Where's that damn muse?

I have been told I need to revitalize my hobbying strategy. Lately my hobbies have included, in no particular order: advanced worrying, budgeting for the weak willed, feeling guilty for spending money, cooking after cooking, trying not to kill plants, and not finishing hats. Also I have been experimenting with frustration and playing zombie computer games.

Yeah, maybe he's right. But I'm sure you guys can sympathize. I have ideas for things I would like to do, but all of them require Bright Shiny Purchases; right now I can't justify spending for anything new. I have lots of great yarn, but don't feel like knitting or crocheting. I have a scanner, printer, camera, thread, modge podge, awesome aluminum tape, altoids tins, nature, a sewing machine that hates me, a needle punch doohicky, perler beads and the more stuff I put on this list the worse I feel for not doing anything with it and/or feeling like there is a need to buy anything ever. Gah! Rampant vicious consumer guilt cycle! I want little projects, not quite instant gratification but something that I can put down when the pastry cream boils over but still want to pick back up when the strawberry tart is done.

Really, though, I want something that is mine. Something that is more than just copying someone else's project. Something that is immune to the critique of others. I read on someone else's blog recently that cooking professionally is the equivalent of saying I love you to complete strangers every day knowing they will never, ever say it back. What I'm looking for right now is a project that lets me say I love you to MYSELF, because I know I will totally reciprocate.

Know the feeling?

Song-a-Day May: Sick day

The best part is that now Schmitty has my plague and we're all gonna die.

I made some soup, though. And we did this thing where we played guitars.

It was awesome. And by awesome I mean it fulfilled the requirements we set forth for Song a Day May.

YES.

I'm going back to curling up on the couch now.

Wake me when it's over.

p.s. We're both sick. THIS MAKES US AWESOME.

Song-a-Day May: time constraints

The house is clean, we are about to run into the city to pick up a friend who is visiting from out of town, and guess I'll just have to put off calling maintenance about the broken sink until tomorrow. This song was brought to you by the chords G, C, and D, and the sentence, "Is this just terrible enough that we can leave it as it is?"

The answer, in our estimation, was yes.

Sorry!

Song-a-Day May: one take

Seriously, it was a long day, and we are really dead on our feet.

I did manage to ask good questions at work today.

It's okay, we'll just run on the awesomeness of yesterday.

Cheers!

Song-a-Day May: Secondary Infection

If yesterday and today are any indication, Schmitty and I will need to become far more efficient if we want to succeed in our compose-a-song-every-day-this-month venture. Well, that, or less particular. Regardless of the original cause, the effect is that we spent literally hours each day trying to put together these tunes. HOURS.

Today's endeavor builds on the continued inspiration from yesterday's bottle, though not as an instrument. This time, Schmitty got to thinking about how, back in the day, guitar slides used to be made from the necks of glass bottles like the one we were blowing across yesterday. Thus, today's song incorporates slide guitar on the lead track, as performed by the Schmitty. Day 2 also features a new guitar--you already met Josie and Gretchen yesterday; today we included Riot (short for the Red Riot). Riot is an electric guitar, which meant plugging directly into the computer for recording purposes, which was great except for the resulting super audio leveling win.

I got off easy today; I just played the baseline. Regardless, have a listen!

The idea was something like an old man on a porch noodling on slide guitar, dreaming of better times, pondering the choices he made such that he ended up sweaty and alone with his guitar. Or something.

(I really must apologize once again. But, you know, the point is learning. Maybe by the end of the month we'll manage something mediocre!)

Excuse me, I was promised there would be hats.

So far, since we moved here, I have made seven hats. Yes, seven. Scary, eh? It's good, because I need hats to wear over my hair at work, as opposed to always working the Aunt Jemima/ gang warfare look that is the bandana.

I've never really gotten the hang of bandanas, I have always felt.

Anyway, the small single skein crochet project that is the hat seems to work for me. I was even going to make seasonal ones if I can muster up appropriate yarn. I couldn't get candy corn colors that weren't acrylic (bastards!) but I still have hopes for an election day hat. Guy Fawkes day hat is a little much, though. I even have budget hats! I made this one with yarn from the dollar store and everyone loves it.

I've also started playing with stitch patterns and the like, with some successes and some weirdness. But honestly, for working, this green, floppy organic cotton one is probably my favorite.

It is really difficult to take a picture of yourself wearing a hat.

Little things

This really is the only good use for that percolator. Also, I made a set of origami box lights for our stairs. Now if only we could be finished unpacking.

Also, I crocheted a hat, but haven't taken a picture yet.

The ghost in the machine

My sewing machine was my mother's, with all the baggage that you can imagine that brings. My sister and I both learned some of our craft skills from her, and a whole lot more on our own, after she died, when faced with the piles of her unfinished projects. The sewing machine is the only sewing machine I can remember, and the memories are not always happy. Trying to stay still while yet another stupid dress was pinned on me. Her critiquing over my shoulder when I tried to sew something. Fights that usually ended with me giving up, and her taking over to finish whatever it was I was working on.

This is why I give serious thought to my training methods at work.

I take these memories with me every time I lug the heavy thing out of its case and set it up on my dining room table. And the machine objects to me. I know it does. I don't understand it, don't understand why tensioning knobs don't work, how thread can get knotted up inside the bobbin, why I have to keep rethreading the needle at random intervals. It didn't used to act this way.

It hates me.

Still, I manage to turn out some ok looking things. Maybe it has personal pride at stake? I don't know. I made this Japanese style knot bag because I hate a purse but like having something for my wallet and phone on a plane. Not bad, right? It's good you can't see in between the two fabric layers. And it isn't exactly reversible the way the pattern is supposed to be. (Hey, props for taking a picture of my own arm!) But passable enough that I'll use it.

