Even for those of us who are perfectly content with our aging vehicles, there is still a little thrill that comes from having a brand new rental for a few days.  For me, that thrill mostly comes in the form of newfangled musical choices.

Satellite radio? MP3 CD? USB input? Yes, please.  I’d like some of those.

If you need me, I’ll be in the driveway getting acquainted with the current decade.

Boring Office Guy and I are quite the pair this week.  If you’ve been keeping up with our photo blog, you’ve probably seen the pharmaceuticals pop into both of our gratitude streams over the past few days.  I don’t like taking medicine for anything, if I can help it, but sometimes you just have to break down and do it.

Anyway, BOGs been home with a cold, coughing like crazy, and I’ve been sidelined with a sore upper back/neck muscle thingy.  Oh, the fun we are having here.

Actually, it hasn’t been bad, just unproductive.

I wonder if my neck will allow me to sew?  I’ve got a project idea, that I hope will turn into a little tutorial I can post.

While I ponder that, I’m going to go reheat a slice of last-night’s pizza for lunch, and cue up an episode of Monarch of the Glen on Netflix.  I’m finally reaching the end of its run, closing in on the last episode of Series 5.

If sewing is out, maybe I’ll listen to some of the new music I downloaded yesterday with my eMusic free trial.  I had tried them years ago, but I didn’t think they had a large enough selection of music to keep me happy.  Things have changed since then, though.  They’re very well-stocked with artists I like.  I got 35 freebies, some of which had been on my Amazon wish list for a while, and others of which were ones I’d liked on Pandora and never followed-up on.  I’ve found others that I’d like to get, too… I may have to keep a paid membership going for a few months, until I’m all music-ed out.

Or maybe I’ll make a photo book.  I see Picaboo has another twofer sale going on.  Gotta love those.  I’m thinking Christmas gifts.

Maybe I should just blow my whole afternoon online shopping.  Oh, the temptation!  If only I had unlimited funds…

Whatever would we do without Netflix?  Well, we certainly wouldn’t be introducing our children to old episodes of The Monkees.  And by extension, I most definitely would not be knitting a green wool hat with a pom-pom on top for my older son.

But, we do have Netflix, and we have been renting The Monkees, and Aidan did ask me to make him a Mike Nesmith hat.  And, really, who am I to say no to such a request?  It’s not like these boys are clamoring for handmade goodies from their mother all that often these days…

The details

• Pattern: improvised k1 p1 rib with a double-strand of yarn
• Loom: 36-peg Green Knifty Knitter
• Yarn: Cascade 220 Superwash Color #1918

It’s not perfect – if I had it to do again, I would probably use a bulkier wool, and I would move up to the larger yellow loom, so that I didn’t have to stretch the hat too much when blocking it.

Still, he likes it, which is what counts.  Now he’s asking for a red shirt with white buttons on the front to complete the look.  If I dig out my old guitar from the basement, it could be a Halloween costume.  And as long as we’re thinking ahead, I suspect this belongs under the Christmas tree this year.  It’s funny the things kids get interested in, isn’t it?

I came across this fun little video while researching the hat.  Thought you might enjoy it.  Happy Friday!

I really like the way this image turned out.  It’s the cover for a new mix CD I made.  Penny and I like to exchange music from time to time – she’s introduced me to some excellent tunes (including one that I really wanted to include in this mix, until I realized I’d gotten it from her in the first place)!

It’s been a long time since I made a mix.  Thinking back, the last one was in February of 2007.  It’s not like me to go more than a couple of months without cranking out a new CD, but I guess I just haven’t been moved in that direction recently.  Or, when I have, I just haven’t felt the songs coming together cohesively.  I like my mixes all to have a “feel” to them and to flow well from one song to the next.

One of the most enjoyable parts of making a CD for me, is the cover.  My old way usually involved me hunting for something appropriate via a Google image search, and then modifying it to fit my needs.  This time around, I have flickr.  And a library of my own photos.

