The Aviary

So, one of my coworkers is getting a new cat. And this conversation ensued.



Coworker 1: You know how it is - we just stopped into the Humane Society for a quick look and bam! Now we have a new cat.

Coworker 2: Oh, things like that are so dangerous! Whenever I go to the pet store to pick up dog food, they're having an adoption event and I have to tell myself that I can't even glance at the puppies.

Me: Man, I know. Every time I walk into a pet store, it take about 2 minutes before I start thinking about how I want to take all of the rats home.

Coworker 1: ...

Coworker 2: ...

Me: And the ferrets!

Coworker 1: That never happens to me.



I have always wanted a rat, you guys, and never owned one. They are so adorable, with their little beady eyes and tiny grabby paws!

Someday.

So, I was having breakfast and I thought to myself that it would be fun to spend the evening after work playing Arkham Horror, since there's no one else in the house to be annoyed by my game taking up the whole of the kitchen table for several hours. Then I thought that I should go ahead and set it up this morning, so I won't have to do that after work, because the game takes a goodly amount of time to set up and I had a new expansion I wanted to incorporate.

It took me half an hour to lay the game out on the table with all the pieces. I swear to god, setting up Arkham Horror is in itself some sort of arcane act of summoning. I'm pretty sure if you did it exactly right, you could actually use the board to contact an Elder God.

Sometimes, when I get my pull list from Midtown Comics, they have thrown in a random free comic in order to entice me to subscribe. I got one this week called Masks, which is about various pulp-era characters teaming up to fight crime and government corruption which, I'm not going to lie, I thought was pretty awesome. Because I love pulp. So well played, Midtown Comics.

Anyway. One of the characters in the comic was the Green Hornet. Which means I am now going to tell you a rambling anecdote about my childhood.

When I was little, I was a huge fan of the Adam West Batman show. It was pretty much my first ever introduction to superheroes and I loved it. It was funny, it was exciting, it was ridiculous, sometimes the heroes were almost killed by giant cakes. It was great. My sister Megan was also a fan. (She liked Robin, I liked the Penguin. Yeah, I don't know either. He had a purple top hat and a cigarette holder! I have liked certain things from a very young age.) We watched it every chance we got.

Batman came on in a block of similar shows, like Wonder Woman and Green Hornet. So we often ended up watching those as well, though not as often. Green Hornet and Kato actually appeared on Batman at one point and got turned into giant postage stamps. Because that is the kind of show Batman was. You'd get commercials for the other shows during Batman and the channel had a kind of goofy vibe and would sometimes make weird little commercials sort of making fun of the shows. One of those commercials made up words to the Green Hornet theme song. (I'm pretty sure that, for a while, Megan thought those were the real words to the Green Hornet theme song.)

Fifty percent of the time, I cannot remember the name of the woman who sits next to me in choir, but I am going to remember the made up words to the Green Hornet theme song until I die. And they have been stuck in my head from the moment I opened that comic and realized that the Green Hornet was in it. Alas, I cannot find that commercial anywhere on youtube and it may only be Megan and I who remember it, but here are the words:

He's the Greeeen Hornet,
Alias publisher Britt Reid.
He fights criiiime with cool gadgets.
Look out for his hornet's sting!

His butler's named Kato.
He's also his chauffeur.
He driiives the Black Beauty.
Watch him make that motor sing!

There are so many other things I could be devoting those brain cells to, but no. Green Hornet theme song. Now you can sing it too. Enjoy.

In which my family are enablers:

I found this pattern while browsing ravelry today. Obviously, I immediately wanted to make all of them, especially the badgers*. So I emailed my sister Katie and my mom so that they could tell me not to buy the pattern and make ridiculous knitted badger gloves.

Katie proceeded to tell me that she now wants to make them too and Mom wants a pair for Christmas.

So I may be knitting some badger gloves in the near future.





*I love badgers and have done ever since I first read Wind in the Willows as a small child. Mr Badger is kickass.

...now I am a little sad that there isn't a mole.

Tonight, I seriously spent three hours playing Arkham Horror by myself. (I nearly won - I only had one more gate I needed to seal - but then The King in Yellow got performed and the Earth perished in screaming and fire, presumably.)

I thoroughly approve of single-player board games. I get all the fun I ever get out of playing a board game and none of the anxiety they occasionally produce. And no one minds if I start singing bits of Shoggoth on the Roof, which is a plus.

So, y'know how sometimes you feel as though you ought to come with some kind of warning label, so that people know what they're getting into when they enter into conversation with you?

I sometimes think that (at least one of) mine should be "Warning: I will tell you the story of the Þrymskviða at the slightest provocation."

