It felt SO good

Pardon the bad felting pun. Yesterday I did the needle felting class at Lettuce Knit, and it was great! I made some funky looking felted and decorated balls, and some flower petals to felt onto Grass, my new green felted bag. I'll have to get together with Dani over the next few days to take some pictures, because I'm really happy about the way it turned out!

I also stayed for the weekly Stich 'n Bitch, and worked a little bit on a new project. It's a shawl in Elizabeth Zimmerman's Pi are Squared pattern in some lovely soft alpaca. I made this shawl for my Stepmother in a different colour, and really enjoyed both the knitting itself and the finished product. And since I've been finishing up a few projects, I figured I could end my moratorium on starting new things.

Then, last night, I ventured forth in the biggest snowstorm of the year to get my laptop fixed. This Saturday, I leave Toronto for a physiotherapy placement in Dryden, Ontario. (More on that tomorrow). I need a computer while I'm there, and I really don't want to lug my desktop up there. I have a very old laptop that I was hoping could be salvaged just to check my email and use MSN (and create blog posts of course!)

I brought it over to Steve, Shawn and Iain, the 3 biggest computer geeks I know, to work their magic. I can sometimes be a little download-happy, so there was a lot of crap on there that was slowing things down. These boys deserve a medal. They had very limited resources with which to work. My old laptop is special. Here's what's wrong with it:

• cd rom drive won't close, needs to be held shut with tape


• Screen cable is very finicky, sometimes goes completely blurry, therefore the lid of the laptop can't be closed and opened more than say, once a year


• The above point was annying enough, but recently the light on the screen has gotten so dim it's hardly usable.


• Many of the keys no longer work. I spilled water on the keyboard when I had had a few drinks one night. Some of the keys are rather critical. Like the backspace key. And two of the arrow keys. This did not stop me from writing my entire honours thesis on this computer.


• The battery is so weak that the laptop cannot be unplugged for more than 15 seconds without dying. That plus the screen not closing makes for a very non-portable machine

After spending a good 2 hours fiddling with it, they gave up. Luckily, they're the type of people who have old laptops lying around the house. So I borrowed a very flashy 1998 Toshiba laptop from them. And no, I didn't bother bringing the other laptop back home with me. RIP old buddy.

OOh, look at my new warm winter boots! Mine are white though, not pink.

I think they'll come in handy for my northern adventure. Icefishing, here I come!