So I made my mix, and was ready for a cover, but before I could choose a photo, I needed a name for the compilation.  I decided it would be fun to go to  wordle.net and enter the chorus lyrics for every song in the playlist.  As it turns out, this was as much of a time-consuming PITA as you might think.  But the ability to see the most highly-recurring words in cloud form was helpful to me.  I played around with the controls, regenerated the cloud a few times, and finally had an image I was happy with.  And the image told me to call the CD “Sometimes Breakable.”  Which really seemed to fit.

There are a couple of standout “thoughtful” songs on this disc – more than I intended when I set out to make it – and there are certainly themes of brokenness in a few of the songs.  Considering some of the places I’ve been since my last compilation, it’s not entirely surprising to find some of those songs creeping onto the playlist.  I have my moments of feeling fragile.   And although they are fleeting, sometimes I do feel breakable.

This image of my shadow by the ocean felt like a good one to use for the cover.  It seemed introspective, without being dark or unhappy.  While there is a thoughtful vibe to some of the songs on this disc, I don’t think it’s sad, or even too mellow.  There’s plenty of upbeat to counter the quiet.

I cropped this image to a square, overlaid the wordle image on top at 50% opacity, darkened the edges, and gave it a treatment that I designed a while back to look like Picnik‘s cross process function.

I was hoping to find a way to share my CD’s playlist with you here, but I haven’t found a good way to embed a playlist that is able to play every single song on the list and in the order I want them to play.  Project Playlist is unable to find some of the songs I need, and last.fm playlists can only play in shuffle mode.  Using either one of those options would ruin the whole flow of the music.  So, for now I’m just including the song list, and linking to the songs on last.fm, where many of them are available for listening.  And If anyone has any more elegant solutions to sharing playlists, please let me know!

1. neapolitan bridesmaid by tarkio
2. in the aeroplane over the sea by neutral milk hotel
3. beautiful child by rufus wainright
4. modern inventions by the submarines
5. breakable by ingrid michaelson
6. new soul by yael naim
7. 1234 by feist
8. why do you let me stay here by she & him
9. trouble by over the rhine
10. anne by broken records
11. dandelion by antje duvekot
12. philosophia by the guggenheim grotto
13. cleanse song by bright eyes
14. side by travis
15. too early to say by the innocence mission
16. even a child by crowded house
17. pineapple head by natalie imbruglia
18. box full o’ honey by duran duran
19. boy with a coin by iron & wine
20. painting by chagall by the weepies
21. sometimes by hooverphonic
22. worry about you by ivy
23. a place in time by amanda abizaid

So there you have it: Sometimes Breakable – a brand spankin’ new CD mix, ripe to be listened to and shared.  I think the sharing is the best part.  Well, aside from making the cover, that is…

Have I mentioned how much I like spring? I think I appreciate it more every year, as I grow to dislike winter at a similar rate. After a long cold spell, nothing invigorates me more than being able to throw open all of the windows and feel the lovely warm breeze on my skin. It’s been hard these last two years having a little one with seasonal allergies. The windows remain closed just when I am feeling an intense need to have them open. I realize the physical toll of the pollen on Eamonn’s teary eyes and runny little nose is more profound than the emotional toll of a stuffy house on me, and so the pleasant breeze remains just out of reach. And all of us hope for a day of rain, to wash away the pollen and allow us to welcome the outdoors in. If the weather report is to be trusted, we may get that day tomorrow.

So, Polydelphia was fun. I did eventually manage to win something! This is a fun, colorful dragonfly pin by Kim Korringa, and I am finding it hard to stop looking at it. I am mesmerized by the wings. I’ve made similar ikat-like blended stripes myself, but I never put them together in this way. I love the combination of stripes and swirls. So pretty. I won’t post images this time of all of the auction items I didn’t manage to walk away with on the second day, but you can see them in my flickr account, if you’d like.

