Monday, February 18

I've probably done this one once or twice before ...

In lieu of telling you how my weekend went, which I will probably do tomorrow or Wednesday, I'm going to do a meme. I caught it catching up on my feeds and saw it from Ugly Green Chair. I've seen various iterations of this meme, by the bye.

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 123.
3. Find the fourth* sentence / phrase.
4. Blog the next five sentences / phrases together with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig your shelves for that very special or intellectual book.
6. Pass it forward to six friends.


Although I'm at work, I happen to have Crazy Aunt Purl's Drunk, Divorced & Covered in Cat Hair in my bag. I purchased it yesterday after car retrieval. (Again, I'll talk about that later.)

Besides, it was funny. She was glaring at me like I was a drunken sot of a no-cooking, sorry-ass, baby mama. Me! A baby mama! I could not correct her.


Now I'm going to ignore the part about passing it on — you can do it if you like, or not. I'm not picky. (Well yes, I am picky, but not when it comes to such quirky trivialities as memes.)

Okay, just to whet your appetite, here's an actual photo of this weekend. It is of my cousins and I at a strip club remarkably close to where Dustro and I used to live.


Here I am with my cousins Noraa and Bug-a-boo at a strip club. We ought to hold more family reunions here ...


*This bit actually said to find the fifth sentence and blog the next four, but that's a little backwards, so I transposed them.

Tuesday, February 12

The Effects of Librotonin and other tales

I'm currently reading four books for the Ravelry Book Challenge, one of which I can't find. As of yesterday morning, I was only reading two books, one of which I can't find. Let me tell you why that is (not the bit about having one I can't find — that's never abnormal, and you know this if you've seen my house).

I have this brain problem. Every time I get in a certain radius of a book store, a chemical called librotonin is produced. This chemical is not dissimilar to serotonin, except that they're completely different. I have thus far been unable to compute the exact event horizon of librotonin, as once I'm close enough to the book store I'm sucked in and Must Buy More Books.

Needless to say, yesterday I crossed that threshold yet again, finding myself at Court Ave Books, our local used book store. (I generally gravitate toward the fiction section in a book store, to start off, so it was no surprise that I found myself in short order carrying Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion by Neil Gaiman. (I just finished reading the four-book Hitchhiker trilogy, and this was just the sort of thing I wanted to read after.)

I made my way then to the young adult area, because I wanted to see if there were more Madeline L'Engle books that I didn't have. And then Lloyd Alexander caught my eye. Well not Alexander himself — that would be rather extraordinary as he died last May — but his Prydain books. I was trying to decide which were the ones in the trilogy (because for some reason I thought those books were a trilogy and in fact, they're not) and chose the one that begins with the Assistant Pig-Keeper: The Book of Three.

Following my foray into children's literature, I then went to the front of the store where they keep the classics. You know, those books you always mean to read because everyone always talks about them but you suspect that they haven't read them either. I thought to myself, Ah, Jules Verne. He's one you ought to read, being all into steampunk and stuff. And I found his books and picked up 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; then I left the store before I could do more damage to my pocketbook.

Despite this librotonin effect, or perhaps because of it, I've finished seven fiction books and two non-fiction books, which you can see little thumbnails and ratings of in the sidebar yonder.


I was also going to write about the snow that fell last night, which was not heavy snow this time, thankfully. It's instead the sort of snow that looks like piles of big glitter flakes and acts like dust. It's the sort that, if you scoop it up in your hands and blow on it, it all comes back in your face and you get all snowy and damp.

It's the sort that, due to its powdery consistency, one shouldn't have to shovel it. In actuality one could go to an amusement park and purchase one of those dreadful little fans that run on a pair of AA batteries that don't really keep you cool but make you sweat just a little more when you point them at your face.

And that's all I really had to say about the snow.

Monday, February 4

In memoriam

Bellatrix toe


When I read on Ravelry last week that sock designer Gigi Silva, known as MommaMonkey on Ravelry, passed away, I was stunned. I'd seen in passing, when looking up some of her beautiful sock patterns, that she was ill, but never in a million years did it occur to me that she was that sick.

