C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 51

still searching for the perfect to-do interface

A friend introduced me to Bullet Journaling, which I looked at with shining admiring eyes and said “Yes, but digital,” and then I went to look for something that I could do that with digitally.

I found Workflowy, which is a 100% ideal work-based Thinks To Do format for me. I’m going to use it for work stuff, because it’s cross-platform, it collapses the to-do lists which is awesome for ease of navigating, you can bullet-point your way in for increasingly minute aspects of the job to your hear...

half a scarf

I’ve been nearing the halfway point on this scarf for a while now, but I have no ability at all to judge how much yarn I have left with regards to how many rows I can expect to knit with it. The last 14 rows went like this:

oh i probably have two rows worth of yarn left

okay so maybe it’s four

…six…

all right i’ve done ten there’s definitely…a dropped stitch there… *fails utterly to fix it, rips out 3 rows*

okay well so at least i know i have 3 rows +1 left, there’s definitely not more than 1...

So here’s the deal.

I haven’t been blogging much because life has been exceptionally chaotic lately, and not in a good way. (Dad and his bionic brain are doing fine, in case you leap to worrying about that.)

Among very many other things, we were informed about six weeks ago that the company my husband works for has lost its contract and the entire site was being made redundant, so Ted’s out of a job as of the end of next week.

We’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what we’re going to do. We still don’t...

happy birthday to my many birthday twins

…including but not limited to Esmerel, Silkblade, Novella, Chaz’s cousin, Morgan Freeman, Marilyn Monroe, and Superman!

Regular blogging might resume tomorrow, but don’t hold your breath. It’s been a hell of a month.

The post happy birthday to my many birthday twins appeared first on The Essential Kit.

cowls & scarfs

I cast off on Indy’s scarf-not-a-scarf-way-too-short-totally-a-cowl-that’s-what-i-meant-it-to-be last week and today nerved myself up to try stitching it together to see if it would make a cowl or if I in fact had to tear the whole thing out and do it again. So I stopped halfway up the seam to see if it would fit over Indy’s head, and he loved it that way:

So I’ve declared it done. O.O :)

I started a scarf for me. (This will actually be a scarf, I have enough yarn.) The point of pride with t...

Writing Wednesday: Price Points

I’ve released two books back to back so far this year, MAGIC & MANNERS in March, followed by ATLANTIS FALLEN in April.

As an experiment, I priced ATLANTIS FALLEN $2 cheaper than M&M, to see if the number of sales at the lower price point made up for or (hopefully) outstripped the profit I make off the higher purchase price of MAGIC & MANNERS.

It did. Just barely. It took about 28 of its first 30 days to catch up to MAGIC & MANNERS’ first month, and in the last couple days it inched into maki...

Man & Cyberman

“You don’t point very well, do you, Grandpa?” said one of my father’s grandsons, critically, when that child was about aged five.

It’s true, though. Grandpa didn’t point very well, because 15+ years ago my Dad developed what’s called an essential tremor, which is, as I understand it, basically a short in the electrical wiring of the brain that causes (usually) the sufferer’s dominant hand to shake uncontrollably, but which can also affect the other hand, the head, and the gait.

Dad, never one...

Kitsnaps: Rimfrost

More from the photo archives; a glorious winter day in 2003, where I lay in the snow and took pictures of rimfrosted trees, and of my puppy snoofling me.

The post Kitsnaps: Rimfrost appeared first on The Essential Kit.

aesthetic: 21st century gibson girl

I dream of a world in which I have a Look. A Vibe. A Fashion. A Thing of some goddamn kind, anyway. As I’m a fan of the whole multiverse concept, I believe that that world probably exists, but sadly, it’s not this world.

Once in a while, though, I have a day of Aesthetic. Today is 21st Century Gibson Girl, courtesy of twisting my hair up into a bun (which I haven’t done in forever) and my ankle-length, kickpleated-to-the-hip, poofed-shoulder, princess-seamed black velvet-collared coat.

Peopl...

all the presidents (men)

I was–well, really–trying to bore myself to sleep the other night by seeing how many of the US presidents I could remember. Fewer than 20, reliably, as it turned out. The whole thing went like this:

Obama, Bush Jr, Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagan, Carter…wait, uh. Spiro Agnew wasn’t ever actually president, who was it in there…well. nevermind, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, then, uh, Eisenhower probably, Truman, FDR for sure…H…Hoover? No, he was the FBI guy… WILSON DEFINITELY WE GOT WILSON YEAH uh…Teddy R...