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Saturday, April 30, 2005
Or maybe there's nothing questionable about this illustration.
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Friday, April 29, 2005
Ryan gave me the most excellent t-shirt ever. It's the I'm blogging this shirt from ThinkGeek. Anyway, it adds that little something extra to, say, buying condoms.
Not that I'm actually doing that, since I left my office/house keys and my magic ATM card at her house this morning and have to run around like an insane person to retrieve them this afternoon. I do have a key to her place, but it's...at her place. So I have to go to her office, get her keys, go to her house, get my keys, take her keys back to her...blah blah blah. How to make Friday more fun! But I did have an excellent time watching MST3K and embroidering with her and Sarah the Hussy last night, so it all works out.
I wouldn't be so disturbed by this if it wasn't the second time in a week that I have forgotten my keys. On Wednesday I left them in the lock on the closet door at work, and only discovered the error when I arrived home. Fortunately, it was almost time to pick up Dennis at work, and he had his keys. I'm just starting to wonder if the part of my brain that is responsible for keys has shut down for some reason, and I'm hoping that it's not next to the part of my brain that is responsible for things like wearing my bra inside of my shirt instead of outside it. looks down at chest
We're getting a new (to us) bed next week and I'm very excited about it. Sleeping alone on our rapidly-deteriorating futon last weekend while Dennis was in Chicago made me realize that I needed to accelerate my mental timeline for buying a new mattress. I did some googling for prices, followed by number crunching on our financial situation and it was pretty discouraging. And then this week someone at church asked if I knew anyone who would be interested in a free swanky mattress that is less than a year old. Why, yes, I do know someone like that. And a way to get it to Oakland just materialized, too, since it won't fit in the bug (duh) or the wagon (had to measure - I suck at spatial relationships). I'm choosing to look at this as a God thing, yet another cosmic cluesticking that I could maybe stop freaking out about money.
I just talked to Dennis, who has decided that his new criteria for whether or not to complain about something is, "Will this make me sound like Andy Rooney?" Because that's the danger, isn't it? Didja ever have to listen to someone whose voice is like a rat in your brain go on and on about how stupid everyone else is? Didja? I'm going to try it, too. Especially about traffic and my commute, which has SUCKED GIANT LIZARD EGGS this week.
If you feel that you haven't spit enough Diet Coke onto your keyboard this week, I suggest another visit to Superdickery, which has only gotten funnier. Hey, it's Friday.
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Wednesday, April 27, 2005
This is from a little book called Stars to Go By for Boys, an alphabetical list of saints. Copyright 1946.
Denis has kind of a Lois Lane vibe:
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Tuesday, April 26, 2005
OMG! Sublime Stitching has monkey patterns. My enthusiasm for this is a bit pathetic given that I still haven't used any of the last four new patterns, including the Guadalupe one, which I NEED to do on dishtowels for my kitchen. But, MONKEYS!
My other wish-list item right now is a mug from Disgruntled Housewife. I just can't decide which one is my favorite. Probably the one that says I Love My Job on the front and then has Kill Me in very small letters on the back. Or maybe I want a monogrammed grocery tote with my new official monogram, WTF.
I find myself wanting to order deeply wrong versions of twee personalized things from Lillian Vernon. Like this:
Only with the word 'soul-crushing' instead of a name. Stupid-ass? Pointless? Dysfunctional? All would be fun.
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Sunday, April 24, 2005
So, la la la another skool weekend down. This was the first one where I only had three classes, as I am dropping the two in which I am the most behind. I'll take them again next year. I need to go over the schedule and come up with a reasonable plan for the next two years, something that gets me to a normal third year at the end. I'm all about the four-year plan, baby. No field ed for me next year. I seem to be the only person who thinks this is an expression of my lameness, so I guess I'll try to go with majority rule and be cool with it. I just want this year to be o-ver.
My major goal for the summer is to get our apartment a bit more in order. My clutter is out of control, and a lot of that is because there's no place for my stuff to go, so I think I need to get all top-level on its ass and rethink the whole stuff configuration.
