darchildre: cooper and truman looking interested and somewhat skeptical (cooper and truman)
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.
darchildre: ray kowalski wearing dorky glasses.  text:  "yeah, i feel fairly dorky at the moment" (golly but i feel like a dork)
Today, I checked in a children's dvd entitled "Taking the 'Duh' out of Divorce."

I stared at it for about a minute, trying to figure out what the hell that meant, until I realized that the title is a play on words that really doesn't work if (like me) you tend to say "dih-vorce."

I feel like it shouldn't have taken me that long to figure out.
darchildre: the fourth doctor's scarft (crafty geek)
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.
darchildre: the fourth doctor's scarft (crafty geek)
Browsing ravely while waiting for the screen that allows me to discard books to come up. (Discard has 2500 items checked out to it, so it takes about 10 minutes to load and you can't do anything else library-related in the mean time.)

Internet, do you think I should knit these? Because, on the one hand: look, it is a summery costume item! Also, I could wear it under skirts in the winter and be warmer! But on the other hand: knitted bloomers. Would I ever really wear those?

Thus, I am torn. Also, I have too many projects going - there's the Kira vest (which needs to be unraveled and redesigned), I have a pair of socks going and plans for several more, and a shawl. But, well, summer and summery clothes are more immediately necessary, so...
darchildre: sam beckett rocking out.  text:  "complete and utter dorkmuffin" (dorkmuffin)
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.
darchildre: green ultra magnified bacteria.  text:  "their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold." (what man knows kadath?)
So I'm reading this DS9 novel, right? It is Fallen Heroes and is pretty good - I'm enjoying it. And I'm reading along and, at one point, one of the characters thinks about having gone to see a production of The King in Yellow performed on the station.

And my immediate thoughts were 1) Doesn't the Federation have rules about maybe not performing plays that inevitably result in madness and destruction? and 2) that is why everything bad that has happened in this book has happened. I don't care what the actual reason turns out to be - the ultimate reason for all the bad things is that someone decided that it would be a good idea to summon the Tattered King.




(This is my favorite random shout out in a DS9 novel so far. Though I also really enjoyed the fleeting mention in one of the others about Ayvon of the Seven, a famous Bajoran freedom fighter.)
darchildre: the fourth doctor's scarft (crafty geek)
Things that are ridiculous:

So, I have been watching a lot of DS9 lately, right? Which has led to reading fanfic and watching vids. This morning, I was watching a really excellent Kira vid (which is here) and one of the tracks my brain decided to run on while watching this vid was, "Y'know, civilian Bajorans wear a lot of openwork crochet (or knitting - I can't really tell without a better look)." And there was this green thing that Kira was wearing in several clips - it's sleeveless and long and green and lovely. I couldn't remember what episode that was in but after about 20 minutes of poking at things and looking through image galleries, I discovered that it was The Circle. So now I am scrutinizing screencaps of this garment.

Alas, they are kinda blurry and it's really hard for me to see the lace pattern clearly, let alone figure out how the garment's constructed. It's got seams at the shoulders but I can't tell if the back and front panels are worked separately and joined at the sides, or worked continuously around. (It could be like the vest I'm working on, where they're worked separately in order to form the arm holes and worked all together for the rest of the garment.)

I haven't gotten to that episode yet and I've been trying pretty hard not to skip ahead to my favorites but I am ridiculously tempted to watch this one, just so I can try to figure out if this things is crocheted or knitted and whether I can work up a pattern. I'd really like to make it, I think.
darchildre: a suit with the ace of spades in the pocket (aces)
In which I am not like other people:

So, a week or so ago, I checked out Bonk by Mary Roach because sex + science = pretty fascinating. And I've been enjoying reading it. And then, this week, I got another book by her - Stiff, because corpses + science = also fascinating. I am enjoying that one also.

What I have discovered over the course of reading them is that while I have no problem eating while reading descriptions of the decay and putrefaction of human organs (like chicken soup!), I am not actually capable of eating while reading about semen, even when couched in the driest and most scientific terms.

So that is my asexual!Sara thought of the day. Putrefying corpses - in some ways, less icky than sex.*





*I mean, if you are into sex, awesome. Seriously, good for you. I am not judging! But, y'know...fluids. Icky.
darchildre: a candle in the dark.  text:  "a light in dark places". (squee!)
In which I have poor impulse control:

Did I just find out about the new Mountain Goats album that's being released in March? Yes, I did.

Did I immediately pre-order it, despite the fact that I have heard not a single track on it and I don't even buy cds at all anymore? Yes. Yes, I did.

