Let’s bring back this little feature, shall we?  Because while I’m actually NOT feeling particularly crabby today (I know… I’M SHOCKED TOO), there’s always plenty to hate on a Monday, including Monday itself.  And I didn’t post anything all weekend because I was too busy with the “ahh” and the “*contented sigh*” and that sort of thing.  Weekends rock.

Okay, on with the hate….

• caffeine headaches.  Yes, I know we all saw this coming with my addiction to Rockstar and all.  Shut up.  No one likes an “I told you so.”
• the iPhone OS 3.0 update.  Okay, the only thing I hate about this is that it’s not being released for another week or somesuch wrongness.  I WANT IT NOW.  SOUNDS AWESOME.
• our mailman.  Yes, it continues.  I NEVER know when the mail is going to be delivered anymore.  Is it SO hard to deliver stuff by 5pm EVERY day?  REALLY?  Do I have enough capitals in this post so far?
• headaches.  Really, how do you get rid of these?  Cuz ordinary pain killers seem to have no effect.  I’ve taken four ibuprofen and nothin’.  Suck.
• the sun.   I got sort of used to the sun being gone last week with all the storms and everything.  This summer weather is for the birds.  I want my rain back.
• that it’s five more days till the weekend.  Not right, man.  (Except that I now recall Kile is taking Friday off and his parents are coming to town so WOO HOO short week!)
• waiting.  It’s for the birds.  I hate waiting.
• my bruised big toe.  Have you ever had one of these?  I landed on it funny when I fell down the stairs last week and ever since it’s been in PAIN.  Turns out?  You use your big toe quite a bit when walking.  WHO KNEW?
• “Ned’s Declassified” on Nickelodeon.  This show is like nails on a chalkboard.  So is “The Naked Brothers Band”.  And come to think of it, I don’t care for “The Penquins of Madagascar” either.
• on the preschool side of things, I hate “Oswald”, “Miss Spider’s Sunny Patch Friends” and “DragonTales”, to name but a few.
• this stupid headache.  Seriously.  Get a clue, dude.

So that’s the list for this week.  Do you hate it?  You do don’t you?  You can tell me.  Anyhow, it would TOTALLY fit in with the whole overall theme.

Thanks for the kind emails a few of you sent me after yesterday’s post.  I wasn’t looking for any feedback, hence why I closed comments.  But kind words are always appreciated.

I want to put out there that nothing in particular happened to spur on my words of woe.  Most of all, it came from the dark place I found myself in late on Monday night when I dreaded the next morning and the next week.  I had SUCH a nice weekend here with my family.  We didn’t do anything particularly exciting or out of the ordinary.  But we had fun together and even the ordinary stuff was enjoyable.  I wasn’t at all ready for the weekend to be over.  I dreaded the daily monotony that I knew was waiting for me on Tuesday morning.

I think pretty much everyone was dreading and/or disliking yesterday.  Mondays are bad enough, because very few people are ever happy to see the weekend come to an end.  But for some reason, the Tuesday after a three day weekend is twice as awful.  Maybe even THREE TIMES.  It’s harder to wake up, harder to motivate, harder to let go the happy, contented vacation days.  Of course, all this said, I don’t think I would ever turn away a three day weekend simply because I dread the next work day.  But I still will wish for a four day weekend here and there too.

So yeah, we had a great weekend around here.  I do love hanging out with my family.  We don’t have to be doing anything too fantastic either, just doing what we do together and I’m happy enough just to be content.  Which isn’t to say that Liam didn’t challenge our patience and Evie didn’t keep me up at night.  But it’s easier to deal with it all when Kile is home too.  As much as I know he has to work during the week, I do miss his support.  And it makes the weekends all that much more sweeter.

Speaking of the little kids…

In the interest of being fair, though, I want to share a list of things about Liam that bring a smile to my face and warm my heart.  Because even though he’s nearly three and very GOOD at being nearly three, there are many things about him that are just wonderful and that I wouldn’t change for a million dollars.

• the way he says “eat da nummies?” when he wants to have something to eat.
• the way he says “Cahs” (Cars), “May-er” (Mater), and “Waw-wee” (Wall-E) when he wants to watch his favorite movies.
• his infectious giggle when he’s delighted.
• his sparkling blue eyes.
• his spontaneous hugs and kisses.
• the way he loves to sing the Alphabet Song before bed each night.
• that “Word World” is his favorite show.
• that even his temper tantrums are adorable (you should see him tell Harry off, saying “Go Way!” and stomping his foot… SO CUTE).

