A few weeks ago, I talked about Deb and the need for blood donors. Today is Deb’s New Birthday - the day of her bone marrow stem cell transplant. I snagged the update below from Manolo’s Shoe Blog - Sis #1 wrote it and sent it to Manolo, but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind me sharing it here.

Dear Manolo,

Just wanted to let you know an update on my sister at www.debutaunt.com . She is going to be getting her blood stem cell transplant on Monday. Right now, the Debu is already admitted to the hospital to get the preparatory treatment—radiation and chemo. The blood stem cell transplant is not an easy process to go through but it gives the best hope to thousands of people, including my sister.

Though going through a transplant is not terribly fun, we learned something that we didn’t know previously—that the donation process is pretty easy. People think of donating blood stem cells as being very painful, and the old way of doing it was certainly not comfortable. But the new technology does not involve an operation into the bone marrow, rather, they just take extra stem cells out of the donors’ blood—kind of like giving platelets.

My sister was fortunate that she had a match in my brother. But there are thousands of people who are not that lucky and rely on the National Marrow Donor Program to find a match. Here is information on how to join it: http://www.marrow.org/HELP/join_the_registry.html .

Anyhow, with the transplant, the Debu is going to be in the hospital for 20-40 more days and is already bored as heck. As her hospital fashion statement, she rejects hospital gowns as being too immodest and ugly, and favors Nick and Nora pajamas (Target now carries them—they are the most genius company). She has the internets in her hospital room, and it has been a lifesaver to be able to visit her internet friends. So if you would like to visit, I am sure she would adore it.

Buona giornata!
Steph

Go send the Debu some love and cheer her on in her fight. She is totally going to kick cancer’s ass.

I wrote this on Tuesday, but before I could publish it the laptop died. I forgot to post it when I got home that night - oops! It has been a crazy week.

I’ve been meaning to write this for awhile, and since I am at my Photo I class without anything to develop (stupid winter weather and gray days outside), I decided it was a good time to write up my tutorial on how I created the colorized images I’ve posted recently.

Step 1 - Open up the image you want to color in Photoshop. (I use Photoshop CS2. I’m sure you can do this in other software, but I don’t know how. So these are the steps I do in Photoshop CS2.)

Step 2 - Convert the image to B&W using your preferred method. I use the Channel Mixer. Be sure to click the “Monochrome” checkbox, and set the Red, Green and Blue channels. I set this one to Red 60, Blue 20, and Green 32. Some people say you should make sure the numbers add up to 100. Others recommend settings similar to what I use. In the end, it is all about what looks best to you.

Step 3 - Set the color for the paintbrush to black for the foreground and white for the background. “Paint” over anything you want in color with black and - bam! - the color will appear! If you accidentally paint over something you don’t want in color, switch your paintbrush to white and paint over it again and it will go back to black & white again.

That’s it! I change the paintbrush settings to larger settings to make it faster to color, and I change it to very fine pinpoint to get into small places. Save it when you’re done (don’t save over the original if you want to keep it in color!) and enjoy!

I love Project Runway. I adore Project Runway. And this weekend, I have finally caught up on watching Project Runway. Yay! So now I could finally read all the fabulous recaps on fourfour and Blogging Project Runway. Oh my goodness, I’m in pain now from all the laughter.

Fourfour has many other great recaps - including my other favorite, America’s Next Top Model. I highly recommend it. Check it out, before I go all Shetangey on you!

Ok, ok, I’m not really going to poke you in the eye. I just sing that song to myself every time I think of the Pointy Sticks podcast. I really need to find out from Jay Lee if I can use a snippet of that Flying Fish Sailor’s song in the podcast - it would be the perfect intro music!

Episode 2 is finally live. At last! Whew. I had everything selected and downloaded yesterday so I could make the podcast after I returned from my Guild meeting, and then the sound card for the computer wouldn’t work! Gah! So I had to test out all the other computers to see if any of them would record in stereo (they won’t) and the set up the laptop to do the recording. It all worked out in the end … until I found out this morning that we had no internet access.

Talk about frustrating!

So now that the internet is finally working after the cable company came out to do repairs somewhere nearby, I was able to upload the podcast and the show notes. Whew. Now I’m going back to working on my Lady Eleanor and later taking photos of my knitting.

