A Blog on Hold, a Life Rebooting

You may have noticed that I have not made a post in a while…sorry.  There is a very good reason for this.  Two months ago to the day I caught my husband in very inappropriate contact with our mutual best girlfriend.  I was willing to try and work through this.  He told me that he thought we needed a period of seperation as he needed time to miss me and work on his issues in therapy alone, so off to Nashville I was packed as he could not leave Boston and I had nothing holding me there but him.  Our dog was shipped off to Florida to stay with my parents and we began a very short separation. Within two weeks our separation turned into “I need a divorce,” and within a month and a half the divorce was final.

So here I am today. In less than two months I have lost my husband and best friend of ten years, my dog, my tiny apartment, my best girlfriend and needless to say I am not in a position to do a whole lot of crafting these days as all of my supplies are still in Boston and will not be shipped down here until around November at the earliest.

And although this is not where I hoped to be in life at this minute, I don’t have any regrets.  I tried and never stopped trying until he made it clear he did not want me and was not going to be involved in our marriage any longer.  I deserve to be loved without conditions, I deserve happiness, I deserve someone worthy of all the love I have to give.  Although I can never claim to be a perfect wife, and Lord knows I am sure I can be a pain in the arse to live with, I can say without hesitation I have many gifts to give that are not worth wasting on those who do not want them or crying over when rejected.  Faith, love, fidelity and forgiveness are cores of my soul.  I know this for sure because I still believe in the future and the goodness of people.   I lived to love my husband, and I will live to love another just as strongly.  And the next time I give my heart to someone else for the rest of my life I continue to have faith that, that man will be confident and strong enough to give his love as fully and unreservedly as I do.  Our divorce was handled amicably and  I wish my ex and the woman he is with now all the best in the world.  Our lack of success should not preclude their chance of happiness.

I am looking at either joining the military as an officer or going to law school (maybe both if I am lucky).  I have been spending all of my free time teaching myself math again (it’s been ten years since I cared about word problems or algebra…bleh). And I have been getting myself back in shape.  I have dropped about 20 pounds in this two months through diet and exercise and I must say…I am looking pretty good these days.  (Before you go “Dang girl! You were huge! I am six feet tall, so 20 pounds for me is more like five or ten for everyone else…)  Hopefully, Basic Training will help me kill the last ten pounds that won’t seem to budge.  But it is not a bad way to get back out on the dating scene, all thin and pretty again.  Between traveling to and from Boston, handling the divorce, exercising, studying and hunting down and motivating ten billion people to do what needs to be done to try and fill out my security clearance packet I have been very busy lately.

This blog will likely be on hold for a few months, at least until my life is settled again.  When I reboot, the name of the blog will likely change, but I ask that if you had me in your links…please leave me there.  I will come back I promise.  I will leave all of my old posts up (even the painful ones that have pictures and stories of my ex) as there are still good projects or funny stories contained in those posts.

I have been loved and motivated by many people during these past two months and although some friends have proven themselves to be less than loyal, many more have stepped up and gone much more than the extra mile to make sure that I am doing OK and have everything that I need to make it through this time.  I have done more new, exciting, and frightening things in the past two months than I have in years.  I have pushed myself and have yet to find my limits.  It turns out when the world pulls the rug out from underneath my feet I remained standing…it is good to know I am one of those people.  You never really know until it happens.  I don’t crumble, I don’t whine, I don’t give in.  I wake up each morning with the word courage, and go to sleep each night with the idea of love and forgiveness.  And that keeps me motivated.

I will see you all again as soon as I can.

-Nikki

 

Whale Watching on a Rainy Tuesday

A friend from high school came into town for a little while and asked what there was to do in Boston.  I listed of the normal touristy stuff and he became interested when I mentioned whale watching.  This is where several whale species come to feed during the summer.  I encourage anyone to take the tour.  It’s worth it to do this at least once in your life.

I am terrible at taking good pictures of whales.  I didn’t manage to take good ones last time either.  I have lots of great, “this is the water just after they disappear shots,” but here is the best one I got.  This is a mother and few month old calf.

Combine large sail boat festival with intense fog and instantly you’re hundreds of years in the past in a ghost story or Peter Pan.  These ships would just appear out of nowhere.  Awesome.

According to a stranger, always the most reputable sources in the world, this is the last occupied lighthouse in the US.

Boston from the water.

Safety Thread – Why didn’t I think of this!

