lots of things

What have I been up to?

A little crafting

a little socializing with the knitsibs and knitsiblettes

and a little belly dance costuming for my troupe, with a great deal of help from the cool Family Studies Teacher, who does this to her horse's mane. Five minutes after this photo was taken, I was cutting the Manos del Uruguay yarn out of my hair. Cut about an inch out of my hair as well. D'oh.

meme via notanartist

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Anna Karenina Crime and Punishment Catch-22 One Hundred Years of Solitude Wuthering Heights The Silmarillion Life of Pi : a novel The Name of the Rose Don Quixote Moby Dick Ulysses Madame Bovary The Odyssey Pride and Prejudice Jane Eyre The Tale of Two Cities The Brothers Karamazov Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies War and Peace Vanity Fair The Time Traveler’s Wife The Iliad Emma The Blind Assassin The Kite Runner Mrs. Dalloway Great Expectations American Gods A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius Atlas Shrugged Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books Memoirs of a Geisha Middlesex Quicksilver Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West The Canterbury Tales The Historian : a novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Love in the Time of Cholera Brave New World The Fountainhead Foucault’s Pendulum Middlemarch Frankenstein The Count of Monte Cristo Dracula A Clockwork Orange Anansi Boys The Once and Future King The Grapes of Wrath The Poisonwood Bible : a novel 1984 Angels & Demons The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise) The Satanic Verses Sense and Sensibility The Picture of Dorian Gray Mansfield Park One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest To the Lighthouse Tess of the D’Urbervilles Oliver Twist Gulliver’s Travels Les Misérables The Corrections The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Dune The Prince The Sound and the Fury Angela’s Ashes : a memoir The God of Small Things A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present Cryptonomicon Neverwhere A Confederacy of Dunces A Short History of Nearly Everything Dubliners The Unbearable Lightness of Being Beloved Slaughterhouse-five The Scarlet Letter Eats, Shoots & Leaves The Mists of Avalon Oryx and Crake : a novel Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed Cloud Atlas The Confusion Lolita Persuasion Northanger Abbey The Catcher in the Rye On the Road The Hunchback of Notre Dame Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values The Aeneid Watership Down Gravity’s Rainbow The Hobbit In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences White Teeth Treasure Island David Copperfield The Three Musketeers

Labels: crochet, dancing, friends, outfits, silly

- 1 comments/foxes -

- Rocketbride's adventure of 5/04/2008 09:31:00 AM -

 
my knitting scouts merit badges

I've been in a merit badge mood all month. It started with You Can Do It! The merit badge handbook for grown up girls, which Martha had in the guest room during our stay in NY. It continued on through Mama Merit Badges, which I madly desire. And then I found out about these guys: Knitting Scouts. Seems that my sash is already filling out!

1. The “Proselytize Knitting” Badge - A requirement for all Knitting Scouts, the recipient must do his or her bit to present knitting in a positive light, whilst at the same time avoiding all references to “hipness”, grandmothers, and yoga. I talk up knitting, Knit in Public, and started a knitting club at work to teach my co-workers to knit.
   
2. The “MacGyver” Badge (Level One) - The recipient must demonstrate clever use of a non-knitting tool in a knitting-related scenario. For instance, recipient has used paper clips as stitch markers, or successfully whittled and then utilized bamboo skewers as dpns. I've used the paper clip trick and also 1-inch decorative pins to show RS.
   
3. The “Knitting Whilst Under the Influence” Badge - This applies to both actual knitting under the influence, as well as achieving moments of stunning intellectual clarity about ones knitting under the influence. Presumes talking about knitting whilst under the influence a given. Every month, baby
   
4. The “I Will Impress You With My Math Prowess” Badge - The recipient is a whiz at substituting yarns and calculating gauge, can space increases and decreases evenly and is fully comfortable with the basic math encountered in all knitting projects. I'm generally good at this stuff, although sometimes I am hit with a fit of stupidity.
   
5. The “I’ve Knit Items With No Conceivable Practical Application” Badge - Recipients are those “special” campers who have knit items which somehow missed the mark of their intended application. There are probably more who are deserving of this badge than one would expect. Cutie baby hats that would fit an adult, weird technology cozies, undersized clothes pin bags...
   
6. The “I’ve Been Published in a Knitting Magazine” badge - The recipient has been published in a print or online knitting magazine, in this case, Knitty. 'Vog on!

