ETA:  Crap.  This one is blocking people too.  I was hoping to avoid doing a word recognition thing, because I didn’t want to add a step for people, but I think I have to do it.

ETA2:  And if you were wondering why I wanted to add something beyond Akismet, in the 10 minutes since I deactivated the new spam plugin, there were 2 more spam comments.  I don’t even want to see them, let alone have to go through 20-30 a day to double-check Aksimet.  *sigh*

Should be finalized soon.

ETA: Whee! I love my new theme! If anyone is wondering, it’s called “Atahualpa”, it’s uber-simple to customize colors and stuff, and it’s widget-friendly. Also, hubby found it first, and I completely stole it from him. One of the things I like about it is that I can upload a bunch of yarn pictures to a folder, and they randomly rotate in as header images. I’m still tweaking a couple of small things, but I think we’re about 99% there. Yay!

OK, I don’t have the patience for this right now.  I’ll play later.  The one I liked was sort of annoying to try to modify.  The search continues.

ETA: Looking at the info on it, the plugin won’t accept comments shorter than 15 words, so it may or may not work for me. I’m going to give it a day or two.

ETA2: It doesn’t seem to do anything. I asked Kris to leave a comment, and it didn’t yell at him for it being less than 15 words. I’m hoping it will have blocked some spam in the next day or two, or it’s back to the drawing board.  It has an option for a comment form, but it looks like a pain in the butt to add it to individual posts, so I don’t think I want that.  It should work without it…  It’s WP-SpamFree, by the way, if anyone has experience with it.

No pictures today – I’m saving it for tomorrow’s YARN PR0N FRIDAY! I know what I’m going to post, I just need to… um… take the picture. Hee. I have made some actual progress on some Christmas knitting, though, as you will see in the sidebar. I finally started the gifts for both my Dad and my brother. Yay! Now comes the hard part… finishing them!

Speaking of yay, today (for those of you who do not know this) is WorldWide Knit In Public Day, so I met up with Alice and a few other people down at the City Dock in Annapolis, where we had a lovely time gabbing and knitting by the water on a gorgeous day. I think I may have gotten a little sunburned, but no biggie. I wore my finished-as-of-last-night Ribbon X-Back, which I was very pleased with. I also started a pair of Pomatomus socks with my Socks That Rock, so we’ll see how those go. I keep hearing horror stories that they are quite difficult, so I’m trying to be patient with them. So far, I have the cuffs done. I am doing them at the same time on two circs as usual, so I am hoping I won’t have too many problems with the pattern.

While we were knitting, Kris was running around Annapolis taking pictures. He even got one of us from across the water:
Left to right, that’s Alice, Maggie, Sarah, Kathy, and me. And you can’t quite tell from the angle on this one, but my chair legs were about a foot from the edge of the sidewalk along the water. It was awesome. He got some really wonderful pictures of all sorts of stuff in Annapolis. After lunch, we went to Allen Pond Park here in Bowie for some more picture-taking. And now, we’re both wiped out and I’m going to go sit and work on my socks. And maybe start my HushHush. =)

Also – current knitting progress. I have put my One Skein Tank in time out until I decide I have the patience to untangle to one ball of yarn, which has gotten horribly snarled. I’m annoyed enough with it at the moment that I am considering ripping it all out and scrapping the idea. This is why it is in time out, until I can deal with it more rationally.

So, in the meantime, my June Free Day for the Yarn Focus Challenge was (shockingly) used on June 1, and I placed a couple of online orders, including one with elann for some Rowan Cotton Tape in “Fever” to make a Ribbon X-Back. As much as I hate seed stitch (and oh, do I hate tedious seed stitch), it’s going pretty quickly. As of this morning, it was here:
Not too bad, eh? I’m hoping to finish it up tonight or tomorrow. If I do finish it, I’ll probably wind some sock yarn to take with me to World-Wide Knit In Public Day in Annapolis. Maybe I’ll even start on my Socks That Rock, finally!

Other than that, I ordered a bunch of KnitPicks’ discontinued sock yarns, which will keep Kris and I in socks for a while, some Wool of the Andes for a sweater for my Dad for Christmas, the Palette sampler to make the Palette Fair Isle Cardigan (gulp!), and some more WotA to make We Call Them Pirates hats for Kris and my brother. Finally, I pulled out the cone of Valley Yarns cotton I ordered ages ago from WEBS to make Hush Hush, figuring on swatching it and getting it started. It was then that I realized that I had ordered the 10/2 cotton, and the pattern calls for 3/2 cotton. There is a significant size difference there. So, I had to order a cone of the 3/2 cotton, which arrived yesterday. Once the Ribbon X-Back is done, I’ll get started on Hush-Hush, but it’s not really travel knitting, so I won’t worry about it for tomorrow.

Last, but certainly not least, I got a package yesterday from my Knittyboard Cheap Ass Secret Pal 2 Pal, Cheapy Cheep. My goodies are pictured here (along with the sheep candleholders that Kirsten gave me when we were in Pittsburgh):
Apparently, Cheapy Cheep was helping out at a garage sale this weekend, and was allowed to pick some goodies for herself (or in this case, me) as a thank-you. The red bag is this awesome little clutch that will be perfect to take along a sock WIP. The card is a really pretty embossed petroglyph design with a lovely note inside from Cheapy, one of the candles in the sheep is a yummy vanilla tealight, and the little bag in the front is just right for carrying stitch markers or other little necessities. (And, like I said, the candleholders from Kir, which Kris insists on calling my “friendsheep”. Sigh.)

Oh, and my sidebars may be a little wonky today. I am trying to switch to a 3-column layout, but we are having technical difficulties. Everything is exactly the way I want it, except that my two sidebars refuse to play nice and line up at the top. We’re working on it. In the meantime, if you can figure out how to fix it, I’ll give you a prize.

And he even made me a button!

Go on, you know you want to grab one. (Please, no bandwidth stealing!)

I’m making some progress on his socks (had to take time out tonight to make him biscotti for doing the design work for me, though). I am not sure if they will be done before the Olympics, but I already warned him about that, and he’s cool with it.

I made this a few days ago, when Zknitter first mentioned it, but I forgot to post it until now:

It’s my very own Word Cloud, courtesy of SnapShirts. Kind of fun, really.

I found the progress bars courtesy of the Knitty Coffeeshop (I can no longer find the original post, of course). I got mine from Unlikely Words, which has a great explanation of how to format them and update them.

You do have to go in and update the percentage numbers when you want them to change, but it only takes a second. I try to update them every day or so, but I’m sort of…um…obsessive about them, which also explains why I like the color of the bar to relate to the color of the knitting project (and be different from any other bar).