some tricky politics

Wait a second–strike that; reverse it.

As threatened, beads!  DMC Perle 5 on size 0 needles with 10/0 seed beads, this is the Lily of the Valley iteration of Perdita.  I have to say that this was nowhere near as nervewracking as I was expecting it to be.  The only tricky part is making sure the beads are where they need to be when doing WS rows, lest they disappear into the fabric, but that’s really no trouble once you figure out the logistics of the bead moving around the stitch.  I wish I’d spent more time tracking down nicer beads (those are the $1/bazillion packet from A.C. Moore, and are misshapen and oddly colored), but I’m still pretty happy with the result.

But perhaps the most significant landmark is this: not terribly exciting looking, I know, but this is my first ever successful application of what I have come to term croshit.   It was getting humiliating; it’s generally considered to be the simplest of the needle arts and is regularly taught to small children in arts and crafts classes.  Yet while I’ve read tutorials, bought books, and scrutinized Youtube videos, I just could not fucking do it. But I couldn’t figure any other way to do a closure without turning it into a huge production, so I figured I’d give it a go.

I managed to bitch it up pretty spectacularly on the first try–turns out, having every single stitch live on the hook does not work!–but after a little Googling I managed to turn up a nice tutorial that was finally able beat the concept into my dumb head, and here we are.  Crocheting an edge onto a finished piece is hardly the same as crocheting an entire piece, but this is still light years of progress for me.  I really think I just need to find someone who knows what they’re doing to watch me and tell me what I’m doing wrong, but the best I’ve been able to turn up so far is “Oh, yeah, I used to do that when I was a kid!”, and my pride forbids me from paying for instruction.  It’s just fucking crochet.

I’ve also learned a bit of sympathy for the MySpace kids, because damn, is it ever difficult to take a decent picture of your own wrist.  (Tripods and timers are for other people!)

Lace knitting is an act of faith.

I’m not going to claim it’s the most difficult sort of knitting there is; while I understand the technique and am fairly comfortable with fair isle in general, the idea of making one of those crazy eight color Scandinavian ski sweaters makes my eyes cross.

But lace is tough.  You’re working with teeny tiny needles that may snap or bend irreparably if you hold them too tightly and delicate yarn that may break if you pull it too hard, both of which you’re going to be tempted to do, at least at first, because you’re going to be doing some of the craziest increases and decreases available (p5tog!!!!) to a knitter, along with plenty of yarnovers to make your tension unstable.

And then, at the end of all that drama, you end up with this!  A snarly, crumpled lump of fabric that just looks awful.  All that effort to create… well… that… it’s downright depressing.  Did you do it wrong?  Is it just ugly?  Did you really just waste all that time, energy and eyestrain on such a turd?

I seriously thing that most people doing their first lace, at this point, persevere out of sheer cussedness; you’ve already gone that far, you might as well see it through to the end in the grim hope that something good may come of it after all.

But it’s still no joke.  The faint of heart may be alarmed to learn that, despite having used enough pins to make a Cenobite proud, that’s a really half-assed job of lace blocking.  (I always thought shawl wires were the silliest things; I know better now!)  I generally find it more efficacious to apply a fan to damp knitting, rather than a cat, but we work with the materials we have available.  Thud is a very agreeable sponge.

And yet, a little finishing work (which the astute knitter will note was not quite finished in the photo, as I had to rush to take advantage of what little daylight was available–oops!) and an added fringe later, behold!  We have a perfectly serviceable little doodad.  That’s worth a little extra effort, isn’t it?  DMC Perle Cotton 5 on size 0 needles. 

Needless to say, it’s been an entertaining afternoon for me.   It has been years since I’ve knit proper lace, and back then I was at an age where me mum handled most of the finishing, so I did not viscerally understand just what exactly went into it. 

There’s also the simple variation of lace patterns; I made a sampler simply as an excuse to play with them, and while I can knit feather-and-fan all day long (and quite possibly with my eyes closed, at this point), man, some of those are nasty.  The second section is a slightly modified trinity stitch that I had to pull out four goddamn times before I finally got it right; which is particularly laughable, as I did a full-sized trinity shawl late last year.

