Tag: knitting

Day 19: the ups and downs

In contrast to the utterly CRAZY day that was my yesterday, today was much better. We had labs to do, but the calculations were similar to yesterday’s scripts, so it was much easier. Either that, or I’m getting better at hooking up JavaScript to web pages.

I think talking a walk this morning when I got up, rather than trying to squash steps in during our lunch break gave me back some of my sanity. Okay…I’ll admit, the pizza lunch, courtesy of our instructor, didn’t hurt, either! Someone also mysteriously sprung for Dunkin’ Donuts munchkins…there should be some sort of quality award for whoever this person is.

I may be singing another tune tomorrow when we’re cramming in our Friday project. I’m trying to get a jump on it tonight by setting up my Bootstrap settings, css, and JavaScript flies ahead of time. I really hope our instructor wasn’t kidding about it being a travel site project, because I just downloaded a boatload of travel pictures, including our Washington, D.C. trip. I can’t take credit for the picture below. Our friend Larry doctored this one up!

Day 18: My life on the “outside”…

…or, WHAT LIFE? Note: whining ahead.

After yet another day of staying very late, trying to figure out code (and desperately trying to remember what I learned last week, that I’m evidentially supposed to be incorporating into the exercise du jour), I’ve come to the conclusion that I really can’t make plans after class during the week. I have a whole plethora of activities that I usually do after work that are just not going to be possible anymore—at least not until I finish training.

So far, this week, I’ve had to blow off my Tuesday night knitting group (sacrilege!) and another activity I do on Wednesday afternoons. We have some friends visiting tomorrow night, whom I’m probably going to wave “hello” to on my way into my home study to do more work (my classwork portfolio is a tad out of date). Oh, and we’re having SEVERAL people to the house this weekend—something we’d planned long before I knew I was going to be spending my summer snorkeling through CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and Bootstrap. Ask me if I’ve done ANYTHING to prepare for this…so far, my poor, long-suffering spouse is having the shoulder the burden for this.

Don’t even ask me about my exercise schedule…okay, you may ask. This was the extent of my exercising for today. At lunch, I enough time to walk outside and take a picture of this bird…that’s it.

Day 15: The Outside World

Last night, after class, I took a much-needed respite and went to a music festival concert. Our local orchestra does a concert series every Friday during the summer, featuring a different theme every week. Last night’s was a tribute to Elton John. It was a fantastic night.

Of course, that’s not what I’m here to talk about…earlier in the day, we all survived a 1-day—we’ll call it a sprint, for lack of a better word (Agile pun intended). We had eight hours to create a 4-page site featuring three financial calculators with about six different equations. I confess we got an assist from our instructor on one, but once we got that one done and figured out in JavaScript, it was fairly easy to google for the rest of the equations and plug them into our pages. It was fun, too, as we revisited our HTML and CSS coding with Bootstrap thrown in, and got to style the pages to our liking. We all ended up with pages that worked by the end of the day. It was A MIRACLE.

I raced to the concert last night, all excited to tell people about my wonderful achievement. Fun fact: unless people are coders, NO ONE really wants to hear about your adventures in coding. I was excitedly explaining my entire eventful day, my ups and downs and struggles to make the scripts work correctly. My librarian friend, who has taken coding classes as part of her library science degree, did understand what I was talking about, but everyone else looked like a deer in the headlights. It might have been more exciting to have the site loaded in a GitHub io repo to show them, but I hadn’t had time to do that.

We artists are SO misunderstood…the only thing less exciting for these poor people would have been had I tried to explain knitting short rows to them…

Day 14: Fried Brains…Fried Brains…

Today we upped the ante on functions by now displaying results in the browser. So, if you want an online calculator or need to find out what 38 degrees Celsius in Paris REALLY means (read: Fort Lauderdale, FL is cooler), then I have the apps for you!

As we’re going to be going full-tilt tomorrow with our Friday lab day, I’m taking a break from my nightly studying to get in a little knitting. I’m attempting to put sheep on a sweater. I’m so fried from class today that it took me 15 minutes to locate black yarn for their little stick legs. I need to divide up small balls of off-white yarn for their fluffy little bodies, but I’m trying not to think about that right now. This is intarsia, and I haven’t quite worked out how much is going to be needed for each ball.

Knitting and sheep pattern

I originally thought this pattern was an in-the-round fair isle yoke, so I wasn’t stressing…until I looked at the pattern AGAIN. I’ve essentially knit everything else in the round, so doing drop sleeves with intarsia on the front and back of the sweater is going to be–oh, let’s be positive and say it’s going to be an ADVENTURE.

My friend Sheila, who–if they gave them out–would have a black belt in knitting, suggested I just modify the pattern to be in the round. However, after days on end of staring at Visual Studio Code, trying to decipher why the #%^*ing code ISN’T WORKING this time and why there are angry red alerts in the F12 console–I just can’t face the prospect of counting stitches to figure out how many little sheep I can knit in the round, and how many more little balls of yarn I’d need…

I suspect lab day tomorrow is going to be simpler than that.