desfontaines

I hate purses.

But I did find one that was right for me a couple years ago.

It ran off Thursday night.

I think the worst part of it all is trying to find a replacement. The credit cards were easily cancelled. The lock on the door is easily replaced. A new license was only $9. The money loss was unfortunate, but similar to if I had done other completely stupid things, like getting a speeding ticket.

I like outside pockets for cell phones. I like slots inside for cards, rather than the plastic inserts (often for photos) that rip and stretch quickly, causing cards to fall out. Lots and lots of slots, because I have many cards and I DON'T like carrying a wallet in addition to the purse - the purse IS the wallet.

I like smallish ones. I used to have a purse that was about the size of a cell phone - it was okay, but I didn't like the plastic inserts for cards and I couldn't carry my checkbook in it. The one I loved was just big enough for checkbook AND a standard paperback, so long as it wasn't terribly long. I usually just attached my keys to the shoulder strap with push/pull pins (I also need to find more of THOSE now) so they were always handy.

Functional. Not "stylish" or "pretty" or shit like that.

God, I *hate* shopping for "girly" shit like this, because there's so much CRAP that's trying to be "stylish" and not functional to sift through.

Yesterday, Jody woke up all disoriented and out of it. He didn't really have much luck getting his bearings, either, throughout our few hours at 12th Night. He felt hot to the touch, and we ended up calling it quits.

Today, my brain *hurts*. The world has a slow spin to it when I'm keeping my head fairly still, but anytime I turn my head quickly, I regret it.

Ugh.

It's that time of year again! Time to take the private list I started on the first of the year and share it with y'all. Although I've got three books in progress, there's no way I'm finishing any of them by the end of today.

I thought it was a rather short list until I looked at the three other years that I've done this. Turns out it's #2. It's also heavily series-focused.... Temeraire, Mercy Thompson, Tower and the Hive/Pegasus, Elemental Masters.... those four series count for about half the books this year!

( Read more... )

"I know. You know I know. I know you know I know. We know Henry knows, and Henry knows we know it. We're a knowledgeable family."

Ah, The Lion in Winter, right on the tail of Love Actually. Excellent, excellent Christmas movies. :)

I'm sitting here in my parents' living room, and there's been a movie going on that no one's really been watching.

I had to turn it off when it got to some nasty torture scene.

Turned it back on to watch what appeared to be the female lead die by drowning. Just about turned it off there, too.

The final scene, I hear the male lead say, "The name's Bond, James Bond." So I looked it up online to see what the hell it was that I was watching - Casino Royale.

If this is normal for James Bond movies, I can't say I really ever want to see any more. I think I'd rather continue as a completely Bond-free mind. Or actually, I'd prefer to go back to my previously completely Bond-free mind, as what I saw was distinctly the sort of thing that will bother me for a long time.

I miss my old apartment at 14 mile and Rochester, in Clawson.

Especially when seeing hotel rates for all the Cons that happen about 3 miles away from it!

Hmm... I think I'm going to list these here so I don't forget them. :) I'll probably see any of the ones I see a bit later than they open, because I'm a huge fan of the cheap Cinemark 16! Hooray for 75 cent movies!

1/8 - Daybreakers - vampiric apocalypse?
1/15 - Book of Eli - cyberpunk western apocalypse?
2/12 - The Wolfman - maybe. Anthony Hopkins, Victorian England, werewolves... maybe
2/26 - Black Death - "deliciously brooding, dark-ages adventure yarn" - I'm there!
3/5 - Alice in Wonderland - no brainer
3/26 - Clash of the Titans - yeah, I know, it isn't the classic... but I like FX, action, armor and swords!
4/30 - Iron Man 2 - Robert Downey Jr ... oh drool.
5/14 - Robin Hood - aw heck, why not if it's at the cheap theater?
5/28 - Prince of Persia: Sands of Time - again with the costumes and swords and action and all that jazz!
6/5 - Eagle of the Ninth - maybe. Depends on if it's got pretty action of legions of Roman soldiers
6/18 - Jonah Hex - another maybe... looks like a dark and gritty Western. And John Malkovich as the bad guy.
7/9 - Eclipse - because sparkling vampires are just so damn FUNNY!
7/30 - The A-Team - oh, the nostalgia!
10/1 - Priest - post-apocalyptic Western with vampires?
11/19 - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - well, duh
12/17 - Tron Legacy - another duh
?? - Scott Pilgrim vs. The World - fun geekiness? Not much on it.

Lots of adventure! Lots of action! Lots of apocalypse! Fun, fun, fun!

Stand in line outside for 15 minutes, munching on the breakfast burrito I'd just made and sipping hot tea.

Orderly file into Kohl's, grab 2 of 3 items, and meet up with Jody as he gets there. He waits in line with the 2 while I search out a 3rd, then join him. Great conversation with the lawyer ahead of us.