I was going through some boxes this weekend and found one of my estate sale finds from last year. I got some Christian kid's books from the 50s for like a quarter each. They're in horrible condition, but the illustrations are fabulous and I'm hoping to find a suitable decoupage project for them at some point. This is from a First Communion book:
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Friday, April 22, 2005
This makes me very happy for some reason.
It's not mine. Honest: Assorted Abes check to see whose cell phone is ringing during dedication ceremonies for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill. [from SFGate]
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Thursday, April 21, 2005
I've decided that the dual-boot idea is a bit too This Way Lies Madness, so never mind.
Stupid thing I discovered last night as I worked on restoring the laptop: I forgot to back up my fonts. Ooops. Not a huge deal, since most of the ones I actually paid for came from Chank and I can re-download them. But, still, dumb. Also dumb was not realizing that the first thing I should do was re-install my anti-virus and anti-spyware programs. I got an adware infestation almost immediately and had to spend a little time getting rid of porn popups. Bah. Everything else has been pretty smooth.
I find this sort of work relaxing, though; everything happens for a reason in the laptop's world, even if I have to do a bit of work to find out that the reason is a .dll file that keeps regenerating itself in my system32 folder.
We've had a 19" monitor sitting in the living room since I got my laptop. It was on the floor, just out of the way enough to keep walking past it every day. I finally moved it this week because I needed a new monitor at St. Ned's. The empty space it left has me wondering what else is in my way that I just step around. How long does it take for something to stop being annoying and just become the Way Things Are?
I broke the carafe on our smallish coffeemaker a few weeks ago. A replacement one costs about the same as a whole new unit, but of course that requires a trip to Target that I haven't made, so...Dennis determined that a big pyrex measuring cup works reasonably well. I have a feeling that we'll be making hobo coffee in that cup for a while, and maybe that's ok. We'll stop even noticing that there's no carafe until someone points it out 6 months from now.
I think there's probably something good about not being overly rigid and living in a Coffee Must Be Made In Its Intended Vessel world, but I also wonder if the overall chaos that is my life is working against me. If there's a point at which half-assed becomes less charming than I like to delude myself into thinking it is, in other words.
One good thing about moving the monitor is that I found my missing leather BCP under it, which I hadn't seen since November. That's BCP as in Book of Common Prayer, not Birth Control Pills, by the way. Although I've certainly combined them into Birth Control Prayer once or twice. One of my Things I Should Invent is a tampon case that plays the Hallalujah Chorus. Because sometimes, it's just the best thing that can happen to you.
My other favorite Imaginary Thing is a website that tells you where to get the cheapest 12-pack of Diet Crack at any given time. Because I feel like my head turns into a giant sucker when I pay full price, ya know? Speaking of deals, I am now a huge fan of Magazine Price Search, after scoring 2 years of Budget Living for $5.00. Hopefully this will not result in something like our current situation, in which somehow a free sub to Blender has begat FHM has begat Maxim has begat Stuff and now I just feel like I'm seeing too much of Mariah Carey's boobs all of a sudden, because they are on the cover of every magazine that comes to our mailbox. When did I invite Mariah Carey's boobs over?
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Wednesday, April 20, 2005
I got my beloved laptop back today. I tried to get the FedEx guy to run towards me with the box in slo-mo in the middle of a field, but he wasn't having it. It was still a beautiful reunion.
I have a new system board. Admire the gloriousness of my new system board.
All in all, I'm pretty impressed with HP's tech support, except that they forgot to give me a new battery, which was supposed to be part of the plan, since the power issue messed up my battery to the point where it is holding a charge for like ten minutes. No biggie, they'll send one out. Obviously, having a happy laptop that never had to go back to meet its maker would have been the best option, but this was all quite smooth, and only took a couple of days.
Of course, the hard drive has been wiped, which is annoying, although it does create the opportunity to partition the drive and have it dual boot.
[boring part] I want to have the option to run WinME so that I can use my laptop to write files to my embroidery machine's card. The ancient super-proprietary Viking software I use for that doesn't run on XP, and I don't feel like paying a couple hundred bucks for an upgrade to a program that does exactly one thing. I use a better, cheaper third-party program for actual editing. If I can get this little scheme to work, I can junk the creaky pentium-266 desktop that I am currently keeping around just to run the reader/writer box.