When are you coming back to Seattle, John Darnielle?
darchildre: green ultra magnified bacteria.  text:  "their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold." (what man knows kadath?)
Today in What The Hell, How Is This My Brain, I Don't Even Know:

So, when I work on Sunday, it is a shelving day. That's pretty much all I do all day long - shelve books. It's cool though, because I like shelving to a certain degree and because I get to spend the time telling myself stories. These vary between things that I'd actually like to write down eventually and terribly indulgent mental fanfic. Sometimes, they continue for weeks and sometimes they're one-shots. I always enjoy them.

Today, I didn't have a continuing story I wanted to play with and had no new inspiration biting especially hard, so I did my normal thing and let my brain just sort of drift and shuffle through the pack of cards that is my favorite tropes and character types. And today, my brain settled on vaguely Innsmouth-inspired fish people. Cool, I thought. Fish people are great and I haven't done anything Lovecraftian for several months, since my brain stopped being All Re-Animator All the Time. And Innsmouth means that the fish people can be cultists, which is even better.

So I'm bopping along, thinking about fish people. And, since my stories are all about feeding into my personal story preferences, it eventually turned into creepy fish people romance. Because who doesn't want creepy fish people in love? Surely that has a universal appeal.

However, there comes a point when one realizes that one has been making up a story in which there are fish people performing eldritch rites naked in a river and eventually there is going to be fish people sex and one has spent the last few minutes considering the erotic possibilities of gill slits.* While shelving in the children's library.

At which point I started wondering what the hell was wrong with me.

Fortunately, fairly soon after that, I got to go home.







*I don't personally find gill slits to be particularly sexy but I imagine that fish people - and especially (as these were) the kind of latter-generation Innsmouth folk who sort of fetishize that which is more fishy than human - definitely would.
darchildre: sam beckett rocking out.  text:  "complete and utter dorkmuffin" (dorkmuffin)
Things:

- It is much cooler this morning, thank all the gods that ever were. I feel so much better than yesterday, it is just unbelievable.

- I do feel somewhat sleep-deprived, but that is entirely my own fault because for the past ::checks back:: two weeks or so, I have been staying up way too frelling late, reading the Inception kink meme. (This fandom, what the hell, how did this happen?) And, see, the thing about kink memes is that you start reading and you say, okay, I'm just going to read a page or two and then I'm going to go do something else or go to bed. And then, suddenly, it's one in the morning and you're reading things like this and giggling ridiculously and sweet gods, how is this my life, I don't even know. I mean, I'm enjoying myself immensely but sometimes I do kinda step back and sort of blink disbelievingly at myself.

- In other news! My computer, my poor Igor, is slowly losing the will to live. He is immensely slow about everything and keeps freezing up at inconvenient times and though it pains me to do so, I think I'm going to have to replace him. I am thinking this time that I want to go for a laptop, because it would be nice to be able to drag the computer around with me. I basically know what I want, so now I'm in the part of the process where I sit around for a few days, convincing myself to actually buy the thing.

- The problem, of course, with buying a computer during full-on crazy fannish obsession is that I will probably end up naming it Arthur and then everyone will have to make fun of me forever. Though maybe naming it that would encourage it to be efficient and competent and, y'know run properly.

- Do you know, I think Igor is my least embarrassingly named piece of electronic equipment? He's Igor because he has two hard drives, which is like having two brains. My kindle is named after Professor Henry Armitage (it has a Miskatonic U sticker on the back and Prof Armitage was a librarian, after all) and the mp3 player is Paul because the one before was Sylvester and this one had a weird problem when I first bought it where it would occasionally just delete everything I had put on it, which was a lot like the Eighth Doctor's recurrent bouts of amnesia. Possibly, I should just embrace my dorky naming tendencies.

- I like to pretend that when I post in bullet points like this that it's slightly more organized and less ridiculous than rambling paragraphs full of nonsense but no, it really isn't. Ah, well.

- Dammit, Igor, why do you not want to let firefox function? I don't have that many tabs open! It should not take 20 minutes to navigate from one page to another! That's it, I am ordering the new computer today...as soon as I can get Igor to work.
darchildre: dr frankenstein, the monster, and the bride.  text:  "fucked up family portrait" (family portrait)
Conversations that other people don't have:

Coworker: Oh, look, the Bride of Frankenstein dvd, Sara!

Me: It is a beautiful film. I would live in that film.

Coworker: You're hilarious.

Me: No, seriously. Well, actually, what I want is the castle in Son of Frankenstein. That is my dream home.

