My (perhaps controversial) thoughts as a "newbie" to CA.

MelissaDallas--How gorgeous! I'm tempted to get hooked on this quilting of yours--what is it?--does it mean thousand or million flowers?---I recognize it from paperweights with that name--it's so tempting as I look at this wondrous thing you've created! Thanks for sharing this image! It's so colorful my eyes are squeaking!

JBeans-- What I'm wondering is, how did you get spellcheck to type out your t-o-u-c-h-accented e? When I try it I get touche with a red line and no accent....

Hah-hah! Cabinet installers with these big ole huge Dustbusters dangling from their tool belts!! How funny would that have been? And a Dustbuster that speaks Spanish no less!

MelissaDallas-- Looks oh so tempting....will definitely keep it in mind for when the blocks project slows down....t

JBeans, that's cool...I'm sure you have umlaut-access also? Or is it just the French words?

I have a dumb phone--but don't tell it that, it'll develop a complex--but it's smart enough for me...I don't have skinny enough fingers to text successfully.....more power to the small-fingered and their smart phones!

Do you know how long it took me to figure out how to capitalize names in my contacts listing in my dumb phone? And how to make a space? Grrrrr.......

But then I felt so smart when I finally figured it out!

Five boxes are 98% finished--blocks are assembled and inside, tab on the end is sealed, now just waiting for the stickers...

I'm all for capitalism but hate it when it makes you have to make custom boxes to house your little creations...

PACKAGING!

Hi JBeans-- Found umlaut yet?

Am still awaiting stickers for the boxes, fearful that you won't be able to read what's on them....they are small-- 1 1/2" square, and the first set I got the words are barely legible....so fingers crossed...

A friend is giving me her copy of Photoshop Elements to dump into my macbook so I can work on photos...then into the nether regions of.....

making a website.

The nether regions as opposed to the upper regions. Don't ask me to further define this as it might not make it through the censors...

Hi DisneyGirl-- Thanks for the kind words....and guess what? The stickers arrived and are fine! You can actually READ the words! Yay!! Yep, it's been quite an uphill fight to get from start to (nearly) finish..... Will let you know when the website is functioning....and maybe some photos too...

JBeans-- Wow, you looked up a bunch and how odd the ones that got through! I had to call apple support tonight to ask about how to load Photoshop Elements into my macbook from a SuperDrive and while I had good Darryl on the phone I should have asked him how they choose words.....

When I work in Word on the novel, one thing pisses me off no end....it's that you can't change the size or the color of the danged cursor! So often in a big chunk of text you have to move about so quickly and I've nearly gone blind and batty trying to locate the damned cursor! I found a bit of help by changing the page color, which shows off the cursor a bit better.... but the ideal solution, of course, and I'm so so so so surprised that clever apple hasn't figured it out--or maybe deems it not important--is just to make this something you can change ALONG WITH things like cursor speed and sensitivity etc....oddly enough, pcs have this capacity...for once, apple is not behind the ball and microsoft is!!! I called a whole bunch of people and put in a word to have this added to the macbook repertoire but no go....

One of the characters in my book is a German war bride named Kathe. This takes an umlaut over the a and the pronunciation comes out something like Kay-ta (at least that's what a Prussian friend tells me). The German writer Goethe, whose name takes an umlaut over the o, is pronounced kind of like "urhgh." I pronounce it--the few times in my life I've ever had to--Ger-ta ...

When I was setting up Word in the new macbook I had to re-do lots of things and one of them was how to strike just a few letters of a name I'd use baziillion times--like my main character Roberta--and have Word autofill the rest of the name. Great gimmick! But the most time-consuming, slow-slogging-through-tech-mud task was how to get Word to autofill Kathe by just typing Ka but WITH AN UMLAUT OVER THE A!!! I almost went nuts trying to get this right...the Word version I was using was years newer than the old Word '97 I'd been using.....when I finally achieved it, I felt I'd climbed Everest, sans sherpa, through an avalanche. ('Cause I kinda had)

Hi WenchLori--

I hope my original post helped you with decisions, musings, wonderings, ponderings. I'm so glad I wrote that, and that I did so here, at this place replete with all these fabulous women! Little did I know back then, on that momentous, chilly, feeling-oh-so-alone-and-no-one-was-home-to-take-my-call evening, how BCO's women would move, inspire, soothe, guide, and instruct me in all things bc. I feel I've found friends for life here, who drop in like next-door neighbors for a cup of tea or coffee and to share with me and let me share with them....

I know these up-coming days will be busy and challenging. It's funny how when I look back at those weeks of the pre, during, and post-op period at how fast they flew by! You get into the rhythm of things and just ride them as you'd body-surf a big wave...

And then the surgery period is over--and life goes back, in a way you wouldn't believe, to normal...

I never knew I'd find normal again.

That I'd once again be pissed at the many thick perfume sampler pages in magazines, their combined scents curdling the air in the room.

That in the bathroom while checking my hair in back in a hand mirror I'd see, with mounting horror, that I have a rear that's begotten "children" that heap at my hips like clumps of cauliflower.

That TV would again seem more and more like an advertising forum laced with little "entertainment" bits.

That as I grow older I feel younger in my naivety regarding modern rock, which sounds more and more like it's being sung in a foreign language.

That I could laugh so hard a blob of mucus flies out of my nose when I see my kitty Pantaloon walk up to a balled-up old sock I've thrown across the room and, lowering her head to sniff, proceeds to shoot straight up in the air two feet.

Yeah.

Normal.

It returns.

So sweet this time around.

And like no other normal in the world...

It's understandable that you'd be searching for things to occupy yourself with right now--I felt the same need. I turned to the book I'm writing and to my little wooden blocks to paint and mess with. At times I wished I knew how to knit as I thought that would have been the perfect calmative---but grappling with knitting needles and skeins of tangled yarn AND two drains would have been too much for this novice, the paraphernalia of knitting plus the drains ended up with me in a ball-of-a-mess on the bed-- poor Pantaloon in the middle of it with me, bewildered beyond belief.

This gorgeous quilt by MelissaDallas keeps tempting me to JOIN IN AND DO ONE. She's a very good spokesperson for it, that's for sure....

I wish you the very best!

Trill

Me, too, JBeans, me too....