I can’t say my knitting skills have improved dramatically since I joined a knitting group, but that is NO reflection on my group.  They are hella-awesome knitters (and infinity more skilled at crochet than I am as well).  Nope, my lack of desire to think very hard whilst recreational knitting is the culprit here.  (Garter stitch all the way baby!  No patterns for Nikki.)

Typical pattern attempt:

“Concentrate, concentrate…think, think, think.”  Knit, purl, knit, knit, purl…Oooh, here it comes… “Ray.  When someone asks you if you’re a God, you say YES!”  Ha, ha! That’s never not funny…wait…knit, purl….purl, knit…? Crap, back up a few steps – pay attention Nikki! (Ten minutes later) Knit, knit, knitty-knit-knit…”CRAP! I remember purling being involved here somewhere. Ugh, time to frog again.”

But hard as I try to remain deaf to the good ideas I hear tossed around at my weekly knitting group, a few inevitably weasel their way into my head in between my bites of Qdoba chips and salsa, and I start to think, “Hey, if I did that maybe this pattern stuff wouldn’t be so bad.”

The first good idea was learning how stitch markers work.  Luckily for my knitting laziness patterns often shift and the stitch markers must shift in accordance to what is going on at the time.  Some thinking still required – Phbisht, I’m out.  You can’t trick me into the harder stuff based on these magic tools alone.

THEN I learned about a Safety Thread.  Dang!  My other big excuse for not working harder is that I often screw up at some unidentified location and I have to frog my project either all the to the beginning or way, way, way back until I reach a point where I know I was doing it right.  Then I have to manage to pick the stitches back up again without hopelessly losing or twisting them. And THEN if I manage to do all that, I have to try to guess correctly what row I am now on… Ugh, kill me.  (Are you starting to see where I might have gotten the notion that a Doctor Who scarf was just my speed.)  A Safety Thread makes that excuse obsolete.

How you Insert/Use a Safety Thread:

At certain intervals (like the end of large sets of repeats) you insert a thread into your work,  along the needle, where you know everything is correct. (Correct pattern, correct number of stitches, correct EVERYTHING.)  Then when you get caught up talking or watching TV and you look down and have a “What the Heck!” moment you don’t have to panic.  You just frog your project to its last perfect point (the yarn will stop the frogging just like you had a needle in there), reset your row counter and use the string as a guide to insert your needles back into the stitches perfectly.  When the project is finished just tug these strings out – there is nothing substantial holding them in.

Big giant Duh here! So simple that I have to say again. Why didn’t I think of this?

Thanks to my friend over at Bareblueskin for telling me about this last Monday at knitting group.

I will withhold an opinion…for now

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has just never appealed to me as a book, but the movie versions and graphic novels have held up much better for my tastes.  Tim Burton and I have years of a love-hate relationship.  I love his visual style but often find myself hating much of the rest.  (Only Sleepy Hollow and Nightmare knocked it out of the park for me, I loved the full package in those two movies.)  So I am torn over whether to even get excited about this.  I mean JUST LOOK AT this image.

But then three guesses who makes up the cast.  Yup Johnny and Tim’s wife, and double yup, he made them ugly again.  Shocker, I know.   Sigh… Tim, why can’t you and I either stay friends or part ways?  Why must you toy with my emotions?

Pluggin’ Along

Boy-howdy when I focus on something I sure do focus… Is it Thursday already?!  James gave me the go ahead to finish writing Book Two.  (Translation, I started dreaming chapters again and bitching about needing to write them down. I  remembered how this worked last time and felt I was too busy, but he told me to stop whining and just do it while it was working even if it meant  ignoring the planet for a month or two.)  I don’t know how other people write but it is something of an intense process for me.  All or nothing baby.  The good news is I can literally bang out a novel length book in the span of a couple months, the bad news is – um, I forget to eat and stuff.  So here is the big project waiting for me when I come out the other side of this alive.  ANOTHER DECOUPAGE TABLE! WAHOO!

Amy over at World of Mod Podge (my newest blog obsession, love her site, go there, go there, go there) is sending me a little package of some, what else, Mod Podge! With a few extra bottles on the way I should have enough to really do a number to the top of this extra long IKEA table.  I am thinking about a red base coat of paint and check out a sample of the papers I bought for this project.  I can’t wait!  (While we are discussing AWESOME desks and decoupage, check out this one and this one…wow.)

Speaking of IKEA, check out how organized this shelf is.  I’ll admit it I’m a convert to the land of the flat packed, nothing-but-pictures instructions.  There’s no shame in admitting I was wrong and letting go of my prejudices.  It makes me a bigger person.  So loud and proud people – IKEA Rocks!

