And... Those Happened.

I watched Whiplash and American Sniper back to back tonight.

Yeah... I'm going to need some processing time.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Nope!

I am sick.

I am stressed.

I have a lot to do.

My post for today is:

Bad Planning, Good Day

So... today was a long day.  Told you this one would be late.

I slept for less than two hours and really only got up on time because I told a friend I needed to be up by then and had incentive to let him know I was.  I managed to forget to bring my water bottle and a pillowcase in which to stealthily hide a quilt (more on that later), but nothing of importance was left behind.

There were practically no people on the road.  It was awesome.  It was 3:00 in the morning.

I got an agenda when I got there and my heart sank because it didn't look like there was going to be enough free time to do anything, and we were leaving at four in the afternoon.  This felt stupid all day long.  I had to text Ian and let him know that I couldn't go to dinner with him and the friend he'll be living with next school year, seriously disappointing all of us.

When I got on the bus I went straight to the back and ended up in the "multicultural cheer" section, somehow.  Black, Hispanic, Arabic, and me the white girl.  It was pretty cool.  On the way back the Hispanic boy and I had our seats stolen by a couple of Asian girls, so the aggregate diversity went down in an amusing way.  There are a lot of different people at my school, and I find this to be really awesome.  Anyway, we chatted or slept for a few hours as the bus left at 4:00 AM and we stopped for breakfast at 6:20 AM.  At some early time of the morning Ian called, and it's weird that my phone has no idea of either this call or the next call but it has the third one.  Anyway, we figured out a plan for when he could come pick me up that would work as long as my professor didn't require that I stay on the capitol grounds (which he didn't, because he knows both of us and is a pretty chill guy).

Rallies are boring.  Cheer cheer speech speech speech introduction cheer speech speech introduction cheer cheer speech speech speech cheer.  Basically.  It was really boring, and it was sprinkling, and my feet were unhappy from standing in my new shoes.  When Ian arrived we were waiting in the school picture line, and he thoughtfully snapped one for me.

It's not very good, but that's the school group I went with.  I'm a tiny red set of pixels on the right side middle row.  Ian's standing pretty far out of the way holding my umbrella, and I wish I had a picture of this because he's a 6-foot ginger boy in a suit jacket holding a black umbrella with purple and blue flowery patterns on it.  So adorable.

He lives within walking distance of the capital and doesn't have his car in the city anyway, so we had to walk.  It was so painful I eventually took off the shoes and just carried them and walked in my tights (I need to wash them now).  Not my favorite thing.  His apartment is tiny and funny-shaped, but apparently bigger than most 4-person apartments (all I have to say is: yikes).  I was cold the entire time I was there, which concerned him because the air was on as warm as it would go.

We grabbed lunch at the cafeteria, which is I think where this picture is from:

What A Day, and 3GT

Today has been long.

I wrote a 400-word response paper for my English teacher, which took way longer than it should have because all my English-class-writing skills are rusty.  Then I stopped at Payless to buy grownup shoes because I need to dress professionally tomorrow (though... I am wearing bright red tights as socks...) only they didn't have them in the right size so I had to go to a different Payless to find them.

When I got home I had to do English class with my youngest brother.  Then it was review-the-terms time for my psychology of sexuality class because we had a quiz on female anatomy.  On my way home I picked up bright red tights at Target and lipstick at Walmart, only to discover that someone with a sense of humor decided to smash the lipstick so now I have to try to return it -- not likely!  Great fun for me.

I have to get up in three hours to get on a bus for Austin, so if there is a post tomorrow it will either be automated or come in after midnight.  Probably the latter.  Apologies in advance.

Because I don't have too much more time to talk, let's hit 3 Good Things real quick before I head to bed.

A Few Major Victories

Sorry this post is coming in so extremely late that we're already almost four hours into the following day.  It's been a bit of a long evening, which relates to the second victory.

Victory: This teddy bear!

I finished it!  Yesterday, in fact.  As you can see, M is delighted.  She has a purple stuffed heart among her stuffing (it's just barely visible from the right angles and in the right light, but it's definitely obvious to the touch), and red features.  She has no name yet, but I'm sure one will be determined soon.  I'm really pleased with her.  I did not expect the camouflage yarn to turn out that awesome.

"Fun" Show

It has been a long, long, long day.  And a lot of what happened to lead up to today I don't want to talk about.

