Deviant Dispatches

 For quite some time, I've wanted to make myself a black shawl. I have lots of shawls in many different colors: blue, purple, orange, tan, grey, and green. But none of those shawls can be worn with everything in my wardrobe. I wanted to make something more versatile - and lighter weight, so I could wear it in this ridiculous weather that we are calling "summer" instead of "hell on Earth," for some reason. That meant making lace. I love it more every time I make it. I made the pattern Summer Flies by Donna Griffin (click pictures for more detail). It's done on size 8 needles and works up really  fast - I started this pattern at the beginning of the month, and I had plenty of time to work on some other projects in between, too. This is the first curving shawl I've made, too - all the others are rectangles or triangles.  By the end, there were 400 stitches per row, but that was the only somewhat boring part of this pattern. Throw on some ...

Yesterday was a Day for me. No one particular thing went wrong, but little things compounded until I reached the boiling point and had a mini nuclear explosion. As a result, today my brain is a bit mutated from all of yesterday's radiation - my emotions have extra limbs, my thoughts are slightly warped, and my brain cells feel sterilized. (By that, I pretty much mean I can't think.) As today promises to be much like yesterday was, I'm taking a few extra minutes for myself this morning. Enjoy these links to other people's disgruntledness. - Rejection letters , including one from Disney about why they don't let "girls" draw. - Complaint about terrible plane food , with some spectacular hyperbole - Butts . Because they exist. (SFW) - Letters to Santa . My favorite is the girl who wants to turn into a dragon.

Ladies and gentlemen: I present to you... the last page of my novel. Some part of me thought I'd never see it again. I can tell that part of me to shove it, because I've finished my second draft. Now comes the hard stuff. All those little yellow post-its? Those are things I need to address in the next edit. All these pages and pages of notes? According to my  editing instructions  for this book, the next edit will be one of the most difficult: correcting all of the major faults. I addressed some of them in the most recent edit (such as changing my main character's age), but I've discovered many more problems. Maybe I should have done the really hard stuff on my first edit, but I'm glad I didn't. One of the huge problems I unveiled was a certain character who could have solved two hundred pages of problems  thirty years ago - now, I need a reason that he didn't. I also added important elements to the world I created - things that may ...

Yesterday, Spousal Unit and I celebrated the third annual Avatar Day . Usually, we celebrate it the day before Father's Day, but we were out of town this year. We also usually have an ice cream cake, while we completely and guiltlessly gorge ourselves on a children's cartoon for hours on end. This year, we decided to try something different.* I found a great recipe for cinnamon chocolate cake in Pillsbury's Healthy Baking cookbook , and I made cupcakes. I totally love those little silicone muffin pan liners - they keep the pan clean, and the innards always slide out easily. Next, I found a depiction of the four nations's symbols: Air, Water, Earth, and Fire. Source After mixing up some buttercream frosting, I practiced drawing the symbol into it. Here, I practiced on an old plastic lid, drawing with a toothpick and straight food coloring. But it worked better to mix 1 teaspoon of frosting with one drop of food coloring - the toothpick just d...

When I first ran across this cover, I thought it was a fake title. But no. The Very Virile Viking by Sandra Hill The Very Virile Viking is a real book. By a real romance author, who apparently doesn't care about pretending to be historically accurate anymore; she just wants to get to the good stuff. The first line of this book? "In the days of old when men were... whatever... " I think this review sums it up much better than I could. I especially like the euphemism the reviewer points out: "It was not yet spring, but his sap was running high." Oh myyyyy. Our next awful book title features... Pregnesia by Carla Cassidy ...Okay. No.  I give up on this one. It's too easy. (Just let me say that either this is a condition where you forget how you got pregnant in the first place, or the lady's birthing a planet. Now I'm moving on.) We all know Harlequins are absolute crap. Here are some more wonderful baby-related tal...

Spousal Unit and I went on a library music binge recently, bringing home about a dozen CDs to listen to and enjoy. Many of them featured music from around the world - Asia, in particular. I especially love Silaihuar by Urna Chahar-Tugchi , a Mongolian musician. It's harder to tell at the beginning of the song, but her vocals really mimic the instruments. I can especially hear it around 3:55 (plus, listen to those notes she hits). It makes me draw parallels with scat singing in jazz, even though these styles are half a world apart. Another thing I love? That she's wearing a bulky jacket and sitting on the ground on her album cover. Any American artist with a voice like that would probably be wearing a fancy dress. In a big city. On a stage with red curtains. I also love the song Zara Zara by Bombay S. Jayashri from Putumayo's "India ". This is my second favorite of the Putumayo CDs - the album flows together very well, and almost all of the songs are m...

Awesome things that have happened lately: I finished my bamboo shawl.  I love how the colors turned out – I was especially worried about the bind off, because I’d wanted to do it in all blue. Unfortunately, I ran out and had to resort to orange. But it ended up just fine that way. I got a gorgeous, almost brand-new jacket for $3.62 while hanging out in Milwaukee.  It’s exactly my style and exactly my size – the arms are even long enough, which is pretty unusual for me to find. It’s slightly padded, which means I’ll wear the hell out of it this fall. In the meantime, I’ve been prancing about in it at home, when the A/C is on, and being giddy over the cute little knots and the tiny guys in fishing boats. We visited Spousal Unit's family in Chicagoland for Father's Day. Everyone who's ever met Spousal Unit's dad says, "Oh. So that's  where he gets it from." So true. (In a good way, of course.) Last night, we w...