And like I said, I want to be fair so here is a list of things Evie does that sorta make me want to tear my hair out (just as soon as I nom on her chubby baby legs, that is).

• her whole “let’s get up in the middle of the night several times to eat even though I’ve been sleeping through” thing.  That’s gotta end.
• her insistence on crawling behind the recliners to get at my yarn and knitting projects.
• the way she will cram her mouth full of food and not chew properly before swallowing thereby giving me a heart attack when she starts to choke.
• the way she wriggles and trys to flip over when on the changing table.
• how she has to grab EVERYTHING.
• including glasses left on the table between our chairs which she then attempts to dump the contents of all over herself as well as any knitting I may be working on.

For the most part though?  I have some awesome kids.  Sure, they try my patience but isn’t that what kids are supposed to do?  Otherwise, why would we ever want them to leave the house when they grow up?  Think about it!

Happy Hump Day, ya’ll!  The weekend will be here before you know it!

Do you have an iPhone yet?  Why not?  You’ve seen me prattle on about mine ever since I got it back at the end of the summer/beginning of the fall.  Surely my gushing has led you to purchase your own, right?

Actually, the iPhone is one of those things that you almost have to experience for yourself to fully appreciate.  This could be why the Apple Stores have about a bazillion on display in their store for you to fiddle with to your heart’s content.  Best Buy has one or two as well, last time I checked.  There’s a reason for this, people.  Once you play with an iPhone, a spell is cast.  It’s only a matter of time until you have on of your very own in your pocket to love and cherish.

Of course, I’m probably just making all that up since I got mine because I WON IT (god, that was awesome) and had I needed to actually pay for one, I may have been far more reluctant to try it out.

Anyhow.

That’s all beside the point because what I want to talk about today is “iPhone Applications”.  Anyone who has an iPhone knows about these applications and all the wonderous and magical things they can do.  Shoot, even if you don’t have an iPhone chances are you’ve seen one of those commercials where they pimp a particular application like the racing game where you just tilt the whole phone to steer or you shake the phone to find out where to eat lunch or somesuch silliness. The point here is: iPhone Applications are Awesome.  And you want to know which applications I cannot function on a daily basis without, right?  Right.

Well, since you asked so nicely, I’ll tell you.

• Air Sharing – I got on in on this one when it was new and free and I think you have to pay for it now.  It lets you upload files to your iPhone that you might not normally be able to store on the iPhone (such as text files, pdfs, etc and so forth).  This is useful to me because a lot of my knitting patterns are pdf files and when I’m on the road, it’s nice to be able to cue up the pattern on my phone to see what the next step is rather than having to either a) memorize which I suck at or b) print it out which uses a lot of evil paper.
• Easy Relax - a sound generator that spits out soothing sounds for you to play while you’re trying to fall asleep.  I have several of these, including White Noise AND White Noise Storm.  I like the beach sounds on Easy Relax though so I tend to use that every night when falling asleep.  Though I just got the word on aSleep today from Sarah at The Anvil Tree and I rather like the beach noises on that one so I think it may be my new favorite.  Anyhow.  Gotta have a sound generator.  I’m addicted to these frigging things.
• Facebook - I swear, I use the Facebook application more than I use the actual Facebook webpage.  There are a few things I wish the app did (such as allow access to the games), but for the most part?  Handy as hell.  Love it.
• Evernote - a versatile notepad application that lets you not just enter in text notes but audio and picture notes too.  You might not believe how handy this is.  I use the text note to keep track of what diapers I currently own.  I know, but it really helps to have it written down so I don’t let myself get nuts with the diapers, yo.
• StitchMinder - This is what it says.  It is a stitch counter.  Handy for casting on or keeping track of how many rows I have done/need to do, etc.  There’s also a handy KnitGauge application but I’m far too lazy a knitter to actually knit a guage swatch. Shyeah.  Right.
• The Weather Channel - My favorite weather application (I have three because I’m thorough like that).  I love the hourly weather info, the 3 day forcast, the week long forcast and the radar.  Very nice.  I refer to this often, and many times in the middle of the night when we’re having a wind storm to see WHEN the heck they expect it to stop blowing so damn hard out there.  Then I turn on my beach sounds extra loud to drown it out.
• Movie Star – a decieving name for this application.  What it is is basically IMDB on your iPhone.  If you’re an OCD IMDB looker-upper like me, then this is handy to have so you can access movie information on the fly.  Trust me, this gets used more than you would think.
• Kindle – It’s basically an Amazon Kindle for your phone.  I haven’t really had the chance to use it yet as I have no Kindle books but I love that it means I won’t need to buy a whole Kindle for $300 or whatever it costs.  Cuz it’s free.  Bonus!
• WordPress - I love this application but it could be a LOT better.  There isn’t much support for anything terribly fancy and there are some features that I would sorely like to see integrated and it hasn’t been updated in like FOREVER.  But whatever. I use it a lot when I need to post from my phone.  I just wish they would allow landscape typing because that would be a lot nicer.
• Flickit - If you need a Flickr application (and who doesn’t, really?), this is the one you want.  I have tried many.  Believe me.  This not only lets you upload in full resolution (not as common as you might hope), but allows for easy name, descriptions, tags, visibility, set support… you name it.  FOR FREE.  FREE, people.  FREE.
• PayPal - Handy for checking balances on the go, which I often need to do.  You can also send money though I’d like it if they allowed you to pick if it was a goods or services or whatever transaction.
• I Can Has Cheezburger – Who doesn’t want access to lolcats on the go?  You also get all the other great lolz, like loldogs, lolpolitics, lolcelebrities, etc and so forth.  Good for a chuckle when you need it the most.

