Measi's Musings

Archive for July, 2005

A few weeks back, I joined a yahoo group designed specifically for cross-stitch related blog questions, called SBQ. Since I was busy with “the moves”, I wasn’t participating… but now I can finally get to them. Questions are posted roughly every Wednesday.

Since there are many in the archives, I’ll probably work backward through a couple of them every week. This week’s question, “What do you do when you have some sort of obligation stitching to do, but don’t want to do it?” doesn’t apply to me, as I’ve never done any obligation stitching to date… so here are a few others from the archives…

7/6/05- Do you think that you stitch neater on Evenweave than you do on Aida cloth? If so, why?

My quarter stitches are definitely neater (for obvious reasons to anyone who’s reading this that knows what Aida and Evenweave *are*), but otherwise I don’t think my stitches are that much neater on Evenweave. If I have one strong fault with my stitching, it’s that I’m not as adept at keeping my thread tension even, so my stitches often are uneven, no matter what I’m stitching on. Hopefully that will change with time and increased experience.

6/29/05 When starting a new project, do you start in the middle? If you do, once you’ve worked down to the bottom, do you turn your chart and fabric around so that you are stitching the top section downwards again or do you just stitch upwards from the middle?

I always start in the middle. I don’t work to the bottom, though– I honestly kind of go all directions from the middle when I work. I try to find identifyable forms to set stitching goals, and work that way.

As for turning my chart and fabric– as odd as it sounds, I always work with my hoop upside down when I stitch (the chart stays upright), but turn it back upright when I am backstitching. It’s really, really odd. But the artists and designers in my department at work have suggested that I do it because I’m focusing on the individual details of the stitches when I’m actually stitching crosses, rather than the finished image as a whole. When I’m backstitching, I’m finishing the image.

It’s really screwed up, but if I turn my hoop upright, a lot of times I get completely messed up as I read charts. Clearly, my brain needs some rewiring.

6/22/05 Are there any types of designs that you won’t stitch?

Unless it were for an obligation piece for a friend, I won’t stitch Christian or Bible-related pieces. I’m not Christian, so I have no purpose for them.

The ONLY exception to this rule would be a stitching of the Footprints poem, which is Christian in origin, but has a bit more universal appeal. I find the poem inspirational. I expect to eventually have some form of this in my rotation, most likely as a gift to my mom (who really loves the poem).

Looky what I did in the last hour…

Eventually, I plan on having everything on my site switch over to the graphics… Stitching page, fanfic, faith ramblings, and yes, my journal. I’m not exactly looking forward to coding Blogger script into this layout, but hey… it works.

I’m too poor to go out and do anything else right now– might as well work on the web pages.

Now if Globat wouldn’t be completely fucked up when I save pages, I could actually do this faster. I guess I’ll work out the pages in Notepad…

*sigh*

I’m really, really sick of my Keds sport shoes (they’re those weird half clog/half tennis shoe things). They’re really comfy… don’t get me wrong. But in my brilliance of packing, they were the only shoes I kept out of boxes. And so I’ve been wearing the SAME pair of shoes everyday, for every purpose, for about three weeks straight now. This is complicated by the fact that I improperly labeled my shoe box, so right now, I honestly have no clue what still-taped box contains my shoes. I know the pile is in a larger box (I AM a girl, after all… regardless of my personal inability to be fashionable… I still have too many shoes).

But yeah– I’m getting sick of wearing the same pair for everything. If they don’t show up by payday on Friday, I think I’ll hit Marshalls across the street from work immediately after my half-day of work, and buy a new pair of shoes.

Just ’cause.

***

Last night was the first attempt at our monthly Worlds Largest Dungeon excursion. It’s in Abington, closer to where we used to live, and runs from around 7 p.m. to 11 or 11:30 (depending on interruptions during the game– we have a stopwatched 4 hours of gaming time). The game went well. Lots of battling. Some plot development about our environment (if that makes sense). Pretty good treasure haul. We seem have been working through an area of the dungeon that better holds interest. Section A was very empty, and a lot of “oh, look… another empty room.” Not so with the area we’re in now.

Getting up this morning was a bit rough, but it was due as much to a lack of sleep the night before as it was the lessened hours last night. Erich and I stayed up a bit too early on Sunday night, so we were tired yesterday morning, too. I have a bit of a headache, but I’ll manage. We’re still partially adjusting to the new commute anyway, so everything compounds a bit.

