Low on content today

I've been feeling very apathetic about blogging for the past week or so, for no really good reason.
At one point I was feeling like I don't think many people read my blog, which got me to thinking about why I blog. Do I blog to brag? Do I blog to share things with my friends, rather than emailing millions of pictures? Do I blog to increase my ego, because I actually think anyone cares?

Ah, the wonderful thoughts I have in the shower. (I loooooove my new shower and want to spend way more time in there than I should.)

Yes, I'd love to have a blog that has a large number of readers, if only for my ego. Am I willing to post as often as most of the high-readership knitting blogs seem to? Um, no. not right now, and for a few different reasons: 1.) I don't do much that changes quickly--most of my projects are long-term ones, and it's just not exciting for me to post pictures of an additional inch of knitting; and 2.) the time I spend at the computer recently needs/has needed to be spent on doing knitting guild newsletters and stuff for charting classes I'm teaching, not on blogging. Not to mention that when you have a lot of readers, it seems like it tends to get more negative. (Cara of January One recently blogged about this.)

I need to keep in mind my original purpose in starting this blog, which was to keep my friends and family, many of whom live 1,000+ miles away, informed about what's going on in my life. I keep getting sucked into the popularity-contest aspect of blogging, though, and wondering why I don't have lots of comments on my blog. Kinda silly, huh?

DD's sixth birthday was this week and I didn't get a chance to take any pictures--she had everything opened and played with before I could get the camera! However, tomorrow is the "big" birthday party with her classmates, so there will be lots more photo ops. Here are the cupcakes we made to take in to her class on her actual birthday:


And here are my "helpers" sampling the goods. :-)

We leave for Utah and Idaho on Friday, and I've been incredibly unmotivated to sit down at the computer and refine my notes for my classes I'll be teaching at the Snake River Fiber Fair. I'm not sure why, although I've managed to make a fair number of notes in the old-fashioned way (pen/pencil and paper). That makes me sound totally unprepared, which I'm not--I've got a fairly coherent start from the handout I made for my charting talk to our guild here in Tulsa, but I need to have a more solid idea of examples and blank charts, etc for this three-hour class. I'm really looking forward to it!

I've also been playing with some charts and making some facecloths for DD's teacher. I wanted to see if I could successfully chart a round dishcloth formed with short rows, and I think I did an all right job. Not that I've put it into Excel yet--it's still on paper, which is SO rare for me. I'm hoping that once the party is over I'll be able to concentrate on the class stuff.

Here are two of the dishcloths:

The pattern came from here, and I modified the one on the right, the solid one, to have wrapped short rows. I'm much happier with it, but I doubt DD's teacher will notice or care.

For no good reason really, other than I felt like it, here's a picture of some stuff in my house:

The doll is one I made back in 2002 (I think) at a quilting retreat in Brian Head, Utah. It was really fun! The picture on the wall is my darling children, about 2½ years ago I think. We took casts of their feet using paper clay, which was really fun. The gold and black rectangular object is a paperweight that my Aunt Louise sent to my DH for Christmas a few years ago. I just love the design. And the round thing is a very very cool dandelion head encased in plastic. My grandmother had one just like it and I used to love looking at it. My parents gave that one to me for Christmas and, more than 20 years later, I still love to look at it (although it's not the same one).
This isn't the best picture--taken indoors at night with a flash--but you can get an idea of how it looks. (Please ignore the dust--we've had the house open because the weather has been so nice.)

And here's my latest spinning adventure:

That's an 87-yard skein, not sure about weight or anything else yet--I still have more to spin up, then I'll do a wraps-per-inch measure and add more detail info about it. (See the previous post for how it looked before spinning.)

That's about enough randomness from me today. :-)