Just how terrible would you feel if you tripped on your shoelace and broke centuries-old vases? And why were they on the windowsill?

[via Cluttered Loft’s Geeknotes.]

I realized today that the same time that my dingy issues began and I started to forget everything was also the time when Dr. Head (the one that I go visit for the whole cyclothymic issue) decided to try me out on a different medicine. I guess I didn’t think about it before because I’ve been feeling so great on this medicine. Well, great aside from the fact that I can’t remember what I study for more than 10 minutes, which doesn’t do me any good when the tests roll around. It seemed like a smart idea to look into it (I still have an appointment with Dr. Has-a-Clue, the blood pressure doctor, for next week) and so I got an appointment to see him.

The second I walked in to his office, he said he was surprised that on a relatively low does I was suffering from the memory-loss side effect. Ok, he used some fancy word that began with a “C” that basically meant that I’ve become quite flaky. He then went on to ask if I’ve had a dry mouth lately - uh, yeah. I had just sucked down about 32 oz. of water while sitting in his waiting room. So we’re changing the meds. Hopefully we won’t lose the positive effects that this one brought on, but I’ll be able to find my brain again.

I knew it was a bit odd to go from having straight A’s to making C’s in almost all of my classes. Just not right. I wonder if the teachers will take a note from my doctor and let me take those tests over? Hm. Well, it actually won’t hurt me too bad in some of the classes - they drop the lowest test grade and replace it with our quiz average if it is higher. So there is still a chance to pull it all up.

I’m just so happy to know it wasn’t just my imagination that I was forgetting everything so fast.

Last year in front of the Supreme Court the RIAA’s lawyers said it was perfectly legal within the realms of “Fair Use” to take your own CDs and convert the songs into mp3s to put on your own iPod. Now they are trying to say that it isn’t legal.

Whatevah!

If I own the CD, I should be allowed to listen to it any way that I want. Things like this make me want to listen to nothing but podcasts, podsafe music released by the artists directly, and groups that aren’t signed to big labels that release CDs of their own music. Screw the deep pockets. Down with the man!

Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle TechBlog wrote a post asking, “Would the local blogosphere benefit from a blog critic?” He is talking about the Houston blogosphere, and a blog critic to help bloggers grow. I linked the post, you can read all the juicy details along with his “requirements.”

My response?

Personally, I think it is a terrible idea. I’ve been blogging for over 6 years now, since before the word “blog” was a household name or had caught the media’s attention in any way. I have hundreds of readers daily. However, in a “blog critic’s” eyes, my site might be terrible. And you know what? I don’t care.

I blog for me in the end. I write when I want to write, about what I want to write. When it comes to reading blogs, you either read it because you want to read it, you have a common interest with the person, or you don’t.

I’ve seen many attempts at being “blog critics” in the past, all of which have failed TERRIBLY. Feelings get hurt, names get called, mud gets slung. It always ends up BAD. It is much like the situation that happens around the blog awards that people coordinate. Not good at all.

I don’t think the Chronicle or its representatives should have any part in that. If you find a blog that is interesting and you feel it deserves attention, great. That is how my photoblog ended up in the Chronicle years ago, and another site of mine ended up in the NY Post. Positive reviews are great, but once you point out that a site has poor writing or bad code, it is going to get ugly.

I think Charles Kuffner said it best when he pointed out that whoever takes the task would need asbestos underwear. It would be flame city before long.

And my pet peeve of the day? When sites have the “TypeKey” sign-in link on their comment page and then don’t have it enabled. Gah! Remove the link or fix the code. Does Akismet work for MT? Because personally, that is the best thing ev-ah for getting rid of spam. I love being spam free!

I’m not having fun in school this semester. Last semester, I rocked. I had a 4.0! This semester? Not so good. I feel like I have no memory. Today, for example, we worked on equations in Chemistry. I did 4-5 problems using the same equation. Within 15 minutes of leaving class, I couldn’t tell you what the equation was that we learned.

Gah! This is driving me nuts!

What is going on? And more importantly, how on earth am I going to make it through this semester like this? I can’t do it, and all of my grades are going to be terrible if it continues. I study, study, study and within an hour I feel like it is all gone. I’m not doing anything different, so I just can’t figure it out. If anything, I am eating better and getting more sleep - I should be doing better, not worse! I really have to find a solution for this. Have any advice?