Coworker: Your dream home?

Me: It has that beautiful staircase. I covet that staircase. Come here, I will show you a picture of the staircase.

Coworker: That's an...interesting looking house.

Me: If I could live inside a German Expressionist film, I would be a happy woman, I tell you what.
darchildre: sam beckett rocking out.  text:  "complete and utter dorkmuffin" (dorkmuffin)
In increasing increments of dorkiness:

- So, before we went to Victoria, I went and found a whole bunch of fanfic to put on my kindle. A lot of it ended up being Highlander fic. So, I have been reading or rereading a lot of Highlander fic lately.

- And I thought, okay, the whole show is streaming on Netflix, I could watch it. And the other day, I was sick and didn't want to continue my Farscape rewatch, so I started watching Highlander. From the beginning. Season one is...kinda bad, but still oddly enjoyable.

- And then, this evening, [personal profile] calapine posted about Big Finish having a sale tomorrow. I haven't done Big Finish in a while, so I went to the site to browse. ...did you guys know they have Highlander audios now? (I...might be downloading one as I type this. Hell, it can't be worse than early season one, right? Or Minuet in Hell.)

- ...did you also know that Big Finish is going to be putting out a series of audios about the Four Horsemen, with Peter Wingfield and Valentine Pelka in them? I mean, they don't come out till January, by which point this madness will almost certainly have passed but if they were out now, I'm pretty sure that I would have ordered them. (I did kinda set up an email reminder for the day they come out. Just in case.)

I feel kinda like I ought to email Marc and let him know...
darchildre: dr rotwang and robot maria.  text:  "I love my robot girlfriend" (robot girlfriend)
Things I do when no one come into the library for an hour:

Start ridiculous swaps on swap-bot.com.

Anyone want to make stuffed robots? (Of course you do!)
darchildre: ray kowalski wearing dorky glasses.  text:  "yeah, i feel fairly dorky at the moment" (golly but i feel like a dork)
So, I'm packing for our weekend in Victoria, right? The trip that is the reason that I filled my kindle up with fanfic and books I haven't read, so that I could just bring my kindle and not any other books? The trip that, seriously, is only going to be four days long and I probably won't get that much reading done anyway?

Yeah. I also packed a book. Just one book. But still. I packed a book.

(My kindle might break!)

I am so ridiculous.

Anyway, we are off in the wee small hours of the morning. Be back on Tuesday! Don't break the internet while I'm gone!
darchildre: the fourth doctor's scarft (crafty geek)
Half-finished crochet projects in my room:

- A Dracula doll. Should be finished in a few days.

- A pair of fingerless gloves with colorwork of the Yellow Sign. Making these is probably a bad idea, but I really like the way the Sign is working up. And I like making gloves.

- About 8 half-finished pairs of socks. Yes, that means I have eight random crocheted socks. I could just make them into four pairs, but somehow, I don't do that.

- The sweater I started last summer. It is beautiful and cranberry colored and full of cables. And somehow, I never want to work on it till summer, when there is no chance of wearing it and having it on my lap is way too hot.

- Katie's afghan. Lingering at half-finished. Someday, it really will be done. But not today.

- There are probably others, lingering in the depths of the yarn basket, neglected and forgotten.



And yet, what is my plan for today? Why, buying new yarn for a brand new project, of course.

::facepalm::
darchildre: sam beckett rocking out.  text:  "complete and utter dorkmuffin" (dorkmuffin)
I'm reading this book - another one of those books that I put on hold and them promptly forgot why I wanted it - called Exchange of Hostages by Susan R Matthews. It is...odd. So, it's the future (or at least humanoids-in-space), right, and the future is horrible and dystopic and fascist, and our main character is a student at the training academy for Inquisitors, who are government-sanctioned torturers. His name is Andrej. Also, there are certain criminals who get to serve out their sentences as, basically, slave-soldiers, and each of the Inquisitor-students gets one bound to him/her for their training period. Andrej has a weirdly intense relationship with his that involves a lot of non-sexual touching and symbolically important knives.

At this point, I'm kinda wondering if this is one of the books I put on hold because I read somewhere that the author came out of fandom.

It's one of those books that you don't really feel like you can actually recommend to people, as it's weird and offputting and there is, y'know, a lot of torture. And I cannot honestly tell you if the book is any good. It might be! I can't tell! Because it is apparently hitting a whole bunch of my id-fic buttons and that sort of thing inhibits my ability to distinguish quality. The experience of reading it reminds me a lot of reading Anne Bishop's Dark Jewels books - it's vaguely ridiculous and you feel kinda like you're eating a huge amount of something tasty but bad for you and probably you don't actually want to admit that you're reading it to other people but you can't stop reading. And then, y'know, maybe you buy the ridiculous book so you can read it again whenever you want.

