My Not-So-Idle Hands

I have been SCREAMING at my fingers for the past half an hour now trying to get them to crochet something comprehensible. I ended up with this feeble excuse for the beginning of a doily:

Yes, that is a doily on my bed.

Some days it feels like my hands have been taken over by a demon with no understanding of the basics of crochet. If only the devil in my hands were able to do something right.

How can I possibly be this effin' clumsy after 12 years of doing crochet? Now granted, I have been sick off and on for the past week and I am trying to do some extremely delicate thread crochet, but come off it hands! There are no excuses for this amount of sheer clumsy uncoordination.

My hands are like this, but hands, not feet.

All of this hand-hating made me think about other people whose hands might have betrayed them.
 

First, I have George Washington. Good 'ol Georgie could not tell a lie and chopped down his dad's cherry tree, but he left out the part about his hands being under the control of a cherry hating demon.

My next subject is another president, Richard Nixon. According to the Chicago Tribune, Nixon supposedly got in trouble one sunny day in Brazil when his hands flashed the OK sign as he was stepping off the plane. In Brazil, OK means "up yours" or "fuck off," whatever you think the equivalent to the middle finger is. I think Tricky Dick can reliably blame this faux pas on demonically controlled hands.

After these two worthy candidates I can only site characters in fiction and movies. Lady Macbeth's hands betrayed her murderous intentions. The poor lady not only was unable to get a good night sleep, but her hands totally gave away her guilty conscience by constantly trying to wash themselves of her role in her husband's act of regicide.

In "Idle Hands" Anton Tobias' evil right hand kills both of his best buds before he manages to cut it off. He still has to follow the creepy thing around for the rest of the movie because it keeps trying to kill Jessica Alba's character, the super cute spunky girl across the street, whatever her name is.

And lastly, but most certainly the bestly, Ash from the "Evil Dead" films. Not only does Ash's hand, and the rest of his body, get possessed by a murdering devil thing, but he manages to cut off his own hand and bionically attach a chainsaw to his bloody stump.

 

Maybe I can somehow graft crochet needles to my palm, since my fingers keep disobeying me. Although that may make me more like Edward Scissor hands than awesome evil-whatever slaying Ash Williams.

This IS The Doily I'm Looking For

Oh happy, happy day! I FINALLY finished that doily that, about two weeks ago, I said was only supposed to take a couple of days. Take a look! It actually turned out to be a doily instead of a sock or a beanie or a basket or some such thing. Coincidentally, you know what else was only supposed to take a few days and ended up taking WAY longer?

Felucia: Marshland

My "brief" tour as a clone in Felucia. (Hello Battlefront III? We're going on like 7 years now.) Thank goodness for Aayla Secura's chicky Jedi awesomeness.

Anyway, the main reason why this doily took so much longer than I expected was because - well, the further along you get in a doily the more stitches you have to make, and that means that it takes longer and longer for you to complete each subsequent row. It almost felt like I was creating some kind of wormholish paradoxical doily where the closer I got to completion the farther away I was from actually being finished. Honestly, I just SERIOUSLY underestimated the time involved in a project like this.

That being said, the end results were, I think, pretty well worth it. The doily came out beautifully despite paradoxical wormholing and its constantly trying to change into a pair of leg warmers. There were a couple of things, however, that I really need to work on.

First, I need better tools and a better proficiency for blocking my piece. I learned that washing and blocking are very important for the sizing and shape of the work and I'm sure they can be done a tid bit more conveniently than my method of sticking pins randomly into various stitches in the vain hope that they will magically give my doily a prettier shape.

 

greenolive

Second - I can't really remember what my second thing was. Never underestimate the power of a time-warping doily? Don't lose your crochet hook by sticking it into your messy hair and forgetting about it and then taking a couple of days to find it under the bed? (The hook wasn't in my hair for days, mind you. It fell out eventually and ended up as a dust bunny's jousting lance.) Maybe I should just try again. I think I'm almost ready for my next one.

