First things first

Twelve people entered my blog-birthday contest, which asked entrants to name the three things they’d take with them to a desert island (and explain why).

In spite of some similarities (many said they’d bring an Internet-connected computer–who needs to bring a boat to use to get off the island when you’ve got e-mail and blogs to keep up with, right?), there was a lot of variety in the responses. Food items such as coffee and good wine made it to the list, as did spouses, children, and pets. Some people thought in terms of basic survival (Leatherman tool, anyone?), and the knitters all put yarn on their lists (though one declared that he wouldn’t need to bring needles because he’d make his own from twigs–talk about resourceful!).

I posted my own answers, too, and briefly considered making those items the prize package for this contest. But a solar-powered computer was way out of my budget, and tastes in yarn vary wildly (and not all entrants are yarnophiles). And Chuck Norris said he was too busy.

So I opted for stuff that I think would be nice to have on a desert island but didn’t necessarily make my list. (Come on, it’s hard to top a computer, yarn, and Chuck Norris, you know?)

Reading material: The Man Who Planted Trees, by Jean Giono. (And I’m delighted that the end of this contest coincides with Buy a Friend a Book Week. Hooray!)

Sustenance: Cherry Moon Green Tea (mildly caffeinated, so you can be alert when the rescuers arrive!), and chocolate from Iceland’s Nói Siríus’

Skin care: Pure shea butter soap from the Out of Africa project (the soap is handmade by women’s cooperatives in Benin, West Africa, and a portion of the price helps fund children’s education in Benin), and all-natural lip balm (with “NO FAKE CRAP” on the label–love it!)

Optimism: An affirmation ball (because when you’re marooned on a desert island, more than ever you need to be told nice things like “You smell nice” and “You rock!”)

It took some coaxing, but I managed to get Sylvia to draw a name from the hat, er, mixing bowl. The winner is Jennu!

Thanks, everyone, for playing! I really had a fun time running this contest and seeing what sorts of things people came up with. I can definitely see another contest in my future. Soon. Stay tuned.

I figured that, in all fairness, I ought to answer the question I’m asking the rest of you to answer.

I’ve given this a lot of thought. I’ve opted not to bring any family members (human or feline) with me. They probably wouldn’t enjoy it there, and I figure someone needs to be coordinating rescue efforts to find me. (Here’s hoping it’s the humans and not the cats who are in charge of this…)

So here’s my list:

1. A solar-powered computer (maybe something like this) connected to the Internet via satellite broadband. This will provide a ton of information, music, video, and communication to keep my brain from turning to mush. Plus when I finally do get rescued, I’ll already be current on who’s president and what wars he or she has started in far-off oil-rich regions since taking office.
2. As much yarn as possible. And maybe spinning equipment, so I can turn coconut fibers and stuff into more yarn when my original stash is exhausted. Assuming I can teach myself how to spin, of course.
3. Chuck Norris. No, not for any prurient reason. The way I see it, anyone this tough should have no trouble figuring out how to survive on a desert island.

If you’d like to join in the fun, go here to read the details of this contest. Be sure to put your comments after that post (not this one) so I can find them. The winner will be chosen at the end of this month!

Today’s Booking through Thursday:

Okay . . . picture this (really) worst-case scenario: It’s cold and raining, your boyfriend/girlfriend has just dumped you, you’ve just been fired, the pile of unpaid bills is sky-high, your beloved pet has recently died, and you think you’re coming down with a cold. All you want to do (other than hiding under the covers) is to curl up with a good book, something warm and comforting that will make you feel better.

What do you read?

(Funny that this turns up on Booking through Thursday just days after I posted about my blog-birthday contest, which has a similar “what would you pick when you can choose only a few things?” theme.)

For comfort reading, I would probably turn to The Fellowship of the Ring trilogy, which I’ve read a gazillion times. It’s a black-and-white world with no moral ambiguity. The good guys get to be heroes, and the bad guys get their just desserts. It’s a feel-good, happy ending. Well, until you get to the part where Frodo is miserable and still in pain years after the ring is destroyed. Maybe I’d just stop with the scourging of the Shire.

This reading would, of course, be accompanied by my favorite nonliterary comfort food: instant macaroni-and-cheese (yes, with the packet of cheese powder)–eaten straight out of the pot. (Because I know I’m going to eat all of it anyway, so why dirty up another dish that needs to be cleaned, right?)

Hard to believe but true: today marks the second birthday of this blog. Wow.

When I started this blog two years ago, it was a place for notes and photos of my knitting projects. For a long time, that’s pretty much all I wrote about. But gradually, the scope of this blog expanded, and I found myself talking about religion, electricity, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, food, and even the Hoff. And knitting, too.

It’s amazing how blogs facilitate a certain type of communication. Through the blogosphere, I’ve encountered lots of people I never would have met otherwise, and some of them have even become friends. I’ve gotten to know some real-life friends better (both through their comments here and through their own blogs), and I’ve renewed contact with people I haven’t seen in years who happened to stumble upon this blog.

In the last two years, I’ve switched from Blogger to WordPress (and never looked back!), changed the name of this blog, written lots of posts (this one is #300, in fact!), and even gotten my own domain for this blog. A celebration of sorts seems in order, both to say “Happy birthday!” to this blog and to thank everyone who’s stopped by and joined in the conversation here.

A contest!