But overall I’m quite pleased with it, if only as a test case; that’s not bad for two hours worth of grumbling and swearing under my breath.  I have learned that it really is impossible to do tiny knitting on wooden needles (even my birch ones wobbled!), that I need to invest in a proper blocking board (whipping out the t-square was both silly and largely ineffectual), that wires are not stupid, and that I need to buy a much smaller crochet hook if I ever want to do fringe again.  (Seriously, I think that was more of a pain in the ass than the blocking, though it came out somewhat better.)

For my next trick: beads!

Granted, this wasn’t exactly rocket surgery, but considering it didn’t exist a few hours ago and I made it up as I went, I’m pretty damn pleased with it.  Yarn is Alpaca Sox in, uh, some colorway, on 2.75mm needles.  (Also, tassels are a pain in the ass.)  This was actually pretty fun and very fast.  I may pick up some crochet thread or embroidery floss and duplicate it, or try a different stitch pattern; I have a feeling it would look better if it were lacier.

It also proved timely, as the Farkers had a discussion that started out with Terry Pratchett and ended up turning into a small Ravelry convention, so Mr. Victus got to show off. 

It’s funny; this is the first time I’ve felt motivated to knit in… months, at least, and it wasn’t so much motivation as it was sheer boredom.

Something about Spring and Summer just utterly kills my desire to handle fiber.  To which one might say, “Well, duh, of course you don’t want to sit around with a lap full of wool when it’s hot out,” which is certainly part of it, but I’d planned to finally teach myself to crochet–which is traditionally done with cotton–instead, and just… didn’t.  (Granted, I’m also a little fuzzy on the physics of that whole ‘turning chain’ thing, which takes some of the fun out of it.)

So I suppose the wheels are starting to turn once more, albeit slowly.  I still need to finish up my Rogue–that hood is no joke–and do the endless, interminable seaming on my Flicca.  Going to do some of the ubiquitous FiberTrends felted clogs, as I have several requests in for slippers and the Fuzzy Feet just don’t hold up well enough, but those aren’t needed ’til Christmas… though considering my tendency to get bored and put things down for a few weeks, I probably ought to get cracking fairly soon.  :)  Then I may finally woman up and attempt a real wedding-ring shawl; I have no earthly need for one, but that seems like one of those Real Knitter things to do.

There’s a lot of complaining nowadays about how modern horror movies just suck; I’ve certainly engaged in my fair share.  And on the surface, it’s true.  The only really good theatrical release I can recall in the last few years is The Descent (though I believe El Orfanato got a small arthouse run; I wasn’t fortunate enough to be able to verify that); the majority of what we get are PG-13 remakes of Japanese films and eyeballs-on-the-walls torture porn. (Which, while it isn’t my cup of tea, I really don’t understand the backlash against. Horror movies, since the giant bug features of the 50s, have always held up a mirror to America’s subconscious. The last time we were at war was Viet Nam, which gave us stuff like Last House on the Left, The Driller Killer, and I Spit On Your Grave. It’s ugly, but it’s pretty natural.)

The thing is, though, good horror has almost never been in the mainstream. A lot of our favorite old classics only got big releases because there was simply no other way to do it back then. Many of the cherished favorites came straight out of the Horror section at the local video store.

I’m not going to blame the internet for the information diaspora, but I do wonder if it’s contributed in a negative way. Heavy metal music has very similar issues. Back in the day, the only bands that got any real press were Ozzy Osbourne and Metallica; if you wanted more, you were pretty much reduced to going to the music store and picking out tapes by bands with scary names and ominous album art. (The only times this ever backfired for me were Meatloaf and Molly Hatchet, but even those ended up being alright. :)) It’s a shame bands don’t seem to thank the other bands they’ve toured with in their liner notes any more, as that’s where I got the vast majority of my recommendations.