The summary is that a friend of mine was going to perform Chasing Cars in my dad's church Fun Show and enlisted me for a backup vocalist because I can invent harmonies on the fly.  Then the parents of the lead vocalist decided to change some of the words so that no one could "take them out of context" and get upset about them (said lead vocalist and I later went through the entire song together and pointed out to each other how the entire song could be read in ways that could potentially offend people in the congregation; we're awesome).  Then I spent at least an entire day trying to decide whether I felt okay singing the new lyrics and decided I didn't, and then everyone's parents got mad.  I didn't care.

But it sort of ruined the event for me, understandably.  I recorded the performance for them, and I was wistful and annoyed the entire time.  I wanted to be singing.  But I wanted to be singing the actual song, not what it became.

There were some really great acts though.  Some of my favorites were:

Milestones And Designs

In that order.

So a few milestones have just come up for my little blog here.

The first one is post count.  My post on January 20th, the one about school, was my 100th post.  Which is kind of cool; a nice round number with zeros.  And I've come rather a long way in 100 posts, from long exhaustive posts to these short little snippets of my life.  And I've grown up quite a bit too, since those earliest posts were published in October 2011, over three entire years ago.  Hopefully I'll do a few more than a hundred posts in the next three years, with my goal to do a post a day this year!

The other milestone is in blog views.  This one's a bit silly, granted, but at the time of writing I'm just 3 views shy of 10,000 -- another nice round number.  An overwhelming majority are on one post, but I have a few other stand-out popular posts as well.

2,900 views on Diagonal Two-Color Squares Tutorial
170 views on Octuple Rainbow: Reminiscing (I'm pretty proud of this post, so I'm flattered it gets second)
155 views on Knitting While Drunk (this is fair; I deserve to be widely laughed at/with for that one)
135 views on Unexpected Toothy Guest (this post is over three years old; I have no idea why it's so popular)
120 views on A Little Spinning Story

Also lately I've noticed that there's always at least one pageview on every post I make, which means I have someone regularly checking the blog and reading all the posts. (I admit to using the jumps to force people to go to the post page to read the entire post, so I can track the view numbers.)  I suspect my regular reader may be Corrie from Plutonium Muffins, but I'm not sure.  I'd love to find out who my readers are though, so please do leave me comments!

Now, after my sneaky pageview-tracking jump break, let's talk about designs.

Words Of Advice, And 3GT

I have three "words of advice" from today:

When you turn off one of your alarms, make sure the other one is still on.

When you do an MKAL from a new designer, expect mishaps and weirdness.

Walmart will have no exercise clothes in a size small, because people who are already a size small are the ones who do the most exercise (this is my hunch).  Also, there are a million size mediums.


On which note, check out my new yoga gear!  The teacher assured us that we "all have something in our closets", but I... really didn't.  So I needed pants, and the hoodie was on sale and had thumbholes and I need something lightweight.

(I sent this picture to Ian without comment and his reaction was, "Woah, what are those?")

Three Good Things is next, but I'll only do through Sunday to stay on track for next week.

Surrealism And Strangeness

I can't say much today.  If you'd like to avoid sad things, just go ahead and skip today's post.  I'll be back tomorrow my usual bubbly self.  Classes start tomorrow and I'll have plenty to say about them.

January Resolutions Mid-Month Update

I promise some of the things are getting done.

First, though:  Today was good.  I spent almost the entire day with Ian, sort of trying to stock up memories so I won't miss him quite so much when he goes home.  Today was my last opportunity to see him until about the middle of February, so we made the most of it.  Plenty of snuggling and discussing schedules so we can for sure stay well-connected this semester.  I also helped him clean out his car, accompanied him on a few errands, and told him stories while he did some packing.

His response to the deck of cards was more than positive.  He read the title card and understood immediately, but asked if he could wait to read them all until he returned home.  I said that was fine, but asked if I could show him the one card I hadn't assigned randomly.  I don't have a picture of this one, but it says "Out of all the girls you know, you still want me", and it's the queen of hearts.  He said he would make the obvious pun, but I'd already done it for him by making the card in the first place.  He also commented that 52 is a lot of reasons, and he was impressed.

Okay, anyway.  Resolutions.  Although I've only marked off one (and a half), things are actually progressing.  Here, see for yourself.