I thought about asking people to write about why they blog or why they read blogs, but that’s already been done before in many other places. Besides, everyone generally come up with the same answers to that question.

My most recent food post, with its mention of one particular cookbook as being desert-island-worthy, inspired the question I do want to ask all of you: What three things would you take to a desert island with you, and why?

If you have a blog, post your answer there (with a link here) and let me know in the comments here that you’ve done so. (Between the comments and trackbacks, I’ll be able to find your response.) If you don’t have a blog, just post your answer in the comments here. In either case, make sure I have your e-mail address.

Participants’ names will be written on pieces of paper (if your answer especially strikes my fancy, you’ll get your name on two pieces of paper–whoo!), and on the last day of this month my two-year-old daughter will pick one piece of paper out of a hat (or a bag or a box or a bucket or whatever I can find that day).

The winner will get eternal glory (yes, that’s right, eternal–remember, everything that appears on the Internet never completely disappears!) as well as a box of goodies via good ol’ snail mail. I won’t specify the contents in advance, since they’ll depend a bit on who the winner is (e.g., a knitter will get some knitterly goodness, whereas a non-knitter, um, won’t), but they’ll definitely include stuff that would be pretty nice to have on a desert island.

Anyone can chime in on this topic–knitters, non-knitters, old friends, new friends, people who’ve stumbled across this blog for the first time. I look forward to seeing what you come up with!

The “official” start of summer, Memorial Day weekend, is just a week away. So it’s only fitting that I just came across a contest about summer knitting. Ali at Skeins Her Way has asked people to post a list of their summer knitting projects by the end of this month. The winner gets a copy of her new pattern (for an awfully cute-looking tank) and the yarn for it.

My own list is fairly modest:

• Another (my second!) pair of toe-up socks.
• A Wonderful Wallaby for my daughter.
• The Artisan Vest in the Green Mountain Spinnery book. (I can’t start this one until my friend and knitting guru, Pat, helps me size the pattern down to fit me.)

I’m sure I’ll get interested in some other projects along the way and maybe even start some of them. But right now, as the advent of summer nears, this is what’s on my plate.

Well, Blogger is still acting weird and not letting me upload photos. But I found a workaround that enabled me to post a photo of the lovely card and yummy yarn that JD sent me: I used the “Blog This!” button in Picasa. Not my favorite option, ’cause it does odd things to the layout and automatically inserts a Picasa link in my post (a link that you won’t see here, since I manually deleted it), but it will do for now.

But let me tell you, it is awfully nice to be reunited with my pal Picasa. Since I switched to a Mac last fall, I’ve been missing it. For the most past, I think the Mac design and OS are vastly superior to what you get on a Windows machine (and this is coming from someone who was a hardcore Windows user until last fall). I’m really quite impressed with almost everything about the Mac…except iPhoto (the photo-management program), which, quite honestly, sucks worse than a Hoover. Well, maybe it’s not that bad, but it’s nowhere in the same league as Picasa. Since Google hasn’t yet developed Picasa for the Mac, I was stuck with iPhoto.

But over the last few days I’ve installed Parallels, which lets me dual-boot my Mac as a Windows machine. So now I can have OSX and Windows XP running at the same time. I needed Windows XP in order to run two very important applications: the Microsoft Office Suite* (I already own a license for the PC version and was not at all inclined to throw down several hundred dollars to get a Mac version) and Picasa. Hello, old friend!

*I’ve been using OpenOffice, which is a great product and an endeavor I wholeheartedly support. (Free! Open source! Multiplatform! Multilingual!) I also use Google Docs and Spreadsheets–formerly Writely–another great (and free!) product. Unfortunately, neither of those applications is completely compatible with the bizarre macros and documents used by one of my Microsoft-loving clients, so the Dark Side chalks up another win as I’m forced to use Microsoft Office. Urgh.

Last fall, a very generous fellow knitter-blogger, JD, sent me her extra copies of two issues of Interweave Knits. Since then, I’ve been following her blogs (and she’s been chiming here from time to time, too) and admiring her fabulous FOs. In December, she posted in her non-knitting blog a “guess how many holiday cards I’ll send out this year” contest. I hazarded a guess of 111 (which turned out to be about double the final tally), but as the only entrant I won. I had completely forgotten about this contest–and wasn’t actually expecting to receive a material prize for it–but Monday’s mail brought a surprise for me: a box from JD with this lovely card and three skeins of Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino in a beautiful red.

A few comments:

• I love love love Baby Cashmerino! I used it for Sylvia’s brown cardigan (which has already made one trip through the wash and come out quite nicely) and very much enjoyed working with it. I think I may use these three skeins for something for myself…
• JD joked about being her holiday card to me being a bit late…but my own cards aren’t going out in the mail until tomorrow. I like to think of them as Chinese New Year cards this time around.
• I’m a few days late in posting my thank-you about this because my Internet connection has been intermittent since Monday. (Comcast blames the super-cold weather we’re having here.) Funny how not having access to e-mail and Google Reader has been jarring…it’s easy to forget how much I use them. It’s sort of like when the power goes out and you find yourself flipping light switches out of habit when you enter a room.
• Alas, Blogger is misbehaving (again) and won’t let me post photos. That’s probably a good thing, because if you saw this yarn you’d likely start drooling with envy all over your keyboard, and that’s no good for the hardware.

Thanks, again JD!