Tonight WILL be an early bed night. I plan on being under the covers by 11. Preferrably 10:30.

But before I go to bed, I have a few things I want to do… like actually set up my desktop computer in my office (finally!). Erich helped me move the bookshelves and desks into place on Sunday so I can start unloading boxes. I seriously can’t wait to have my office together. Hopefully I can have the majority of that accomplished by the end of the weekend.

Tonight, I focus only on the computer. Because I’m already tired and won’t want to do much else… but I’m in desperate need of an escape into Sims 2 for a while.

And as a note to myself, for this week…

1) Last post-party cleanup in kitchen
2) Finish backlog of laundry, put away
3) Pay all bills
4) Double-check bill and subscription addresses, update where needed
5) Respond to emails (where needed)

Busy, busy, busy…

Best. Letter. Ever.

Original link found here…

What the fuck do you think you’re doing?

This is London. We’ve dealt with your sort before. You don’t try and pull this on us.

Do you have any idea how many times our city has been attacked? Whatever you’re trying to do, it’s not going to work.

All you’ve done is end some of our lives, and ruin some more. How is that going to help you? You don’t get rewarded for this kind of crap.

And if, as your MO indicates, you’re an al-Qaeda group, then you’re out of your tiny minds.

Because if this is a message to Tony Blair, we’ve got news for you. We don’t much like our government ourselves, or what they do in our name. But, listen very clearly. We’ll deal with that ourselves. We’re London, and we’ve got our own way of doing things, and it doesn’t involve tossing bombs around where innocent people are going about their lives.

And that’s because we’re better than you. Everyone is better than you. Our city works. We rather like it. And we’re going to go about our lives. We’re going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we’re going to work. And we’re going down the pub.

So you can pack up your bombs, put them in your arseholes, and get the fuck out of our city.

1. How did you learn about yesterday’s bombings in London? I found out when reading my friends page in my LJ. I wondered what Qelen was talking about… and then switched over to CNN.

2. Do you have any personal connections to the area? Some online bloggers, penpals, and a few work mates.

3. Do you use public transportation? Every workday, yes.

4. Have you ever let threats of terrorism change the way that you live each day? “Let” isn’t a fair word to use, IMHO. My day to day life hasn’t changed due to terrorism threats. But governmental laws and added security have altered things slightly– not by my choice.

5. If you could say something directly to the person or group responsible for this tragedy, what would you say? I wouldn’t, honestly. I imagine talking to them would be like my attempt to talk to someone who is an Evangical Christian on the far Republican Right– if you don’t agree with them, you’re not really going to have any meaningful conversation. It would be a waste of my time.

Courtesy of Friday Fiver.

I woke this morning, checked my email, and saw a post from FlyingBlogSpot regarding London. Did a WTF? and checked CNN.

So before I get into anything– my thoughts are with those I know in Britain, and those I know who have friends and family in and around London who may be affected by the explosions this morning.

Since communication in and out of the U.K. seems to be nearly nil at the moment and both emails and phone messages aren’t getting through… if you see this and are in and around London, please reply and let me know you’re okay.

~ Mel.

I’m finding that living in a house for the first time since moving to college is a strange but comforting experience. It’s definitely different than the apartment complex, where my front door merely led to a hallway for the better part of nine years. There’s definitely something cozy about padding down to the kitchen to grab a glass of water in the middle of the night, or listening to the neighbors shooting off the holiday firecrackers down the block, or smelling the neighbors’ bbq grills and mowed grass over the weekend.

They’re all things that I forgot about once I moved to college. But they’re very tangible parts of the neighborhood as a child, and ones I definitely have welcomed back itno my life quickly.

Today is my last full day of “vacation” before heading back to work, and so far, I’m feeling fairly in control of the unpacking. The kitchen is virtually done. Save the stove, which still needs an electrical socket repair to be plugged in, the kitchen functions just fine and is almost completely together. We have a grill in the backyard and the microwave for leftovers, so we can cook at the house (rather than run out for junk food, which we’ve done entirely too much of the past three weeks). I think I finally felt in control of the house once the kitchen was functioning. I can get dishes done. We have food in the fridge. No worries here.

