We're one of the Top 100 Teacher Sites!

In other great news, Mytutorlist.com made it into the Top 100 Teacher Sites! Woo hoo!

Our page rank is 3!

Since the new database launched for Mytutorlist.com, our page rank has gone up! We now have a page rank of 3! This is up from our original page rank of 2. I'm not sure what has changed, but I guess more people are finding the site useful. (I know for a fact that many of the tutors using the site have been getting a lot of emails from interested students.) This is fantastic news.

Page rank is a measurement devised by Google that measures the number and quality of links pointing to a website. This is meant to measure a site's popularity. The maximum page rank is 10 and the minimum is 0.

First Squab of the Season

Look who I spotted sitting on the wrong side of the glass by the Skytrain. He must have flown over somehow and he can't figure out how to get back! Instead, he just sits there looking small and lonely, watching all the other pigeons (and probably mum and dad) on the other side.

Fantastic Maternity T-Shirts

I think these maternity t-shirts from Discobelly are quite beautiful

Monkey Hat

Hee hee hee! Check out the cute monkey hat by Cite Fuzz.

Flowers by night

This is my view of the flowers at night. I find it quite soothing.

Things that inspire me today

I feel a lot better today after taking a much needed break after work. I thought I'd share some pretty pictures I took that make me feel happy.

The flowers are sitting on my desk in my room and they look sooo lovely. Each day they open a little more and their colours become more vivid. The water is turning pink too. I like how the colour sits near the surface of the water.

Long, grueling day

It was a very long day for me. The shoot that I was on today went well, but it required a lot of dedicated attention and I had to be on-the-ball to give feedback, stay up to pace, and find any mistakes. Thus, at the end of the day, I was very, very tired. Unfortunately, I still had a lot of work to do before I could leave.

I had to send out end-of-day emails, set up batch scripts to run on the new data, and import data into the proper databases. If programs cooperate, this can be a time-consuming but straightforward task. However, I encountered numerous problems and by 7 pm (I started work at 8 am), my programs were still giving me error messages or frozen in processes thinking. I had no idea how long it would take before all the errors could be fixed and I wasn't even sure if I was doing the right thing. I gave up. I planned instead to come in early tomorrow with a fresh mind to find help and finish the remainder of the tasks.

But as I packed my things to go, others looked at me like I was abandoning them or being negligent in my duties. I felt guilty and irresponsible as I walked out the door and it made me feel angry. I had worked diligently and accomplished a great deal in my 11 hour work day. However, because my programs wouldn't run properly and because there were too many tasks allotted to this particular job task for the end of the day, I was unable to finish everything that I was assigned to do even though I had worked an extra 3 hours of un-paid overtime.

Rant over, I hope tomorrow will be a better day. I'm going to wrack my brain over how I can make this job task easier to manage and hopefully make a few suggestions for the future. Until then, I really need some sleep. I'm pooped.

Grey Scarves and Flowers

It's Saturday, but I had to work today. In preparation for the lack of a proper Friday night off yesterday, I tried to double-time in order to squeeze all my activities in. I watched a movie while crocheting another experimental scarf. This time, I mixed white Baby Boucle yarn with grey Astra yarn. The result was good.

I purposely wove a loose fabric using a combination of double crochet and chain stitches. I also chose a big size 10 crochet hook.

Grey and white is easy to match with other clothes so I proudly sported my long holey new scarf to work. After work, my sweetheart surprised me with a big bouquet of flowers. We didn't get to celebrate V-day on the 14th so we've moved it to the 24th. He has some sort of "Valentine's Day Extravaganza" planned for tomorrow that would be easier without having to carry flowers around so he gave them to me today. Awwww!

My New Scarf

I've been obsessing over art yarn for a while now and came to the conclusion that, if I can't buy it, I'll make my own (I think this is typical of crafters). So I found two balls of yarn that were different in both colour, thickness, and texture, and crochet them together. The end result is the purple vision you see in the photograph. I tried to give the final fabric a more even look by using a single crochet and chain combination of stitches that weaves into the resulting gaps in the previous row. I didn't want loose yarn tassels at the end so I opted for a collection of long and short chain stitch loops at the end. I am quite delighted with the final result, although I must admit that I find it difficult to match this scarf with anything because of the choice of colours... (I previously had a plain white fleece scarf). I think I will experiment with some baby boucle and astra yarn next.

Felted Green Hat

What an adorable felted green hat from Krider Knits.

Meeting famous people

I had the pleasure of meeting and chatting with Peter Mensah yesterday. Memorable acting roles for Peter include being the messenger in 300 (he says, "This is madness!" and Gerard Butler kicks him into the pit) and being General Sam Grellar in The Incredible Hulk. I was surprised to discover that he is a super nice guy, easy to talk to and very amiable. He's the first famous person that I've met that I actually recognize, so I was very delighted and honoured to be able to talk with him as though he was just another person instead of a famous person. I have met other famous people before, mainly athletes, but because I'm not much of a sports fan, I had no idea how famous they were or who they were at all. I suppose, in some ways, it's better not to know. Then you can just walk up, say hello, and be oblivious to just how lucky you are to be hanging out with them. It's only later, when someone says, "Oh, wow!" that you realize what slipped by right under your nose.