Yoga And Bean Soup

Today's been a bit of a quiet day.  I got up at a regular morning time (which resulted in my mother inquiring if I was accompanying her to the park this morning; ha, ha) and pulled out my yoga mat for some sun salutations.  I haven't done that in over a year, and today reminded me exactly why I signed up for a yoga class: I love it to bits.  It's so relaxing and energizing.

I spend the better part of the middle of the day (11-3 or so) with Ian.  It's the last week he'll be here before school starts again so there were a lot of really tight hugs.  Both of us started crying at different times, which made the other one cry.  (His was really disconcerting; he just stared at me from about a pace away for a good thirty seconds before finally saying "I'm going to miss you," which is when I realized he was trying really hard not to cry and failing.)

The afternoon was quite a bit more productive.  I started making a cowl from some gradient merino handspun I did over a year ago.  It's a really nice skein and I'm sorry there's only 66 yards of it.  I dyed the fiber in five sections in ratios of red to blue: 100/0, 75/25, 50/50, 25/75, 0/100.  Those ratios don't give a perfect red-purple-blue gradient (especially not on grey and brown fiber), but it's actually gorgeous.  In the spinning and plying the transitions got even more muddled than they were already, which makes it very gradual indeed.  I'm knitting the thick-and-thin mostly-worsted yarn on 10.5mm needles, so it's pretty loose, and it's in moss stitch to give some texture.  It's turning out quite nice and I look forward to finishing.

Red, red-purple, purple, and the very beginning of purple-blue.

I also took some time to make a strap for my yoga mat, since I expect to be hauling it to school twice a week (then back into my house for practice).  I still have some ends to weave in somehow, but it looks excellent and functions perfectly so far.

I used the brightest rainbow variegated yarn ever, but held it with black to tone it down a bit.  It worked wonders!  

In addition to the fiber-type crafting I did today, there was some food-type crafting as well.  I've had a bit of a craving for both the process and the finished product of homemade bread, so I finally just went to the kitchen and did it.  I was a bit freaked out by the refusal of my dough to rise in the pan, but a bit of poking around on the internet informed me that it was probably just too cold, so I put it in a warmed (but not on!) oven and it promptly puffed right up.  See?

Kiss A Ginger Day (And 3GT)

Did you know January 12th is Kiss A Ginger Day?  I learned this today, and it made me laugh.  I'm a redhead by choice, which I call "ginger with maintenance" for giggles.  And my boyfriend is a natural ginger, though it's intermittently fading to blonde.  It's not a really good color for him and I keep contemplating suggesting he get in on the whole henna thing.  (I don't think he will.)

Anyway, the other thing it is today is said boyfriend's birthday, which is just extremely appropriate and ironic.  I find it absolutely hilarious.  (Although my mention of it on Facebook makes no sense, since he accidentally put his birthday in wrong and has never bothered to change it, so pretty much everyone he knows thinks his birthday was a few days ago.)

Because it was his birthday, I said he could pick the colors for today's square in my Year Of Adulting blanket, if he liked.  He was very excited about the prospect.  His options were to pick the colors themselves, or to pick three numbers (1-15 inclusive) and let the system I set up pick the colors for him.  Being a geeky sort of person he opted for the numbers, and chose the numbers 6,7, and 15.

This came out to Red, Grape, Ocean.  I started giggling like mad and informed him that he had chosen a red and a purple, which are (as you may recall from the Friendship Star) our colors.  He rather proudly asserted that he was "too good", a sentiment with which I readily agreed.

So today's square looks like this:

Golden Globes

I don't have too much to say today!

Tonight is the Golden Globes and I'm sitting in the gameroom with my mother, grandmother, and aunt listening to them watch the end.  They're being very loud and my mom is doing a lot of giggling, which is probably good for her.  My aunt is wearing my mom's sweater and plastic Mardi Gras beads, while her voice alternates between very shrill and very calm.  My grandmother is quiet and happy as usual.  (I keep pausing to admire pretty people and enjoy the fact that I know a lot of their names.)

I'm staying with my aunt tonight as well because my grandmother is staying in my room another night.  Thanks to the Golden Globes we have a bunch of movies to watch, so we'll probably watch one tonight and another tomorrow.  (Aunt is squealing.)  It'll give me time to work on her sprites.  Have I shown you her sprites?  Here.

Whiplash Day and January Resolutions

So I've dubbed today Whiplash Day.  I got a call from my manager this morning informing me that he was not going to keep me because he'd had more resignations and needed full-time workers.  So three days of training pretty much wasted.