But nowadays we have mp3s! File-sharing! MySpace! Online ordering! Web radio! I can get my hands on a four-song demo slapped together by some teenagers in Finland that a decade ago I would never even have heard of… but managing to hear of them in the first place seems a lot more difficult now. The signal to noise ratio is way out of whack.

And I think horror movies have the same problem. I haven’t set foot in a Blockbuster or Hollywood Video in years; I couldn’t even tell you the last time I saw a real mom’n'pop rental place. And yet I remember spending a lot of time as a youngster perusing the shelves, admiring box art, reading summaries, and occasionally picking up something random just because there was a two-for-one deal on Tuesdays. There really isn’t a modern analogue for that–sure, you could prowl IMDB, but that takes a lot more effort than most people are willing to put forth. There’s horror review sites, but I have yet to find one I really like–even one that simply maintains a fairly up-to-date list of coming releases. The more palatable ones seem focused on reviewing older movies, which is great for new people, but the rest of us have already seen those! (Another problem being that, while horror journalism has always sucked, the age of the blog has really dumped it into the sewer. It now seems almost entirely comprised of folks who want to prove how very edgy and hardcore they are by delivering ‘witty,’ profanity-laden reviews of what are essentially okay films. I’ve been guilty of similar myself but, then, nobody is paying me to do this; and I really fucking hated The Strangers.)

And yet there’s still great stuff out there! Wind Chill, Behind the Mask, Shallow Ground, [REC], The Gravedancers, Fido… there are still talented people who love the genre turning out some amazing flicks that are managing to fly almost completely under the radar. We really do live in an age where you don’t even need to be able to borrow cameras from your film school any more; if you had some talented people behind you (always easier said than done, I know), you probably could put out a pretty damn good movie for $20-$40k. Digital film! Adobe Aftereffects! Hell, iMovie! One of my nieces just made a short film presentation for her fourth grade science fair that probably would have been beyond the grasp of Hollywood fifteen or twenty years ago.

So I am off to see what there is to be seen. Since I’ve got a couple of weeks while I wait for my face to mend, I am going to try to get through as many of the new crop as I can; my only rules are that they be horror movies released in 2007 or 2008 (though I may go a year or two earlier if there’s something really unusual or highly recommended, primarily because I want to finally watch the gay slasher duo of Hellbent and Dead Boyz Don’t Scream.) So far I’ve got:

Death of a Ghost Hunter
Fearmakers
Skin Crawl
Solstice
The Sick House
The Tattooist
The Mad
Blackout
Breathing Room
Inside
Special Dead

Anything fantastic I’m missing? Anything I’ve got that I really ought to skip? Let me know, lest you hear about them in detail in the near future. And if anyone knows where I might get my paws on a copy of The Etruscan Mask (Ted Nicolaou, hooray!), I’d be in your debt.

After my last horrible dental experience (from which I still haven’t entirely recovered, but that’s a wholly separate revolting story), I am even more wildly phobic about visiting the dentist than ever before!  Unfortunately, I really need to get some heavy duty work done, and I’d put it off as long as I could, but I finally broke down and called my dentists in Chicago, figuring I would make an appointment with them and just spend a week up there getting everything taken care of and getting it over with while sedated.

Yet the “if you could live here, you would too” aspect of Asheville has struck again–lo and behold, they have a colleague who’s retired down here! They assure me that getting me in to see her will be no problem, they have the utmost confidence in her work, and will take care of everything for me. I’m not entirely thrilled with this, but I’m not really thrilled with the idea of flying to Chicago, either, so I go in for a consultation.

The good news is that she seems super-competent, and really did a great deal to put my at my ease. The bad news is that North Carolina has essentially fucked the practice of oral surgery. Two months ago, with no warning, they seriously upped the requirements for sedating patients, so every working oral surgeon in the state got their license undermined. There are people who have been doing this for twenty years, whose entire practices are built around people like me, who are not legally permitted to ply their trade until they complete what amounts to another semester’s worth of school, which no one has had time to do. You cannot be sedated in the state of North Carolina right now; the soonest it will be possible is in November, which is assuming your surgeon got right on the ball, which it sounds like no one did.

