The Shadows on My Wall Don't Sleep

I heard about it months ago, but at the time I didn't see much use for it. The person that showed it to me was using it as a collaborative idea board and, at that time, it wasn't very friendly to someone just looking around to see what it was all about.

Pinterest has gotten over that little problem. I've only had an account for about a day and a half and I have ten boards and sixty seven pins. I'm sure I will have more by the time I go to bed tonight.

See, I have had this huge bookmark file that I've moved from browser to browser and PC to PC for about fifteen years. It had more than 3500 bookmarks before I ran my latest "find me all the dead links so I can dump them" tool (Check Places add-on for Firefox). Sadly, an automated pruning program doesn't help as much these days as it did years ago, too many domains get parked and links redirect rather than nicely returning a 404 or other useful error codes. So I've been manually cleaning up after the first rough pass and dumping bookmarks left and right. I still have in excess of 2300 of them though.

What does this have to do with Pinterest and my obsession with it? Well that has to do with how I ended up with so many bookmarks in the first place. I wasn't just bookmarking interesting sites, I was bookmarking interesting pages, or even parts of pages. Basically one bookmark per idea rather than overall concept. I don't think I was the only one doing this.

Pinterest gives me a place to put all those "ooh, shiny!" moments without having to add a bookmark into an increasingly convoluted set of folders. Granted, at the moment I'm still sorting out my boards, which are enough like folders that I'm sure they'll multiply like proverbial rabbits, and some things I'd like to put on more than one board, which you can't do right now (maybe in the future... I can hope), but it does give me a nicely laid out visually oriented way to see all those neat things. So the bookmark file is shrinking to things I actually use and all those "hey, that's a cool use for an old light globe and a half burned out string of Christmas lights", "that recipe looks tasty", and "cool, living bridges!" bits are getting pinned.

Of course looking at what other people are pinning is also helping my boards fill... but at least they aren't adding more bookmarks because I just repin them to one of my boards.

Currently if you request an invitation at the site you'll probably get one in under 12 hours (I did). Or you can drop me your email and I can send one to you. If I'm online (which, lets face it, I usually am if I'm not sleeping) you'll get it faster, and you'll probably be linked up as my friend automatically rather than having to hunt me down (I'm Tephra there).

One downside, you are required to have a Facebook or Twitter account to sign up even if you have an invitation. They use that to give you a seed set of people to watch. You can remove those people, and disassociate your account, once your account is created.

My favorite skirt from back in my grad school days fits¹ again! I love this skirt to pieces, it's black with a vaguely Victorian rose pattern. The fabric is sheer and crinkly and it's put together in tiers with the last tier being short enough to be judged a ruffle. Even though it's tiered it hangs very straight and even though it's sheer it is lined to mid calf (with an nearly as sheer fabric, but it is enough). But the things that make it awesome are that it is long, the ruffle rests on the tops of my feet, and it has movement. Walking in this skirt is amazing because it swirls around like liquid without getting tangled up around my legs.

If you listen carefully you can probably hear my *squee!* of joy at being able to wear this skirt again. Walking out to the mailbox was fun even if it is spitting snow right now. :D

---

1. For a value of "fit" where I put it on over my head and squish the boobs through before snugging it down to my waist. It won't go over my hips. This is exactly how it fit when I bought it.

Or I missed them finding it.

A dragon made of CAKE!

And he's (she's?) a gamer, or snacks on them, there's a d20 there under that foreclaw. :D

Thanks to this post by CraftyHippie on Craftster I now have a source for $5 casual summer shoes.

Most people have no occasion to be aware that those cheap White Stag shoes at WalMart often run up to size 12. I generally just check the bins of the Keds knock offs (with little luck) but the ones with the elastic gores frequently have at least a few pairs of 12s. Until I read the above linked post I never paid much attention to that since the elastic gore made them impossible to wear with my very high instep.

She's right, the gore comes right out clean with just a seam ripper.

Pity they never seem to have 12W shoes in those bins, but so far these seem comfortable enough with thin socks. :) And if they only last a summer, well they were only $5.

*contemplates the things she can do with a supply of cheap black, white, and sometimes navy, kakhi, or red, canvas shoes*

I almost ordered these. In purple.

I'm really boggled that I could possibly get glasses, with my choice of lens shape in that frame, for under $25 after shipping (under $30 if I got the anti-glare coating, and under $35 if I also got the clip on sunglasses).

It seems far too good to be true.

My current glasses are a year old and I was thrilled to get them for only $150 (compared to the nearly $500 Walmart quoted for basically the same glasses). But unlike the frames from my previous pair the bows touch my temples with this, leaving the oh so attractive dent and letting my skin chemistry play havoc on the frames.

Well I bookmarked the page. We'll see what comes. I probably should fork over $60 for an eye exam again "soon", it will be two years in August. If the deal is still sitting there I can hardly quibble at $30 for glasses after a $60 exam.