I spent most of the afternoon watching Once Upon A Time with my mom.  Then I got an email from the library where I volunteered all through high school requesting that I call to set up an interview for the page position I'd applied for early in December.  So I have an interview for that on Thursday.

At about five -- when I should have been going to the shop for training -- I messaged Ian to ask "If I wanted to go out and do something tonight, would you have any ideas?  I don't want food, I don't want to see any more movies, and it's too cold to be outside.  This basically exhausts my ideas of what to do with myself."  He offered to find some live music, picked me up (for which I felt guilty later when I realized I could have driven to his house), and took me downtown to a coffee shop that I swear is in a basement.  Where we discovered that a friend of his was playing that night at that particular shop.  Ian had gone to see a show of his last night.  It was great.  I enjoyed myself in the quiet sort of way that comes from just listening to good music for a while.

So!  That's been my day.  Ready to see my month?  I have six resolutions this month, and five of them are yarn-related.

The Year Of Adulting Blanket

I did a dumb thing.

I offered help to someone trying to figure out how to do a temperature blanket in squares because 365 will not make a rectangular shape.  (In case you're wondering, a temperature blanket -- or scarf -- consists of assigning a color to a temperature range and working a number of rows or a square in the color corresponding to the day's high/low/average temperature.)  I admitted that perhaps I knew all the math because I was eventually planning to make one.

"But not this year," I said, "Too much is happening this year for that."

Too much is happening this year for me to make the blanket that is supposed to help me document an entire year of my life.

...Crap.

It makes way more sense to pick an important, dynamic year than a year in which only minor changes occur.  For instance, doing it last year would not have been very interesting since the most important things that happened all year were my grandfather's death in April and getting a job in the last week of December.

Which brings me to this year.  I have dubbed 2015 "The Year Of Adulting".  I'm moving out this year, leaving my first college, getting my own car, and various other adult-ish events will also occur (incidentally, at the end of the year I'll be legally allowed to celebrate these events with alcohol).  This is an important year for me, and it makes a lot of sense to record that.

So I guess this is the year for the one-year blanket.  Here's how that'll work.

Today Has Been A Day

Yeah, I think that's about all I can say about it.

Ian woke me up at quarter to ten with a bunch of text messages, which hasn't happened in a while.  We had some plans change and he wanted to let me know, so that was nice.  (And that reminds me, I need to pay my phone bill.  Hang on.  ...Okay I'm back, having discovered that I have my credit card number memorized, so that's fun.)  I decided to hang it all and get up, and actually fixed my bed and showered and had breakfast (all of these things are unusual; the shower thing because I tend to do it at night).

Mom took me out to lunch at P.F. Chang's, and we forgot to take pictures, so here is me in the car with the leftovers.

Card-Making Endeavors

As I mentioned earlier, my grandfather died this April.  Now that life has settled somewhat, my grandmother decided it was time to start writing thank-you cards for the dozens of people who came out of the woodwork to help and support her.

Something you have to understand about my grandmother:  She took up card-making as a craft several years ago.

The way I am about yarn, she is about cards.  She has diecutters, various types of ink, the hugest collection of stamps I've ever seen (yeah, the rubber ones like kids play with), embossing powder, ribbons, glitter.  She makes these work-of-art cards for every birthday and holiday and we just marvel.  When my aunt moved out, Grandma took her room and converted it into something like a study/craft room.  The closet is like a tiny card workshop.  It's fabulous.

But she has 50 to 100 thank-you cards to send out, so she reluctantly decided she'd save herself the work and just buy them.  So off she went to every store she could think of, looking for simple elegant thank-you cards that suited her taste.  Unfortunately, she couldn't find anything that wasn't tacky or too plain.  She could always find something to improve, and she wasn't willing to send out any less than the best.  Eventually she gave up the hunt and resigned herself to making them.  Still not quite ready to make them all from scratch, however, she found a box of 50 black-and-white patterned plain cards she could embellish, and enlisted my help.

So Thursday afternoon we planned and had a few mild arguments over the designs. (Mostly I just sat around while she tried things, and occasionally gave input on ribbons.)  Friday afternoon we really set to work, and I was smart enough to pull out my camera and take a bunch of pictures of the process to share with you.

