krisw

I'm getting a serger. I'm trying to decide between the Brother 1034D and the Pfaff Hobbylock 2.0.

What do you guys know about either?

Thanks! =)

I finally broke down and joined Goodreads today

Remember that contest I mentioned a little while back? Well, I'm one of the winners! I won an electronic copy of The Dragon Variation, an omnibus of 3 titles from the Liaden Universe. Never having read anything from that universe before, I dived right in and have finished 2 of the 3 titles in it. I'm enjoying them immensely. I'm going to have to get more of them!

There's a contest to win an electronic copy of The Dragon Variation, an omnibus from a series called the Liaden Universe. You can win if you've never read any of the books before. Good luck!

I took some pictures and videos with the Evo and also some pictures *of* the phone. I then stuck them on Flickr. The pictures taken with the phone in the set are of my cat, along with one picture of her taken with my Canon digital camera for comparison. I'm not likely to dump having my digital camera with me, but as cell phones go, it does a pretty decent job.

The set is here.

I'm thinking the quality would be better in the videos with daylight rather than indoor lighting. As we don't have daylight at the moment, though, you get what you get =)

We've made the switch from AT&T to Sprint, and from iPhone to Android, by picking up Evo 4G phones at yesterday's launch. Due to an unfortunate glitch in each of us taking the wrong phones when Chris dropped the boys and me off at home while he went to work, and a migraine today, I've not spent as much time loading things as I'd like to have done by now, but I've definitely loaded some apps, set up some home screens, read lots of e-mail and twitter and facebook, and generally had a good time with it.

it has a HUGE screen, more customization than iPhone offers, front and back cameras, video chat, multitasking, some basic flash ability. It comes with an 8gig micro SD card, and unlike the iPhone, should that not be enough space for me I can easily buy another with larger storage. The screen is beautiful and bright, great for watching videos, and it comes with YouTube and Sprint TV to do just that.

For the most part, it's simple to use. You have 7 home screens (and you can have different "scenes" which are sets of 7 home screens, so you can lay out a different setup for work, school, home, games, whatever) on which you can put widgets, links to apps, shortcuts to people, places, playlists, labels from gmail, things like that. The center of the 7 is linked to the "home" button. tapping the home button twice takes you to a screen with thumbnail views of all 7 screens so you can simply jump to the one you want, or you can swipe to switch between them similar to the iPhone, hitting home to quickly take you back to the center again. You also aren't limited in number of apps by screen real estate, as at any time you can pull up a list of all your apps--you don't have to have them on one of your screens to use them at any time. You can keep your screen space for widgets and your most frequently used apps, without dumping a game which you pick up every few weeks.

There are a few things from the iPhone which I have missed. The keyboard, although it has some lovely features which the iPhone's has not (instead of having to switch to a different keyboard to include numbers or international letters in your text, you can hold down keys to pull up alternates, although you CAN also switch to a numbers/symbols keyboard if you'll be typing a lot of them), is a little different and sometimes the spacebar doesn't register when I attempt to hit it. Probably that'll improve as I get more used to where to hit keys. Also, you can't just hit the status bar at the top of a window to go straight to the top of a web page or list. Also, there isn't a simple integration with iTunes as the iPhone has, but Google is going to be releasing a similar product to help sync music and so on to your phone more simply. In the meantime, there are some 3rd party apps to facilitate transfers, or you can just plug your phone in as a drive and move things over manually, which of course you can't do with the iPhone natively.

Above all, I don't miss the dropped calls and poor call quality I was getting on AT&T. In our area, Sprint seems to work better.

Now, I'm not going to tell all of you who have iPhones to rush out and dump yours anymore than I would have told everyone to rush out and buy an iPhone when it was my phone. For one thing, not all of you have or want a smartphone at all. Android and iPhone do things similarly in some ways, differently in others, and neither platform is going to be for everyone. Personally, had it not been for AT&T's poor call quality, I could have gone either way. However, so far I'm really liking my Evo and not mising much from my iPhone which isn't duplicated in Android functionality.

Once my camera's batteries are charged and I'm less headachy, I'll be posting pictures taken by and of the Evo, and probably a video or two as well. If there's anything you want to know particularly about the Evo or Android, let me know and I'll try to either take pictures accordingly or answer your questions.

so ends my short review after 2 days with the Evo =)

So, I'm totally annoyed with Gateway's customer service. My laptop is presently at the repair center for the second time, we think the motherboard is glitchy. It keeps crashing or freezing, depending on its mood at the time, even when I have next to nothing on it (and absolutely nothing I don't have on other computers, including the one I'm on right now, without incident) and we are certain it is a hardware issue. According to the warranties on it I should be able to get it fixed, get a replacement, or get our money back. I just want a working laptop, is that so hard? Also they don't appear to have a system in place to get me a replacement or our money back. So right now I don't know when I'll have my laptop back, and I have no idea if it'll work properly when I do.

