I don’t have any progress pictures for you, as it’s the middle of the night, and much, much too dark for photo taking. Rest assured that good progress is being made on the shawl for Karen. I had a bit of a glitch yesterday, forgot to put two beads on it. I ended up tinking (un-knit, one stitch at a time) two rows to fix it, so it wasn’t a catastrophe.

I was recently reminded of a beading tutorial on Knitty. If you want to add beads to your knitting, be sure to read this tutorial. Since I stumbled on the crochet hook method last summer, I’ve been, er, hooked on adding beads. No pre-stringing! Much simpler. I highly recommend it.

We use a service to filter out spam for us, a company called Katharion. I like them much, much better than the last outfit we used. They catch more spam, more viruses and worms, more everything. Plus, they send an email message every day at about midnight telling me what messages they blocked. It’s easy to scan down the list and catch the occasional good message that they blocked accidentally, then add that address to my white list. All cool. This week I noticed a marked increase in the amount of incoming spam. Yup. Here’s confirmation. I got the weekly update just a bit ago, that shows week’s totals. The week before last they caught 182 spam messages for me, messages that never made it to my inbox; this is pretty average for me for the last year. The stats below are for the last week. Egads! Whoever found me, I’m super glad that all this crud didn’t wind up in my inbox. Thank you, Katharion!

Spam stats for the week:
Total Email Messages Scanned: 1554
Junk Messages Detected: 1328 (85.46% of total)

Wait! I do have one picture for you, a picture I took of Ricki last weekend. Here she is in all her cuteness. She was laying on the floor in my office after having had a good scratch session with her scratching post.