Early Morning, A Quilt, And Incoherency

I was still awake at five-thirty this morning.  My brain wouldn't shut up, and I wasn't physically tired enough to use my body's inclination toward sleep to calm my mind down.  So I got up, made myself a cuppa (TJ's Mango Black Tea with plenty of cream and sugar), and ventured outside with a blanket thinking I would watch the sunrise.  Instead, I ended up watching a lot of clouds.

But that wasn't bad.  I could actually watch different layers of clouds blowing across the sky at different rates, which was fascinating.  I also caught glimpses of a gibbous moon when empty patches in all the layers lined up just right.  And of course there were the birds.  I heard plenty of chirping from seven or eight small birds that looked like they were setting up some sort of aerial football (soccer) game which eventually dissolved into flirting, a few annoying crowing noises from the ubiquitous grackles, and at least one mourning dove said good morning.  The mourning dove in particular made me smile, since one of my brothers taught himself to imitate that call on an ocarina, so perfectly that I could never tell whether I was listening to an actual bird or a plastic potato.

--

So the crocheted thing from my last post.  The one that kicked my ass with embarrassing ease?  It's a blanket.

What, you already figured that out?  Okay okay fine, let me give you some more detail.

At least a year and a half ago, probably closer to two years, I promised Ian that I'd send him to college with a blanket if we were still together.  In August, he moves approximately 200 miles south to start his junior year, and when he does... his blanket will absolutely not be finished.  But I should have it done for his second semester.  I think the wait will be worth it, considering how much symbolism I managed to cram into one blanket.  Here's what it should look like when finished:

Summer Fun Bingo, Or, Resolutions For June

Sometime before the end of last semester, Ian asked me if I'd like to go to France with him in July.  He has family there and occasionally flies out to see them (and practice his French) for a few weeks.  I said yes, of course, even though I don't speak a word of French and I'd had half-formed summer plans already.  Pretty much nothing takes precedence over Europe.

I'm still not sure if we're going -- planning this has turned into an adventure for him -- but I operate under the assumption that I'll be out of the country for three weeks in July because if I don't I probably won't be able to go.  That means I can't go job-hunting (no one will give me three weeks off when I started working like two weeks ago), and I can't take a summer class (the last week or so overlaps when we're potentially leaving).  Essentially, it means I have to cram my entire summer into June, and hope I won't be here in July.  Enter the Summer Fun Bingo, Year Two.

Click to zoom

This is something we did last year.  I honestly don't remember if I did all 24 things or not, but I at least gave it a shot.  Last year there were categories, and really hard things as well as really easy things.  This year I just threw together a list of 24 things I want to get done, and think I can possibly accomplish in June.

So for this month I have either 1 resolution or 24, depending on how you look at it.  If you think of it as one, my resolution is Complete Summer Fun Bingo Card.  If you think of it as twenty-four, here's the rundown:

Rising From The Ashes

As you may have noticed, I failed at juggling.  In fact, I catastrophically crashed and pretty much everything but school fell to pieces.  I still made straight As.  I have no idea how.

--

My grandfather died in April, a few days after his 70th birthday.  I hadn't seen him in some time because I didn't want to remember him like that, so I'd already said my goodbyes.  Twelve hours later I listened to the announcement in church and just felt numb.  One week later I went to his funeral in a black-and-white dress (mostly white) and bright teal shawl because I couldn't bear to just wear black.  My aunt looked at me and said "I think all Grandpa would have said is 'nice hat'.  Non-issue."  Apparently he didn't look too good dead, so the casket was never opened.  I'm okay with this.  (The funeral arrangements included those tiny Hershey's candy bars wrapped in little blue papers that had a picture of Grandpa and had his birth/death dates on it.  We were very disturbed by what we dubbed the face chocolates.)

--

A couple weeks before this, on the 8th, I finished this blanket for a baby cousin so new he wasn't even born yet.  He was born exactly one month later, on May 8th.

It's a very happy blanket.  I have a picture of him lying next to it, but I'm not going to put it up here out of respect for the kid's privacy.  Suffice to say, he's an adorable little bugger and I can't wait to meet him.

--

I got my wisdom teeth out about a week and a half ago, and my jaw is still sore.  Plus food keeps getting caught in the empty sockets and bothering me.  I'm not really sure what the point of that was, but it's over now.  Although I did lose some weight while on a soft-foods-only diet, which could be problematic.  Essentially all I did for three days was watch episodes of Arrow on Netflix and work on this: