Mortaine’s Blog

This past summer, I went through my dresser, bathroom counter, and my jewelry box and picked out a bunch of things I no longer wanted or wear. Most of it was jewelry, from my high school and college days, when I was younger and didn’t need to present a more “professional” demeanor. I put everything from slave bracelets to unicorn neclaces to the dozens and dozens of pairs of earrings that I can’t wear anymore.

And then they sat, on the floor and chair next to my dresser, for several months.

Then, in early November, a friend of mine from Toastmasters sent out a call for donations to a yard sale to benefit the U’ilani Fund for complementary/alternative treatments for women with breast cancer. Well, the event was November 18th, the day we left for Costa Rica, but I emailed her and offered to drop off the 5 bags of stuff I had sitting around. I added five fall jackets and my desk chair to the pile, plus a stuffed animal a friend gave me, and took them all out to the car.

I was supposed to bring it to the TM meeting that week, and did, but we both forgot until we’d left, so I swung by to drop it off that Friday.

Well, then I went to CR and promptly forgot all about it. When I saw Janet yesterday, she said they had had so much fun with the jewelry, and that one young boy begged his mother to let him go home and get all his money, so he could buy necklaces and earrings for the ladies on his Christmas list this year.

It was heartwarming. It was also for a good cause. And after, they dropped off the leftovers at Goodwill.

Man, that felt great. And it should explain to you all why, when John came home last night, he found me with a pile of envelopes stuffed with yarn and other crafting supplies, a pile of more stuff coming out of the closet, and a huge, energetic smile on my face.

As much as I love to shop, I love reverse-shopping even more.

This is an archive of my shorter book reviews and notes, which historically have been posted over at the 50 Book Challenge on LiveJournal, but which I’m starting to move over here. I’m posting them with altered date-stamps, but they might show up in my LiveJournal cross-post anyway. Bear with me, please.

Note: Many of these books also have full reviews available in the book review podcast (RSS).
Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to help me with Item #1 on my wishlist (get rid of stuff), and you do crafts (or know someone who does), comment below (screened) with the package you’d like to receive and your mailing address:

1. Assorted yarn, grab-bag. Fiber unknown (Edit: I still have 2 left, plus one that has a “hopelessly tangled” ball of ribbon as well as an untangled ball, if you want to spend an evening detangling a mess of fancy ribbon). (I still have the ribbon grab bag)

2. Cross-stitch pattern. Might include fabric. (I have one more of these)

3. Spanish moss

4. Raw, partially felted, pre-dyed wool (handy for weird art projects, but not useful for much else)

5. Small wooden bits and pieces (pegs, female shapes, railroad tracks, pawns, a box)

6. Dinosaur goodies (pads and mini plastic dinos)

7. Seed beads, assorted colors. Not sorted.

8. Flower arrangement supplies– silk flowers and some blocks for making arrangements.

9. Fancy paper/stationary or journal (don’t know how much of this I have, but there have been several requests, so it may be gone by now, and I’m going to mark it such until I know for sure.)

10. Fabric remnants and odds and ends (still have lots of this)

11. (Added) Acrylic paints in many colors, a sheet of stencil paper, and a small ivy stencil.

12. (Added) A black-paged photograph album.

13. (Added) Fabric paints in various colors

14. (Added) 6 uncut yards of white satin (I think) fabric, 45″ wide. I recommend you grab-bag this only if you plan on making a specific costume, a quinceanos dress, a first communion dress, part of a wedding gown, or about five baptism outfits. Otherwise, it is a LOT of pretty white shiny fabric to have hanging around attracting dirt.

Why I don’t like or use YouTube:

Every time I open a YouTube video on my PowerBook G4, it’s choppy, grainy, and even if I pause and wait for it to download the whole video, it stays that way throughout the whole video. Why? Because YouTube wants people to use their proprietary viewer to watch videos, or at least to watch them 100% on the YouTube website with YouTube’s ads. Also, when I go to YouTube I find the same video “owned” by many different people– who really created that work?

Compare this to putting your videos on your own web server or on blip.tv, something that’s easy to do, and having some control over the quality of the video when people actually manage to watch it. People try to tell me that degrading the file and switching it into a format that looks like crap (Flash) isn’t making a “derivative” work, but it definitely changes the work. All the choppiness and poor video quality really speaks poorly of one’s own talents.

The poor quality is one of the main things I’m asked about when I talk about my book, by the way. All I can do is shrug and explain that it’s a limitation of the site, and they should consider switching to another site if they care about quality.

A fellow videoblogger put it well: $1.65 billion, and not a cent of it went to content creators. Says something, doesn’t it?

I’m attempting to get something via torrent right now and it says it has “14 days remaining” to download.

I really, really, don’t understand the draw.