Stuff and things
Jul. 21st, 2009 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
norsegirlI never did post about the Ikea trip this weekend. I got Jason up bright and early Saturday so we could be lined up before the opened. We waited for half an hour or so before the frenzy began. Fortunately, unlike most of their sales, they had plenty of product in stock, so we were able to get the TV cabinet we wanted as well as both of the book shelves. All pieces were assembled on Sunday afternoon, and while they await a bit of vacuuming in their final destinations and bolting to the wall, so far they're looking good. After securing the furniture we went back in for our free breakfast (yay!) and picked up a couple more little things.
I overdid it a bit as by the end of the trip I could feel the strain in my core muscles. I have been walking rather slowly ever since. Felt good to be physical while I was doing it though.
Today I didn't accomplish much. Mostly just sat around and read depressing stories about the "care" in labour and delivery departments here and watched videos about awful statistics regarding cesarean, maternal death and infant death rates in this country. Birth by the Numbers is an excellent video that highlights just how bad the health care system really is down here. If you can read the ity-bity text in his graphs you'll see that Canada doesn't fare a whole lot better, but it's still better.
I also experimented with Google's free website hosting as Geocities has announced that it will no longer be offering free hosting as of October. Didn't I just move everything there? I'm not completely satisfied with what Google offers, and I'm getting tired of looking for new options that don't cost money and allow me to do html. It's not that hard, why does everyone have to treat us like there's no way we could possibly learn and use it?!?! I'll probably just convert my instructional webpages to Word and hand them off to Stefan for hosting and call it quits on hosting my own site and displaying galleries of my own work. Or maybe I'll use Google for galleries and Stefan's for instructions. I'm still undecided on that one.
Here's what my bead gallery looks like on google sites. You can compare it to the original version of my site here. I HATE the way they force you to insert links (not letting you use href tags to call it something other than an address) and because of the difficulty inherent in inserting pics I decided to table the images instead of thumbnail links to larger images. This has lead to some of the images being smaller than originally intended. Also, they only allow you to display them in "small" "medium" "large" and "original", which gives you very little control on the exact display size. It does allow me to toss up a gallery of work and patterns, but I'm not sure it's the best way to accomplish that. Flickr may actually be a better, easier option. Or just saying "fuck it" and not putting galleries out for the world to see.
I like the idea of putting my work out there mostly because when I'm looking for inspiration or getting started on a new hobby I really like to see other people's work. I'd like to provide that same resource for others and encourage them to share in return, but it's just not worth paying money for, and having to move it every few months as the free sites all shut down just isn't worth it either.
I also spent part of today writing a basic inkle weaving instruction hand out. I offered to teach a class next week and didn't find any that I liked. One of my favourite instructional sites for inkle weaving appears to have shut down. Sadly I didn't print any of the material there, or if I did it has been lost in the move. I'm sure I had something printed from there, so maybe it will turn up some day. Interestingly, I don't own any books on this subject. Very odd for me.
In my reading about the business of birthing down here I also ran across an ad for cloth menstrual pads. This got me thinking, if I can cloth diaper, why not use cloth on myself too? I'm especially thinking this might be nice post-partum when everything there is a little sensitive. I'd rather not have that crap where the adhesive comes loose from your panties and sticks to your skin, or pubic hairs get caught in the adhesive and yanked, or the plastic surface of the pad (or the chemicals in it) irritate my skin when I'm dealing with everything being a little tender down there anyway. Has anyone out there tried cloth pads? What did you think of them?
My plan is to drive Jason to work tomorrow and take myself to the fabric store to purchase the appropriate supplies for making myself some cloth pads. I'm also thinking I might make that trip up to Ikea for the crib and see if I can't get some helpful employee to load it into the van so Jason doesn't have to get dragged back there.
I've been taking pictures of the construction next door, but interestingly, as soon as I start talking about how fast the houses go up here, they decide to slow down. When the stimulus package (and the no-strings-attached $8000 for first time home buyers) was announced there was a big boom in sales and they were rushing to finish all the houses. But now this is the second to last lot in the neighbourhood with a "sold" sign on it, so there doesn't seem to be a rush any more. I'm guessing it doesn't look good for sales if there isn't any construction going on at all. There was no work at all on the weekend, and very little today or yesterday. At this rate there is no way they'll be anywhere near complete when I have the baby. On the bright side, I enjoyed the uncustomary silence over the weekend.
