A letter that isn't likely to be read, because I can't get to sleep

Dear whoever it was in front of me who really, truly wanted to go to Olive Garden,

I know how it is. Man, those breadsticks are fucking tasty. However, sometimes we all forget that the turn is coming up, and it's just unfortunate when you're starved for chewy Italian goodness, but you just have to keep going, make a couple of Michigan lefts, and try again with your head out of the clouds this time. It is not acceptable to decide you can take the turn if you just, you know, slam on your brakes and hope that the person behind you is paying attention.

I wasn't even the person behind you. I was the person three cars behind you, and luckily for me, I was listening when my driving instructor, my mother, my father, and Click and Clack told me about maintaining reasonable distances from the driver in front of me.

However, the recent drivers-ed graduates behind me hadn't had this drilled into their head yet.

Now, everyone was okay, and hell, there wasn't even any noticeable damage to my rear bumper, and I just had a ridiculous series of moments where I was thinking "Sweet I'm not going to hit the guy in front of me," glancing in my rear view mirror, and thinking "Wait maybe I am going to still." But it could have been worse, all because of your impatience for having a swarthy man point a peppergrinder in your face.

In summation, please try to take others in consideration when you're on the warpath for some parmesan goodness, douchebag.

-Sasha

Dear car-full of sixteen year olds,

Driving is, as we have just covered, a bit on the stressful side. You're just learning and it looked like you were still new to not having an adult in the car with you.

In the future, please keep in mind; at least one hand on the wheel at all times. I would've hated to tell the policeman that I saw you using both hands to light your cigarette when you should've been paying attention to what was going on ahead of you, or, you know, steering your car. Speaking of which, seriously. Knock that shit out already. I don't mean to sound like a PSA, but smoking is gross and makes you gross by association.

On the other hand, I'm glad you're okay, that your car was okay, that we were all okay, and I do appreciate your complimenting my pants. It was somewhat flattering to know that, even in a full-on panic attack, you could take time to check out my ass.

-Sasha

Score!

I drove to Belleville last night to pick up my new dining room table. It's freaking adorable.

There's only two issues with it that I can see off hand: a chunk of the veneer has torn off the side of the leaf. I may just strip that off and see if I can find some kind of replacement veneer for it.

Also, the swivel joints are CAKED with really heavy motor grease, so it smells faintly like garage when you're sitting in them. On the other hand, they definitely don't catch or squeak.

It was pretty hilarious trying to fit the whole shebang in my car; the table was deposted and in the back seat, there was a chair lying across it, two chairs in the trunk, and one chair riding shotgun with me. The seller helped me guide things in, but getting it out again to put into storage was an exercise in swearing and grunts.

Now all I need is to find an apartment to put it in.

I found it

If you have played Animal Crossing, you will understand why I want this table as hard as I do.

Day 1 of the Musikmesse

I'm eating Paprika Pringles.

They're FUCKING DELICIOUS.

The view

Frankfurt is a fancy-lookin' town. For example, this is what it looks like out of my window on the 44th floor.

(Sorry about the monster-file.)

I made a puppet.

He's the best puppet I've ever made so far.

There's not really a good shot amoung them, and these are all several months old. I've since begun the Mark Wood Mark Two, this time with more felting, so that his face won't be so damn floppy.

In my defense, I swear I was neither drunk nor stoned when I decided to make a puppet of Electric Violinist Mark Wood, nor am I creepily enamored with him. Those of you who know me well know that I don't handle boredom well. Perhaps you just hadn't realized how poorly I handle it.

My apartment smells

Wool is one of those wonderful luxury fibers. I love to knit with it; it feels wonderful if you spend the cash to get the good stuff, it's got the right amount of stretch and give, and it looks damn fine when everything is said and done.

The one downside is blocking it. Blocking it means you dip the whole thing in warm water, press the excess water out, and then spread it out to dry. It sets the stitches, makes laces and cables stand out better, and gives everything an extra touch of zing.

The downside is that in the meantime, it smells. Wet wool is not a sexy smell at all.

Also, I'm going to Germany in a week. Squee!

It's all about Search

I have a dirty-love for the BBC radio, because it's really the Fox News of NPR.

They keep referring to Yahoo as "The Mighty Yahoo."

Heh.

Huh?

I had a dream last night, about Rocky Horror Picture Show. I'm not sure why, or even how, because I've never actually seen Rocky Horror.

Mostly it was just Tim Curry dancing around in dominatrix gear.

It was a very confusing way to wake up.

This is why I usually ignore those ads

This bank of ads accompanied a conversation I was having with my mom about my birthday present. Do I now need to mark google ads as being not safe for work?

