Ten Random Things...and some color on a rainy day

Knitsofacto is one of my favorite knitting blogs. In her most recent (Sunday 4/20/14) was entitled "Ten Random Things" and invited her readers to also create their own lists of random things to share. So, because I've not felt well enough to actually write much, but have had lots of ideas for blog posts that then end up just sitting in lonesome rooms of my brain, I'm going to take her up on her invitation and create my own random list.

Here's my Ten Random Things:

1. I've been reading the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs. I highly recommend it for lovers of action, strong female leads, and lots of paranormal characters. There are no wilting violet lovers in these books. In fact, none of the books I've read so far have sex in them. Just good plot, fighting for justice, good vs. evil, and a wonderful non-traditional main character. Love them.

2. Oh, I updated the "About" page on the blog. You can also just click on the link above.

3. I am diagnosed with Bipolar II Disorder (more commonly known as manic depression). It sucks. I'm "outing" myself because I'm aware of a stigma against people with mental disorders. I'd like to write a book to help others. One that focuses on research, with only small bits of my own experiences. But I can't even read too much research or even chapter one of a book about another family's experiences without crying and feeling sad and angry. One day, though.

4. I use my Pinterest boards mainly to put images of potential knitting projects all in one place so I can better make a selection without needing to print anything. (Anything that looks like a collection of wedding pics is actually part of an idea dump for a story.)

5. For two days I've listened to a constant whirring noise. My mom has created two brass asymmetrical buttons for the "Touch of Luxe" cardigan by Anna Cohen (Ravelry link here, needs updated pics) that I've knit for her. The buttons are in a tumbler to smoothen edges, hence the constant background noise.

6.  My bedroom is painted purple. A perfect purple. I love purple. Most people would run from purple walls, but this is mellow and plummy and soft.

7. I have collected folk art cat sculptures for years. Mainly small ones. But now I want birds. A collection of folk art bird sculptures. But people keep giving me cats.

8. I want to lose enough weight to run again. I used to love trail running. And running at night in quiet neighborhoods. But there's a major jiggle factor right now. I hear Gorilla tape does wonders.

9. A couple of freezing nights, just before Easter, may have killed our Japanese maple trees. We think we may have missed the first freezing night and only gotten the sheets over them too late to help. Mom and I are very sad and holding our breath to see how the leaves react as the weather warms up.

10. I work on two laptops: a Macbook named Maybel and an Asus Ebook named Elvira.

Remember when I said that Knitsofacto is one of my fav blogs? Here's another project inspired by her blog. I have seen images similar to this elsewhere, but she offered a post with detailed instructions on how to accomplish it. (Her post is The Colour Collaborative: March: Bud.) What is this? It is a picture from which color swatches have been created. This would be useful for selecting faire isle colors or paint for your house. I think it is way super cool. As soon as I saw some of the images that I'd captured of our trip to the beach, I knew I had to try this.

I have so much to learn about color and light. An exercise like this makes it look like I actually have a clue. But it does give me lots of ideas of what to do with them.

P.S. The online photo editor used to create this, PicMonkey, didn't like my Safari 5 (on Maybel the Mac), so I used Chrome.