because they hadn't updated their feeds in a long time and i was missing all of these entries for DAYS!!! it was really annoying. so i downloaded sage (thanks hammy!!) which is a firefox lightweight add-on for RSS feeds and figured, to hell with bloglines and all these online RSS services that can't be trusted, i'll do it on my own. and sage is pretty cool but having to manually synch up all of my reading between home and work is a bit of a pain as is checking RSS feeds from a computer that i don't own.. so sage is nice but, alas, not bloglines. then i received word from bloglines:

We are currently moving our machines to a new network facility that will enable us to update feeds as soon as the publisher tells us there is something new. For feeds that don't tell us when to check for new articles, we'll update every hour or less.

this is good news as now i no longer have to write about how bloglines sucks. i can save that rant for the future should they ever suck again (and i wouldn't put it past them.)

so a week ago, i attended the spiders holiday party! and no doubt if you read my blog then you probably read other spidey blogs so you saw pictures there that you did not see here. that's due to my poor planning at the end of the evening. when i was gathering my goods together i left my camera on amanda's coffee table, and there it sat until someone noticed it later and decided to have some fun. well, at least if i'm not there to continue the party, my camera was! before it was having a good time without me i captured a few moments...

ready to pounce on some gifts

kaitlyn says, who do these belong to?

then it all went downhill...

i say, who do these belong to?

hhmmm, not really sure what's going on here...

anyway, there's more madness in the gallery.

the conclusion of secret pal 6 is upon us! and though from the looks of the secret pal blog things were dicey this year, that wasn't so at chez gleek. i got into SP6 late but managed to get a large package off to my secret pal (i won't reveal her till she gets her last package which should be sometime late this week) and then received a few things from the woman who got me. she sent me some lovely bath products which i've already used, some lovely stationary, and fall themed pot holder perfect for hot pots. yesterday, i received my final package from her and it was the motherload!

a very cute hello kitty traveling cosmetics case which could be used for knitting (hehe, almost anything can be used for knitting i've found), a hello kitty padded hangar perfect for a winter dress, two skeins of recycled sari silk in kathmandu: original (which i totally wanted!! i think that i might make a mitered square bag with it), three skeins of lion brand landscapes in coral reef (which reminds me of manos so i'll probably make a my so-called scarf with it), hello kitty magnets, a knitting journal, and picture cards. wow, i'm truly a happy camper. thanks starr!!! i hope that you'll comment here and leave your blog address so that we can all visit you!

this week will be busy for me. like all other knitbloggers, i've taken on some last minute holiday knitting but all the people that i am gifting them to read this blog so that means no pictures! sorry! i'm still working on the jaywalkers but they've taken a backseat to holiday knitting for the time being. i'm also in training all this week for work (learning about XML) so i won't be around much for updates anyway.

p.s. i finally saw harry potter today! talk about cutting out EVERYTHING that wasn't absolutely necessary to the central plot! it jumped around a lot and lost a lot of the momentum of the story by doing so but i still enjoyed it. voldemort was scary looking and like i pictured him and so were the dragons and much of the other special effects. it's just too bad that goblet is SO BIG that you have to lose so much in order to get it on the screen. prisoner of azakaban is a most shorter story and therefore didn't lose a lot of its charm when it made it to the film. in the end, i think that the rest of the books will be better adapted since they're also shorter and the extraneous plotlines have already been whittled out by this movie.

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