Valentine’s Day Pains

From the brilliant Daniel Gardner:

New camera!

I haven’t been posting nearly enough lately. I hope to start posting more though, between pictures and craft projects. Which brings me to…my new camera! I got it for my birthday, and love it. It’s a Canon PowerShot A570. I’ve been playing around with it a lot, trying to figure out the settings. I’m getting over a virus I caught the day I got the camera, so with that, I haven’t been up to taking as many pictures as I hoped to have by now. I have gotten some, however, and I’m having fun figuring things out. I really want to learn more about photography, and this has a lot of manual settings, so it’s good to learn with.

This is my favorite so far:

Also, I made my mom an apron for her birthday, and took pictures as I went along. I plan on posting those soon, with general directions for how I made the apron.

Back!

My blog is back! I missed it! It’s been up and down lately, as I’ve been trying to move it from one server to another and had trouble transferring the domain. But as you can see, it’s back now!

I hope to soon actually have something up at the home page, so wovenandspun.net will be a bit more interesting. I’m also working toward getting an Etsy shop up soon, which I’ll link to on here. I’m thinking about having a separate craft blog, where I post pictures of various things I make and link to the Etsy shop. Then if I wanted to give someone the link, they could just go to wovenandspun.net and find my craft stuff.  I haven’t yet decided though.

Homeschooling families

Just this afternoon, my mom and my sisters and I were talking about how we’re different enough from the majority of people, that many would probably think we’re as odd as The Addams Family. Then I just found this video, and thought it was hilarious.

A Homeschooled Family

Technical Difficulties…

I’m in the middle of switching all of our sites to a different web hosting service, so there may be various technical malfunctions until that’s resolved. I may disable comments until it’s fixed, because any comments added from now until it’s done may be lost. Hopefully we’ll be up and running again soon! I’m tired of the service we have, because it’s almost constantly giving me grief in some way or another, whether it’s one of our sites being down or their site not functioning properly. We’ve been with them for a while now, but from various reviews I’ve been reading, it would seem I’m not the only one with these issues. I find more negative reviews than positive regarding their service. However, I’m only finding positive things about the one we’re switching to, so I have high hopes for their service! Hopefully our sites will be running better once the switch is made.

Also, I added a new section to my profile, which I’ll keep updated with various things I’m reading, interested in, and working on. I’ll add more info soon.

Anchored in Faith

This is a wonderful example of a young mother trusting the Lord through difficult times. She’s a homeschool alum with two young children whose husband is overseas with the Army. I found it neat to read about her faith and how she’s getting through these rough times.

4 Things

I got tagged for this over at LiveJournal and thought I’d post it here too.

1. 4 movies you can always watch:
Singin’ in the Rain, Star Trek: First Contact, White Christmas, Fellowship of the Ring

2. 4 bands you can never get enough of:
Hmm…none really come to mind. As for singers and other music, though…Josh Groban, Nichole Nordeman, Tchiakovsky’s Nutcracker Ballet, Beauty and the Beast soundtrack

3. 4 towns you lived in:
Dallas, TX; Little Rock, AR; Baton Rouge, LA; Prattville, AL;

4. 4 shows you like to watch:
Star Trek, LOST, Jericho, Monk

5. 4 websites you visit daily:
HSA, Facebook, Dilbert, my Google Reader rss feed

6. 4 favorite foods:
Peanut butter, chocolate, Caesar salad, pizza

7. 4 places you’d like to be now:
Ireland, Scotland, someplace with lots of snow, Italy

8. 4 songs that really move you:
I Am, Why, and Gratitude, all by Nichole Nordeman; Beauty from Pain, by Superchic[k]

9. 4 books you will always love:
Little Women; Anne of Green Gables; Lord of the Rings; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

10. 4 colors that will always be in your closet:
Blue, green, black, chocolate brown

11.4 authors you’ll always love:
Jane Austen, C.S.Lewis, Louisa May Alcott, JRR Tolkien

12. 4 favorite actors/actresses whose talent you honestly respect:
Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Patrick Stewart, Hugh Laurie

13.4 languages you’d love to be fluent in:
Italian! Welsh, Irish, Russian

14.4 other countries you would like to live in:
Ireland, Scotland, Italy, Wales

15.4 skills you would like to improve:
Writing, sewing, crocheting, music(guitar, tin whistle, piano)

16.4 items that are “a few of your favorite things”:
fuzzy socks, cute hats, peppermint mochas, my Audrey Hepburn purse

Now I’m singing the song My Favorite Things. It is a great song though!

I’m not tagging anyone here, because I don’t know who regularly reads this, but if you read it and feel so inclined, feel free to fill this out! I’d love it if you commented to let me know so I could read it.

Homeschooler Influence

First off, if you haven’t seen the ad with Mike Huckabee and Chuck Norris, watch this. I think it’s great.

Then I was just watching an interview on Fox News with Chuck Norris and Huckabee, and found this pretty cool. Chuck was asked how he came to endorse Huckabee, and he was talking about all the research he did…and how two boys from Oregon with a site called The Rebelution emailed him and told him why they supported Huckabee, then he gave the link to the site and told people they could check it out. I’ve been to their site and heard of it many times, and they have a lot of great stuff. I just thought it was pretty cool that they got together because of Brett and Alex Harris, Josh Harris’s younger brothers, and Alex is also on HSA, which I’m a member of. They’re pretty well known amongst older homeschooled kids and graduates.

Here’s the link to the video, but I’m not sure if that will work. If not, go here and scroll down to “On the Record” and click “Dynamic Duo”. (After writing this, I found you can also view it here on their blog)

I thought it was pretty neat to see how much influence an email from two homeschoolers could have like that, and it’s a reminder how small the circles are among homeschoolers.

Plans…

There’s a quote that says, “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.” We can plan so much, but sometimes, our planning just doesn’t coincide with our circumstances.

I planned to be much more diligent about blogging this month, to write a novel(or at least start one) in a month, to work on crocheting and finish up Christmas gifts and making cards before December, and to work more on web and graphic design and make some blog templates and advance my skills. A bit ambitious, but I was going to try. Another quote says, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” Okay, a bit inaccurate, considering the moon is closer than the stars are, but that’s beside the point. I wanted to make the most of my time by working toward all those goals. I figured even if I didn’t accomplish them, if I at least tried, I would get a lot done and have a rather productive month.

Did I mention that our plans don’t always work out? Mine certainly didn’t. That tendinitis has still been being a pain, quite literally,  and typing irritates it faster than anything else. So I’ve done little typing, and when I have been typing, it’s been to catch up on correspondence or do things I had to get done. Pretty much everything I planned to do needed my hand, which hasn’t been so cooperative. Though I can crochet some, which is nice. That doesn’t bother my hand nearly as much as typing does.

This is the longest thing I’ve typed in some time, and my hand is starting to rebel, so I should probably stop. My hand is slowly improving, I think, but  I still need to rest it a lot.

Snow!

In honor of the coming winter, and because I’m rather longing for cooler weather, I thought I’d share a picture with y’all. The only snowman I’ve ever made.

I made that a couple of weeks ago with a free program I downloaded. It’s pretty cool! I haven’t worked much more on it, because of the problems with my hand and wrist, but I’m reading over things about it and want to learn how to do more 3D/animation type stuff.