Not for the easily engrossed

I'm starting to think more memes should involve reading wikipedia articles.
I do feel a bit bad about this, though. I got five books for Christmas, and I've still only read half of one of them.

Instructions:

1. The first article title on the Wikipedia Random Articles page is the name of your band.
2. The last four words of the very last quotation on the Random Quotations page is the title of your album.
3. The third picture in Flickr's Interesting Photos From The Last 7 Days will be your album cover.
4. Use the graphics program of choice to throw them together, and post the result.

Good news! That Varied Tit is just looking for lunch, not being all dead.

Band Name | Album Title | Photo Credit

Happy Birthday so far

Being as I'm just crawling into bed now, I'm positive I will be a useless husk come Monday morning. But boy, this has been one of those cockle-warming birthdays, so far.

Highlights from today's BBC World Broadcast

"Militant Fruitarian"

Stupendousness

I managed to insult my neighbor's religion inadvertantly after 11 at night. This may be a new record for my ability to gnaw on my toes.

They had their music playing loudly enough to wake me from a light doze. While irritating, this is the first time this has happened since I moved in, and compared to every neighbor I've ever had since I started college, this is a new record. So I figure that I'd be polite and knock on the door, rather then try the floor-stomping routine.

I put on a shirt and pants, and go downstairs. Knock knock.

No response. I can hear talking inside.

Hmph. This isn't how I'd planned this to go. Once again, knock knock.

The stereo shuts off completely. I hear something about religion, door, and this time of night. I make a poor judgement at this point, but one that made a certain degree of sense at the time; when I'd gotten home from teaching, I could see through the front window that there were two girls at my door. I figured one of them was my roommate's new convenient distraction, and frowned a bit, since I knew he was out of the apartment eating dinner somewhere else. By the time I'd gotten my bass out of the car, and checked the mailbox, they were on their way down the stairs, and it turned out it was two high schoolers shoving religious tracts into people's doors.

No one appears to be coming to the door, but the stereo is off. I figure they've gotten the hint, and start walking back up the stair. As I reach the landing, the door opens, and there's my neighbor. She looks irritable.

"Oh," I say. "I'm sorry to be a bother, but I have to work in the morning, so I was just hoping you wouldn't mind turning your stereo down."

She nods, and apologizes. I smile and say, "Not to worry, I'm not some late-night Jehovah's Witness or something."

From the look on her face after that comes out of her mouth, I know that was the wrong thing to say. "I am a Jehovah's Witness, actually."

I'm not sure how to react. I'm half-asleep, which makes me muddy as is. Something tells me I should apologize, but I'm not feeling terribly apologetic, and I don't like lying to people when I know I'm not coherent enough to carry it off ever at all. So instead I get all lame and just say, "Hmm, okay."

"Right," she says.

"I, um."

We look at each other awkwardly for a moment. She goes back into her apartment. I walk up the stairs.

Now I can't get back to sleep.

Goddamnit.

You know you've hit rock bottom when...

One Missed Call, a movie only noteworthy for it's creepy mouth-eye poster, currently has a rating on Rotten Tomatoes of 00%.

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Movie, currently has a rating on Rotten Tomatoes
of 06%.

You know you've failed in life when a Uwe Boll movie has a higher rating than yours does.

OH GOD I CAN'T SHUT UP

There's a couple of things in movies and horror literature that still don't fail to creep me out. The first is people getting stabbed or sliced in their Achilles Tendon, and the other is serious eye deformities.

But these pictures of mouths in place of eyes I find both deeply unsettling and strangely hypnotic. It's hard to just stop looking.

And it's FREAKING ME OUT.

I'm feeling blabbity

I went to the craft store last night to buy a new set of size 8 double points, because I keep losing them. As I was walking to the register, I was fancying something that would mess up my blood sugar levels, and there were silly boxes of Pop Rocks with locks on them that were alleged to be full of Pop Rocks.

I forgot that I had them until about ten minutes ago, and I unwrapped them, pulled off the key, unlocked the box, and opened it up.

Then I laughed for some minutes.

Unlike the normal pop rock packages you would expect to see when opening a pop rock packaged-shaped box, I pulled out tiny little square packages that looked very curiously, like, well.



I have had various silly candies in the past. Most memorable prior to this was the chocolate vagina I had bought for a friend my freshman year of college. But now, I'm the proud owner of a box of explosive candy condoms.

Okay, they're just normal pop rocks, but they're in a lockable container and shaped like candy condom packages.

Now I'm just feeling super blabbity

I had plans for Christmas. Silly plans. I would make some sort of handcrafted gift for everyone in my family.

