Somebody To Love

I just noticed that when looking at patterns from books on Ravelry, there is a link at the bottom of the page that says,

“search your local libraries”

which links to the record for the book you are looking at on WorldCat. Very cool.

This weekend has to be one of the first that I’ve really enjoyed in London. Funny, since I wasn’t even in town for half of it. Saturday me and Dean walked from my place to downtown, and spent some time in Victoria park watching the squirrels dig up the nuts they planted last year.

On the way there we got to walk under a train, and Dean managed to get some really good pictures of it.

We also saw another chair in the river.

Later on I dreaded my hair. Sectioning it was a pain, since I’d never done that before. Not to mention I couldn’t see what I was doing on the back of my head at all. I got Dean to help with that part, so if any of the back looks weird you guys can blame him. I’m going to.

(Please excuse the pile of crap). The finished product:

Today was another fun adventure. We went to Oil Springs to visit Brier Run Alpacas since it’s shearing weekend and they were having an open house. One of the alpacas kept yawning.

I gave one of the puppies a good ear scratching and he begged for more attention when I tried to leave.

I also bought some brown fibre to spin. It’s got small amounts of blue silk streaked in it, and is going to be very pretty once it’s spun up. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet, but I plan on taking pictures of the process when I do decide.

I spent the last few weeks scanning some very old family photos and it gave me plenty of time to think about the digitization of paper-based media, and why I have such mixed feelings about it.

I appreciate the ability to preserve documents and photos by moving them to a digital format. But at the same time, doing so removes a lot of information you gain by working with the originals. We interact with objects using all of our senses, but when dealing with digital media we are no longer interacting with the object as such, but with the object we are using to access the media.

If I’ve lost you, think of it like the difference between watching a video of something and actually being there. You lose the connection that you have from being part of the experience and interacting with your environment.

I find this extra layer problematic. Sure, you can read the same text you could have read before and you can see the same images that you could before. But not in the same way. Something gets lost because we no longer have that direct interaction with the object.

I finally got my marks for last term. I was starting to worry that I wouldn’t get them before starting the new term. Not that it really mattered since there was no way that I’d get bad marks. But I was hoping for straight As. It turns out I didn’t quite get that, since I had one B+, but it was close. Much better than last term, that’s for sure.

I’m trying to be excited about next term, but so far I’m ambivalent about most of the classes. I guess we’ll see if I’m more enthused once they start and I have something more than a course outline to go on.

There’s a workshop at a conference in Windsor next month that I want to take. I’m not sure if I can do that without having to pay for the whole conference though, so I wall have to contact them and see. One of my courses this term might get into that stuff so I wouldn’t have to worry about it at all. I find out on Monday though so I won’t have to wait long for that.