Argh. But she agreed to load me up on Valium beforehand, and I really need to get this dealt with, so…

While that is certainly nothing I’d ever do for fun, I must say it wasn’t as terrible as I was fearing; technology has marched on, and dentists who feel like shelling out the money can now buy nearly silent drills. Still not looking forward to going back on Tuesday for the root canal, but I am looking forward to having my jaw not clicking any more, and she was generous enough with the pain meds that, at least right now, I can regard the process with equanimity.

Which is where, I am hoping by all that’s holy, is where the problem came in.

I was laying in bed reading, when I felt a weight settle on the end of the bed, and start moving up towards my head. This is nothing unusual, and I simply assumed it was Thud coming to curl up with me. Yet as the new visitor stepped up onto my back, I realized that Thud was already lying down beside me, and that this was way, way, heavier than Bitca.

I look over my shoulder to see a large, pitch-black cat crouching on my back. It met my gaze, bared its teeth, and said, “Sleep like the dead, all nights but this.” It bit me on the back of the neck, and as soon as it did so, I began to hear this horrible, inhuman buzzing voice that seemed to emanate from the back of my skull exhorting me to do… something. I don’t remember what, but it was terrible.

So, yeah, I just had my first incident of full-blown sleep paralysis in more than a decade! Glad I had already taken today off because, man, there was no way I was getting back to sleep after that.

See, when I was a youngster, I was plagued by crazy sleep apnea. I started sleep-walking around the time I hit puberty, which the doctors assured my folks was perfectly normal–and it is, to an extent; your body and your brain aren’t necessarily growing at the same rate, and things can get out of whack. But I didn’t grow out of it, as they assured us would happen; it got a lot worse. It turned out that my septum was very slightly deviated, but it shouldn’t have been enough to cause the problems I was having and, as the corrective surgery at that time essentially boiled down to breaking the patient’s face in half, they were loath to do so until we had exhausted all the other options.

Fortunately for me during that process, I never tried to run into traffic or anything–though I woke up beneath the magnolia in our yard a few times–but there were a couple of really unpleasant incidents, and I don’t think I got a solid night’s sleep for about five years. My big thing was, I am told, getting out of bed and going to watch other people in the house while they slept; which, needless to say, was no fun for them to wake up to. Apparently telling me to go away usually did the trick, and if it didn’t, steering me back out into the hall would send me away, so my family got used to it, and it wasn’t a huge issue unless we had guests… which is how the problem ended up solving itself.

My aunt’s family were staying with us and, for whatever reason, my id decided to up the ante. I wandered into my cousin’s room and, instead of taking up my usual post at the bedside, I climbed onto the foot of the bed. I had very long hair back then, and when I was on one of my walkabouts I tended to snore in a particularly unpleasant gurgling fashion. So he, awakened in the middle of the night to find an amorphous shape crouched at the end of the bed growling at him, reacted as most sane people would and flipped the fuck out. In his flailing, he managed to kick me in the face and break my nose, which, after all was said and done, seemed to cure it.

I evidently still talk in my sleep quite a bit, but I haven’t had any really unusual incidents (like the one this morning!) since. I’m sure it’s just the stress and anxiety about the dental work coupled with the drugs, but I can’t help but worry that this is a reversion to my old problem, and I cannot deal with that again. Ugh.

\o/ Bloodlines is one hundred pages long! \o/

Twelve point Times New Roman, baby, holla!

The bad news is that I’m pretty sure it’s now going to run nine chapters, but, eh.

I’m chuffed. Seeing as it is now officially longer than Bloodpact, this will be the longest thing I have written (for fun) in… two years! Damn near three. And in only two months; not too damn shabby. I probably shouldn’t say this, as I have a tendency to jinx myself, but I’m hoping to get it done before the end of August; that way if I really kick ass, I can have the trilogy done in time for NaNoWriMo.

I’m beginning to understand how the pulp writers manage to do it. Whee!