It turns out that when you work 40 hours and teach twice a week, this is what most people would consider to be a really dumb Idea. Fortunately I had some lead time (I decided this back in October) and a couple of projects half complete, so it seemed fairly doable.

The first of them was for my mom; I would finish a cross-stitch I had been working on for her over the past four years (So maybe I'd started before October, even?). I'd started it when I had access to TV, and soon after I lost access to TV, I learned that cross-stitching is really, really boring. Most of the work on it has been done at my folks' house, on their couch, in front of the boob-tube. To compensate for my lack of cable, I began renting movies like a madman the past two weeks. I've seen some good stuff, and some stuff I could've lived without, but it got the job done, you know?

For my dad, I made a tie. This turned out to also be a stupid idea, because it was supposed to have been a birthday present. For his Birthday. In August.

Oops.

It turns out that using #1 size needles makes everything take 17 times longer than you'd expected it to. Also, it turns out my hand-sewing skills are shit, which is why I'm leaving the lining of the tie up to my mom, who has hand-sewing skills that are more like the roses that grow out of the shit-skills I currently have if you give them enough time. Maybe one day I'll be able to handle it, but with my rate of learning sewing techniques, there's a chance I'll be doddering and incontinent, and I'd probably end up wrapping a tie around my dad's gravestone.

Still, so long as you don't flip it over or look too closely at the carrying side, it looks pretty decent.

The next gift was intended for my elder niece. (By elder, I mean she'll be four the day after Christmas, which still makes her older than her little sister.) I've been designated "Strange Aunt Sasha," or "Silly Aunt Sasha," so I felt compelled to live up to my name and make her some mittens.

Shaped like LOBSTER CLAWS.

In spite of a couple of experiments with gauge swatches, they turned out goddamn huge. However, it turned out that the wrist-holes were too small, so while they would have been too big if she'd gotten them on, she couldn't actually get them on. Grah.

This may be a lesson about not trying to size things for people if they can't volunteer body parts for them.

At the same time, I started work on a project for the younger niece. Let's just leave it at failure due to terrible instructions and forget it ever happened.

The next project almost became a failure as well. It was my first attempt with felting, which is kind of like when you ruin a new sweater by putting it in the washer, but with purpose. Wool will turn to felt, and can be shaped and formed if you're careful about it. It's not really complicated, but you only get one shot at it, and if it doesn't work, then it doesn't work.

I wanted to make my older brother a stuffed hedgehog. He'd collected them when he was a kid, and this seemed like a simple enough gift for him that would end up in the hands of his own children. Or it would have, if the first one hadn't failed. You see, all of the paws felted zip-zip-zip-zip, but the rest of the body had only felted in clumps here and there. Also, the fur turned from this pleasing, lush texture to an unpleasant, clumpy feel.

So, I went to the yarn store and whined to the woman working there, and she advised me to a better choice of fur-yarn. I went through the pattern again, and then delayed actually felting it, worried that it would fail again. I had another talk with the lady at the knitting store, and she told me where I could find a proper washer that would be hot enough to do things properly, a big change from the less functional machines in my apartment building.

So a weekend before Christmas, I felted that sucker up, and it worked all properly like it ought to have the first time.

On top of that, I made one set of gauntlets for Seth, which I neglected to take any pictures of. It was a quick adventure in cabling. The first one was from a pattern, but I didn't like the way it worked out and decided to try a different pattern for the second. I couldn't find anything I particularly like, so I made up something new, derived from patterns that I had liked. They worked pleasantly, and I liked the way they turned out; the same cabling technique, but on different scales.

Blah, blah, blah.

I may make many more of those hedgehogs, now that I know how. They're adorable and quick to make. The lady at the knitting shop had mentioned using smaller needles and a lighter gauge yarn. If there's one thing I've learned from Japanese people, it's that making things smaller makes them more intensely adorable.

For my little brother, I made some hats. Yay for hats!

On living with your ex-boyfriend who hasn't gotten over you

NYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH.

I love the pet store.

My boyfriend and I went out to have pizza last night. While we were waiting, he suggested we walk around, and I said we go to the pet store.

On the one hand, it was kind of sad. Both of us are working all the time, so it's not really feasible for us to have a pet that requires more attention than a fish tank, or maybe a lizard requires. I'm down with that; I'd love to have a pet snake, but that would be a dealbreaker for living with my boyfriend, who would be super, super uncomfortable with that notion. My suggestion that I get a burrowing snake that he would never see did not go over well (which is fine, because realistically if I had a snake it wouldn't spend that much time in its cage and much time pretending to be a necklace.)

On the other hand, watching chinchillas is a great way to kill time while you're waiting for dinner to finish baking.