Out of store 1 hour after it opens, in the parking lot of Office Max almost two hours early. Started reading Pegasus in Flight. Used tea to keep hands warm once I needed to leave the car at 40 minutes before opening.
Couldn't get to the tickets for the projector, but Jody got it at the store he was waiting at!

Back home, read a little more, slept a little. Yay!

I like Black Friday, but not for gift shopping, oh no. This is how I snag keen items, like my (old) fridge, the dishwasher, the TV (all three in one fell swoop at ABC Warehouse, just after buying the house but before moving in), and the couch (Art Van). I already get up pretty early regularly, so getting up just a little bit earlier to wait in a parking lot with a thermos of hot tea and a book isn't that big of an issue for me. The crowds can be irritating, but it's worth it if it's something I've been needing at massive savings.

That, and I just enjoy trying to optimize plans in the hunt, even if the strategy doesn't work out in the end. It's a way to game the system. I like gaming the system! :)

This year's plan? Kohl's at 4 AM for a new set of pots and pans - the old nonstick ones (a day-after-Xmas Meijer doorbuster) are finally starting to wear out after many years - and a Belgian waffle maker cause Jody likes to make me low-carb waffles! From there, Jody and I will split up and go to separate Office Max stores, which open at 7 AM, to try and snag one of the LCD projectors. $400 is a bit more than I'd like to spend on something now, but it'll mean I'll have one for my classroom for as long as it will last, and it'll be tax deductible at least. It's exactly like the one that my mother is so generously lending me, so I know it'll work fine. I just hate monopolizing her's!

Good luck to anyone else out in the crowds, particularly those of you working during it all! My closest brush with the hell that is Black Friday was just working for a Halloween USA one season. No comparison, really.

( Well, that was a decent weekend! )

I decided to not start a big project in my science class for the two days we have this week, putting it off until we're back from the Thanksgiving holiday. Grabbed an appropriate video from the school library - "Amazing Earth" by the Discovery Channel. Long enough to last today and most of tomorrow. Perfect.

It's narrated by Patrick Stewart. *swoon* I get a whole hour of this velvet voice talking about plate tectonics, asteroids, formation of the oxygen atmosphere, and the like! *SWOON*

“I’m looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-live-without-each-other love."

That was Carrie, in the final episode of Sex in the City.

I'm not much of a Carrie fan. That kind of passionate emotion actually bugs me. It's too make-believe, fairy-tale, and nonsensical for me, I guess. Unrealistic in real life.

I'd prefer sultry, sexy Samantha or smart, pragmatic Miranda any day. But I do think I need to watch the whole series again. I'm saying it here so that I remember to do so, next time I'm dinking around on the computer at home.

I found this amusing... but in a sad way.

The middle school is doing this big "caught doing good" leadership thing. Teachers get coupons to give to the kids they think did something exceptional. The kids put their name on the coupon, select a prize number that they're interested in, and the coupon goes into a raffle for that prize. There's a display of the 9 prizes near the office.

So what are the prizes?

1. Cute little rag doll
2. Little book (photo album, maybe?) on "sisters"
3. Peacock feather mask
4. Photo frame
5. Ribbon board for sticking photos and memos on -- with lots of words on it like "Girls only" and "Glamour"
6. Recipe cards
7. Little spiral-bound memo book with a wooden holder - the holder would be what I call "country kitsch" in style.
8. Pastel colored memo pad

and....

9. SPIDER MAN T-SHIRT!

The first 8 aren't completely focused on girls. I mean, recipe cards could be good for either sex, and the photo frame is also gender neutral. The peacock mask is pretty sweet too. But there's a definite, strong leaning towards "girly stuff" in all but the t-shirt.

Today I was out of my classroom for training for Michigan Merit Exam, seeing as I'm still running it for the high school, even though I'm now teaching in the middle school, in a building right across a courtyard. I didn't HAVE to go, technically, but I did want to. My back-up test supervisor from last year couldn't do it this year, as she has a son at another school taking the test. So my new back-up was required to take the training, and I knew it was lousy enough that having someone along to make snarky comments with would help.

See, the training is run in a biiiiiig convention hall. We get a huge packet of color-coded papers, and spend about 3 hours watching _video_ of people from ACT (for the ACT and the WorkKeys tests), from Measurement Inc (the company that the state hired to do the state-specific tests on a third day of testing), and the state Department of Education. They pretty much just read through over 200 PowerPoint slides that outline what they expect us to do.

It's a GREAT "How Not to Teach" lesson!

And then it was followed by a Q&A session where about half the questions were from people who were obviously not paying attention, because they had simple answers directly in the instructions. However, this was better than last year, when it was pretty much ALL stupid questions. There were actually some very interesting ones this year!

I had planned on taking my laptop and entering the names of all our students who are taking the test this year into a spreadsheet, so I'd have a nice file of them that can be manipulated as needed, unlike the list on paper that the high school counselor's secretary gave me. Unfortunately, I got there just before they started, and the place was already packed. Couldn't get a seat at a power outlet, and my laptop's battery lasts, oh, about 5 minutes.