And here is just a sampling of what I am NOT working on because I am busy writing up a storm.  Yup, as soon as I decide I have had it with the library and racing deadlines and I go ahead and order some books on Amazon – BAM! – the bug hits me again and these sit and collect dust waiting to be studied.  Ah, well.   At least I own them and can pick them up whenever I want.

Doctor Who Scarf – Post Four

Here’s the problem with legacy projects and blogging – while I work and work and work, I have very little new to report. 5 1/2 feet into my Doctor Who scarf and all I can say is, “I’m still at it.”

But just look at all of this lovely, never-ending  garter stitch!I am just under half of the way done with the pattern which means that I should really be at about 6 to 6 1/2 feet of length at this point, BUT, I knit tight. Real tight.  Tight like anal-retentive accountants would look at me and go, “Why don’t you chill a little girl?”  I don’t know why I do this, I have tried to knit looser (I knit much looser than I used to…I can now get the needle between the yarn and the other needle without effort…I can slide the yarn freely on the needles as I am working it.  These things used to be an issue.  But, let’s just say I am rarely concerned that my stitches are going to fall off of the end of the needle when I am not paying attention. They stay nice and still until I choose to move them.)

So the bad news is my scarf will most likely be on the shorter side. The good news is it should be nice and wind proof.  I’ll take the trade off.

- You should see how tight I crotchet.  Ca-ra-zy-

Websites of the Week 6-6-09

I SWEAR posts are coming.  I’ve taken pictures and everything.  It’s just I have had this migraine for a couple days and I fell behind on everything else and excuse, excuse, excuse…no pity flowing in…nothing…alright then, to tide you over here are some of the things that have made me happy today.

First, ReaderCon 2009 is coming up in MA very soon.  I’ll be going.  I hope I’ll learn more about publishing, it’s a science fiction convention for writers.

I don’t have any cats at the moment, but if I did you can bet they’d be blowing my dog to imaginary bits in the cardboard tank.  The good folks down at Think Geek never disappoint. (Oh, and James you have fallen on the dork food chain.  This month’s advert has a Blue Violet Laser Pointer.  Your Green Laser Pointer is sooooo 2008 darlin’, you might as well have a red one now.)

And just in case my readers were wondering, “Gosh, I wonder if they have a sonic screwdriver to go with the Doctor Who scarf she’s been knitting forever,” shah, they do.

Amy over at World of Mod Podge has a love of all things glued, reused, and reinvented that rivals no other.  She trolls the blog-o-verse for the best of what’s out there in the world of modern decoupage and combines it into a very easy to navigate blog.  Seriously go check her site out, tons of great ideas and links to fabulous new blogs.  If you’re not gluing SOMETHING by the end of your visit you’re dead to inspiration.

James, look away. So ‘Bake Decorate Celebrate’ on the Create Channel, (it’s on Public Access people, follow along) showed a SUPER simple German Chocolate Cake For Two recipe with no pesky coconut to mess with his one food allergy. (Damn that allergy! I love coconut.) But just look at this cake!!! This will make an appearance at some point.  Click on the picture to get to the recipe.

On the laughing my Ass Off front check out this YouTube video of Darth Vader doing Thriller.

And last but not least, for rich bored dorks. You too can go on a SciAm sponsored cruise. Bright Horisons 6 is accepting reservations now…don’t miss your chance!

Seminars are as follows: (and I am not even remotely ashamed to say I am interested in more than a few of these and own the keynote speaker’s book)

Ode to Neglected Blog

Who’s avoiding editing anymore this morning – ME!

Great blog, from the Point of view of Obama’s Teleprompter:

“I’m sure some of you have seen the footage of Joe Biden’s speech today, where after the wind has knocked a Teleprompter screen over, he said, “What I am going to tell the president when I tell him his teleprompter is broken. What will he do then?”

First, it wasn’t me.

Second, we don’t bother giving Joe a real Teleprompter. It’s just two screens that plays “Tom and Jerry” cartoons on a loop.”

I killed Twitter today

I shot the little birdie account dead.  That only lasted a month. I just could never see the point of yelling into space or watching others do the same. There were a few cool people that I spoke with and it did divert traffic to my blog when I put a lot of effort into it but on a whole I was not impressed. Mainly folks just used it as a way to market their products or their blogs nonstop. Who needs that?

I haven’t visited MySpace in months, if not almost a year, and I only go to Facebook in spurts because I detest talking on the phone and that site is now my main point of contact with my family.  And I know this makes me a dinosaur but I actually know everyone I am friends with and still I get annoyed at the length of the list (a whooping whole 70-ish people), esp. since Facebook changed to their “new” and to me, still terrible format.