I overdid it a bit as by the end of the trip I could feel the strain in my core muscles. I have been walking rather slowly ever since. Felt good to be physical while I was doing it though.
Today I didn't accomplish much. Mostly just sat around and read depressing stories about the "care" in labour and delivery departments here and watched videos about awful statistics regarding cesarean, maternal death and infant death rates in this country. Birth by the Numbers is an excellent video that highlights just how bad the health care system really is down here. If you can read the ity-bity text in his graphs you'll see that Canada doesn't fare a whole lot better, but it's still better.
I also experimented with Google's free website hosting as Geocities has announced that it will no longer be offering free hosting as of October. Didn't I just move everything there? I'm not completely satisfied with what Google offers, and I'm getting tired of looking for new options that don't cost money and allow me to do html. It's not that hard, why does everyone have to treat us like there's no way we could possibly learn and use it?!?! I'll probably just convert my instructional webpages to Word and hand them off to Stefan for hosting and call it quits on hosting my own site and displaying galleries of my own work. Or maybe I'll use Google for galleries and Stefan's for instructions. I'm still undecided on that one.
Here's what my bead gallery looks like on google sites. You can compare it to the original version of my site here. I HATE the way they force you to insert links (not letting you use href tags to call it something other than an address) and because of the difficulty inherent in inserting pics I decided to table the images instead of thumbnail links to larger images. This has lead to some of the images being smaller than originally intended. Also, they only allow you to display them in "small" "medium" "large" and "original", which gives you very little control on the exact display size. It does allow me to toss up a gallery of work and patterns, but I'm not sure it's the best way to accomplish that. Flickr may actually be a better, easier option. Or just saying "fuck it" and not putting galleries out for the world to see.
I like the idea of putting my work out there mostly because when I'm looking for inspiration or getting started on a new hobby I really like to see other people's work. I'd like to provide that same resource for others and encourage them to share in return, but it's just not worth paying money for, and having to move it every few months as the free sites all shut down just isn't worth it either.
I also spent part of today writing a basic inkle weaving instruction hand out. I offered to teach a class next week and didn't find any that I liked. One of my favourite instructional sites for inkle weaving appears to have shut down. Sadly I didn't print any of the material there, or if I did it has been lost in the move. I'm sure I had something printed from there, so maybe it will turn up some day. Interestingly, I don't own any books on this subject. Very odd for me.
In my reading about the business of birthing down here I also ran across an ad for cloth menstrual pads. This got me thinking, if I can cloth diaper, why not use cloth on myself too? I'm especially thinking this might be nice post-partum when everything there is a little sensitive. I'd rather not have that crap where the adhesive comes loose from your panties and sticks to your skin, or pubic hairs get caught in the adhesive and yanked, or the plastic surface of the pad (or the chemicals in it) irritate my skin when I'm dealing with everything being a little tender down there anyway. Has anyone out there tried cloth pads? What did you think of them?
My plan is to drive Jason to work tomorrow and take myself to the fabric store to purchase the appropriate supplies for making myself some cloth pads. I'm also thinking I might make that trip up to Ikea for the crib and see if I can't get some helpful employee to load it into the van so Jason doesn't have to get dragged back there.
I've been taking pictures of the construction next door, but interestingly, as soon as I start talking about how fast the houses go up here, they decide to slow down. When the stimulus package (and the no-strings-attached $8000 for first time home buyers) was announced there was a big boom in sales and they were rushing to finish all the houses. But now this is the second to last lot in the neighbourhood with a "sold" sign on it, so there doesn't seem to be a rush any more. I'm guessing it doesn't look good for sales if there isn't any construction going on at all. There was no work at all on the weekend, and very little today or yesterday. At this rate there is no way they'll be anywhere near complete when I have the baby. On the bright side, I enjoyed the uncustomary silence over the weekend.