One small frustration has revealed itself over the weekend– somewhere in the mess, Erich has misplaced his ring of keys, which means that we’re down to one car and one set of house keys. We’re doing to do some lost and found calls to a couple stores that we’ve frequented in the past few days to make sure they weren’t left there by accident (both of us have done to places together several times). We’ve managed to get into Erich’s car and checked both the car and the trunk… no dice. And I’ve been looking everywhere as I’ve been unpacking, but nothing so far. Thankfully the trash hasn’t gone out since we moved in– and won’t until Thursday, so if it needs to happen, we’ll dig through the trash bags just in case they accidently got swept into a bag. We only have a small number of open but still semi-full boxes to check through– most of the remaining boxes are still completely taped up (which eliminates them from the search).

But aside from that, it’s been a smooth weekend. We had our first dinner party yesterday for the 4th. Erich’s dad came over, as well as our friends Kevin, Tone, and Robin. We did lots of grilling, chatted, showed off the house, and just had a relaxing afternoon together. Next weekend will be the busy one with the official first house party. Hopefully the forecasted tropical storm will avoid us so we can have a sunny, dry day to party outside in the yard.

Before the party, I went into a patch of our yard that is really nothing but weeds (yay– we get to do some tilling next year!) and dug up about three dozen day lillies that had propogated into the area of the yard. Despite it being weeds, Erich’s mowing the area just to keep the height down right now, and I wanted to salvage the lillies if I could to transplant around the yard. They’re all bright orange tiger lillies– very pretty. I know that they’ll spread quickly once I get them back into the ground, but for now they’re all in my window boxes (that weren’t planted this year since I knew we were moving). We have several bare spots around the yard, so these should definitely help to liven them up quickly.

Anyway… I need to get over to the train station to pick Erich up from the commuter rail. Back to real life tomorrow. (whee!)

I feel so weird. After a couple months of coming down here to do little maintenance and update projects on the house, we’re living here. It’s so strange. But oh so cool.

We spent the rest of yesterday doing very little due to exhaustion. We’d packed up any non-boxed stuff into our cars to haul down, and the trips up and down three flights of stairs killed both of us. Dinner (with celebratory margaritas) was spent at the Texas Roadhouse down the street. Bed arrived soon after. Both of us were out by around 10:30.

Things I’ve learned this move…

Getting movers was the best idea ever. They might be somewhat expensive ($1,200, in our case), but were worth every penny. They showed up at around 8:30 yesterday morning. They cleared the entire apartment out by noon. Had lunch, drove down, and had everything unpacked and into the house by around quarter past three. It saved our backs– and our friendships with all of our friends.

Color-coded room tape from U-Haul rocks. Once we directed the movers for the individual pieces of furniture, they just moved all the boxes in by themselves. We just taped pieces of white paper with a slash of each individual room’s tape on the doorways… they were able to do half of the unloading by themselves. The tape costs $25 for a 4-bedroom pack and saved tons of labelling and sorting time on both ends of the move.

Starting early to pack was key. Since my life had been enveloped by the office move until about mid-June, I hadn’t had time or energy to focus on the apartment move. Taking two weeks off before moving was a lifesaver. Save a few hodge-podge items and the bathroom, we were completely done packing by around 8 p.m. the night before. We actually got a full night’s sleep before moving. Which is nearly unheard of. The only thing I would have changed as far as our packing was concerned was start a bit earlier with items we didn’t use as much– cleaning through drawers, throwing junk out. It would have made the last two days much more relaxed as far as packing goes.

But we’re here. And I’ve already managed to unpack most of the dish boxes. I’ll be doing double the work in the kitchen– I need to wipe out and re-paper the dish shelves, but we’re doing so much furniture moving that I just wanted to put all of the dishes safely away in cabinets for peace of mind. If they need to be washed, no big deal– we have a dishwasher for most of that.

The cats are doing okay. Gus is completely traumatized and spent most of yesterday in a fetal position in either the cat carrier or under hiding places. He’s getting a little bit braver today, but his tail is firmly tucked between his legs, and he’s slinking around very low to the ground when he actually goes anywhere. Colley’s getting a bit more calmed down, after spending yesterday wedging himself into very good hiding places (as is his signature style in strange places). Fizz has been the brave one, being the first to really explore. She’s completely on edge, though, and is hissing and growling if any other cat approaches her at all.

All three cats insisted on accompanying us to the bathroom in a pack this morning, and then back to the bedroom. I found that very amusing.

So today’s going to be fairly laid back. A few boxes done, a few furniture placements, a little shopping. Nothing frantic, though. We got through the hard stuff. It can go slowly now.

It feels so good to actually be home.