My knitting disorder continues to run amok. I got a yarn store gift certificate for my birthday and I'm wondering what that's going to turn into. Hmmmmmm.
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Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Thing that rocks about being me today: I have lilacs on my desk. And they smell glorious. TheRev's wife brought them in for me from their garden. There are roses, too, including one that is a beautiful progression from light to dark pink.
Also, I have a kickass new purse with a freak show Ape Girl banner on it, because Ryan gives the best birthday presents ever.
I had a very good meeting with my spiritual director. One of the things we noticed is that I haven't questioned my faith at all through everything I've been going through these past couple of months. My reality is: I live in Oakland. I am married to Dennis. My car is green. God is with me. None of these statements are more or less true than the others.
I'm sad, but I haven't really hit despair. This is just where I need to be right now, and I'm surrounded by people who aren't going to let me fall. I think that's why I can be doing the inner work that I'm doing now and not be so afraid. Because people will be there with me and bring me lilacs and chocolate and let me just be in suckiness for a while, even as they invite me out of it.
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Monday, April 18, 2005
I got to Baby Wrangle at yesterday's service. Our music director has a new baby, and his wife is also in the band, so someone has to hold baby Jesse while the band is playing. He's six weeks old and is tiny and adorable, so this isn't really a hard job to fill.
Meanwhile, the fairy godchild tried to take a drum solo:
My laptop is off to HP and they claim that I will have it back by the end of the week. I was able to get all the major files off of it using a borrowed battery, so I'm less worried than I was. Although I miss it terribly, and the kitty is upset. Clyde really enjoys napping on Dennis' computer chair when he's not in it, but now I'm using his computer, too, so the chair is rarely empty. And this will not do. The chair is on rollers, so one of the things she likes best is to jump onto the chair from the back of the loveseat, and go on a little chair-ride across the bare floor. Weeeee!
I have this weird heavy sadness right now. It takes five times the normal effort to do, well, anything. It's like living in jello.
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Saturday, April 16, 2005
I had a really great birthday. I was seranaded by a group of pre-schoolers singing Happy Birthday to me in the church office, which was very sweet. Ryan made an amazing cake and brought it to the office before the small group that I lead on Fridays, and we all got to eat super-yummy chocolate cake with raspberries and creme fraiche. I got some very cool presents, including a copy of the hilarious Brick Testament Story of Christmas, and some chocolates which will not last the weekend. I also got a birthday wand, with which I bopped Dennis all evening.
After the group, I had a therapy appointment in Berkeley, so I hauled ass across the bay, planning to stop off at home and pop the leftover cake in the fridge (I didn't want to leave it in the car for an hour because of the creme fraiche).
The cake was on a platter, covered in saran wrap. I made it home, got the cake out of the car and was just about there when...plop. Upside down cake, on the floor. I was still holding the platter and staring at it when I realized that the vast majority of the cake was still contained within the saran wrap. So I flipped it back onto the platter, put it in the fridge, and cleaned up the rest. It's not as pretty as it was, but it still tastes great and I still intend to eat it.
Dennis took me out to see Millions, which is the best movie I've seen in a very long time. Run, don't walk.
Whereas this afternoon I am going to see the new Amityville Horror with Ryan, which I do not expect to be all that good. But I remember being deeply freaked out by the original when my young self watched it at a slumber party, so I'm going for nostalgic reasons.
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Thursday, April 14, 2005
Grrrrr...I am filled with rage.
My relatively new HP laptop (July 2004) has developed a problem with its power input. Which means I cannot make it do things I like it to do, such as 'turning on' and 'charging the battery' because the ac cord disconnects if you just look at it.
It's in warranty, so it's going to go to wherever these things go once the nice man from FedEx comes to pick it up next week. If it goes to India, maybe it can pick me up some samosas. I've had Indian food for lunch for the past two days, and that's working for me. Today we had the fairy godchild with us (add Indian food to the list of Things You Can't Get in Bozeman, MT) and she was quite adorable, and an excellent restaurant companion. We had a good discussion on the way back to the office about where our noses are. Where's Sara's nose?
