Happy Birthday and Miscellaneous Updates

Birthday Celebrations

Happy Birthday to me! We celebrated today with a delicious meal of homemade pasta with chicken fricassee. I made a coconut cake for my birthday cake. It is the first one I have made and it was delicious! I apologize that I neglected to take a picture of the main dish. It was worth every bit of effort. I love fresh pasta! The chicken and pasta recipes are from my Joy of Cooking, which is my staple cookbook.

New Electronics

I recently pre-ordered the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. This was mainly a business purchase but I was excited when it shipped early and was supposed to be delivered today. That seemed like a fun birthday surprise, right? Unfortunately, there was a delay in delivery though. So it hasn’t shown up yet, which is a bit of a disappointment.

On a related note, I also ordered a new laptop this week. This was something I planned to do this year, but was waiting until spring. I have had my current computer since August 2018. It is a Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 6 and has been the best laptop I have ever had. I wanted to get the new model (gen 12) and build it to the specs I want. Those plans had to change when I turned on my computer three days ago to this…

I had no warning that anything was going bad. It was fine until it wasn’t.

Those white vertical areas aren’t supposed to be there. You can also see that the text is virtually illegible. I wasn’t sure whether this was a hardware failure of the display or the integrated graphics processor. We have a external monitor which I set up in my office. I hooked up the computer to it with an HDMI cable to see what would happen.

That worked! I assume that means that the display is the problem. So, while I can still use my computer now when hooked up to the external monitor, I still need to replace it for use on the road.

So, waiting until March wasn’t going to be an option anymore. I went ahead and built a gen 11 model. It was supposed to arrive February 1 at the earliest and probably a few days later than that. I was pleasantly surprised to get the shipping notification this morning and it is currently expecting to be delivered January 29th. So, that’s good news!

Knitting Updates

In other news, I have another finished sample to show you today and a new one on the needles.

Here is my Maize Cowl washed and ready to wear. I have a Ravelry project page for it too. You can get further information there if you like.

I made a trip to Joann and got some buttons for the small size Classic Baby Cardigan that I finished last week. When I was knitting this, I saw that the pattern could use some updating for clarity. So, I did some editing and uploaded the revised edition to my website and my listing on Ravelry.

There is only one project on my needles at the moment. I may cast on something else soon, but this is it for now. It is another booth sample re-knit of the Spiral Effect Cowl. My daughter, Heather, is the designer of this pattern. She wrote it for my Classic Merino Superwash Sock yarn about 12 years ago. She was selling it online from Ravelry and I sell it at festivals. I have made it several times and I enjoy wearing mine when I want a little something lacy to wear.

It is a quick and fun lacy project that is perfect for even the knitter who thinks lace is too challenging. It is the same stitch pattern every other round with a simple shift to give the diagonal effect. I made this one a couple years ago.