Hopefully I'll have it back soon and hopefully the problems will be fixed. If so, I'll finally get around to updating my LJ profile which is woefully out of date.

But in the meantime, I'm just annoyed. I don't have access to my music or pictures until I can move them back off the backup drive, I can't use my new photo editing software, and I can't play most of my games.

Otherwise, the boys are doing fine. Kevin's 1! can you believe it? we had a nice family gathering for him. Pictures...someday. Isaac will be 4 in less than 2 months. Both of them have way more energy than I have.

I have my laptop back! Hopefully it will work better now. I'm setting it up as I type.

Happy birthday, almalthia!

Thursday, we discovered Kevin's first tooth! My mom spotted it while she was helping me keep him still while I changed his diaper in the car 'cause we were out and about. Yay baby tooth!

Friday, as mentioned, Isaac had his allergist appointment. The skin test showed very minor not-worth-blinking reaction to milk, and the egg increased in size but decreased in redness so we're not anywhere near trying a food challenge on egg. However, we were going to challenge the milk, so we asked them when the earliest we could get in was--Dec. 8. BUT as we were about to leave, the person in charge of the food challenges came back in to say, "hey, if you can come back this afternoon, we've had a cancelation, we'll fit you in! Just get some milk and come on back at 1!"

so we did. Food challenge=interesting. First we did little bits of milk in a medicine syringe. Isaac does not like milk much. (neither do I.) We had him drink a bit, waited a while, got tired of Little Einsteins (we'd bought him a new DVD for the appointment and brought my laptop so he could watch), had him drink a little more, waited a while, etc. At each stage he was checked for signs of reaction. When none appeared we progressed to a small medicine cup of milk but ended up using a syringe for that too as he wasn't enthused about drinking it. (poor kid--you see how you feel about being told to drink small amounts of something you don't really like after a morning of being poked and then having to wait around with your shirt off while getting probably a bit itchy...). After that, we moved on to a regular sized-ish cup, which they added chocolate syrup to and provided a straw for. Let me tell you internet, chocolate milk is much better, and so Isaac thinks too. That went down quite nicely. Waited a bit longer to make sure of no reaction, then sent us home with orders to give him no more milk that day, to keep an eye out for delayed reaction, but then he could have it. He spent the rest of the afternoon poking me with a straw to "test" me and then giving me "milk" with the same straw.

so, yay =) It's unfortunate that the egg one hasn't been outgrown but if I had to choose one it would've been milk anyhow.

We had Mandy and her son over today, and everyonebutKevinandme had pizza for dinner. Yay Isaac having pizza! He wouldn't try the pepperoni, though.

As for me, I still can't have milk/eggs until Kevin is old enough, ie. 1 year old. Here's hoping he's not allergic to anything!

We also got Isaac's new carseat, moved Kevin into the convertible seats.

And! We got Wii Fit Plus, which Isaac is playing right now (or was when I brought Kevin in the bedroom to keep him from turning the balance board off/getting fallen on by his brother). One of these days I'll have to record him playing, it's hilarious. It's also quite fun for me to play as well.

Happy birthday, teal_cuttlefish! sorry it's late but hope it was nice!

Happy birthday, 3under3!

Oh, I forgot to mention (and am too lazy to edit the last entry) that we've Isaac's allergist appointment scheduled for Friday morning. Please keep your fingers crossed for us! I'm still not at all sure how we'll go about introducing milk and eggs to Kevin and re-introducing them back into my diet (or when we'll do so) but hopefully Isaac's allergies will be outgrown. Being able to feed him milk and eggs would help so much. Being able to eat them again myself would be wonderful.

Kevin's 9 month appointment was initially set for last week but because our insurance was changing at the start of this month, we rescheduled it for next week. The co-pay is cheaper on the new insurance.

I vote for a do-over. Of what? Of a lot of things! But mostly the last few days--I've had an unspecified bug of snufflies, stuffiness, sneezies, and wheezies. Still feeling crummy, too. Luckily the boys seem fine, though Isaac's had a cough for a while. Both boys are full of energy as ever, which is good, but hard on me when I'm home with them. (we did vote, by the way, filled out our ballots last week and Chris dropped them off yesterday morning. It was a horribly full ballot, it had 3 whole things to vote for. 4 if you count picking 2 people for one of the options.)

