Deviant Dispatches

Source Today, I'm backing up the blog. Enjoy another gorgeous day - go for a walk, plant some flowers, throw a frisbee, or throw on a black cloak and pretend you're a vampire. I'll see you Thursday.

Another year has come and gone for me, birthday-wise. (Though it hardly feels like it - I think I'm in emotional shut-down mode for the new job and upcoming move.) I've tried to do 25 things before this birthday happened. Some of those goals were met; some, I had no reason not to meet, but they fell by the wayside. Here's the recap of the last year: 1. Take a creative class - painting, writing, etc. - Not completed. I'm hoping it will happen this year, now that I have a regular schedule I can adhere to. Still not sure what kind of class, but it will be full of creating. 2. Take kendo lessons, at least one class - Accomplished , and I was surprised by how much I was not interested in it. 3. Start sewing afghan squares together (this is the third year that damn afghan is on my list...) - Accomplished . The afghan is now 7x5 squares, and I've almost finished making all the squares. Awesome. 4. Make another shawl for myself, in a fiber I don't have a shawl of yet...

Sometimes I have trouble coming up with blog post ideas. My wells of creativity become dusty and void of intelligence, to the point where I consider posting a picture of how thick the dust on my dresser has gotten. I actually kind of love it when I reach the final crumbs of pseudo-original thought my mind can conjure. It means I get to search the vastness of the internets for people who've had this problem many times before - people who are willing to help me out. This time, I just searched "blog post ideas," and here are some of the fun things I accidentally found.  - Joy the Baker . Usually, a list of post ideas has all the ideas I've already done, plus a bunch that I would probably never write about (things like starting a 401k and hiking across Tunisia). But her list actually got me thinking - especially her idea to post about where inspiration comes from! Post I'll feature soon: crafts I hope someone  will make, inspired by Cirque du Soleil's Love ...

Yesterday, I was planning on cutting myself some slack and not posting a full blog. I still wanted to put something up, though, so I construed a wee paragraph or two and added a picture. Then the internet crapped out for the rest of the day. Not even a blip of signal. On top of that, my day was pretty similar to the above image. I got little sleep, forgot to eat for eight hours, bawled in a shrink's office, and learned that skim milk does not a custard make. (The latter one was, in fact, pretty gross.) Needless to say, I'm glad it's today now, and not yesterday again. Worst Groundhog's Day ever, if that were to happen. It was obnoxious and disheartening to miss my first blog post since I started this thing, but today I take heart. Today, I will have had more than 10,000 page views since I started this lovely thing a year and a half ago. My sincere thanks to those who have followed me on this bizarre and exciting journey. Here's hoping it takes even les...

Ladies and gents: I successfully avoided putting the box of cereal in the fridge when I got up this morning. Hooray for that. Now for news that you actually care about. First, thank you for participating in my meager little survey. Results said that, if anything, you would all like to see more letters to various entities, be they undead mythological beasts or undead modern companies (seeing as corporations are people in the good ol' US, I guess they're just as at risk for becoming vampires, too). Tied with that was a craving for more book previews. I am totally okay with that. It helps that at work, I'm now the custodian of sections that I care about, so I will more often stumble across awesomeness. Such as the one I'm going to tell you about later this week... But overwhelmingly, rather than seeing any one particular thing more often, results said that you all like Deviant Dispatches the way it is, and wouldn't change it a bit. Which is why I'm go...