Though I never new MommaMonkey personally, I know that she was such a loving, caring person. I decided the only thing to do was to finish my Bellatrix socks, one in a series of Harry Potter-themed patterns she released last July, as a sort of tribute.

Bellatrix socks
This pair's for you, MommaMonkey.

Saturday, February 2

I'm too lazy to think

Rules of the game:
1. Put your iPod, iTunes, Windows Media Player, CD player, etc. on shuffle.
2. For each question, press the forward (next) button to get a new song, the title of the song is the answer to the question.
3. You must write the song name down no matter how silly it sounds*

Questions:
If someone says, “Is this okay?” you say, Be Free - Papa Roach
How would you describe yourself? Filthy/Gorgeous - Scissor Sisters (You know it!)
What do you like in a guy/girl? Re: Your Brains - Jonathan Coulton
How do you feel today? General Joy - Tori Amos
What is your life’s purpose? Drunken Lullabies - Flogging Molly
What is your motto? Take Me Out - Franz Ferdinand
What do your friends think of you? Witness - Tori Amos
What do your parents think of you? The Power of Orange Knickers - Tori Amos
What do you think about often? Take Your Mama - Scissor Sisters
What is 2 + 2? You Could Have It So Much Better - Franz Ferdinand
What do you think of your best friend? Untitled - Rachael Yamagata
What do you think of the person you like? Midnight Show - The Killers
What is your life story? Martha's Foolish Ginger - Tori Amos
What do you want to be when you grow up? The Beekeeper - Tori Amos (I wanna keep bees. Don't want 'em to get away!)
What do you think when you see the person you like? Millionaire Girlfriend - Jonathan Coulton
What will you dance to at your wedding? Sweet the Sting - Tori Amos
What will they play at your funeral? I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas - Gayla Peevey
What is your hobby/interest? Tori Amos
What is your biggest fear? Under My Skin - Rachael Yamagata
What is your biggest secret? On Top - The Killers
What do you think of your friends? Paper Doll - Rachael Yamagata

Seen at Terra Nullius ...


*Just so's you know, I'm typing this at my parents' house and using my playlist there ... which is why it's not terribly varied.

Tuesday, January 29

Fantastically hot or fucking freezing ...

Two posts in less than a week? Too bad I don't have anything particularly witty to say. In fact, it's just about the weather.

I have this funky weather widget called Forecastfox on my browser here at work. It can tell me all sorts of numbers and give me fun pictures of radar and useful stuff like that (for instance, in the photos below you can see a severe alert icon, the radar icon, a mouseover of current conditions, and icons for the next few days, which tell you the forecast when you mouseover). It gets data from AccuWeather.com.

I glanced up a while ago, after working on finagling some particularly difficult text, and saw the windchill. That's the number in parentheses below. When I saw it, I nearly started swearing.


If this doesn't qualify as fucking freezing, I don't know what does.


You see what I mean? This weather is absolutely ridiculous. I wish I had taken a screenshot yesterday of my beloved Forecastfox. It was an astonishing 50-some degrees here. I actually walked outside yesterday, outermost layer a sweatshirt. Today? Couldn't wear enough layers. Thankfully, I can easily catch a ride home. No way in hell I'm walking six blocks with a windchill this low.


Look at that forecast for Saturday! Much nicer than right now.


Although the temp, as of this second, has adjusted to 3 degrees above and a windchill of 29 below, so we're getting there. Slowly but surely.

Monday, January 28

Today feels suspiciously like a Sunday, but it's Monday

*Sigh.*

I just can't get Heath Ledger out of my head. And the image of him that continues to pop to my mind is not one of his more recent roles, but rather his portrayal of Patrick Verona in 10 Things I Hate About You. It's very strange.




As you may have noticed by taking a gander at the sidebar, I've cast on for another project: Swamp Witch from The AntiCraft. I have no photos currently, but it's just a really big, lacy shawl on really big needles.

And I finished another block on the Filet Crochet Par-tay. It's squirrels. (Again, no photo. I'm a slacker.)