Lost Boys: The Tribe, 2008
AKA “Ripcurrents of BLOOD” AKA “Miami 5-OH FUCK IT’S A VAMPIRE” AKA “I Am Relevant: The Movie”
I wanted to love this movie. I wanted to. And, for what it’s worth, it’s nowhere near as bad as I feared it was going to be… but, alas, as much as I wish I could say so, it ain’t good, either.

Lost Boys fans will get a kick out of it because they’ve seen it already (though, while it’s been quite awhile, I don’t recall there being quite so much nudity and vomiting in the original). In a lot of places it feels more like a remake than a sequel; while a movie like this is obviously going to rely on its catchphrases and hallmarks, in several sequences they are merely recreations of the original scenes, rather than updates or nods. The folks behind this knew they had to go for the “so bad it’s good” angle, but for the most part it comes across as strained; throw in some fanservice for all the girls who grew up with crushes on Keifer Sutherland, and it becomes screamingly obvious they’re trying way, way too hard.

That being said, it’s got its moments. The beta vampires are probably the most interesting, original part of the film; it’s neat to see the brief glimpses of what night-to-night living is for the average vampire. There’s fantastic practical gore, a couple of cute cameos and, though I sincerely can’t tell whether he’s playing it straight or not, Corey Feldman is hilarious (though probably not in the way he intended). Definitely one for fans of the original… but don’t get your hopes up too high.

The Strangers, 2008
HOLY SHIT, I HATED THIS FUCKING MOVIE. Seriously, I am truly, sincerely, grievously sorry if anything I said on this blog encouraged anyone to waste an hour and a half of their life on this movie; I have that on my conscience. OH MY GOD.

Have you ever seen that internet meme where you’re watching what appears to be a car commercial, and then a zombie face pops up? Or where you take a colorblindness test, and then a scary face pops up? Or the photo of the “haunted” room where a white blur shoots at the screen after you’ve stared at it for a moment?

NINETY MINUTES OF THAT. OVER AND OVER AND OVER. There is no plot worth speaking of. There is a little bit of characterization, but it’s irrelevant to the movie. Liv Tyler answers the door. SCARYFACE. Live Tyler hides in the bedroom. SCARYFACE. Liv Tyler’s boyfriend hides in the closet. SCARYFACE. Liv Tyler crawls through the barn. SCARYFACE. The only break in the monotony (OH SHIT, SPOILERS) is when another character (I am honestly not sure if this was meant to be the guy’s friend, his brother… he just kind of randomly turns up) wanders into the house, peeks in on them, and Liv Tyler’s boyfriend, already keyed up from a few rounds of SCARYFACE, shoots him in the head. Accidentally. I think. SHOTGUNSCARYFACE. Oh, and a car gets set on fire.

Seriously. This movie makes me angry just thinking about it. There are not words to describe this incoherent bullshit. Oh my God.

The Gathering, 2002
I’d never heard of this one, but IMDB tells me it was actually in theaters for about five minutes; which is a shame, because I’d have liked to have seen it there.

This is a quiet, grueling movie in the best tradition of British horror; it really seems like it would work better as a novel, though it fits in well with the Prophecy/Stigmata/Christian horror trend we went through for awhile there. Its mystery is well-told and well-telegraphed; the ending is inevitable and easy to see coming, but by that point you don’t care, as the fun is in the journey. It’s very understated, but nevertheless delightfully creepy; there are two sequences that raised the hair on my arms.

My only complaint was the rather tacked on happy(ish) ending, but I am willing to bet anything that was a result of test screenings, and it’s still a lot more grim than you’d expect. Barring the last five minutes (which you are free to skip, and I advise you to do so; you’ll know when) this one is pretty much perfect.

I am not at work right now.

I have taken a whole week off and even though today is technically my first day of actual vacation, I’ve been in a frenzy all weekend. This was supposed to be a nice, calm staycation, but faced with a lack of crises, I have seized the opportunity to run around and do all sorts of pesky little chores I usually ignore.

