Brownies and Bloodlust

Next I could make a bedazzled straitjacket

Girlzilla wanted me to make a sweater for her and we decided on the tubey sweater from knitty. This was started around Valentine's Day and it's been a pretty fast knit. Really the hardest part has just been taking the time to actually be able to knit instead of the work-teach-clean-cook-drop dead cycle that has been my life lately. The yarns we chose aren't quite like the original, though. The shrug-like top part is Caron Simply Soft in a sort of brick red and the body is most like the Angel Hair super-soft fuzzy stuff (lost the band, so sue me) in all sorts of beautiful reds and purples. The shrug seemed to take forever and now that I've started the body it seems to be going fastfastfast.

Doesn't hurt that I was able to watch Jekyll and knit.

Jekyll is Exhibit J in a series of infinity of why British TV rocks. It's one of those productions where you hope evrybody involved makes boatloads of money. (Except maybe the sound guy. The music gets annoying sometimes and sometimes the ambient noise makes dialogue really hard to hear. There's so much dark humor and wordplay that you really need to catch every bit.)

You don't have to knit, but certainly...watch Jekyll.

That is all.

With my abject apologies

So Benevolent Patriarch lost his job at the very beginning of December.

I've been trying my best to move forward, and some days it feels like swimming through murky waters against the weight of sodden formalwear. All my best efforts just aren't sufficient to make any actual headway and the slightest attempt to catch my breath sends me downward.

Yet life does go on.

Wolfman Dilbert has his college graduation in a month, and he (thank whatever powers may be!) is already employed. He'll be moving to another state and beginning his ludicrously lucrative job the first week of July. I can't help but feel that I've failed him unforgivably in all that I wasn't able to do for him. I certainly had planned on more than I did, but I honestly don't see what I could have done.

Le sigh.

This morning is my wedding anniversary, and Patriarch and I have been husband and wife for 18 years now. I love him dearly, but today I'm finding it awfully hard to believe that he appreciates me to any real degree. It's not something so trivial as "he forgot our anniversary!"-he hasn't- it's more about a constant need for him to remember that I'm not the maid nor his keeper.

There are certainly good times and great moments with me and mine, and believe me...I do appreciate and cherish those times when the world does turn smoothly.

And my thanks to all of you for letting me vent. I hadn't wanted to post a "poor me" laundry list of woes and I certainly don't want this space to become that. I'm well aware also that these times especially are rough and tense and that I've been sheltered from far worse than I've felt.

So this is a return. I want to reconnect to those I've met here, the people that I feel close to even though we've never spoken face to face and probably never will. I want to be there for ruiner again, instead of ignoring her in favor of my own problems. I want to ooh and ahh over Petra's new achievements, and use them to remember when my own children were so new and so changeable. I want to see what cool new projects knittycat has come up with. I want you all to know that I'm here, and that the more I'm here for you the better off I'll be. I'm already lucky, and complete, and rich and much of that is from you out there.

But, should Benevolent Patriarch ever read this,

Do You Love Me - Fiddler on the Roof film

I want my MP3!

(With apologies to Martha Quinn, of course.)

So Wolfman Dilbert came home and told me of his adventures in job fair turf. Lots of companies represented and lots of shwag, including and iPod Shuffle that he won in a raffle. Poor thing already has an mp3 player, and couldn't bear his new iPod to feel homeless so it'll be mine, mine, mine. (Yes, dears. I know only dinosaurs don't have sexy cute little mp3 players. Shut up.)

So I'm thinking that I can start cruising accessories to take care of the clutch of CDs in my car and have my own cute sexy little iPod to keep me in tunes.

Yay!

I want my MP3!

(With apologies to Martha Quinn, of course.)

So Wolfman Dilbert came home and told me of his adventures in job fair turf. Lots of companies represented and lots of shwag, including and iPod Shuffle that he won in a raffle. Poor thing already has an mp3 player, and couldn't bear his new iPod to feel homeless so it'll be mine, mine, mine. (Yes, dears. I know only dinosaurs don't have sexy cute little mp3 players. Shut up.)

So I'm thinking that I can start cruising accessories to take care of the clutch of CDs in my car and have my own cute sexy little iPod to keep me in tunes.

Yay!

It's a conspiracy, I tell ya!

So I've got cats on the brain, and Anarchy is being especially random which doesn't help. Anarchy looks just like Barry Ween, and is quite smart but still gives in to things like assassinating invisible dust motes. Disorder (aka Dizzy aka "the dumb punk") is more prone to expressions that say he has no idea what just happened. Narc took over dominating Dizzy just after the elder grand dame died, about a month after Narc came to us.

Somewhere in all of the last couple of months, my best friend sent me these, and I just rediscovered them. Yes, here are the cat training videos that teach all cats how best to manipulate us.

Voici!

Simon's Cat 'TV Dinner'

Simon's Cat 'Cat Man Do'

Simon's Cat 'Let Me In!'

Sometimes the only doctor you want is Kevorkian

Sarcasma

Like there isn't a market for this. Les at stupidevilbastard owes me a keyboard now, and a mouthful of orange juice.

I especially like the warning at the bottom. Shame they misspelled Tourette's, though.

BTW, I do have a certain fondness for Dr. Jack Kevorkian. He's from around here (Michigan) so he's got a certain native-son thing going on, but I've always loved his wicked sense of humor too. For example, he paints as a hobby. He's taken a bunch of adult ed classes where he invariably shares a classroom of older ladies who want to paint puppies and kitties and big-eyed kids. At least one of these class sessions ended with a showing of all the art the students produced. At that show, there were lots of puppies and kitties and big-eyed kids...and a dry white skull with moss, mold, and vermin at the base. The title? "Very Still Life."

Heh.

Another in an infinite series of my unsuitability for customer service

Me all over.

Basic081117

Like Foamy the Squirrel says, you just have to follow your heart. And sometimes your heart says "kill...kill...kill...kill!"

The hard part is possessing sufficient self-control to remember that if you start slapping people at random, it almost always looks like your fault. Unfair.

Which is why this other Basic Instruction is so helpful.

Smile

Scott Meyer, you never let me down! And his new book is finally out, and entitled "Help Is On the Way". Everybody buy a copy, and tell your friends you'll never use these on them.

And the Obamas' one car was exceptionally shiny...

There's a documentary in the works targeted to right-wing sorryass whiners conservative voters titled "How Obama Got Elected". It's already shaping up to be a smear job, and I just hope the filmmakers come to their senses long enough to base the movie on this:

Obama_miagi

in which case I'd not only watch it, but also buy the DVD, the book, and the sequel "How Obama Got Elected and His Groove Back" starring Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, and Dave Chappell as the narrator and guiding spirit of Rick James.

And then angryalien could make it into a 30-second movie for Starz!

Yeah.

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was...

Tomthedancingbug

Normally Tom the Dancing Bug is awfully lefty for my taste, but I've got to admire the way this describes just what went on with that bailout. And Bolling put this out in 2001, when it was about the airline industry which had been failing badly before 9/11.


I really don't want to hear "personal accountability" or that "the invisible hand of the free market will decide" from any of these scoundrels ever again.

And I own the only Solipsist card...

Straight from New Humanist I present to you...  

Zoroastrian

Agnostic

CofE2

No rules yet, which I choose to interpret as an open-source game that has yet to be developed. There are quite a few religions represented, including Born-Again Anything and Buddhist but there's loads of room for more.

I'd love to see these mixed with the Playing Gods board game that's just come out. I figure either everyone will get some perspective about religion, or we'll end up seeing mild-mannered Lutherans talk about becoming suicide bombers.