Is it a sign of my age or disconnection with current social realities that by the ripe old age of almost thirty I am over this whole Online Social Networking thing?

Am I the only one who is feeling this fatigue? I feel like I am sometimes the only one. The generations ahead of me seem to have really taken to these sites. My Aunts and Uncles are all over it and my youngest sibling (I guess they are calling her generation the Millenial’s now, I wish I was called something, I’m a little too young to be Gen X and a few years to old to be Gen Y or Millenial or whatever else – my age group got shafted in the classifications department) has something in the neighborhood of 3000 facebook pictures with her taged in them.  Dear lord.

So there we are. I’m back to just blogging. My one conncesion to modern life. the online journal. It only took me 29 years to accept how weird this concept is and then force myself to get over it.

An Open Letter to the Drivers of Boston

My fellow Bean Town drivers,

Let me say first of all I empathize with your sleepiness. I too am tired at the butt-crack of the morning and dodging pedestrians darting out into traffic without a look or a care to catch a train running down the middle of the road is difficult. It is not your fault that the city planners were too lazy to plan a city and simply established permanent roads wherever the cow trails happened to be – absolutely cows have the best judgment about how we should reach our final destination, they are never known to wander about aimlessly. I do not begrudge you the confusion the situation brings when you cannot figure out where to turn as the train sneaks in and out, from the center of the road to the side and you must decide do I drive on the service roads or main lanes? Dear God, am I now going the wrong way down a one way street/service road!…all of this is all tricky indeed. So go ahead, slam on your brakes and vacillate in and out of traffic listlessly as you make up your mind. Lord knows I do too when I am on unfamiliar turf.  If I might make a suggestion, when you are new in an area you might watch the flight path of the herd and not shoot up the (temporarily) empty lane you find yourself in.  We are not weaving for our pleasure and we will save your wheel alignment if you follow us.  I (and the others I see each day) have a carefully mapped out series of lanes changes (and shifts within the lane) that I make every day designed to minimized (although by no means eliminate) the chances of my car falling into what I can only assume are portals to hell. You might call them potholes but I swear I once saw flames licking out around the edges of a particularly deep one, I’ll not be testing them.

Nope, I am, in general, well able to forgive the follies of my fellow drivers because we are all human.

That said. STOP BEING DOUCHE BAGS. When approaching an intersection a football field wide with waiting traffic and a train staring down at you do not presume to pull yourself into the intersection after the light has been green for some time KNOWING it will turn red with you stuck out there through the entire next side’s green light. (I am talking to EVERYONE who has ever entered Storrow Drive.)  When then stuck in the intersection and blocking all traffic have the good graces not to respond to resulting honks and/or fingers with a shrug and a “what can I do about it?” look and a geusture to the stalled traffic in front of you. It was just as unmoving before you put your dumb-ass self in the intersection and in our way. This makes everyone want to kill you for being a double moron. Either stoically keep your eyes glued forward or pretend that the oncoming traffic is in fact an emergency vehicle you must make way for and find a way to get your ass out of the intersection. You could do it if you tried, it just wouldn’t be pretty….you might have to *GASP* leave the line.

And Boston, red means stop. I know this can be confusing as the municipal vehicles do not seem to understand it. You might think because you have seen school buses loaded with children running red lights where other vehicles have already managed to stop not to mention the obligatory every-cop-car-out-there going right through them as if they don’t matter, however, this still does not give you permission to do so. In particular, if I have time to slow my car during a yellow light and come to a full stop at the resulting red you should not feel authorized to change lanes, pull around and continue traveling through the light.

And I know this is going to shock some of you, please sit down before reading, when you are driving down a four lane divided road and you find yourself needing to stop and either conduct business or release a passenger you must continue on until you a find parking space or a turn-off. If the street parking is full simply putting on your hazards does not give you legal permission to turn a normal driving lane into a second parking lane. On my last week in town I am going to drive through Boston in the Bat Tank (from the first Christian Bale Bat Man movie) in the right hand lane of all two lane roads in Boston and I am not changing lanes for any reason.

You have been warned Boston,

Nikki

Making Fabric Covered Notebooks and Car Ride Exorcisms

I was going to do a step by step tutorial on these but then I only had one set of hands and, really, I think you guys are bright enough to figure it out.
I have been meaning to get around to this for a long time.  I have a boat load of spiral notebooks (ten years of continuous college for one or both members of the house will do that.) I HATE spiral notebooks. They must be the ugliest office/school supplies to ever grace the planet.  It pains me to write that last sentence as I have a love for all things sold at Staples and I will even horde notebooks despite their ugliness. However a little Mod Podge and a $1.25 fabric squares from JoAnn’s transforms these notebooks from something to be hidden to display worthy.