There is at least one application that I would love to see that I haven’t found yet.  And that is a dedicated Google Reader application.  I’m tired of using Safari to read my feeds and it’d be real nice to have an application devoted to my reader.  There are feed reader applications, both free and pay but none that are Google Reader specific (as far as I can tell… correct me if I’m wrong!).  So that’d be nice.

I may have already done one of these “gotta have these applications” posts, but… I don’t care.  I’m too lazy to look it up at the moment and frankly, my needs have changed in the last several months so I’m sure there are many things on this list that wouldn’t have been on a previous one.

So if you have an iPhone… what are your favorite apps?  What can’t you live without?

Remember when I used to usher in the new week by spewing forth vitrol regarding everything in the world that was pissing me off?  Yeah, I’m doing that again this week.  Cuz I realized yesterday that I have a lot of Hate.  And it’s gotta be shared with the internet.

• The Children’s Place. We’ve spent a lot of money at this store.  Shoot, most of Harry’s wardrobe is made up of clothes from Children’s Place.  Cute clothes at reasonable prices.  Their sales were discount GOLD, people.  We loved it so much we got a store charge card.  We don’t do that, like, ANYWHERE.  We don’t do credit cards.  So to get one for Children’s Place was a testament to how much we liked shopping there.  I was looking forward to getting to get some of their utterly adorable girly clothes that had taunted me for years.  This brings me to last week when for whatever stupid reason, they canceled our credit account.  Why?  We made our payments on time.  We hadn’t paid much debt down but there wasn’t that much on there to begin with so big deal, right?  We paid every month.  We pumped a lot of money in.  And they cancelled our account.  The only reason given?  They checked our credit score and didn’t like it.  I don’t like it either, don’t get me wrong.  But shouldn’t our account history with the company take precedence?  Should it matter WHAT our credit score is as long as we’re paying our bills?  WTF, yo??  Let it be known this card was handled by Shittybank er Citibank. It’s truly a shame because I enjoyed shopping there.  But apparently in this trying economy OUR MONEY isn’t good enough.  They want AAA+ credit score customers only.  Whatever.  I’ll get my kids clothes elsewhere.
• Old Navy.  SERIOUSLY.  What is WITH these stores??  Do they not want to keep customers?  Is the pressure of ending up like Circuit City too much for them and they freakin’ fall apart?   We stopped in there yesterday for shits and giggles and browsed their sales.  They had a lot of cute stuff that was awesomely discounted.  I saw some toddler pajamas that were marked down from $14.50 to $4.50.  SCORE!  I showed Kile a pair (that had a discount sticker on them) and offered to use my PayPal funds to buy them.  He didn’t seem enthused so I put them back.  I did some more shopping and Kile apparently went back to look at the pajamas again.  He picked a pair that had monkeys on them (because Liam IS a monkey) but (gasp) it didn’t have a sticker on it.  Shouldn’t matter.  EVERY other pair had a sticker.  Shoot, Kile even saw another package of monkey jammies that had a sticker on them.  He figured the sticker fell off this one and tossed it in the cart.  Meanwhile, I found some totally cute long sleeved shirts that were originally $15 and were marked down to $4.  I need long sleeved shirts like you wouldn’t believe so I grabed two.  On was a purple stripe and another was a turquoise.  Pretty! We went to check out and the jammies rung up as being $10.  There was much hubub as we tried to explain ourselves and the cashier called back to a manager who said, “Nope, monkey jammies aren’t clearanced.  They’re $10.”  Well forget it!  Cripes!  We paid for the shirts and left.  I get home and I realize that one shirt was $9 instead of $4.  Turns out?  It was marked on it’s sticker as $9 but in the hubub over the stupid pajamas I missed it.  Now I’m cheesed off and am tempted to just return both the shirts and give Old Navy the bird.  How hard is it to SEPARATE clearance items?  HOW?  Can someone tell me?  Is it harder than moving the clearance stuff to ONE table and the regular or just plain sale stuff to another?  Surely it must be because otherwise they would have done that, right? RIGHT?
• People who run over Girl Scounts.
• That I was unable to get the yarn I really really really wanted this morning cuz I’m ze broke.
• That it took me FIVE tries to cast on the waistband of the pair of shorties I started last night.  I swear to GOD, I lost the ability to count somewhere there for a minute and I was about ready to toss the whole thing out the window.
• When dear friends lose their pregnancies.  That just sucks all around.
• When dear friends are losing their parents.  That sucks all around too.
• Rush Limbaugh.