Oh well.

I did whip out a legal pad and got together a good list of what my 7th grade Social Studies class will be covering over the next three weeks, at least! I'll be spending some of this weekend trying to sort through the stuff I've got for these topics, adjust as need be, and create whatever handouts/instructions/activities need to get done.

And after I was done, the awesome known as my husband met me at Red Robin for lunch, and I stuffed myself on my free birthday burger. Mmmm!

I need to post something happy, dangit. And kitties make me _very_ happy! And I'm happy in this picture! :)



Thunder Cat helped me work on my loose gown the afternoon before Coronation by holding it in place for me while I sewed. What a helpful kitty!

Thank you to Midair and Alina for passing that photo of myself and their kitty to me!

I spent the past week or so busily finishing sleeves, beading, and binding! After much fussing, I had managed to drape a short sleeve that I was happy with, and I cut it out of scrap to use as a base. Then, with a pattern drawn out on newspaper, I layed out how my strips of fabric would go, and put down measurements that seemed to have enough extra to allow for poof. After that, I had about 10 hours of sewing and binding strips of black velveteen and gold silk with green silk. I watched a lot of Good Eats episodes during that, thanks to the recommendation of pstscrpt.

Then, some linen and fiddling with strips to lay out the sleeve bases:


At this point, there was hardly any black velveteen left, so I sacrificed the bodice to get the ends of the sleeves!


At that point, it was basically a lot of hand-sewing of binding and finishing off the pearls, which I worked on all Friday. Literally, all Friday. I had arranged for a personal business day to work on it. Worked on it at elaine_alina and charles_midair's home, while waiting for him to get home from work. Worked on it until there wasn't enough light anymore in the car. Worked on it at the fabulous apartment rental that turnberryknkn had found us all until 1 AM Chicago time. Worked on it for a few more minutes in the morning, until it was wearable. There's still some work to be done, but it's minimal. Pictures soon!

Well, actually garbage day is Friday here. But I haven't posted good stuff recently. Must remember to post costuming stuff!

There was once a dress.


This dress had a LOT of history. Two yards of a beautiful black and gold brocade was bought for me at the ValDay event by my first fiancee as a Valentine's Day gift. One year later, I had used black velveteen, trim, and beads to create the dress, and went to ValDay again with said guy.

Since then, the dress has made many appearances. I took it to Chicago once, forgetting the brocade skirt, and ended up stitching the front edges together in the woman's dressing room. I bought a black velvet hat to go with it. It made it to dancemaster_e's laurelling at Pennsic, so that I'd match temporally the outfit I had made him for the occassion. lyev requested that I wear it for HIS laurelling.

But I don't want to wear Elizabethan much anymore. And I did want this new loose gown idea that I had mentioned previously to happen. And here was this skirt full of nice black velveteen that wasn't being put to good use.

( So I played fast and loose with my seam ripper. )

The neat thing about MY Midas Touch is that a) it doesn't make things super heavy, b) it's cheap and easy, and c) it cleans up pretty well.



( Bling-bling! )

(plus, the insect population seems to be rapidly dwindling)

So there was this fabric that I decided I wanted to make my new loose gown out of. I thought it was at my parents' in a footlocker, but it wasn't. I kept searching, because I _knew_ I had it somewhere. The good news? I found it. The bad news? There was only 1/2 a yard, and I need 3-4 yards. Boo.

The more I think about it, the less I'm liking the fabric choices I put in my previous costuming post (by the way, I fixed the pictures on it, I think!). Maybe I'll just make the whole thing black velveteen, lined with gold silk dupioni, perhaps even piecing fabric together from a dress I made back in, oh, 1993-94? That way I can use the yummy green dupioni for something else, like an underskirt.

Anyhow, because I haven't decided yet what to do with the loose gown, I decided to make use of the stuff I did find at my parents' -- little coffee straws!

I've been collecting bits and pieces to make an uber-awesome girdle -- something beyond just a string of beads and pearls. I wanted kick-ass gold plaques and pearls. Kind of like this one, from Allesandro Alori's portrait of Maria de Medici.



( On to girdle-goodness and pictures! )

This is getting really frustrating. My home is cleaner than it normally is. Yet for the past week or two, we keep getting ants. More and more ants. Ants crawling on me where I sit on the couch. Lots and lots of ants on the kitchen counters and floor. And as of yesterday, we started getting lots of houseflies.... I almost never see a housefly in my house, and yesterday I killed about 5 of them, saw 6 of them on the kitchen light this evening. Wasps have started swarming the top corner of the front door, especially in the mornings -- I've nailed them with wasp killer twice. They die, and more come back. Chased a cricket out the front door a day or two ago, when it tried to get in as I was using the door (I think Jody did the same thing a bit earlier, too). And now a cockroach!?!?!?!??!!?!?!?

WTF!?!?!?!?!?!??! Are we going to need to barricade the house with borax at every wall, like we did three years ago when the Texan fleas tagged along with Jody and Grey?