Meanwhile, I'm going to try to see if I can get the computer to power on long enough to grab some files off it. I figure I can have Dennis hold the cord in place while I copy stuff across the network onto his computer. I have at least one crappy unfinished sermon on there that I would like to save. And, of course, all of my homework for the next class session, which was all completely brilliant, plus all of the papers I still need to turn in and...wait, I'm not fooling anyone here, am I? Yeah, it's pretty much about the old email and the pictures of bad nativity sets I haven't posted yet.
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Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Doll-based levity aside, I'm actually in a pretty crappy place right now.
For one thing, my birthday is on Friday, and I get weird around my birthday.
I'm also having serious doubts about my ability to finish this semester of school. All this anti-baggage work I'm doing right now is consuming all of my available formation calories, and while I could probably coast through and pass most of the classes, I wouldn't actually be absorbing anything. Which is kind of a shitty way to live and misses the point entirely. I don't see myself being ready to do field work starting in August, so I've blown the three-year plan as it is. I'm just feeling really damaged right now, and some days I can barely even get myself to work, let alone think about getting my homework done. And I'm doing a lousy job at work. The Toilet Paper Crisis of 2005 is not exactly going to be in my 'impressive accomplishments' column.
I don't think I'm knitting for entirely healthy reasons. Although I guess it's better than I'm using that as an escape mechanism instead of endless games of freecell, which is where I was last month. At least the fairy godchild gets cute stuff out of it. Women who knit too much, and the kids they knit for.
I just feel like such a fucking failure. Which isn't at all helpful, I know, especially since it's really clear to me that what I'm doing right now is what I need to be doing (the therapy, not the knitting) if I'm going to be of use to my calling. But that doesn't make me feel like less of a giant loser.
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Thanks to everyone who alerted me to the existence of this:
Some things to think about:- My brother had GI Joe dolls that were this size (back before that weird 80s shrinking) and before I got a hippie Ken doll (with Now Look Hair! and adhesive goatee!) they were pretty much Barbie's main dating pool. So I'm picturing Jesus getting stuck in the Dream House kitchen, possibly dressed in Rocker Ken gear.
- Dolls always end up naked in a pile. While I am vaguely interested in knowing how the 'boxers vs. briefs' thing plays out here, there's something weird about Jesus in a pile of naked Barbies.
- Seriously, how long is it going to be before someone swaps out that voice box with Talking Barbie or Talking GI Joe or, hey, my Talking Tick Action Figure. Verily I say unto you, SPOOOOON!
Yes, I know, this is supposed to be an alternative to the whole Barbie/GI Joe thing, but I don't really think that any kid outside of Rod and Todd Flanders is going to be especially excited to get this at their birthday party. It's a lame toy, if used as intended...which, actually, I'm not sure how it's intended to be used. Let's play Sermon on the Mount! Let's put sores on Ken and then heal him (ok, that could be fun)! Let's set the shrubbery on fire and reinact the burning bush scene! Hmmmm.
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Saturday, April 09, 2005
[caution: knitting jargon ahead] I'm doing my first intarsia project, using multiple colors of yarn. Five, in fact. And apparently I can't freaking count, because I have a monkey with an off-center face. NAAAAAARRRRRGH.
[later] ok, I realized that the error only went four rows down, so I un-knit the face section onto dpns, and then reknit it, without disturbing the area around it. It did mess up the tension a bit where I started re-knitting, but hopefully that will come out when I block it.
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Total time required to put a new headlight bulb in the Beetle: 20 minutes. This is about half the time it took the last time I did it, so apparently I am a lean mean bulb changing machine at this point. Bite me, dealers who think this act is worth $125. Oh, right, $8 of that is the bulb, so it must be worth it.
I also am finally getting around to using the touchup paint I got for the giant scratch on the front bumper. If it doesn't work out, I'll just get a DOH sticker from ThinkGeek to cover the scratch and be done with it. Because that is how much I care about my bumper, folks.
I don't know where this energy is coming from, but it's welcome after my rather mopey demeanor over the past few weeks.
