Happiness!

Last night I saw a great short play at Bryant Lake Bowl, "Adventures in Mating". I saw this originally when it was part of the Fringe Festival in 2005. It stars Joseph Scrimshaw (one of the funniest people in the Twin Cities) and Alayne Hopkins as two people on a blind date. I orginally saw Craig Johnson as the waiter in the restaurant they meet at but the waiter is now being played by Jim Robinson. The show always starts out with the man trying to prove he's a "bad boy" in the hopes that the woman will like him and the woman breaking out a checklist to determine whether this guy is worth even getting to know. From there, it's all up to the audience. Throughout the rest of the play, there are key decisions to be made as to where the play will go and it's up to us to make them. It's very funny and fun without being too scary for reserved Minnesotans. I'd highly recommend it for a girls night out or a date night. It has an open run on Monday nights at 8:00 at Bryant Lake Bowl.

I hesitate to even bring this up, because apparently some folks are getting restless about it, but I have to encourage everyone to sign up for Ravelry. I'm sure you've heard all about it around the blogosphere, but just in case you haven't, here's the scoop: It's a brand new website developed to create a community of fiber lovers as well as provide a tool for the individual fiber artist. It's currently not even final, it's just in beta testing. But it's so awesome, everyone wants in. If you haven't yet, sign up for the waiting list. I first heard about it a couple of weeks ago and got on the waiting list and I got an invitation last week and entered some of my stuff over the weekend.

I was a little foggy on what exactly was what, so here's a little more info, if you're interested. Before I had a blog, I had a website where I kept info about all of my finished projects. You can see it here. After I started the blog, I decided to continue to keep this central place where all of my finished objects were available for me to look at or send links to people online. I also decided to start cataloging and inventorying my yarn stash, so I could see what I have or if I found a great pattern, I could look to see what I have at that gauge, etc. You can see my stash inventory here. I didn't get everything photographed and entered into the list, though. I also hosted my own pictures for the blog off that website. Then, disaster struck late last year. The server that my website was on crashed. A blog without pictures is boring (as you can tell from this post), so I signed up for Flickr as a temporary measure. The website got moved to another server, but because of technical issues, Microsoft software I was using to do my website didn't work on the new server. Tech guys pissing match ensued. I've finally got access to my website with a different software, but it doesn't work the same and I can't access it from home and blah blah blah. I haven't updated my website since last fall.

But in to save the day is Ravelry!! Ravelry is integrated with Flickr, so all your Flickr pictures can be imported into your Ravelry notebook. In your notebook, you can track your current and then completed projects. So I don't need that website. You can create an inventory of your stash, too! You can make a list of projects you want to do in the future. You can also inventory your needles and books. So, everything I was doing on my webpage, I can do through Ravelry, with pretty pictures from Flickr! Yay, it makes my anal-retentive heart happy. But even more than that, it links you with the rest of the Ravelry community. Want to find out who else has or is knitting that sock pattern you're working on? Ravelry will tell you. Want to know who has some Lorna's Laces in the stash? Ravelry will tell you that, too. It's so cool. And the more people that are using it, the more people that can link up. So, go get on the waiting list. But be patient - it's worth the wait!