I've been thinking long and hard about setting up a separate blog, away from LJ. I wasn't sure what, if anything, I would put in such a blog. I already have accounts on other sites built on the LJ engine; InsaneJournal, GreatestJournal (though that comes up with a 403 and a message to use LJ instead), DeadJournal. And I have blogs elsewhere; I maintain a doll blog (a mirror of posts to my Arkadian Dreams LJ) on my own server using Blogger, plus my faith blog over on Wordpress.
So, why another blog? I'm not entirely sure, except I feel the need to set up a separate space somewhere that's not plagued by the kind of issues faced by LJ clones and where economic politics at Sup won't threaten my words and thoughts. And it's entirely possible that the kind of writing I'm likely to do on a conventional blog is going to be quite different to that of an LJ entry.
That's why I've felt the need to start up a BlogSpot blog. How much I'll use it, I don't know; conveniently however, Semagic can post to Blogger blogs as well as LJ-clones, and post to several accounts cross-platform simultaneously, which does make things simple.
Etsy/Geekery
I've now started trading on Etsy; I've made my first sale there, plus the Lilac Faery outfit that Gabrielle modelled sold on eBay with BIN; with the proceeds of the Violet Faery sale, I was able to afford a new replacement keyboard and a new set of hinges for the lid of my Dell C610. Small children with cups of liquids will be kept well away from this keyboard! Replacing the keyboard was ridiculously easy; the 5 screws in the base that have to be unscrewed are all helpfully labelled with a letter "k". It took me all of 10 minutes to swap over the keyboards and have my machine up and running again. Replacing the lid hinges is a bit more involved however so will take a bit longer.
The new battery David gave me for Christmas is brilliant; fully charged, it gives me 5 hours' runtime before I need to plug the laptop back in. David has mentioned I'd get even longer if I were running Ubuntu and has pointed out that Photoshop runs quite nicely under Wine - but although I could get Semagic and Photoshop to run under Wine (and, indeed, have done so before), it requires a degree of faff and yak-shaving that annoys me. I've done it before; I just want to use the apps, not prove a point. This laptop does have a Debian partition, and at some point I may well install Ubuntu on that partition - but right now everything I want to use is on Windows and I'm quite happy having it like that.
Next plan is to get a decent DVD drive for the laptop to replace the floppy drive it currently has - at which point it will be a very useful machine indeed. I am still incredibly grateful to Tony for giving it to me; a laptop is such a versatile machine that after my last ThinkPad packed up on me I was rather lost without one. I do look speculatively at little Netbooks like the Asus Eee from time to time - but whilst they are cute little machines for browsing on the go, I'd far rather have a serious machine like the C610, even if it's substantially heavier. :-)
Social
We had a rather nice visit from Francis last Saturday, bearing a gift - a P4 PC for middle daughter K, who is absolutely delighted to have her own PC which she has been avidly watching Buffy DVDs on ever since - she's currently working her way through Liz's boxed collection, and is now up to Season 4. She and Francis seemed to hit it off well, chatting animatedly whilst I was busy cooking, and Francis joined us for dinner too - it being the least I could do after he'd come all that way bearing a large heavy PC! It was good to see him, and very enjoyable having a guest for dinner - something of a rarity these days, alas. Hopefully that will change soon though.
Dolls
I've currently got a doll head up for sale on eBay, having finally decided that it's highly unlikely I'll be able to afford a body for it any time soon. With any luck, it will sell in time to help cover part of the final down-payment on Kai, the Cerberus Project El that first got me into BJDs in the first place. It feels rather strange yet exciting, knowing that I'll soon have in my hands the actual doll that first got me into BJDs nearly four years ago; I've calculated that he'll likely arrive pretty close to the 4th anniversary of the very day I first saw his photo after following a link from
Bošic, the Serbian Orthodox Christmas, went pretty well. Although we're not Serb Orthodox, the girls' father was, and the girls have celebrated it ever since they were tiny - and it's one custom we're continuing as our own family tradition. So just before dinner, I raised a toast and said „Христос се роди“ to D2, K (D3 F being too young to speak yet and say the proper response), and she replied with „Ваистину се роди“ and then we all said "Sveti slava!" to one another (literally "Happy God!") and exchanged gifts before I served up dinner - gibanica, followed by sacher torte made the way my late mother-in-law used to make it. Bošic technically goes on for three days, so it's a good excuse for leaving the Christmas decorations up until Friday night. ;-)
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