But I’m mostly done now, and it’s so… empty. Seriously, I think this is the first time I have been unoccupied and not debilitatingly ill or injured in… shit, at least two years. I honestly don’t remember! Even the last time I fucked off to Denmark I ended up getting involved in an art gallery thing.

Nobody has shouted obscenities or shown me a disgusting photograph all day. I don’t know what to do with myself.

It’s freaking me out.

But one of the pesky little chores I’ve been tackling is finally getting my reading logs wrangled into some kind of order. GoodReads is a super-cool website that I am probably the last person on the internet to hear about, but I am deeply charmed. You can check out my profile to get an idea of just how awesome it is. (And the scary thing is, that’s only about 2/3rds of it; we’re going to see whether or not my common sense can win out over my OCD completism when it comes to transcribing the handwritten stuff!)

So now I am going to go, uh, relax or something. Maybe teach myself tuckpointing. Jesus.

Or, Thud: Friendly As FUCK!

I was taking some photos to update my Ravelry profile with, when I realized that I have yet to introduce the internet to the new fellow.  So, meet Thud!

We’ve had him for… oh, not quite two months now, though it’s actually very strange to type that; it already seems like he’s been around forever.  We adopted him from the Madison County Animal Shelter via MaryPaws, a local no-kill shelter that had scooped him up once they’d gotten sick of him.

As strange as this will probably sound, I am not a cat person; I didn’t want another cat after Poot.  He was my buddy, and he was unique; Bitca is cool as hell, but I was perfectly happy for her to be an only.  But Mr. Victus is a firm believer in the “cats are a byproduct of a functioning household” idea, and kept arranging for us to just so happen to need to hit the pet store whenever there was an adoption day.

It had gotten to the point where Mary recognized us, and was familiar with our shortlist–black and white, male, preferably a Manx or Siamese mix–so when we appeared for the second or third time, she was ready with a list of candidates.  I was completely over the idea by that point, but she worked very hard to match us up with a beastie, and while I was loath to waste her time, it seemed a shame to simply blow her off.

When she introduced us to the unprepossessing black lump curled up in one of the bottom cages, I was underwhelmed, but he immediately hopped up and gave me a cursory sniff before beginning to strop himself against my legs, purring his throat out.  Mr. Victus crouched down to see what was going on; the cat sniffed him, and then rammed him in the balls hard enough to knock him down.  :)  I promptly decided that this was The Best Cat In The World; after ten minutes or so of the then-unnamed Thud luxuriating in my attention amidst a clamor of stray animals and Saturday afternoon shoppers, I was sold.

It’s practically impossible to take a decent picture of the guy, as the instant he senses attention being paid to him, he will immediately run over and begin ramming you, as even his Petfinder profile will attest.  This is probably the best one so far; this was taken the very first morning he spent with us, less than sixteen hours after we’d met him, less than twelve after he’d been in our home.  Mr. Victus awoke to be greeted with this–Thud had somehow broken out of the guest room and braved the house to join us in bed–and grabbed his camera phone to snap a picture.  Deciding, correctly, that it was a pretty bad photo, he slunk off to grab the real camera; by that point Thud had grown interested and moved, so he attempted to recreate it by putting a cat treat in my ear.  What is not pictured is the screaming, flailing, and running around that immediately followed; but, hey, we cope.

That’s the thing that blows my mind: this guy does not take no for an answer.  The down side of that is that he weighs a smidge under sixteen pounds, and he isn’t very fat at all; I have never encountered a cat this strong.  His neck is thicker than both of my wrists held together!  There isn’t a mean bone in his body, but when he gets excited, even having him knead you can be a pulverizing experience; the love bites and play fighting are unreal.  He simply doesn’t know his own strength; yet I can’t bring myself to punish an animal for being affectionate, so I’ve got lots of little claw and tooth stipples to show for it.  :)  We’re working on it, though; he responds to “RUDE!” about half the time now.

Thud is teaching us that “love” is in fact a verb.  His verb.

