the whole point of having a blog

In my case, one of the reasons I keep a blog is to keep you, my readers, informed of what is going on. Sometimes that turns out to be interesting random stuff, like picking rosehips from the side of Kennedy lake and turning them into a sauce for the duck to be roasted. Sometimes it's about the things we make. But lately, as my life has taken many turns and tumbles, it is really to keep you posted on what I'm up to and how I'm doing.

A long time ago there was a tradition of once-a-year form letters that people wrote & tucked into their Christmas cards. Then came the big blanket emails that some of us sent out to everyone, not wanting to repeat themselves or to save themselves the labour of writing out the same story 50 times over. For me, at this moment in my life, I bypass all that rigamarole and keep a blog. The Adventures of YarnSalad.  Some people check it regularly and each time I make a new post, I tweet it and post a link on Facebook.

I was very surprised then to hear that someone who follows me on Twitter and is also a Facebook friend only realized yesterday that I was back in town. I've been back for a month. With all the ways I go to great lengths to keep in touch with people, communication can still fail and I have to accept there is nothing I can do about that.

drive-by friending

If you are a knitter and listen to knitting podcasts, you may have encountered the term "drive-by friending". This refers to people who hear or read someone's Ravelry name, and then add them to their friends list. The friendee recieves a message "yarnsalad has added you as a friend" and sometimes you have no idea why.

 I first heard this term while listening to Susan Dolph's podcast, Knitajourney. Louise J Hunt mentioned it in a recent episode and said that I was the first person to drive-by friend her. Really?

Last June, I went through the entire Ravelry group for the Electric Sheep podcast and friended every single person. At the time, it was something like 600 people. Total drive-by friending, and simply because (and this is what I told people when they asked) they listened to the Electric Sheep podcast and therefore must be a nice person. A few dozen people asked, a few hundred friended me back, no questions asked.

Ravelry is unlike Facebook in that there is no steady stream of status updates. If someone is in your friends, it simply means you have ready access to their notebook. This includes projects, queue, library, groups, and hooks/needles. You can see what they are knitting/crocheting, see what books or magazines they have, see what groups they are in. It's a great way to learn about the kinds of things that are out there that we may never have heard of before.

So drive-by friending on Ravelry isn't as invasive as Facebook is. When I joined Facebook the first time around, people I hadn't heard from since high school friended me, ostensibly, to stalk me. I found that creepy. I don't really spend much time on Facebook now, since I find I have all my social media needs met here, on Twitter, and through Ravelry.

This is all to say if you are reading this, are on Ravelry and haven't yet friended me, you are welcome to! My handle is yarnsalad pretty much everywhere I go.

Critical thinking

This topic has been stewing in my head for some time. You may recall me last week talking about how I got flamed on Facebook and how that was not cool. What got me the flaming was in challenging other people's criticisms.

When I went to university, I was trained to be a critical thinker. This means being able to see more than one side of the story, for when you write a literary essay, you must argue your point and be able to defend it. When considering how to do this, you must also consider other points that could be used against your arguement. Being good and articulate at arguing your point, as in being persuasive, is what makes a good literary essay.  I also studied for the LSAT a few times (Law School Assessment Test) and quite a large portion of that test is critical thinking.

This skill has served me well in my later education, because when I encountered things like tall claims or strong opinions, I could challenge them by questioning the underlying assumptions. If I challenge someone's opinion, it doesn't mean I think they are wrong, per se, just that I wonder what led them to the conclusion they have come to. Strong opinions, in my view, are often borne from a lack of information, or an unquestioning belief that the source of that information is correct and well-founded. For example, my sister's husband believes that such-and-such a truck is the best truck, and so-and-so makes the best farming equipment. Do they really? Is there empirical evidence to prove that?

This is where being a scientist can get me into trouble. See, people with strongly held views like this have accepted their belief as fact, something that I was trained out of in my education. When you challenge them, they get mad, they may even see your challenging as a personal attack.

This is the point where I try really hard not to look down my nose at someone with less education than me for not having the cognitive ability to understand that others might have a different opinion. I get really irritated when someone is uber-critical of a given topic for no real reason, it seems, other than wanting to spread some venom around. Maybe there is a culture of this on Facebook that I just don't understand and wasn't formerly exposed to. Somebody posted a photo of something and proceeded to tear apart the thing the photo was of. I thought the subject of the photo was rather interesting, and I could appreciate it from an artistic perspective, but my opinion was absolutely silenced when a dozen people seemed to jump on the critical bandwagon to bitch about the thing in the picture. I couldn't believe it. Why would you spend so much energy on negativity?

It's one thing to have strong opinions, but if you assume that your opinions are the right ones and everyone else is wrong, my bullshit filter flings itself into action and I lose respect for what you say. I know I'm not perfect, but I do try to reconcile an issue when an inconsistency in my thinking is pointed out to me. I have often felt compelled to do the same for others, since I feel I have benefited so much from it, but I just know my observations would be met with hostility and give up before even trying.

The week that kicked my butt

Hi friends,

Another brief update for you. The hard drive on my beloved HP laptop was failing, then I hammered the nail on the coffin when I tripped over the cord and it came crashing to the floor last week, shattering the tablet touch screen. Dan salvaged what he could, was able to recover most of my data, but because I use my computer so much we had to find me a new computer to use fast.

Yesterday we drove out to Courtenay to get Camilla, the little white Samsung netbook I am writing on now. I don' know why I have named her Camilla, I'm not in the habit of naming my electronic toys, but there you are. Some guy listed it on Craigslist for $120 and the thing is not even six months old. We were happy to take a trip out of town to get it! The keyboard will take some getting used to. The shift key and apostrophe are in different places, so I'm backspacing a lot to get this text out.

We popped over to Comox, since I'll be picking my sister & niece up from the airport there in April. Lovely little town, so many deer!

Somewhere during the day I started feeling sick, which is not at all surprising since Dan has been sick for much of the last week. I haven't been sick since June, was rather smug that I had sucessfully avoided being sick twice while my dear husband suffered. That's what I get for kissing him before the contagious period ends.

This means I had to call in sick today, and will be staying home tomorrow too. It's always a bit nerve-wracking calling in sick when you are new to a job. But I work in a hospital, and really, you don't want the person who cleans the instruments and handles the supplies and drugs to go into work sick, do you?

 I'm writing to you from my bed and I think I'll soon be going back to sleep. Cold medicine is taking hold, you see, and I need to chase sleep. But there you are, the reason I have been, as they say, dead on the air. (Though not if you follow me on Twitter, since I have the Twitter app for my phone). Also, if you are friends with me on Facebook, I got flamed last week and am having a Time Out from Facebook. I find I get much more respect and positive communication with Twitter. You know what they say: Facebook is for friends who are more like strangers and Twitter is for strangers who are more like friends.