I mean, I think that people mostly enjoy it when it happens and it's not as though I start my day thinking, "Today I will tell people stories about Thor in a dress!" But it happens more often than is probably strictly necessary.

What warning labels do you think you ought to come with?

In which I am a giant dorkmuffin:

So, on the last couple hexagons on my quilt, I've been doing some duplicate stitching. So far, I have a terrible crow, a fox, the moon, the sun, a couple of flowers, and an ampersand. These are all from other people's charts that I found on ravelry - I have a few more charts that I've saved that I want to stitch.

But I have no geeky hexes as yet, which is obviously a problem. So last night, I found a TARDIS chart and watched some Doctor Who and stitched it. But see, that is clearly not sufficient, because if I have the TARDIS, I should probably have a dalek. Apparently, no one on ravelry has yet charted a dalek, so I had to do it. I haven't stitched it yet, but I think the chart looks pretty good. (There is a part of me that wants to try making a cybermat because I love them, but I don't think I could adequately chart that so that it would be recognizable.)

So this is a good start, but somewhat monofannish. No one has apparently made any Star Trek charts as yet either, so I stayed up way too late trying to chart the Starfleet emblem combadge thingie. And then the Peacekeeper symbol thingie from Farscape (which was surprisingly difficult). And now I have realized that I have no monster-based charts and that Frankenstein and Dracula at least should be represented.

Fortunately, I had no big plans for this weekend.

Last night, I went into iTunes with the intention of resubscribing to my OTR horror podcasts, since I had lost those in the hard drive debacle. And then I intended only to download the episodes I had missed.

That did not happen.

So now, I have something like 30 episodes of various OTR horror shows on the ipod I am borrowing from my mom (since I can't add new stuff to my mp3 player and have not replaced it yet). And this weekend led to something of a monster-love revival, so I am watching old horror movies and plotting random Universal monster fanfic and reading my ridiculous Dark Horse monster fanfic tie in novels, so at least 10 of those episodes are from The Creaking Door. Because The Creaking Door has that guy who sounds amazingly like Colin Clive and is often scripted to have hysterical breakdowns. I am totally a sucker for that kind of thing.

I should watch Mad Love tonight. Peter Lorre and Colin Clive - what could be better than that?

The trouble with wearing my bloomers is that they go under my skirt. And thus, I am quite comfortable and toasty warm, but I can't show them off to people.

Well, I mean, I could, but it would be awkward for all concerned.

They are really awesome, though.

Today is the day during which I ended up trying to tell the story of the Volsungasaga to my coworker. (Well, two-thirds of it. The Sigurd bits and Otter's Ransom.)

I'm not at all sure how that happened.

Things that are alternately awesome about the internet and ridiculous about me:

So, this morning, I have some time for knitting and an urge to start rewatching Twin Peaks. (Maybe this time I will finish it! ...gods, I'm such a dork.)

I am watching it streaming on Netflix because my dvds are upstairs and I don't feel like getting up.

Today, I went to the Funky Junk show in Puyallup with my mom, which is a lot of people selling weird vintage stuff and artsy things. It was a whole lot of fun and, well, as one does at such things, I bought something ridiculous.

I bought a vintage sewing machine.

See, I want to learn to sew. (It is my other goal this year, besides learning to knit. I have learned to knit.) And older machines are so pretty. And it was only $15. So.

It is a Kenmore 117-812, and came in its own little case with tiny drawers that have random notions in them. (It looks like this.) Alas, it didn't come with a manual, so I'm trying to find one online. And then I will learn to sew with it, and make dolls and clothes and things!

I'm very excited.

Slow night at the library, so I am trolling ravely. Which is a bad idea, as I have two pairs of socks and a shawl I'm in the middle of (though the shawl is nearly done), the yarn for the Kira vest coming in the mail to be started later this week (so exciting!), and nebulous plans for an eventual robot-themed cardigan.

But, see, I found this pattern from this book, and it is explicitly a sweater for surviving a robot uprising (or other related apocalypse) in. Pretty much, that is amazing, and thus it needs to be added to the project queue. It has artistically placed dropped stitches, to simulate the kind of wear it would undergo while you're fleeing the alien invaders! That is hilarious and wonderful. I would wear that all the time.

(I...would not use the suggested yarn, though. I have no doubt that it's lovely but I am spoiled by knitpicks and thus cannot bring myself to spend more than $5 or so a skein. Also, I would prefer to actually be able to wash my garments in a washing machine, rather than doing it in my sink.)

Man, geeky yarn craft is my favorite thing ever.