Diet Sabotage

So yesterday was hubbie’s birthday and also a Monday night, which is our regular turbo kickboxing night.

I kind of wish I had her pants and obvious ninja skills

Brent is funny because he didn’t even think about skipping out on TKB for his birthday. Instead he decides that he wants to give everyone in our kickboxing class a special birthday treat – cupcakes. That’s right, we took cupcakes to our local 24 Hour Fitness. You should’ve seen us walking up to the gym with two trays full of 80 mini chocolate and vanilla cake batter cupcakes.

Sprinkles mean birthday goodness

We picked up a ponderously large group of drooling gawkers on our way in the door, not to mention a crap load of dirty looks. The most popular question of the night was an outraged, “Why would you bring cupcakes to a gym?” Brent’s birthday was obviously not a good enough excuse for most people. Fortunately, the workers at 24 Hour saved us from having to stand with trays in front of the treadmills, cupcakes held enticingly out of reach. Thank goodness for people who work out enough that they don’t worry about eating a mini cupcake or two.

As for the rest of the people in our class, you would think that a cupcake was the end of the world. It was like by giving out this one small treat we would send people down a never ending diabetic spiral of binge eating, glucose overdose, and straight fat injections. On the contrary, in my experience with my recent weight loss, it helps to do everything in moderation. Cutting out treats like cupcakes and cookies completely from my diet only leads me to gorging when I finally allow myself to have one.

Gorge-ous cupcakes

Anyway, our awesome friend Brandon was gracious enough to supply our diet sabotaging stunt with his amazing cupcakes. You can order your own from BrandonCakes if you happen to be in the area. My favorite flavors are Ice Wine, Bubblegum, Li Hing Lemon, Tie-Dye, Vanilla Cake Batter...

Generation Y Are You Such Sissys?

Have you ever been chilling on the internet and had an obnoxiously stupid turn of phrase pop out at you and say, “Hey, look at me! I’m a horrible, horrible phrase and I’m in your face with my horribleness?” This happened to me today. It doesn’t happen often (I think the last time was either retrosexual, emo, or Twilight lover) but when it does this shit sticks with me. The thing that really pisses me off about stupid words is that once I see them they are stuck in my head forever! There is no going back, dammit.

So today I was looking at Pinterest and this thingy popped up:

(Find this infographic at KellyAshworth.com with information from ThinkSplendid.com)

 

Um…what the hell is a millennial? Am I an idiot for not knowing this? Because this “infographic” seems to imply that I am. (Don’t ask me how a graphic can imply anything about me, my husband asks me that question all the time and I’m tired of it. Many things, including inanimate objects, can make horrible implications about you as a person without even knowing that they’re doing it…just like my husband.)

 Of course, after looking at this poster a bit, I finally realized that they are talking about the generation supposedly after my generation, and that made me even more irritated. Firstly, if I’m Generation X, why aren’t we calling them Generation Y? Well, according to Wikipedia, which also prefers to call them Generation Y, “millennial” is a phrase which the generation coined themselves. So millions of kids just spontaneously started walking around saying, "I’m a millennial?" I'm pretty sure that it was people in my parent’s generation that coined the phrase Generation X and that we had no effin' choice in the matter. I've decided to call the millennial generation, Generation Y are you such sissys? There you go sissy generation, you suck.

Secondly, my husband is considered a millennial and I’m not. How can you consider someone who was twenty at the turn of the century a millennial and not someone who was twenty-two? If you're going to use the word millennial to describe a group of people, shouldn't they be a group of people that were born around the millennium, say 1990-2010? They double suck.