... not so much for coffee, but they're great for loose tea.

We have some Russian fruit infused black tea that hafoc bought a while back. It's really good, but it's a hassle to brew because it's loose and we have to mess around with tea balls or strain it through a sieve if making a pot rather than just a mug. But with a French press, well, now it's a snap.

You can't leave it in the press while you drink a cup of course, it just keeps steeping and getting more and more bitter and astringent, but if you pour it out into a pot or pitcher....

Today I'm having it sweet, chilled, and "seasoned" with a splash of apple juice... yummy!

Of course, with my friends list I'm probably the last person to know about this site.

"The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Freesound focuses only on sound, not songs."

Interesting what you can find when you put "windchime mp3" into Google.

*goes back to making a playlist for her NaNo writing*

So I'm cruising around LJ to avoid making a call that I need to make but really don't want to deal with and I come across a reference to Sock Dreams. Now I'm not that much for socks, at least not like I am for shoes and boots, but the indication was that funky (as in looks, not smells wiseguy) socks could be found there so I went looking.

OMG, tons of thigh high and over knee socks in nifty patterns and colors. They have toe socks and tabi, and animal print toe socks! *glee*

I find a likely pair of thigh highs, advertised as fitting feet sized 8-13 and stretchy for larger thighs. Cool. Then I read the sizing info:

"36 inches from the heels to the tops with good two way stretch. medium to larger feet sized 8-13 thighs up to at least 24 inches, remember, the wider your thighs the less high these will go, but you can always cuff them or slouch them. "

...

My calves are 24 inches.

*pout*

So morganalilith, I remember you mentioning you knit socks. Have any handy advice for a new sock knitter? Guestimation help on ounces of whatever weight yarn to sock size?

For those few among my friends that don't read ursulav's personal journal (which I highly recommend for the art and then funny) I thought I'd mention that she's started another journal to document one of her ongoing projects, gearworld. It's styled as the journal of an explorer named Eland (an antelope, which she has painted in the past) and his companion Heinrich (as yet unmentioned species, but I suspect a bear) as presented by a librarian (Vo the Eighteenth, no mention or speculation as to species).

I'll Ursula explain it by posting the journal bio here:

From the notes of Senior Librarian Vo the Eighteenth:

( It's a bit long for an uncut entry, please click here. )

So if you like the cryptic markings, odd constructions, and mysterious origins check out The Book of the Gear.

1. Total number of books I own:
If "own" can be interpreted to "bought" then I have to count the 3000 (+/- a few hundred) paperbacks that my mother and brother are holding hostage in Massachusetts. ;> They're communally owned, though I was the one that actually bought over 95% of them. (And my brother and I will likely have battles when the time comes to divide them up, I want all the Nortons but he wants at least one of her series. There may be some negotiation over getting them duplicated somehow.)

Now for books actually in my vicinity... I guesstimate another hundred or two.

2. The Last Book I Bought:
Erf. I've been broke so long that it's been a while. I think the last bunch (I never buy just one book, unless I'm buying in the airport) included books 4 and 5 of the Harry Dresden series by Jim Butcher and The Service of the Sword (Honor Harrington anthology).

3. The Last Book I Read:
Well I tried to read a book on reincarnation which billed itself as the best book on the subject that I'd read in this lifetime... my next lifetime had better have better books on the subject. I guess the last one I completed was Death Masks, the 5th Harry Dresden book.

I think at 55 chapters (with one more in the works) The Best Defense by joisbishmyoga qualifies as a book. I read the whole thing through again (for the 4th or 5th time) last weekend.

4. 5 Books that mean a lot to me:
This would be a lot easier if it said "that I like a lot"....

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien - Mom read this to me so often that eventually when I asked her to read it to me again she suggested that I read it myself. I think this is the first non-children's book that I read myself.

The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey- The books (it's a trilogy, and I should include the Harper Hall trilogy here as well) I read after I exhausted every horse book in the library.

Witch World by Andre Norton - What I read after Dragonriders and the start of my Andre Norton obsession. I find Gates fascinating, and Ms. Norton wrote a lot of books with Gates, not just the Witch World series.

Flanker's Tale by William J. Rogers (hafoc) - How often do you get to read a series of five novels as they are written? I really should read the current edit, it's been a few years and I know he's made a lot of changes since the last time I read it. It has Gates. :)

Sargasso of Space by Andre Norton - Really, I should say "The Solar Queen Series". This is the one series that I know my brother and I are going to go head to head over when the time comes to divide the book collection. Maybe by then the whole series will have been republished (several of the books have been already, but not all of them).

Tag 5 people and have them (refuse to?) put this in their journal:
Most of my friends have already done this meme, someone I name is sure to have done it.
morganalilith
toy_dragon
dewhitton
chrissawyer
toshirodragon