As long as you take your time with these they are really easy.  The only slightly tricky part is sizing the fabric to the spirals. But even that isn’t hard. Just measure the circumference of the spiral from cover to cover and that becomes the width of the spine, the height of the cover is the height of the spine. (For a five subject notebook it is usually 2×11 in.) Use your measurements to mark where the spine will be in the center of the fabric then cut and fold a flap down (glue into place) on both the top and bottom so that the fabric at the spine is the exact height of the spirals. (You will have at this point a rectangle of fabric with a notch taken out of the center at the top and bottom, this also helps you to make sure everything is centered as you begin gluing the fabric to the front and back covers.) The rest of the excess fabric will be folded over the inside edges of the cover and glued down but you can’t do that in the center spirals so you have to do it before you glue the notebook to the fabric.

Supplies: Pre-cut fabric squares, Mod Podge or Elmer’s Glue, Spiral Notebooks, Cheap Paintbrush to spread glue, scissors

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If you are interested in how the desk was decorated check it out here.

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This has been a busy, busy week and we have a house guest coming tonight. Am I cleaning and getting ready for her as I should be, nope, I’m writing this.  But it’s OK…we should completely have time to find a place for her to sleep amid all of our crap after we get home from the midnight screening of StarTrek tonight, right? Sigh, I should go get cleaning.

But first I have to leave you with this parting story. We were driving and talking a lot these past few days and the topic of my learning Hebrew came up (I started yesterday, super interesting), this naturally lead to a discussion of religion in general and he asked if we still had a bible at the house.  We did at one point but I don’t think we do any more…I think at some point in out eleventy-billion moves it got tossed along with a whole bunch of other books that I didn’t feel like moving up and down stairs any longer. (I have had to do this on my own a few times, books are considered very carefully come moving day.) So any way, after mocking me for tossing out a bible and making it clear that was the last piece in my one way ticket to hell he busted out this gem of a conversation starter.

“So what will I use if I need to perform an exorcism on you?”

(Snort laughter!) “If we ever reach the point where you must expel the forces of darkness from me, please call an expert. Perhaps a priest, a priest who owns a bible…”

“I have an expert, I’ll Wiki it.”

“Do NOT wiki my exorcism!”

“Sure, I’ll wiki-cise you!”

“Oh dear God, you’re not going to exorcise the demon your going to open a larger portal to hell.”

“It’ll be your fault for throwing out the bible I needed.”

You see how it always comes back to me folks…

Refurbishing a Desk on the Cheap

Every house has it, the dreaded ugly piece of furniture. (Sometimes this horrific fiend has an entire family of ugly friends clogging up your space.) And like me you walk past it and sigh. You know you should do something about it…but who has the money to replace it or time to deal with it? Then one day your brain snaps and the ugly must be dealt with, but how you ask? Super Cheap I reply.  Behold the ugly desk.  This dark beast labored under my computer and piles of crap in a darkly painted entryway with no windows, relentlessly sucking out what little light managed to peek into that corner. (Whose bright idea was the dark brown paint anyway?…Oh wait, mine…moving on.) Due to drying times this project will require a weekend to accomplish.Something must be done, so I took stock of what I had – you can see it there sitting on top of the desk. Three pretty pieces of paper and some Mod Podge…I’m totally prepared. My plan was to cover the drawer pulls with the gold paper and use what I could of the tiny amount of cranberry paisley paper that was super pretty and super scarce. Off to the store I go with a sample of these two papers. Turns out no paint matches both so I buy a perfect match for the background color of the paisley paper…Salmon.

Newsflash: Salmon is Benjamin Moore code speak for shocking band aid pink. You have been warned.
I determined very quickly that my new giant, band aid pink desk is not in fact an improvement over the previous incarnation. Think, think, think. New plan. Go under the sink and pull out more of the light brown paint from when we first moved in and I was painting the apartment. Using a giftcard to maintain an equal distance from the edge of the desk I tape off a square with painter’s tape and make a brown square.

Hint: for clean lines paint a quick edge inside the tape with the background color and let dry for a few minutes before moving onto the next color.

While watching TV that night I used scissors and an exacto knife to cut out the swirly flowery pattern on one of the pretty papers that I liked. After letting the paint dry over night I traced the edge of the square with a gold paint pen I had left over from an old project. (You can’t tell much but it’s nice up close.) Then I played with the best arrangements of the design for a while and put a thin layer of Mod Podge under the paper and a thicker layer on top to decoupage it to the desk. Let this dry completely, a few hours should do it. I would hit it with another layer of glue to help protect the image.