Let's see, it's been a while since I've had an update... The boys are growing like weeds. Kevin's in some 9-12 month clothes and some 6-9, as baby clothes are strangely sized. Actually the jammies he's wearing right now say 2T on the tags. He's insanely frustrated that he can't walk yet, he keeps pulling up on things then letting go and trying to take off walking, which clearly doesn't work so well and sometimes results in bonkings and cryings. Isaac is still sometimes saying he likes his haircut and sometimes that he doesn't *want* his haircut. He was pleased by trick-or-treaters coming to our door on Halloween. Maybe next year we'll dress the boys up and go out.

Pictures forthcoming once I have a backup set up on my laptop--I don't know if I ever mentioned, but we ended up exchanging the laptop we bought for another of the same model. The first one must have had glitchy chips as this one doesn't have the issues the other had and works quite nicely. It runs all the software and games I want to play. I'm waiting for my free copy of Win7 for it. It's lovely having a laptop that plays games like Everquest and that runs videos smoothly--the other one, I couldn't even watch video on the news sites reliably.

Isaac just pulled out his camera and was taking pictures of things. He asked me if he could take a picture of the cat who was sitting in the hallway, then turned to do so. "hey caaaa-aat. Say 'meow'!" *click* "Awww, you're such a cutie!" (it would be a good picture too I think except he insists on putting the flash on fill even when it doesn't need a flash.) Then he proceeded to turn into a cat and is now wandering around meowing.

Ok, well, I think that's all I have in my brain at the moment besides the cotton it feels as though it's stuffed with.

Happy birthday, muirichinnahali!

Happy birthday, karnythia! I hope it's a great day!

Happy birthday, haumea! Hope you have a great day!

((and sorry to those whose birthdays I've missed, I'm trying to do better))

So, my new laptop is having crashy issues =/

my boys are cute though--woke up this morning laughing at each other. Nice change after yesterday when Isaac was defiant all day long!

So, I've a new laptop for my birthday/winter seasonal holiday of your choosing gift. Yay! I have now loaded Semagic on it and naturally need to post to LJ using it.

I'm not used to Windows anymore but I do remember Semagic and missing it when I switched to my iBook.

it's a very nice laptop, though we've had some glitches in getting it set up. So far it seems to be working now, fingers crossed, though if it starts having unsurmountable difficulties we can take it back and get a new one when new models come out with Windows 7.

So, my Windows-using friends, what essential things do you just have to download/install first thing?

Kevin started cruising along the edge of the bed today. Sooo pleased with his little self =)

Isaac is just plain adorable--he absorbs so much like a little sponge and amazes me and makes me laugh every day. He also frustrates me every day. It balances out =) Just now he walked in to tell me about his letters, then went back out front telling me "I need to watch Food Network."

Me? I feel rather like crap today, like I'm coming down with something. Blah.

That is all.

So, when I went to the doctor recently for a checkup they had me go in for a blood draw for routine tests. Results came in today and apparently my thyroid levels are high and potassium levels are low. They want me back in for more test.

Might explain why I've been so tired all the time.

we got a refurbished 8g iPhone 3G for me and one for Chris yesterday. Not very much difference between it and the 2g, but the improved GPS ability is nice, and we're keeping the old iphones around--my old one has become our audiobook player for the bedroom, so I don't have to keep our audiobook collection on my phone which means I have room for other things like music and videos. I do miss our unlimited mobile to mobile texting plan which they don't offer anymore and we couldn't carry over. The faster 3G speed should be nice when I'm out and about, though I've mostly been home with our wifi since getting it.

Kevin can go from crawling (well, inchworming but boy is he fast) to sitting up all on his own now =) He's getting so big! I can't believe he's 6 months old already.

Saw Harry Potter--they left a lot out but it wasn't badly executed and the effects were cool. Looking forward to buying it on DVD.

Isaac is of course huge =) He's always got something to say, much to my occasional frustration. He loves Kevin dearly and vice versa, Kevin finds whatever he is doing *fascinating*.

Happy birthday, bookwoman50! Hope it's been great!

Happy birthday, idigthered!

I'm really into Twitter right now. I don't put much out there, though I do post occasional tweets, and I don't incorporate it into my LJ or Facebook (I figure if ya'll want to see my minimal tweets, you'll follow my twitter account--and if not, you're honestly not missing much), but I enjoy watching what goes on, doing searches to see what other people have to say about things, etc. It's kinda fun watching things spread. It also doesn't hurt that there're at least 3 free iphone apps for twitter use--I do virtually all my twitter watching from my phone. And the messages are so short they don't require much time investment =)

If you want to follow me, I'm krismw on there.

If there is one person or more on your friends list who makes your world a better place just because they exist and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.