Emily Martin on a podcast

I'm a big fan of Emily Martin of the Black Apple. I love reading her blog posts daily and checking up on what's new in her shop. For the most part, I'm fascinated by the idea of working as an artisan full time and being able to make a living from doing what you love. It's like a fairy tale come true. Today she has a link to a podcast where she talks about how her blog works to keep her customers in touch with her and how it inadvertently drives more customers to buy her products. She describes it as being a very unusual outcome to her desire to keep in touch with her friends, family and customer base. Worth a listen, if you're interested in how blogs can help drive a small business.

AWESOME

Check out this great commercial with Michael Bay for Verizon. It's awesome.

3D Animated Marvel Heroes

I'm actually quite happy with the 3d animated movie clips found on the Marvel Kids website. They feature Spiderman, The Hulk, and Iron Man. I'd like to see this developed into a regular TV series.

Bumblebird Paintings

I like the warmth of the colours and blurry lines in the paintings by Bumblebird.

Human Cars

Ford has a really neat advertising campaign going on right now about how a car isn't a car until it's powered by you. There are some cool photos and videos on their site worth checking out.

Rainbow Geometric Origami

I used to make origami balls like this. I strung them up with beads and bells and gave them to people or hung them around in my room. One day, I gave up on them and tossed them all away. Now I discover that there are folks selling these origami balls for 195 dollars - with no beads and bells! Wow! What a fortune I have thrown away in handmade goods. Do you ever wonder how much value you've tossed away?

I'm currently working on a scarf made from my own version of art yarn (I just mixed 2 textures of yarn together). With every stitch I wonder about where my very first crochet scarf has gone. I decided I didn't like a homemade scarf one day and put it into a bag of give-away goods. Now I miss that scarf. It was pale periwinkle blue and made from cotton yarn. It was soft and fuzzy... :P

The last of the snow

It was a sunny weekend at long last. The snow began to disappear and this little pile was all that was left of an entirely snow-covered field last week. While I had fun trompin' through the white stuff, I'm rather glad to be rid of it all. There's something about a sunny day that just makes one feel really good.

Big-nosed Hedgehog

I can't say I love him, but this is an interesting looking rendition of a big-nosed hedgehog.

Tea Girl Bookmark

This is a nice laminated Tea Girl bookmark from Pequenio.

Delicious Glass

This hand-blown raspberry sorbet creamer from Rivulette Craft is delightful.

Sara and Schipperke

I really like the new print by Black Lily Pie. It's called Sara and Schipperke. The thing I'm most impressed by aside from the final result is that she painted the original in acrylic. It's painted in real life! I know it seems like a trivial thing to some, but after seeing scores of similar images painted in Photoshop, it's a wonderful thing to come across a drawing that is inked and painted in real life.

Chill Saturday

I took it kind of easy today and just worked on some new banners for Mytutorlist.com I figured some of the older images could use a tune-up. You can see that one of them is for this blog! I've also grown attached to the new feature for Google ads where you can have rounded corners so I made some of my banners have rounded corners too. You can't tell right now, but once they are placed on a dark grey background you will only see the lighter rounded edge. I tried to make the large banner reminiscent of a black board with white chalk writing.

I love art yarn

I really love art yarn. I love the homespun irregularities of the yarn and how bits and pieces of stuff from fabric to buttons to flowers are woven in.


These art yarns are from Snowberry and Lime.

Coping

This is a beautiful photograph by Robert Socha called "Coping".

Happy Un-Valentine's Day to you!

I hope that you all had a good day yesterday whether you spent it with a sweetheart, with family, with friends, or by yourself. V-day is so overcommercialized these days and I know it can be a hard day for a lot of people. I hope that, irregardless of whether you celebrated it or not, that you had a really good day. Cheers!

Multi-media Fabric Sculptures

These are some neat felt, yarn, and fabric sculptures from Cocoon Designs.

The best tea party ever

I really like the presentation of felt cookies in nanaCompany's store. I know I would have loved something like this when I was little. Although I still think real cookies are the best, the felt cookies would have been good for the dollies. Mostly, I just like the pretty-ness of this little package.

I saw the best tea party ever on the Barefoot Contessa the other day. All pink with ribbons blowing in the wind and a 3 layered home-baked cake with creamy pink frosting. The tea party attendees got to decorate the cake with an abundance of different silver, pink, white, and pale blue candies. There was also a fresh-made pizza and some other tasty foods. It was amazing. I really wish there were tea parties like that when I was little.

Shmulik Paper Doll

These are some pretty amazing looking do-it-yourself paper dolls from postdesigner. Most of the stuff in this store is quite strange and twisted, but the style is very distinctive.