I also decided to paint the front of the drawers brown (there was still WAY too much pink going on.) the only thing I left pink was the handles which I Mod Podged little strips of the paisley paper onto. It still looked a bit unfinished so I hot glued some mint green buttons on top of the whole shebang after the top and drawers of the desk got a quick coat of Minwax. (Along with everything else in the house I have been avoiding sealing for the past three years.) The fumes…Oh the fumes…

Here it is, my brand new desk ready to handle all of my crafting needs in style, all for the whopping sum of $15 dollars and I still have a TON of Salmon paint left, you know…should you be dying to paint something in your home the color of band aids.

Full list of supplies for non-crafting, non-packrats. Keep in mind this grew out of what I had on hand.  If you don’t have something improvise. I never would have come up with so many pretty things if the pink hadn’t been so unexpectedly ugly.

• Mod Podge (or Elmers Glue)
• Foam Brush
• Paint
• Paint Brush
• Painter’s tape
• Gold Paint pen
• Decorative Paper
• Exacto knife
• Minwax sealant
• Buttons
• Hotglue Gun

Doctor Who Scarf, Post Three – Progress

First things first, Torchwood is now on my Netflix list because I am not afraid to say this loud and proud; Captain Jack is yummy. I don’t even care if the spin off is terribly good, as long as he is in every scene I will suffer through all three seasons.

Onto scarf progress.

I am so consistent it’s scary. My scarf has followed the same time honored path as everything else I have ever started. Transcript of my life: (Substitute the word that with anything I have ever wanted, it will still work.)

1. Oooohhhhhh, I want that!
2. I WANT THAT NOW!
3. Now, Now, Now, Now, Now!!!!!!
4. Quickly find out everything the Internet knows about that.
5. Purchase supplies in a frenzy of glee, often skipping around the store and/or squirming like a three-year-old who has to pee. (Stupid lines and driving, slow me down from starting my project.)
6. Assuming something shiny has not yet at this point distracted my attention and taken me down a new path of “Oooohhhh, I want that!” I now begin building/drawing/cutting/knitting etc., said desired object which will bring me all the joy the universe has to offer.
7. Get about 1/4 of the way into project and discover I should have maybe taken a little more time to plan, inevitably I do not have enough of something critical and there is no way I can justify this project costing even more.
8. Scrap everything I learned in Step 4 and wing it from then on. Pattern or original idea be damned!
9. After extensive alterations I have something that very nearly resembles that which I wanted in the first place.

We have accepted my compulsive nature and built a system around it. Like handguns, there is now a waiting period in my home for crafting projects (or anything really.) I have to wait a week from the first Ooooohhhh before I am allowed anywhere near a store.  (This helps to weed out the passing fancy shiny and pretty things and makes sure I have less than 100 projects at any one time.)  It also works pretty well for him and electronics…

My scarf didn’t let me down. Right about the second tan section I started to notice something funny, “Huh, I sure am going through this beige A LOT faster than anything else.  I wonder if I will have enough to finish the project? How many more rows of tan are there?”

You see the critical flaw in my plan now right?  This was the FIRST time that I counted and added up the number of rows that each color is expected to cover. (My master plan was I bought two of every color – surely that would be enough.) Ummm, problem.  There are 300 rows of tan, 270 rows of green and 80 rows of brown.  Clearly the colors are not spread out evenly…Slap forehead and rethink.

New plan, completely and radically rewrite pattern to space out all of the colors and salvage the project.  So now I no longer have a Doctor Who scarf…it’s more like a Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor scarf.  Whatever, I still love it. Whoever invented miles and miles of garter stitch must have known I would be born one day.  I know this bores everyone else on the planet, but not me. In my world the more repetitive and thought free an action can be the more I love it.

Ah, and my buttons came in.  Luckily I have been sick and having fun with my scarf or these would have distracted me again.  Sock monsters would have been made, and James would have been sad.  As it is very likely that I would have cut up perfectly fine socks in my hurry to make them and he sure does love having a plethora of socks.  One fight averted by the common cold – thank you Rhinovirus.

Slow Cooker Chili (with or without beans)

I am reaching into the grab-bag of meals past for this post.  I have been too sick to get much of anything substantial done lately. (Thank goodness my current knitting project requires no thought or I couldn’t even do that.)

