The WYSIWYG* Blog

Happy 60th Birthday little country of mine. In spite of everything, we wouldn’t choose to live any place else but here. (More tomorrow after tonight’s festivities and tomorrow’s barbecue…if I can get up off the couch.)

Live Hatikva | Hatikva Guinness World Record at 22:50 Israel time Wednesday night.

WP.com’s new theme for photoblogs is live!

Shutter Clutter is the result.

My grandparents, Russian immigrants who escaped the pogroms at the beginning of the last century, made their way to America, met, married and raised a family there, were already elderly by the time I arrived and never really talked about what life was like in Russia. First of all because they didn’t want to talk about their previous life in Russia (they were both teenagers when they arrived in the US) and second I was too young to know enough to ask them.

Fast forward to high school and my closest friend. Her parents were both Holocaust survivors and I remember sitting on their living room couch, listening to my friend’s father recall how he and many others with him had jumped from a transit train bringing them to Sobibor and despite having been shot and left for dead, he survived. Although my friend’s father passed away a couple of years ago (z”l), his and his wife’s testimonies can still be heard online at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Scroll down the page to “Mastbaum”. In spite of the poor sound quality (it was recorded in 1983), their interviews are interesting not only because of their holocaust experiences, but also their recalling of what life was like in Poland before WWII. My 81 year-old Polish born mother-in-law still can’t talk about her experiences.

At 10:00 a.m. this morning, as a siren wails, we as a country will stand for a minute’s silence remembering those that died in the Holocaust. May their memories be blessed.

(Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial on flickr.)

Are You A Yarn Collector?

Wow. As of today, there are 1677 comments on that Knitting Daily post. That post and the wonderful comments left on it were a huge reaffirmation that as long as there are knitters, there will be yarn collectors.

My first website “Yarnaholic Confessions” was born out of my addiction to collecting yarn. In the 9 years that my site has been online, I’ve received a lot of yarn collecting stories, some of which were published on the Knit Natterings page or entered in my site’s guestbook, or received privately by email (and some of those were SCARY). Personally, after nearly 28 years knitting and collecting, I can now say I’m a rehabilitated yarnaholic, although the FO to unknit yarn ratio is still screwed. (The hard evidence is on my blog’s Loose Ends page.)

The number of hits on my blog from people searching the WordPress.com categories/tags surfer for “PhotoImpact” and “PhotoImpact Goodies” has rocketed in the past few days. Surprisingly my blog seems to be the only PI-centric blog around on wp.com.

So, if you’re coming through as a result of those search terms, leave a comment on this post and let me know what you’re actually looking for and maybe I can point you in the right direction.