Woolen Rabbit Opal in "Godiva"

Let’s see…the Knitcircus sweater reached Jaala at Knitcircus right before she left for TNNA (lucky lady!).  I’m just about to start my run of editing for the Knitcircus Fall issue (and folks, this one is shaping up to be FABULOUS).  I’ve been editing some lovely pattern by other indie designers as well.

Here’s a yarn pic from the California Revival Collection….it’s so gorgeous, so luscious…. It’s from Kim at the Woolen Rabbit, her Opal base in Godiva.

In the garden….our Santa Rosa plum tree, little as it is, has been producing some luscious plums over the past week or so.  We don’t harvest enough to need to do anything with them, like jam or anything (though I fully intend to in the future, when the crop gets bigger).

The crows have been dining on our Desert King figs before we can pick them.  I’m sure I’ve asked before, but does anyone have any good fig recipes?  I like dried figs, but am clueless as to what to do with fresh.  (I suppose I could dry them somehow.)

Our peach tree is bearing a tiny bit of fruit — but what’s there is delicious.  I planted some raspberries a month or two ago, and they’re already bearing a tiny bit of fruit as well.  The one raspberry I ate was very, very good.

We’ve been having baby lettuce for salads for the past couple weeks (month?).  Lettuce, for us, is a pest-free crop (as opposed to the broccoli/ kale/ etc family, which attracts aphids like no tomorrow).  I’ve planted some varieties that are supposed to be slow to bolt — I’d love to have lettuce all summer.

I ate some cherry tomatoes yesterday — they didn’t even make it into the house, though I shared one with our neighbor Doug.

Oh — almost forgot!  I now own another loom.  It’s a used Wolf Pup that I purchased from the arts director at the Idyllwild Arts Academy. It needs some TLC, but I’m hoping to start nurturing it this summer.  Dave’s okay with it — it takes up about 1/6th or less the space the Beast would’ve (the Beast being the humongous loom I adopted last year, and for which I subsequently found a new home).

I finally agreed to getting smartphones. Dave & I both got Samsung Focuses (Foci?). Anyhow, one of the main reasons I thought a smartphone would be useful was to have my Outlook calendar handy.

Little did I know how much of a pain this would be. You’d think, Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft Windows 7 phone. Should be easy, right?

Nope. Several hours later, here’s the final (and imperfect) answer, pieced together by finally finding a couple helpful sites (and this).  Note:  I could never make Outlook Connector work, so that option, well, wasn’t an option.  The following steps apply to getting the calendar from Outlook to Windows Live;  I’ve not included setting up the phone for Windows Live.

Go to Outlook.  Export calendar in .ics format — not by exporting, which seems logical, but by being in Calendar view and doing File >Save As.  Make sure you look at options such as date range, detail level, etc.  Default seems to be “Today” and limited details i.e. just showing if you’re busy;  not very useful IMHO.

Sign in to Windows Live and go to your calendar page (under the Hotmail tab).

Subscribe (not import, which seems logical) to your calendar.  If you’re updating your current calendar, make sure you choose to import into a current calendar.

Make sure that this calendar is the one checked as your primary calendar on the Hotmail Calendar page — this is the one that will sync with your phone.

So, obviously, there’s no way (without Microsoft Exchange) to directly sync Outlook with the phone.  If you make changes in Outlook, you have to go through the above steps to get the changes to show on your phone.