In honor of the days before this never ending cold, you know when I could still taste things…here is a great Chili Recipe.  Note: I dislike beans, so my Chili is just meat, but if you’re a fan of chili with beans just dump in a couple cans of you favorites.

Ingredients:

• 3 cans of Hunts Diced Tomatoes (various flavors)
• 1 – 2 Diced Yellow Sweet Onions
• 1 can of Sweet white corn
• 3 slices of thick cut bacon
• 1/2 can Chipotle peppers
• 1 diced green pepper
• 3 cloves of garlic, pressed
• 1 pound of lean ground beef, cooked and drained
• salt and pepper
• 1 orange, juiced completely
• sugar to taste (depends on your spice tolerance)
• (beans if you like)

Throw all of this into a slow cooker (set to high heat) for at least three hours. Separate extras into Tupperware for freezing.

Serve with some sour cream and shredded cheese, this tastes even better after it has been frozen or in the fridge for a couple days.

PhotoShop verses Nikki, Round One

This was two days of my life.  Sad, I know. But given the fact that when I started I couldn’t even find the “paint fill” button I’m not dong too shabby. I think if I wasn’t working on a laptop that was ichin’ to crash every ten minutes and had an actual mouse instead my irritating touch pad this would have been smoother…Plus for the life of me I can’t figure out how to download any add-ons, so I am stuck with only the limited things that actually come with Photoshop, not all of the cool brushes and filters that people have created and made available for free downloading. Did I mention I am working with an outdated slimmed down version of the program…oh yeah, it’s a pleasure. (Boy this sounds bitchy…sorry PhotoShop makes me a wee bit grumpy.)

I want to be able to not only manipluate photographs but create images from scratch.  There is no point in upgrading my blog if I can’t build the header and buttons to make the upgrade worth it…so back to toiling away.  I just had to prove I had done something with my time. (However small it feels.)

Update: James couldn’t figure out how to fill pen drawn objects with color (that took me almost two days to master, all the tutorials assume you already know how to do this) but he did figure out how to get extra brushes. Yeah! so now my tree has bigger sparkles. Wahoo.

Sketches of Yore

I’ve been surfing a lot of artist’s blogs recently and feeling a bit, well, behind on my drawing skills. (As if knitting, crafting, cooking and writing aren’t enough to take up my time – I feel guilty for not drawing and painting more these days.)  So in honor of when I did spend more time with my sketch book here is a random selection, enjoy.

Dragon study for a family crest I painted as a Valentine's Day gift a few years ago.

You can see part of the completed painting here.

First Draft of Husband's Tattoo, the head and center changed in the final version.

Madonna and child, and Laocoon

I can't remember this artist's name...but if you know him, clue me in again. He was astounding! I made a few sketches off of his work.

D&D Character

I tend to sketch good ideas to remember them, so not every idea here is mine. For a while James and I were kicking around the idea of doing an online comic so I was doing so research for that project.   Here are some cool things I liked and copied down or ideas I came up with.

Top left came from MacHall, raccoon from this awesome, creepy Alice in Wonderland spinoff that I can't find again

I think most of these expressions came from vgcats.com

The top were first draft ideas for the undergrads that were going to be characters in the online comic we were thinking about making. The rest were face studies for James.

How do you REALLY get a fiction book published?

Researching this is like asking “What’s the meaning of life?”  Everyone has a different answer.

I have the first book in a fiction trilogy finished and I am far enough into the second (and even a little bit into the third book) to know for sure now that I can live with the rules I established in the first book.  As such I think I am ready to look for a publisher.  BUT HOW?

Do I approach an agent first?  Why would they talk to me?  Do I approach a publisher?  It seems like that is a black hole for manuscripts.

How do people do this?

Has anyone out there published fiction?  Do you have the name of an agent or the contact information of someone in a publishing house that I can try.  My email information is in the contact me section, you don’t have to leave it in an open comment if you don’t want to.  I just need any help I can get here.  I feel like I am running in useless circles.

I mean really – really, for my 150,000 word novel I am supposed to go out and hire a professional editor for anywhere from $5,000 to $12,000 dollars just on a chance it will clean the manuscript up enough to maybe make it presentable enough to not get rejected by a publisher after one paragraph.  How does anyone do this?

The Apple Dessert Topping of all Happiness

This is SOOOO easy and healthy, in theory, as long as you ignore the fact it is going on top of ice cream. We made it last night for the first time and I have been waiting all day to make it again.  (I thought it might be excessive to have dessert at 10am.)

Ready for the ridiculously hard recipe.