 Thirdly - you have to actually read the infographic for thirdly. “They prefer whole foods over processed foods. They will spend more on ethically sourced meats & farm-to-table experiences.” Farm-to-effin-table experiences? How about a my-foot-to-your-face experience? Bigoted foodie hippies are what these kids are. They are the Hitlers of gastrointestinal anything; they want to take out all impure foods and leave only the “pure” Anglo-Saxon food. That's what I'm taking away from this infographic, at any rate. What’s next Generation Sissys? Passing a law against McDonalds? Oh wait, didn't they just ban the Happy Meal in freakin' California because mothers are afraid that their millennial children won't get that farm-to-table experience? (Totally not the reason but whatever.) They triple, quadruple times a billion suck. Screw you Millennnials, I don’t like your name.

Twas a Dreary and Doily Day - Hooray!

View of other houses by my house getting SOAKIN' wet

It's been so incredibly rainy here for the past few days. I mean like thunder and lightning, flash floods, and raindrops the size of peas kind of rainy. It's the rainy that makes you wanna curl up under the blankets and crochet. (Yes, we do have blankets in Hawaii; add to that electricity, rock music, and bad drivers, and you've got everything you need for a full and eventful life.) Well, you might not want to crochet. You might want to curl up inside your Tauntaun and read, for all I know, but I really like to crochet. Speaking of Tauntauns, check this out:

Yes, it's an adult Tauntaun sleeping bag. They have a kiddie version, but who wants to shove their kid in a smelly Tauntaun? I've absolutely got to get one of these for my summer vacation on Hoth, otherwise known as Alaska. By the way, you can totally buy this at Think Geek.

So, back to rain and gloom and non Star Warsie things. The only bad part about curling up under said blanket and finishing said crochet project is that I'm having said bad crochet day. Wait, I didn't say that until now. Anyway, I've had to pull out one and a half rows of my stitching two times now because of the same mistake. The same stupid mistake! Some days you just have to suck it up and crochet on. Here's the project I'm making:

It looks exactly like this only I'm using Knit-Cro-Sheen size 10 crochet thread in white and the doily is not quite finished yet. I am currently working on row 17 out of 22. It's coming out pretty well so far, but it's my first doily, so I could be completely wrong. I might be crocheting a leg warmer or a bra and just think I'm crocheting a doily. At any rate, I'll post whatever it is I end up with as soon as I'm done with it, which should be in a couple of days.

The pattern for the legwarmer-doily-brathingy came from this book. It's got pictures of some pretty good pineapple doilies in it. The ultimate goal for these doilies (because just having a doily isn't enough anymore) is to turn the finished ones into pillows. I've seen a few being sold on Etsy by Betsy Bell and I decided to make my own. Of course I need to actually make a doily first. Here's hoping.

The Dreaded Blank Page of a First Post

So, here I am, staring at the extremely blank page of my first blog post ever. Actually, I take it back, I often do blogging for my job. Just about every Monday, to tell you the truth. This is completely different. I wonder how many people started up a blog and just stopped right here? Anyway, if you are reading this, I am amazed. It would be nice to have someone take a look at what I have to say, but I'm really not expecting it. I think it will work out better this way.

This blog will encompass many things. It will talk about the absolute joy I find in gaming, even though I've been trying to stay away from Skyrim for a little over a week now. I will wax eloquent regarding my inability to make a specific craft work. For example, any card I am currently making, a knitting pattern I have recently thrown on the floor, or the scrapbook that I can never seem to get started. My blog will also go in depth into my love/hate relationship with movies and learning how to cook. I may mention my husband once in a while. (By the way, he was the one who thought this was a good idea - now you know who to blame.) I'll probably never mention Taylor Lautner, except for right now. If you find his name in this blog more than once, please let me know, so I can find a suitable punishment for my mind.

On a completely different note:

Who does a mediocre-esque looking person (I think this is me) have to sleep with to get a good game studio to finally put out Battlefront III?!?!? HELLO, the PlayStation 3 needs this! My 2 is only about 8 years old, but in gaming platform years that's like 80! By the way, I can't actually sleep with anyone to get this done, but I can try to find someone to do it. Maybe even pay them some money. I think I've got 40 bucks in my pocket right now, so how does a 30 dollar hooker sound, person who will take on Lucas Arts? Please get back to me about my offer, you're our only hope.