican City. I don’t know if it’s that crowded all the time, or just Saturday mornings, but we spent about 45 minutes in line just to get into the Vatican museum. It was an amazing museum, even if it was a little crowded. We visited St. Peter’s, and climbed right to the top – we didn’t know in advance that there were over 300 steps, which included spiral staircases and everything! Sunday was spent exploring ancient Rome, and then we took an illuminated Rome tour for out last evening there. Rome album (81 photos).

In general, we had no problems with language – because we stuck to fairly touristy areas, pretty much everyone spoke at least a little English. The food was amazing. It wasn’t like restaurant Italian food, but more like Grandma’s cooking – except in a restaurant setting. I couldn’t get into the coffee there, although Denis liked it just fine. The gelato, on the other hand…mmmmm. Oh, and I know it’s a very touristy thing to do, but we had some pizza for lunch while we were in Venice, and it was the absolute best pizza I’ve ever had!

We had a really nice trip, and someday I’d love to go back and spend more time there!

It’s a long story, but it took me a while to convince iPhoto to play nicely and let me upload my pictures to Ofoto. So, no pictures of Italy, no blog about Italy, no blogging at all…

At this rate, by the time I get around to showing off the new project I’m working on, it will be done!

I did finally manage to burn the album to CD, but now I have to spend hours uploading the pictures 10 at a time. (Ofoto really doesn’t have a great Mac interface.) Can’t the photos just upload themselves or something? Really, what good is digital if I have to do all this work?!? ;)

I hereby solemnly swear that by the end of this weekend those pictures will be up and linked. Unless they’re not, in which case, well, I’m sure I will have had a good reason!

“As you slide down the banister of life, may the splinters never point in the wrong direction.”

I am still so jet-lagged that I ended up taking today off. I managed to get some grocery shopping done, but not much else! But going grocery shopping allowed me to pick up a small corned beef brisket and all the trimmings for a St. Patrick’s Day dinner. (Yesterday, the best we could come up with would have been ordering Chinese food, as our fridge was completely barren of anything edible!)

Still no progress on the pictures. I don’t even have them all loaded on my computer yet, let alone uploaded to Ofoto. Maybe tomorrow night…

Right now, I’m going to find my pillow, because I can’t keep my eyes open any longer.

Well, at least physically. Mentally, it’s almost midnight, and between the plane and the car I’ve been traveling 20 hours out of the past 34. (It doesn’t help that we woke up at 3:45 this morning, feeling like we’d overslept, and decided to stay up so we could get an early start on the drive home.)

I have to tackle a bit of Mt. Laundry, and then maybe I’ll have the energy to sort through the 400 or so pictures we took before I finally crash.

Oh, and comments are back on. They were on for a whole 25 minutes before I got another spam comment…

Just a quick post to let everyone know that we’re here in Italy, and having a great time! We have internet access at our hotel in Rome, but it’s fairly limited…

Venice was amazing, a short blog post can’t possibly describe it. So far I’ve taken, oh, about 200 pictures. Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with all of them when I get back!

No yarn stores yet, although I did buy an Italian knitting book. Maybe tomorrow!

Well, I did get everything done – although, not without some problems. (Remind me to tell you about my felting disaster when I get back!)

There’s lots of other stuff I didn’t have time to write about, including the fact that Murphy’s 1-year-adoption anniversary was March 1st. (I didn’t forget, really, I just forgot to post about it!)

Also, a little housekeeping. If you’ve tried to comment in the past couple of days, you’ve probably noticed that you can’t. This is intentional. I occasionally get massive amounts of comment spam in a day, and I really don’t want that sort of thing hanging around for the whole time I’m gone. I’ll miss all the good comments, but I feel very strongly about not having my blog littered with inappropriate comments… Don’t worry, though, as soon as I get back and have constant access to my email I’ll turn them back on!

If I get a chance, I’ll try to blog from Italy, otherwise, I’ll be back in a week! Arrivederci!