A couple of parts of the machine broke off recently. Kinda important parts like the thing that holds on the foot. I went to Jo-Ann to ask about the existence of replacement parts. A lovely woman called Viking for me after we discovered no such listing for the model in the parts book. New parts, they said, are just not available anymore, even to those who would be able to service it, if I could find someone. The lady at Jo-Ann broke the news. "You're going to have to start looking for a new machine."

I know this will help my sewing. A new machine and I could become at least understanding if not outright friendly. But I'll admit it, I'm not ready for a new machine just yet.

I was hot, and I was hungry.

Actually, I was tired and feeling lazy, and there were some trying moments today that demanded chocolate, and this only took twenty minutes if you also count the time I spent consuming the resulting product.

However, I still think there is something vaguely revelatory about the knowledge that you can make s'mores in a toaster oven even though I don't particularly like s'mores.

I know, I know, strange but true--they're just too sweet for my tastes.

Despite that, tonight was a s'more night:


Man, how many pictures are there of oatmeal in my entries?

practicality on a Sunday night

I go through socks something fierce. It is to be expected, I figure, but it means I end up with a lot of holey heels. Mostly, these socks linger for an appalling amount of time in my sock drawer before finally getting thrown out. But every once in a while, I'll darn up a pair. I like doing it, there is something satisfying about the process of mending, but the end result is bittersweet.

I can never really wear these mended socks the way I wore the originals. The repairs make my sensitive feet more tender, rub in my clogs in weird ways. They are good enough for around the house, but they will never really be the same again. Strangely, this makes me want to decorate them more, to festoon them into something supremely unpractical. I'd probably stop short of lace around the cuffs, but I'd seriously consider just about anything else. An embroidered Taj Mahal on the instep? Well, that's a bit above my skill level, but not out of the question.

Just fixing the heels is enough for today, though.

Channeling my inner fourth grader

All right, so there was no post yesterday (although that does not reflect a dearth of craft; I crocheted for an hour in the airport:

and then made 350 desserts with the adoxograph [no photos of that, sorry]. It just turns out that Kathy's job is hard work, and getting up at 5AM on a Sunday to go to the airport is hard work, and in the absence of the scarf being done and photographic evidence of the desserts, it was kinda hard to get motivated to write something).

However!

Today is a new day, and so I drew/colored a hand turkey. Hand turkeys were a great favorite of mine in my youth, and, I must admit, it was nice, from a nostalgia perspective, to revisit that particular form of self-expression. (Hopefully it will be nice from a punctuation perspective to use fewer commas in the rest of the sentences in this post. Yeesh.)

Here's Tom:

The fat cat looks displeased.

I can't remember whether I was a color inside the lines person as a child now that I am old, but if my current performance is any indication, I may have been a get distracted by other things person. Seriously, can I not even color for twenty minutes without stopping to watch a TED talk?

Unstructured

Today I had a long conversation with my favorite co-conspirator at work about the concept of a comprehensive list of human skills, and how such a thing could be used as the basis for a tool that would help you identify the right person to do a job you had--and it could be any job, from debugging code for a meteorological simulation, to figuring out what that noise your car is making means, to roofing your house, to separating your stuck Lego bricks. If you could completely characterize someone's skill set and the skills necessary (both in terms of technical know-how and social capabilities), then in theory you could find someone who perfectly matched your stuff-doing needs.

Unsurprisingly, this got me thinking about what my own personal skill list would look like (knitting, crocheting, neuroscience, note-taking, reading for comprehension, understanding people's underlying motivations, flirting, and swing dancing would all be on there in various places), which got me thinking about the nature of intelligence, which got me thinking about IQ tests. Which brings us to today's thingaday.

You know those questions on IQ tests where they show you a flat diagram, and then ask, "if this was folded at the indicated creases, which of the following three-dimensional shapes would the folding produce?"

I decided to do that with fabric.



I took those pieces (well, except for three of the really square ones, because it was already taking longer than I expected and I decided to leave those out) and sewed them together along their edges until I ended up with just a small hole left, then turned it inside out, stuffed it, and sewed off that last hole. It turned out that if you folded up those bits of fabric along the seams, the resultant three-dimensional shape would be this:


I think I am going to call him George.

Don't judge George.

It's not his fault.

Incidentally, using one hand to run the foot pedal while the other hand guides the fabric is a pretty suboptimal sewing machine usage arrangement. Surprisingly, though, it is not so suboptimal that I am motivated to acquire a desk.

Is nostalgia always for simpler times?

As I was thinking about what to write today, I found myself reminiscing about the January/February a few years back when I sent the love of my life a postcard every single day over the course of the month leading up to Valentine's Day. Don't get me wrong, it's not a holiday that I am a big fan of, but I was (and remain) a hopeless romantic. There's no helping it. So I find myself wondering--is it the sheer force of Februaryness that makes me willing to commit to doing something every day?

And then, even more than that, contemplating the general concept of commitment. What do you have to have in your heart to be willing to make a promise that you intend to keep. And, perhaps even more noteworthy, what do you have to have in your guts in order to do the work to keep it?

Then, of course, there is the concept of overcommitment--it's all well and good to promise something and mean it, but at some point you may find that you have made so many promises that it is impossible to keep them all, and the best you can hope for involves everyone feeling shorted in one way or another.

Regardless of that philosophical tangent, it was another self-portrait day, wedged between meetings and errands. I'd hoped to make cupcakes (the coworkers love cupcakes), and if I can't sleep tonight, perhaps I still will, but in the meantime there is this:


Strangely enough, I am actually kind of proud of this one, more for this picture than for the drawing itself.

As you can see, I gave myself an out by not including my entire head.