I expect my visits here to be few and far between this week. I have a certain 8-year-old’s First Communion this weekend and would kind of like to have my house in decent shape for the inevitable invasion of relatives. Plus, in an astounding display of forethought (yes, that is sarcasm, in case you didn’t recognize it) I scheduled a swap for this week. So while I’m cleaning the crafty supplies out of the dining room, I’ll be working around 100+ vintage sheet remnants. The current count stands at 116, but I’m still waiting for, I think, seventeen swappers’ sheets to arrive. There could potentially be another fifty sheets showing up here in the next few days. I’m having a lot of fun with this, but the timing really could have been better. I blame the US Postal Service. If they weren’t planning an increase on Monday, I’d be taking my time with this instead of scrambling to save my 20 cents per package

One last thing before I go… I’m thinking of shutting down my radio station. The big thing that’s holding me back from doing it, is that, frankly, it’s cool to be able to say, “yeah, I have a radio station.” But when I think about it, is that coolness really worth almost $200/year to me? I’m leaning very heavily towards NO at the moment. So I’m looking into alternatives. I still want to be able to share my favorite music with anyone who will listen. But I want to do it cheaply and without the pressure of updating my playlist every couple of days. I’ve really fallen down on the playlist-updating part of the job lately. Live365 gives me about 7 hours of playlist time with the package I have now, and unless I rotate songs in and out frequently, hearing the same 7 hours of music is going to get pretty old pretty fast to my listeners. My stats definitely back this up.

I’m looking at last.fm right now. With their plugin for my media player, every time I listen to music on my computer, it is noted on my last.fm profile. Visitors to my profile can listen to a radio station that is built based on my personal listening history. So, if I’m on an Indigo Girls kick, and playing RItes of Passage while cleaning the kitchen all week, my last.fm radio station is probably going to be queuing up “Galileo” for your listening pleasure. And, if I prefer more control than that, I can create a playlist, filled with songs I’ve listened to that I specifically choose to share. I’ve been building a playlist for the last few days, if you’d like to have a listen!

I don’t have any last.fm friends at the moment, so if any of you use the service and would like to be friends, visit my profile and add me.

And now I must be gone.  There’s laundry to fold, a dishwasher to unload, and orders to get ready for shipment.  And I see a certain 5-year-old on the other side of the room who looks like he could use a good tickle

I’m not talking about anything sinister or sundry. No, it’s really just something that I’ve been prone to all of my adult life – doing “work” that doesn’t need to be done, simply because it’s fun, regardless of the important work that does need to be done. This morning I found a tool that would help me splice together three different feeds so that I could offer one single Polka Dot Radio feed that would let subscribers know when there is a new blog post as well as when there has been an update to the station’s playlist. Is that a cool thing to have? Oh, yeah! Could my radio station have lived without it for another few days, weeks, or months? Most certainly.

I didn’t spend my entire four hours playing around with radio-related things, but I did spend more than half of it that way. And when I skip my morning shower in favor of turning on my laptop, and when I get lured into blowing off a task list so that I can tinker with code, it sets a precedent for the day. No matter how many times I said to myself today that I would put down the computer after such-and-such a time and concentrate on other things, it was an uphill battle all the way. I did the bare minimum – straightened up the living room & dining room, processed new orders & payments, and finally took that shower. Other than that, there were feeds to play with, blogs to read, and Moo cards to order.

When I’ve had a productive day, but productive in an “I did what I wanted and shirked all other responsibilities” kind of way, it leaves me feeling like I somehow cheated my way through the day, and that I’ve probably missed some of the better moments having my nose buried in my laptop.

The day wasn’t a total loss. I did orchestrate a small treasure hunt for Aidan to do when he came home from school. At the end of the hunt was his favorite snack waiting for him. He loved that. And tonight the four of us sat on the boys’ beds daydreaming about a fun trip we could take this weekend. Aidan wants to stay in a hotel, and while that is probably a cost-prohibitive diversion, I think we can manage to replicate some of the great things about hotel-stays right here at home. Making plans has a way of pulling one out of their self-absorbed doldrums. It’s optimistic thinking infused with enthusiasm, and one can’t help but feel better in its wake.

The high lasted all of 5 minutes before I found myself sitting downstairs on the couch, one eye on the TV, the other on my laptop. I was reading some of my favorite crafty mom blogs, and while often I find them uplifting and inspirational, that is not the case when I’ve had a slacker kind of day. Seeing all of these women who make beautiful things and find creative and special moments with their children gave me this feeling of terrible inadequacy. I found myself wondering what I’ve missed with my nose in the computer so much. Why wasn’t I outside pushing the boys on the swing, or taking a walk in the crunchy leaves today? The winter will be here before I know it and I’ll wonder where the fall went. Where did it go? It left, while I was being picky about an irrelevant rss feed and reading about other people’s lives.

