What’s sadder than this small Thanksgiving display at Michaels, with everything 50% off way before Thanksgiving has even arrived?

Maybe only the other side of this display.

Browner, messier, and even more half off.

I first noticed Michaels’ sad Thanksgiving display before Halloween, when it was also discounted. (It may have been 40% off then, but I can’t remember.) Clearly Thanksgiving is less fun for retailers than the other major holidays, and that’s one more reason to like this holiday. Brown and orange and yellow just haven’t been cool in a mainstream way for a few decades, so if you want a Thanksgiving-themed sweatshirt or an elaborate fall centerpiece, you’re going to have to actually get creative.

I’ll admit that I’m not working on any Thanksgiving projects this year—I’m just looking forward to a few days with my extended family—but this has me wondering how many of you are out there making any Thanksgiving crafts this year. Can we have a show of hand turkeys?

Exciting things are being knitted this week, but not things I can share quite yet. So instead I give you the the saddest toilet I’ve ever seen.

Such an indignity, to be thrown out next to the box that your replacement came in! Flushie is appalled.

Since moving to Chicago I’ve noticed that some fascinating scenes happen in the alleys. You never know what lurks behind the tidy houses in my picturesque neighborhood…

Almost every day, I hear from someone who is going through a crisis: their hard drive crashed, and they’ve lost all of their PDF knitting patterns!

Sometimes these knitters are hesitant to request new download links for patterns that they had bought from my shop, but I’m happy to help out—it takes almost no time and effort on my part to look up the purchases and reactivate the links. But I’m sure missing Mochimochi Land patterns are the least of their troubles, what with the precious photos, emails, and other data that we all trust our computers with. Since we’ve heard this sad story again and again over the past few years, Error and I decided to do a little public service announcement today:

Back up your computer right now! And do it regularly.

It may seem like a pain, but it’s not like the pain of losing everything. I know from experience: a few years back, my hard drive crashed and I lost entire patterns that I was in the process of designing, along with lots of photos and music. I had backed up my computer, but not within the previous six months or so. The one bright spot was a nice customer service person at iTunes who didn’t ask questions when I requested the music I’d bought from them. It’s that experience that makes me eager to help out my own customers in crisis.

As I’m typing up this blog post, right this minute, I’m backing up my computer to an external hard drive. I suggest you do it too!

This has been a public service announcement from Mochimochi Land.

I just returned from spending Christmas with the fam in Oklahoma. It was a great trip, made memorable by the heaps of snow falling on Christmas Eve and our getting stuck in it while foolishly driving on Christmas Day—much shoveling and pushing was had by all.

Despite the holiday excitement and coziness that all the snow produced, I just realized that the only photo I took during my trip was of the Great Wall of Ranch Dressing at the local Wal-Mart.

Either way, it was bound to be a white Christmas.