Labels: achievement, silly

- 0 comments/foxes -

- Rocketbride's adventure of 8/23/2007 11:37:00 AM -

 
meme for me me

7 Weird Things, for Michelle

1. I have drunk human blood. It wasn't a vampire thing; it was a trust thing. (Okay, it was kind of a vampire thing.)
2. My happy place is a yarn store that I co-own with Johnny Depp. We spend afternoons knitting on the same pair of socks. It's not a sex thing; it's a yarn thing. (It might be a sex thing.)
3. I've been a regular church-attendee since I was a child. That Belle & Sebastian line about S&M & Bible study might have been about me at one time. (Not now.)
4. I didn't wear a bra for about 9 years. Then I gained a lot of weight & got pregnant. Enter the bra.
5. I don't eat strawberries. Wasn't raised to them; don't like them.
6. One of my teeth is from the baby set. It'll fall out one day and I'll have a charming gap, but until then I try to act spooky with one normal and one stunted canine.
7. I dress my son in pink girls' clothes from time to time. I don't happen to think this is odd, but it makes some people positively red in the face.

No tags because I'm feeling misanthropic and unhappy tonight.

Labels: silly

- 4 comments/foxes -

- Rocketbride's adventure of 5/18/2007 07:35:00 PM -

 
i am a fiber i've never used. cosmic.

Labels: silly

- 0 comments/foxes -

- Rocketbride's adventure of 4/29/2007 02:26:00 PM -

 
fame!

Speaking of Dirk Nightshade, he's famous (albeit anonymously)!

The other day, I met a young man (when you're my age, they're all young men) who was knitting his first project. Unsurprisingly, it was a garter stitch scarf. It was about six or seven inches wide, and he had about six or seven inches worth done, so he had what looked like a lovely square garter stitch potholder. He told me that he had started the scarf nearly a year ago, got this much done, put it down for a while—like ten months—and only now had he picked it up again.

I nodded and smiled and told him he was doing a good job and that it would get faster and easier—but in the dark recesses of my brain I thought: “Oh, just bind it off. Call it a potholder and bind it off. It's fine, you've learned garter stitch, it's time to move on.”

- David Demchuk, "It's the little things," Knit Like a Man, Spring Knitty

I'm proud to have been the enabler that brought Dirk to Lettuce that night, not to mention giving him knitting lessons in the first place. It's almost like being famous myownself.

Labels: friends, knitty, silly

- 0 comments/foxes -

- Rocketbride's adventure of 3/14/2007 01:38:00 PM -

 
aw, dude!

I been tagged. Rules to follow.

1. A prostitute once offered to tell my fortune. She got it all wrong.
2. While pregnant, I was terrorized by a schizophrenic building tenant who thought that we were making meth in our apartment.
3. I married my second boyfriend. We did not live together beforehand.
   
4. I have been heavily & simultaneously involved in the goth and United Church subcultures.
5. I don't like to be touched on my shoulders, hips, or anywhere the bone is close to the skin.
6. The first song that moved my unborn child was by Ministry.

THE RULES: Each player of this game starts with the ‘6 weird things about you.’ People who get tagged need to write a blog of their own 6 weird things as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave a comment that says ‘you are tagged’ in their comments and tell them to read your blog.”

Everybody I read is already tagged. So no further. Thanks, Sandi - this was fun.

Labels: silly

- 0 comments/foxes -

- Rocketbride's adventure of 12/18/2006 07:42:00 PM -

 
oh, the silliness

In other news, I did some stash enhancement this weekend, as Knit-o-matic stocks the ball I needed to finish the Boy's Christmas present from last year (gulp). While I was there I picked up some manly Noro for another cabled hat and some yummy German stripey sock yarn (mit Aloe Vera!). I think I paid too much for the sock yarn, but considering the length of time I take to knit a pair of socks, I'll get good value for my money. And the Aloe Vera will soothe my spirits.

Christmas is coming too quickly. Even if I strike almost everyone off the handknitted gift list, I still have a bunch of yarn from last Christmas that hasn't gone anywhere. And Blake's birthday is less than a week away! At least I got the zipper for his sweater this weekend - now it's just a battle between time and the seemingly endless finishing.

Labels: silly, stash

- 0 comments/foxes -

- Rocketbride's adventure of 12/03/2006 07:53:00 PM -