A few days by myself

There are little things that I like about having the place to myself. Like I can leave the kitchen light on all night without having someone around to complain about it. Like if I wake up in the middle of the night I can roll over and watch TV without disturbing the other person.

Would have been nice to have a working VCR when I wanted to watch TV in bed, but I still don't have one. My brother gave me a VCR that he wasn't using, but you need the remote to set up the VCR, and the remote is ruined because the batteries were left in it when it was put into storage.

Don't ever put things into storage until you've removed the batteries.

Other than that, I had a pleasant enough day, and I got almost six hours of sleep last night.

Another thing about having the place to myself is that I can take naps whenever I want and not have to worry about the other person's schedule.

A couple of days ago I got out the knitting machine and moved it into another room. It wasn't working very well where I had it, partially because I haven't used it in almost a year, and partially because the table wobbled a bit. So I hoped that it would work better once I got it set up in a more stable spot, which it did, but I am still out of practice a bit, and I've misplaced some tools and what I am using as substitutes aren't working as well as I'd hoped. But they do work somewhat, so I've decided to continue with a project that I hope will end up being Miss Allergies Christmas present.

If that goes well, I will make something similar for someone else. That still leaves one friend that I don't have money for, two friends that I don't have a clue, and most of my family that I don't have a clue.

Back to the knitting.

About a year ago we found another knitting machine in a thrift store. It was a slightly older model, but still basically the same as the one I already had. It was "new in the box" and had all of the necessary parts. It was forty dollars. We bought it. Not that I really thought that I would need a whole second machine, but I thought it would be nice to have replacements parts if I broke a keyplate or something. And of course, I was always losing things like transfer tools and latch hook tools, so now I had a whole new set of those.

So I eventually lost all of the first set of transfer tools, both latch hook tools, and all but one of the new transfer tools. I still have all of the other parts such as keyplates from both sets. And somewhere around here I even have another whole machine that I have never even set up. It is still in the box, but I've put the tools that came with it somewhere else.

I have tried to get other things that would work as latch hook tools. First, I bought several latch hook tools made for rug kits. These are available at most craft stores for a few dollars. But, while they pretty much look the same, they are a bit too big to replace the ones I lost. The second thing that I did was bid on a few eBay auctions to get replacement "needles", thinking that most machines would use the same size I had. Actually, most machines use "needles" that are smaller than those on my machine, and so I bought ten very reasonable priced smaller "needles" that I was going to make latch hook tools from, only after seeing how small they were I didn't bother.

At the time I did all of that I was just looking for backups, just in case. I still had at least one complete set of tools. Now that I have lost all but the one transfer tool, I have to use the other latch hooks, one that is too big, and one that is too small. Though not comfortable to hold, the smaller one looks better, so I am mainly using that.

At this point I would pay for the over priced tools and the shipping if I had any money, which I don't. Yesterday I was desperate enough to try to break a "needle" off of the spare machine. Except that when I went to get it, I found only the empty box from the first machine. Now I can't find the second machine.

I did all of this cleaning. How come I still can't find things?

The other thing I will probably do this weekend is make more videos. I found another contest. In fact, I've found several, but I don't have ideas for all of them yet.

We have received emails from the first contest saying that we had won third place (a hundred dollars) and then the non-winning entries were supposed to receive $20.09 each. Since I had three non-winner entries, and received an email for each, we should be getting a total of $160.27. Except that there has been no word from them this week. Monday was a holiday, so maybe that slowed things down a bit, but I would have thought that they would at least send us another email.

I could really use $160.27 right about now. We have to sign something first. Maybe something will be in the mail today. But still, you'd think that they would have emailed and told us to watch for it in the mail.

Still a bit early to do much of anything. I think maybe I'll watch Bones or something.

Oh, and yesterday I found a link for a movie my dad rather liked called The 27th Day.
http://www.megavideo.com/?v=M783NEWE