The final straw for me was reading about Stefani’s muffins. Her kids were enjoying homemade muffins for breakfast in a tee pee they’d made together in the yard. A stray thought crossed my mind: “how nice it would be to give the boys something homemade for breakfast instead of the usual pop tart.” I almost dismissed it like I’d lazily dismissed all other thoughts just like it today, until I paused. What, exactly, was I doing right now that was so important? Was I particularly interested in what was on TV? No. Could I really enjoy any more crafty mom blogs while I was in this dark place? No. Is 9:15 too late to start baking? Well, usually, but not tonight.

So now I blog as the smell of a recipe I’d never tried before wafts through the house. Awash in a sea of cinnamon, cloves, and ginger I feel more in balance right now than I have all day. Pumpkin Biscotti cooling on the counter, I’m ready to think ahead to a better day tomorrow. Tomorrow I will tackle that task list. Tomorrow I will be open to putting aside the laptop for a little real living. And tomorrow I will greet the boys with a smile and we will have cookies for breakfast.

The reason it’s in my encyclopedia is because I run one of those thousands of stations. I have been making mix tapes (and later CDs) from the first day that I had the technology to do so – I’m guessing since my early teens. In 1996 (I think) I orchestrated an annual tape exchange with my coworkers and have been doing tape/cd exchanges periodically ever since. It’s great, particularly when you find exchange partners whose musical taste complements your own (hi, Penny ). A few of the bands I am particularly enthusiastic about are groups that I was introduced to via a single song from an exchange.

It seemed to me to be a natural progression from sharing my favorite music through cds to starting my own radio station. Given changes in the way royalties are paid, running a station may become cost-prohibitive when my contract is up for renewal in November, but for now I’m having fun making up playlists and broadcasting them for all the Internet to listen to. My only complaint is that I am only able to upload enough music for a 7-hour playlist, and in order to keep the music fresh, I really have to change the playlist often. I’m just not that organized lately! Ideally, I could devote a computer here at home to being a music server and broadcast live all day long – then I’d only be restricted by the size of my mp3 library. Which is substantial

You’re all invited to listen. Every time you drop by this blog (or any part of the Polka Dot Creations website), you’ll see at the top of the page a little area devoted to Polka Dot Radio. The currently-playing track is listed, along with a link to the website, a speaker icon to allow you to listen now, and an rss icon so you can subscribe to the message board (which sees pretty much zero action since I got sucked into the blogosphere ). To listen to my station, you’ll need a Live365 account, but they are free and relatively easy to sign up for. You can download Radio365 (for a fee), listen to the station on your browser (for free), or use any other media player of your choice (which is also free). We even own a little doohickey that lets us listen to internet radio (and our own mp3′s, too) on our home stereo, which is pretty nifty. As soon as I’m done blogging, I’m going to update the station, since I think it’s been a few weeks – 7 hours of music repeats an awful lot in a matter of weeks!

L is for Live365. And for Listen!

And for Lisa.

I encourage you to take some time looking through the CraftCast archives. There was a Donna Kato interview a few weeks back that was interesting. She talked with Carol Duvall recently, too (although I have yet to listen to that one). And tonight I played last week’s chat with Tim McCreight. It seemed interesting, although my listening experience was punctuated by loud, shirtless little boys running around playing Ultraman, and I’m afraid I didn’t catch a whole lot of what was being talked about. I may have to listen to that one again when everyone is in school…

On another note:
Over the last few days, I’ve been populating the Google Reader with as many clay-related blogs as I can find. If you’ve got a favorite, I’d love to hear from you. I’m going to mention Polymer Clay Daily and Polymer Clay Notes here, but frankly if you’re a clayhead and you haven’t heard of them you must be living under a rock

Looks like it’s time to get those boys into some shirts and put them to bed. Until next time…

Lisa

I have a new internet radio station! Check it out!

Next time you sit down to play with clay, put on a little Polka Dot Radio to keep your ears entertained

Oh, and if you want to keep informed about special broadcasts I may do, join my mailing list.

Lisa