Live-blogging Hurricane Irene!

OK, that title is a bit of a tease. The full force of the hurricane is supposed to pass through the Washington, D.C., area later tonight and last through tomorrow morning. Right now, as of 4:30 p.m., it's intermittently pouring and the lights are occasionally flickering.

I am way, way overdue for a post about the Bead Soup Blog Party. The beads from my partner, Jane Haag, were waiting for me when I got back from Austin last weekend. She sent me a lovely assortment of aquamarine and amazonite beads, among others, with a focal of green ice quartz and a handmade silver clasp.

I apologize for the quality of this photo, which was taken with my camera phone. It does not do justice to the beads.

Bead soup bounty from Jane Haag

Why am I using a camera phone? Um, funny story. My digital camera apparently decided it needed a longer vacation than I did. So while I was playing tourist at Vermillion Village in the heart of Cajun country (visiting my sister in Lafayette, La.), my camera stayed behind to catch some more zydeco. I didn't realize it had escaped until late in the evening, and we had to leave early the next morning for Austin.

My sister later retrieved it (thank you, kind and honest soul, who turned it into lost and found), but I guess she has yet to coax it into a box, because I haven't received it yet.

I know I will have fun playing with Jane's beads. I love this shade of green, and this combination is very much something I would wear.

It's my party and I can blog if I want to

Woo-hoo, I'm going to be participating in Lori Anderson's Bead Soup Blog Party. I did a bead swap with the affiliated Yahoo group a few months ago, but this is the official big event that's open to all comers (as long as you have a blog and sign up during the three-daywindow). I don't know how many beaders signed on, but my name was in the 200s.

This is the fourth swap event, but it has already spawned several magazine pieces and a book that's coming out in October. And it has won Lori legends of fans. I'll be in Austin by time the beads are due to be mailed out, so I'll have to get mine out before we hit the road this weekend.

My technical accomplishment of the day was to figure out how to successfully paste the html code into a Blogger gadget to get Lori's blog party button to come up over in the right-hand column. (I appear to have been less successful in creating a custom Favicon to get rid of the annoying Blogger logo--I think I downloaded one correctly, but it's not showing up. Maybe it will after I post this. Or maybe it only shows up when I post on other sites.)

I have been working on another kumihimo rope, this one in red, but I don't have any pics to show. So how about I paste in this pretty snapshot from the University of Texas, where I'll be dropping off my daughter in just over a week.

Texas Exes, Your Tuition Dollars at Work

(Not that I went to college anywhere warm, but they didn't have amenities like this on campuses in MY day.)