This weekend’s open thread is hosted by this river otter sounding its barbaric YAWP. It was snapped at the London Zoo by Martin Pettitt.
What’s making you feel like YAWPing today? Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a good book (or a bad one)? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? What have you created lately? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?
Categories: Life
Soggy here, innit? 
In memoriam: Diana Rigg 
Getting out the ‘yes’ 
100 books by women in 2016 
Hoyden About Town 
It’s WorldWide Knit In Public Day/International Yarn Bombing Day (either today or tomorrow depending on which websites you read) and I still cannot knit. I bought a crochet project over a year ago and haven’t started it.
Would cross-stitching in public be an adequate display of ally-ship?
I’d accept cross-stitching in public! 🙂
Can I plead off for today? I knit in public most days of the week, but I’m at home (no public transport today, thanks to trackwork). I’m knitting at my laptop, if that counts.
Ah, kitties. Took Maddie up for her F3 shots yesterday. She complained all the way up, took a dump in the carrier, and complained all the way back. She evidently felt a bit crappy after the shots and was pretty subdued last night and this morning, though not enough to lose her appetite. She started to brighten up a little, then when I mentioned things like “Feeling a bit better?” she promptly went back to Deep Offence Mode and curled up in her basket, giving me Looks.
I am impervious to her accusations. I’ve two arms covered in bright red scratches from trying to get her in her carrier here and there, so I think I’ve done penance enough. 😛
I reckon cross-stitching is a pretty good ally thing, TT! 😀
I spent far more money at the Lifeline Bookfest today than I intended to… But all the books! So many books!
I also decided to quit Facebook this week (at least for a while). It’s day three, and even though I still have the open-browser-check-facebook instinct, I get this incredible surge of glee every time I remember that I deactivated my account. I’m quite spiteful towards it at the moment, actually. I seem to be having these dark thoughts about it and needing instant gratification and validation, and turning into a machine, and other things that freak me out. Either way, I’m not really missing it yet. Anyone else decided to go on a Facebook break or quit for good? What were your reasons for doing so, and how do you find you manage keeping up with networks or groups you’ve established?
Jo – is an answer from someone who barely dipped a toe in Facebook any use? I could tell you in detail but I’m not sure it’s on target. 🙂
Listening to the ABC Classic 100 whilst doing housework. It’s lovely, but no female composers yet that I’m aware of. Hope Rachel Porter gets a look in somewhere.
Ooooooooh on the topic of knitting … I’m looking for a pattern for a jacket to do after I finishe the jumper I’m doing at present, and found this:
http://www.lionbrand.com/patterns/60648A.html
It would look SO GOOD in the pink yarn I did my cable beret in.
… Wool Baa are going to make a fortune if they have enough of that yarn!
I’ve spent most of the week in bed with a stinking rotten cold, which Mr angharad is now getting, so neither of us were up for much being out in public today, except for a couple of open inspections. I can’t knit either (my mother tried to teach me when I was about 8 and I couldn’t get the hang of it), but I’m a long time crocheter.
@Jo – I’ve avoided that by never ever signing up for Facebook. I have a terrible case of ‘if everyone else is doing it then I won’t’ syndrome, but for a long time I didn’t really see the appeal. Just recently my family has been using it a lot more and I’m getting kind of tempted.
I was pretty late to Facebook (well, for someone my age…), but I do find that now it’s actually quite useful for uni contacts and for organising things – basically all the organising for the women’s collective at uni happens on Facebook outside of meetings. So in a way I don’t want to miss out on that. Maybe once I feel I’ve fully detoxed I can start maybe limiting it to once a week or only on weekends or something. For now I’m good though, semester is almost over.
I can’t actually knit. I can crochet though, which I find much faster and easier, and if I drop a stitch or something, I can just pick it up and start again instead of having this huge mess! So much simpler. 🙂
I have 2 disparate primary uses for Facebook – keeping up with distant rellos, and keeping track of Aussie comedians for my comedy site. It’s quite good for the latter via a dedicated page and the comics learning how to create events so that I see them, it’s mixed for the former due to highly variable net-savviness.
Because I’m there anyway, I also keep in contact with a few old schoolmates and rather more online contacts, but I’m sporadic at best with keeping on top of that. One the whole I prefer Twitter for keeping in touch with my invisible friends.
Threadjack: I have learnt a perfectly cromulent new word – WANKBADGER.
You know you know one.
Wankbadger is an excellent word.
Someone posted a comment on Manboobz today, a flashcard of “Why I would never date you” reasons for showing to creeps. The last and unforgettable was “you have a hedgehog attached to your genitals”.
Funny how wankbadger brought that to mind. 😛
Re: Facebook. I made an account at the urging of friends who were all “you’ll need it as a writer!” (they’re writers themselves). Now I’m not and never have been remotely interested in “networking” and really didn’t want to go trawling FB for interest groups. The few friends (real friends, I mean) who were on the site didn’t post anything I wanted to read – I couldn’t care less about Farmworld or whatever the game is.
I probably would have let my FB account just sit there but for one thing. My boss, who’s not on any social networking sites, got an email from FB urging him to join, because “these people you know are members!”
One was me.
One was our then-general manager.
One was a bloke who worked in the company ten years ago.
I’ve never put any information about my workplace onto public sites; I’ve only used it as a delivery address for purchases. I’ve never mentioned by name my boss, or our manager, and I’d never even heard of the guy who used to work there.
That all said FB was doing some serious data mining and invasion of privacy. Maybe not legally, but it was scary as fuck and I closed my account immediately.
@Kitteh – yeah hearing about that kind of thing also has kept me away from FB
Really, Graham Cornes?? Really??
http://www.news.com.au/national-news/south-australia/nicole-cornes-great-embarrassing-moment-at-hotel-after-afl-hall-of-fame-night/story-fnii5yv4-1226660648030
Well, that was fun. Anyone else get caught up in the delays at Dandenong today? I ended up having a day off. Adding a minimum of an hour to a 2.5 hour commute didn’t strike me as worth the bother.
Quite a few other people felt the same way, according to my highly scientific, on-the-spot straw poll.