Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Stayin' Alive

Okay...so I seem to have this problem with work, life, and blog balance. Work is going passably well. Everyone I work with is very nice and very helpful. I feel lost, though, and suspect that it's due to the lack of high drama. The last five years of my working life have been imbued with high drama. So now I have no road map. No one here runs up and down the halls, waving their arms, wailing that the sky is falling. When there is a crisis (a real crisis, like the production system went down and it's going to take several hours to bring it back online), people take notice, roll up their sleeves, and work to solve the problem. It's quite refreshing.

Life is also going passably well. There is a lot of knitting. I'm still not done with the Christmas knitting. But I have finished four hats, a pair of mittens, a scarf, and one sock (not a pair of socks, one sock). I still need to finish the poncho (I'm applying the I-cord now), a sock, and maybe a couple more hats (the rasta colors hat was very popular) and perhaps another scarf. I drew Tom's sister for gift exchange and gave her a gift certificate for the knitted garment of her choice, so we'll see what comes of that. One of my Christmas gifts was a copy of Folk Mittens, which is very good. I can't wait to start knitting mittens with colors and patterns. The only problem is that I can't quite figure out how to read the charts. It's going to require some studying.

And then there's this blog. My poor, neglected blog. And the poor, neglected Extreme Knitting entrants, who I have not forgotten. I think about you every day and feel guiltier and guiltier. The problem, I have figured out, is that it takes me too long to load the photos to Blogger, then incorporate them in an actual blog, instead of having one photo per blog entry. The workflow goes something like this: Upload a photo, mark the blog entry as draft, upload another photo, mark that entry as draft, write the actual blog, go back to the draft entries with the photo links, then copy and paste to the real blog entry, then publish it. And for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to upload more than one photo per blog entry using Picasa. Someone told me how to do it, but I was still only able to load one measly photo at a time. It's very frustrating and very time-consuming. So there you have it--the true reason I haven't published lately.

And once again, I'm going to apologize for not publishing the Extreme Knitting entries. I really haven't forgotten. And once again, I'm going to drop off the radar so I can finish the Christmas knitting. I will strive to maintain a better work, life, and blog balance after the New Year.

I wish everyone Merry Christmas (a little late), Happy Hanukkah, Happy Holidays, and very Happy, Healthy, and Prosperous New Year!

7 comments:

Cerridwen said...

Yay! Welcome back. I had that problom with blogger for a while, then I stopped using it. There is a little box on the html page that looks like a little window with a scene in it, and if you click that, then you can upload pics stright from your harddrive. I think it is a new feature, but makes it a lot easier!

Carole Knits said...

Hi there! Nice to see you back again, I've missed you! Anyway, I have the folk mittens book and I just started a nordic mitten (from a kit, not the book) and it's really fun. The charts aren't bad once you get going. I'm sure you can handle it.

Jen said...

Hugs, Teri! Glad to see you're still doing all right.

I hear you about the life, work, blog thing - if you work enough, you can afford to blog, but you don't have time to, and you don't have time to do anything to blog about, anyway. If you don't work, you have time to do things to blog about, but can you afford to?

Tricky juggling act!

Otherwise, I'm going to suggest you look into the offline blog editor I use for Blogger - Zoundry BlogWriter (www.zoundry.com). It's free, you can drag-and-drop pictures into it quick as a bunny, and you can completely edit, format, and preview your post before publishing it.

It's still in beta, but it works well, and the folks at Zoundry are quick to respond when we discover issues - which very seldom happens. I've been using it since almost the first day it was available, back in May, and I swear I would never be blogging like I do without it. You can check out my blog to see what sort of posts - full of pictures - I am able to manage with it.

Anyway, more hugs, and Happy Everydays to you!

Emily said...

Merry Christmas, Teri! Glad to see you posted, I was just wondering about you the other day.

Cathy said...

You can upload your pictures on blogger - I used to do PIcasa, but now use the upload feature on Blogger and you can upload multiple images.
It's easire than Picasa.
Cathy

Jen said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Jen said...

Yes, you can upload pictures in Blogger. But I found it slow, clunky, and it frequently failed on me. And last I looked, you couldn't drag-and-drop a picture from My Pictures - you had to Browse to it. PITA.

Besides, the Blogger online post editor is also slow, clunky, and has entirely too small a window to work in.

With BlogWriter, I edit posts offline in a large, word-processor-like window. I drag-and-drop pictures as desired into the post - all at once if I like, adding the text after, or one at a time as I write the appropriate paragraphs to go with them. When the post is completely to my liking, I push one button and BlogWriter uploads the post - pictures and all.