As I just lamented to GC, do you think I could get my Bio teacher to count knitting as work for the class? Like if I identify which phylum, class, order, family, genus and species the fiber came from? I mean, that should earn me a good grade, right?

Today my Mom is having Dr. Hand do the carpal tunnel surgery on her right hand, and I realized I haven’t posted an update about my hand in awhile. I’m breaking it down by surgery, because the results are definitely different.

- Carpal Tunnel Surgery: This has been *fabulous* so far. I highly recommend it if you have any carpal tunnel issues. Seriously, the recovery for this wasn’t bad, and now I have no numbness, tingling, pain - nothing. No more splint. I wonder why I waited so long to do this surgery, because it has brought me so much relief. I’m considering doing the left hand during the summer since it has mild to moderate carpal tunnel too.

- DeQuervain’s Syndrome Surgery - This one has not been as fabulous. Basically, they cut the area causing the pain for the tendons leading to the thumb, along the outside of the right wrist. From time to time, I feel like there is a “pulling” feeling of tightness over my wrist. It is getting better, but in hindsight I wish I had just done the carpal tunnel surgery first and then addressed this if it was still a problem afterwards. This part of the surgery was the reason for my giant club cast that I got to wear for two weeks, and it was a month after my surgery before I learned that while the initial recovery is 6 weeks (vs. 2 weeks for carpal tunnel), the full recovery time is 6 months. Ugh.

As for all the other medical issues, we still have no clue. No idea what causes the pain in my right side, which has been better for the past week, so we won’t talk about it and maybe it will stay away. The blood pressure battle is still a matter of finding the right combo of medicine, but at least I’m no longer taking ones that make me swell up like a sausage or give me hives. I’ve actually gone entire weeks lately without seeing any doctors!

I still think my Mom should get a discount on her hand surgery. First the doctor worked on my Dad’s shoulder, then my hand, and now hers - we should get a family rate!

Studying all this Trig and Biology has sapped my brain of all coherent thoughts. Ugh.

I’ll post photos of the Knitting Olympics launch tomorrow night, after I take the last test. Also, there are people in the photos and I want to clear it with them before I post them. The yarn shop is closed on Mondays.

I’m still in wedge 1 of my shawl, but I’m a lot happier now that I realized that the rows get shorter and shorter as you go along. 660 rows of knitting was sort of scary at first, but now I’m cool with it since it isn’t 110 stitches on each row. I’m on row 52 right now, so there is still a long way to go.

My first Jaywalker sock is done! Unfortunately, I won’t get the pair finished by tomorrow. No prizes for me. Picture tomorrow; I love how it turned out in the Trekking XXL yarn.

Oh! Before I forget (again) - I love to watch the figure skating at the Olympics, and I was so excited yesterday when I discovered that there is a show called “Olympic Ice” on the USA channel at 6pm EST/5pm CST. Daily. An hour of figure skating talk. Such fun! The TiVo is all set to catch it for me now.

I hear sines, cosines and tangents calling my name…

Thanks to the Brilliant Button Maker by LucaZappa.com, I now have a button for the knitting Olympics! Feel free to take it and share it!

I’m about to head out to lunch, then on to Twisted Yarns, where “Twisted Team Houston” will have their Olympics kick-off. I’m working on a button for the team and I will post it here later when it is all ready! Hopefully I will have photos of the event to share too!

“I’ve got Katie tucked away, so no one will get to us until my child is born — and until I want them to.”

The man is whacked. Total nutcase. I like the bit in the article about how he won’t let her be like Nicole. Nice. Really nice.

Oh my goodness. This is SO COOL. You can make a pinhole camera that uses 35mm film with a Matchbox! Check out the directions. I know what I’m doing this weekend! (Inbetween taking tests, knitting, watching the Olympics and studying. You know, in all my spare time.) [via ReadyMade Blog.]

Speaking of studying - I have my first Biology lab practical tomorrow. I’m terrified. I have to know Phylums and Genus names for a ton of itty-bitty things. (Bacteria, molds, fungus, algae, etc.) The test will be timed and is something like 150 questions long. I’m freaking out. There is no way. No way! I guess if I go back to reviewing the CD of images instead of reading about pinhole cameras, that might be a good start though. Sigh.