That is all.  For now.

I have to share with you what I “discovered” yesterday.  I’d like to say that this took a lot of forethought and planning and my super-genius mind crafted this all up with perfect intention.  But… not so much.  See, I often troll the knee-high section at Target looking for socks that I can turn in to baby leg warmers.  You’ve seen those Babylegs?  The little legwarmers that babies can wear up to their juicy thighs to keep their legs warm, knees protected, etc and so forth?  I love them but I don’t love the price tag.  I saw a tutorial online for how to sew them yourself and VOILA.  I had a couple made and was pleased with the results.  It’s a simple process that involves cutting off the heel and toes and taking the “foot” part to make a cuff that you sew onto the “leg”.

Well, yesterday while in the process of making up a few of these, I sorta fuxed up one of the cuffs.  Annoyed, I left the cuff off and pulled the bottom of the “leg” tight while running a zigzag stitch along it.  GENIUS.

And you should see how adorable they are when she’s NOT wearing Hello Kitty shippers (shoe+slipper=shipper).  But seriously… COME ON.  How cute are those??  With the lettuce-y edge?  And it took like TWO minutes to do.

I kill me.

Now, if anyone spots any bright rainbow striped knee-high socks, will you think of me?  I’m rather desperate for rainbow baby legwarmers.

***

In other news, I’ve been rather productive since yesterday’s post.  The legwarmers weren’t on the list but they should have been because they were definitely on my “to do” pile.  So what have I done so far?

• Craft Blog – well… I installed it.  Does that count?  I put a few plugins on there.  And that’s about it.  I need a design.  And, you know, POSTS.  Will keep you all tuned.
• Last minute customs for mom – I finished one of them!  The very cute and very twee newborn longies!  And I’m 2/3 done with the other, which are adorable small shorts.  These need to be recieved in the mail by her next Wednesday so I have to get these done ASAP so I have enough time to wash and mail them.  But check the longies:

• Finish setting up HC shop – Yeah… no.  Haven’t even touched it.  But I’ve thought about it.  Does that count?
• Post here every day – so far so good!  Hey, it may be a little on the late side but IT STILL COUNTS.
• Post to cloth diaper blog – GULP.
• Organize iPhone – YES!  I did this today while knitting.  I’m so multi-talented.  And now I can fit all my songs on there as well as podcasts, apps and ringtones.  Go me!
• Organize yarn stash – Nope.  Have not even looked at it.  This WILL get done.
• Organize knitting needles – Didn’t do this yet either.  But I looked through the needles my mom gave me last night.  Just need to track them all in Ravelry.  And then I can plan what needles I want to buy (am thinking I want 4-5 more pairs of Addi Turbos).
• Laundry – I’ve done some (diaper laundry), but the rest is still begging for my attentions.
• Dye yarn – Nope.  Still sort of waiting until I get a scale to weigh yarn on so I know how much I’m dealing with.  Believe me, that’s kinda important.
• Find scale – I saw a bunch on eBay but alas, my PayPal tree has run out of leaves.  I need to get cranking on these customs so I can get paid!

Whew.  Okay, it may not seem like I’ve got a lot accomplished.  All I’ve really done today is knit knit knit.  But if I can finish these shorts tonight then I will be able to get a LOT more done off this list.  Go me!