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Friday, April 08, 2005
A parishioner brought me something fabulous for my tacky Jesus stuff collection today - it's a necklace with a mood cross. You know, like a mood ring? But it's a cross. I couldn't find the exact one online, but it's kind of like this.
Maybe I can use it as an early warning system if I have another day like Wednesday. The necklace is GREEN, people! Get away while you still can!
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What rocks? Why, I'll tell you:
- The fairy godchild!!! She and her mom arrived yesterday. I picked them up from the airport and was able to fit everyone into the Beetle, plus BabyK's car seat and her stroller and a huge suitcase. It was even easy to get her in and out of the seat, thanks to the tall ceiling in the bug. She thinks that dogs ride in the back of all cars, like her dog Oscar does in their CRV, so she was pointing to the trunk of the bug and asking where Ossie was. Um, not in the trunk, sweetie.
- Getting the car seat set up before I went to get them was pretty entertaining. I couldn't figure out the whole Latch System thing and ended up just using the seat belt. I used to think it was silly that you can get CHP to inspect your car seat installation, but now I think I understand - they don't make sense!
- I got to have an hour or so with the fairy godchild today while her mom got her hair cut (apparently it's really hard to get a decent short cut in Bozeman, MT), and we had a blast. She's 18 months old now, so she knows a bunch of words. We invented some kind of game where I had a bunch of plastic leis in my hands like pom-poms, and would wave them around and yell, "Yay, BabyK! Go, BabyK!" and she would run from one end of the office to the other, then stop and wait for me to start waving my pom-poms again before running back. Ok, maybe you had to be there. But it was Really Really Fun.
- Jon and Ryan, who are giving us Ryan's old car because she got the world's most beautiful Jetta wagon. Maybe I will even learn how to drive a stick. It could happen. Ryan has driven this Escort wagon for as long as I've known her, so it's going to be kind of weird to get used to her in the Jetta. I wonder how many times I've moved with the Escort. I think four, but I could be forgetting one. So, now Dennis and I will have a station wagon in addition to the bug. I feel like we should go to Ikea just because we can.
- Dennis, who gave me an early birthday present today - the MST3K DVD collection which has the first collection of shorts on it. Oooooh, yeah. Also Pod People, Cave Dwellers, and Angel's Revenge. And I have some new yarn, so my weekend just got pretty fabulous.
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Wednesday, April 06, 2005
I am like the queen of the raw nerve today. Seriously. I am in the worst mood. This would not be such a big deal if I got to work in a little cube and could put up a 'please kindly fuck off' sign, but of course I work at the front lines of a church. And we are not allowed to tell people to fuck off, especially when they don't deserve it.
People come in and don't realize that they have unwittingly stumbled into a puddle of gasoline, and that reporting to me that the toilet is being weird is the equivalent of throwing a birthday cake with 35 candles into the puddle. Fwoosh!
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Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Therapy is kicking my ass. Hard. I'm trying not to see this as a detour from my formation work, but rather as part of the whole process. I have to get my own stuff out of the way so that I can be with people when they are in crisis, without having a bellhop following me around with one of those brass carts full of all my baggage. I'll be ok eventually, but right now not so much.
I told Dennis I would be happy to make him anything here in what could probably be called the cavalcade of bad knitting. He declined.
I just want to take a moment to mention how annoying it is to me that all of a sudden, there are interesting crochet patterns out there, and lots of books of crochet baby things that are actually cute. A few years ago, before I learned to knit, I looked for cute crochet patterns, because I've been able to crochet since I was very young. I found craaaap. And now that I've moved on to knitting, everything is all about crochet. Grrrrrrr. However, nothing covers that embarrassing roll of toilet paper like a doll in a crocheted dress (this is actually tempting). I wish someone would do a toilet paper doll contest, like the crocheted flower contest they're doing at stitchdiva only with a category for Deeply Wrong. I'd love to see what would come out of that.
I ended up not being well enough to go to school last weekend, which is why I don't have a new sermon posted. I didn't get beyond the first pass, and it was pretty lousy. My next assignment is a sermon for the first Sunday in Lent.
Ok, I think that covers everything...I'm nuts, friends don't let friends make granny-square neckties, toilet paper without a yarn-based cozy is immoral, and I didn't go to school.
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