Ingredients:

• Apple Juice, about 2 cups (I just poured it in)
• 2 peeled and chopped apples.
• Sugar

Cook apple juice on med. heat, until it has been reduced almost in half and add apple pieces.  Cook until apple pieces are tender, and remove apple pieces (then set aside) continue cooking juice until it has reduced down to a small amount of liquid (about 1/4 or less of what you started with).  Just before you are about to take it out of pan, turn off heat and toss in some sugar, a couple spoonfuls should do.  Stir in quickly and pour over the apple pieces. (You don’t want to caramelize the sugar so don’t leave it in the hot pan long.)

Cover bowl with plastic wrap. (Push down to the top of apples so there is no air between apples and plastic wrap.) Put bowl in refrigerator for about 1/2 an hour to an hour to cool it down a bit.  Then put it over top of vanilla ice cream.

Some caramel and cream on top of this or granola…Huummm, so much I want to try.  Apples in homemade apple syrup.  I am so great.  Go me!  Alright, enough back-patting, I’m off to make some more.

Doctor Who Scarf Follow Along – Post Two – Progress

Day three of knitting while watching TV at night and here is where I am – about halfway through the first red section. (4th color change.)

I am loving making this! I think I actually like the back side more where you can see the colors mixing with each other.  I might take the picture from that side next time.

I think I would be much further along if I didn’t have to stop at each color change and wrap a new center pulling ball of yarn (can we say yawn).  But in honor of all of the practice I am getting at doing this…there is a tutorial coming.

OK – he’s gonna kill me for this, but I have to share.  My always interesting spouse is constantly popping out with doozies that I can’t share with the world because they are either way, way too wrong to share (as is half the stuff I say) or he would just kill me if I published it.  But this, this has to be shared:

(Background, he is OBSESSED with owning new socks and belts, seriously, socks and belts – this is a decade long conversation, just with a new ending.)

Doctor Who Scarf – Post One – The Pattern

• Knitted in Garterstitch
• 70 Stitches wide
• I am using a US size six needle
• All color changes on same edge (even number of rows for each color)
• Tassels close together consisting of all 7 colors (about 4 inches long)

*All numbers are in rows

BEGIN 10 purple 52 tan 16 brown 10 yellow 22 red 8 purple 20 green 8 yellow 28 tan 14 red 8 green 10 purple 42 green 8 yellow 16 gray 8 red 54 tan

CONTINUE 10 purple 12 green 8 yellow 18 red 8 purple 38 Green 10 tan 6 gray 40 red 14 yellow 20 green 8 purple 42 tan 12 brown 20 gray 8 red 20 purple

CONTINUE 6 tan 14 yellow 54 green 16 red 12 gray 8 yellow 20 green 10 purple 12 tan 32 gray 10 red 18 yellow 40 tan 8 Green 24 red 14 purple 12 yellow

CONTINUE 44 brown 8 red 14 tan 18 green 28 gray 30 yellow 50 purple 16 tan 8 brown 18 green 24 red 14 gray 10 yellow 26 tan 12 green END

I learned a lot more than I ever wanted to know about Doctor Who scarfs while researching the pattern I wanted to use. There are some super wacky fans out there. I chose this pattern, mainly because I thought it looked the best and the website I got it from had the clearest instructions. You can get patterns from different season scarves and the patterns come in either this format or in color block format, which I find helpful…the only problem is that I couldn’t find anywhere how much yarn I would actually need. So I simply guessed, ordered and prayed.

Speaking of just ordering and praying.  I don’t think I am going to order yarn online again.  I spent a lot of time price and color shopping.  I knew I needed specific colors and I needed a lot of yarn (working within a budget here).  I determined very quickly that I was going to have to sacrifice on the material.  I had to downgrade from wool to acrylic almost immediately but I still thought I could hit the mark for the colors…I was wrong.  Plus I got totally burned on shipping costs; it ate through much of my savings.  (I went with Lion Brand, Vanna’s Choice Acrylic.)

Now let me just say, the colors my yarn actually turned out to be are still  lovely, and the scarf will be very nice.  I made sure to order all within one brand so they will all blend well together and they are still going to have a very 70’s feel…but the tan on the screen ended up beige and the gray ended up taupe.  So we’ll see.  It’s not a huge deal.  90% of the people in the world weren’t going to understand the scarf anyway and of the remaining 10% who get it – well, I am unlikely to come across a super-fan as I don’t attend conventions.

However be warned, should any future conversation ever start like this:

“Hey, I love your Doctor Who scarf…but you know that he never had a creamy beige in any season right?”

I have a mean right hook, and yes, I am bigger than you.