And since I’m making with the cute cat pictures, here’s Bitca.  I don’t think I’ve ever posted about her before, simply because there’s not much to post besides, “OMFGCUTESQUEEEE!!!”  Seriously, she is like having an adorable anime sidekick brought to life running around the house; in another universe, there is war and fascism because she is sucking away all their warm fuzzies.  Even when she’s being bad, she’s tooth-rottingly precious.  I found her asleep at the scene of the crime and added the Post-It note before I acquired the documentation to prove to Mr. Victus that yes, his little darling IS in fact rude enough to pull shit off my desk to nest in; she obliged me by waking up and yawning, thus allowing me to take the best cat picture I’ve ever done.

Ah, kitties.

Four weeks later, and I suppose I can now call myself a novice spinner. Seeing it laid out like that, it seems like an awful lot of fuss to go through for what I ended up with–I think that’s maybe two hundred yarns total in both skeins; the little one is certainly less than a hundred–but that’s part of the learning process, I guess. I certainly wouldn’t buy either of these, but I’m not ashamed to admit I made them.

Nevertheless, I’m really glad I took the class; if nothing else, it’s made me a much savvier yarn shopper. (Coarse as it is, the fact that Lamb’s Pride managed to be that awesome with a single ply is even more impressive, and the notion of cable twist sock yarn still breaks my brain.) My teacher was also excellent; so excellent that I’m half-tempted to go back for her weaving class, which I haven’t the slightest bit of interest of in, simply for a chance to sit under the learning tree some more. Her tangents were almost more fascinating than her actual lessons; thirty years in the fiber business will give you a wealth of knowledge that just can’t be duplicated any other way. Check out the fine folks at Earthguild if you’re ever lucky enough to get the chance; I think they mostly stick to weaving shows, but they do travel a bit.

Still, it’s made me even more dubious of the snarls of indifferent handspun littering Etsy these days. If I’m capable of producing this less than eight hours after never having touched a spinning wheel before in my life, I really can’t imagine why people who have free access to as much practice as they like think charging boutique prices for stuff I wouldn’t classify as seconds is acceptable.

I don’t think I’ll continue on with spinning, though; it is very time-consuming, and while I knew wheels were expensive, I didn’t realize they were that expensive. Still, who knows what the future holds; it is a very Zen activity once you get the knack of it, and my inner engineer can’t resist the urge to try building a better mousetrap. I had a notion for a heel-driven pedal that I conceived in reference to kick-drums that I think might work very well for a spinning wheel; it might be time to see if I can’t knock out a prototype.

I’ve been knitting away as usual; behold Rogue’s hood, up to row 52, I believe–right before it gets really crazy. I’d forgotten just how seriously intense the cables were, but there’s little out there as gorgeous. Of course, my awe and respect are tempered by the fact that I’d actually gotten to row 55 before realizing that I’d bitched up some of the twists in row 51; just in case you were wondering, unpicking three rows of cables with at least six twists per panel really, really sucks. No harm done, though, and it has served to reinforce the fact that I am not as clever as I think I am, and that I do in fact need to keep a close eye on my charts.

Not a great deal else has been going on; real life has kept me quite busy. I’ve done a little maintenance on the websites, though most of it is backend stuff for my benefit. The stuff of interest for you guys over at logistify is that you can now view an easily printable version of any story; I do mean to get around to putting up the requested pdfs some day–I too have come to love reading on my iPhone–but revising and reformatting takes a hell of a lot of time that I just don’t have these days, unless I put actual writing aside. Over here, I’ve added an e-mail function to commenting–tick the box, and you will get notifications of comments here just like Livejournal; hopefully this will make conversations easier to follow–and a progress bar with which I’ll be tracking my writing progress; you may feel free to glare and tap your feet at me if it hasn’t moved for a couple of days. Blood* chapters generally take 8 to 12 hours to actually write, with another two or three hours of revising and formatting for posting to follow, just to give you an idea; I can only ask for indulgence if you notice I’ve been dragging my heels for the past week!