This time, at least, the books have less embarrassing covers (and titles) than the Anne Bishop books.

My library does not have any more of the series after the first one. I think I can get the used paperbacks pretty cheap, though.

Tell me about your embarrassing guilty pleasure books. We can feel suitably ashamed of ourselves together!
darchildre: elsa lanchester as the bride of frankenstein, applying makeup (this is my girly icon)
Ok, you guys, I am now going to wax extremely enthusiastic about centuries-old clothing technology but it is relatively new to me, all right? So what I have to say is: shawls are pretty much awesome. They are cozy, they are pretty, they're like a jacket except that you don't have to take them off indoors, they're like a sweater except that they're easier to remove if necessary, they're like a blanket except less cumbersome. Really, the only way that the shawl I have been wearing all day could be improved would be if it had pockets. And that is only because almost every garment could be improved by the addition of pockets. In all other ways - totally great.

...I was pretty much designed by nature to be a spinster, wasn't I?
darchildre: the fourth doctor's scarft (crafty geek)
Today in dorky things I have done:

I may have crocheted myself a cuddly stuffed Cthulhu.

pictures! )



And, in non-dorky things that I have done, here are the gloves I made for my [livejournal.com profile] help_haiti auction. They were won by [livejournal.com profile] gossymer and are currently traveling to her as we speak. I'm pretty proud of them, so I'm showing them off.

more pictures! )

And those are my crafty things of late.
darchildre: the fourth doctor's scarft (crafty geek)
Dear Brain,

I do not care how cool the Kid's Weaving book that just came in looks. You have at least three craft projects that you have to finish before the 21st. You are not allowed to decide that now is a good time to take up a new craft.

At least get all the Christmas presents done first, for goodness sake.
darchildre: green ultra magnified bacteria.  text:  "their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold." (what man knows kadath?)
So. This summer, when I discovered tapestry crochet, I decided to make myself a pair of fingerless gloves full of tapestry work. I am wearing them now. They came out pretty awesome, if I do say so myself, though the thumb gusset could perhaps be a little neater. Still, pretty good for one of my first tries with a new technique.

They are also about the geekiest things I have ever made for myself because, at the time, it seemed like a really good idea to make up a chart of the Elder Sign (both regular and mint) and stitch those into my gloves. So, y'know, now I have gloves that ward off the Old Ones. Also, they keep my hands warm. And I get complimented on them (mostly on the tapestry work - not so much on the geekiness), which is nice.

Anyway! I was wearing them the other day and thinking, "Y'know what would be neat? If I made another pair of these, but with the Yellow Sign on them!"

Obviously, that thought is a crazy thought. Because a) there are only so many pairs of gloves one can wear, b) I already have way too many half-finished crochet projects, c) I do not actually want to be possessed by the King in Yellow, and d) I don't wear yellow much anyway, so it's not like they would go with anything.

So I am not allowed to do that.

I may have charted the damned thing anyway, though...
darchildre: clark kent drinking cocoa with his mom (cocoa with the kents)
My day so far:

- This morning, while fetching something from my car for Megan, I tripped over my pajamas and fell flat on my face on the sidewalk. It was frelling hilarious. And I'm going to have a pretty awesome bruise on my right forearm, which I'm fairly excited about.*

- Paperback swap leads to me reading ridiculous things because I don't have to pay for them and no one I know has to see them. Ridiculous but weirdly enjoyable. Sadly, no one seems to have any more of those weird Dark Horse-Universal Monsters fanfic books that I can gulp down like candy.

- Today, I opened a new pomegranate and took some for lunch. It was awesome, especially with the incredibly chocolatey brownie I also had.

- We have new shelves behind the desk this morning. I kinda want to attack them with a label maker and give everything an actual Place That It Goes. I like things having a Place That They Go.

So far, Tuesday is a fairly happy day.



*Other people get excited about bruises, right? Bruises are neat. They make my skin turn weird colors and it's nifty.
darchildre: a candle in the dark.  text:  "a light in dark places". (Default)
So...how ridiculous would it be to try to get time off in November to go see the Mountain Goats when they come to Seattle? Because, okay, the concert is on a Tuesday, which is a stupid day to go to a concert and taking off work at Kingston is always kinda awkward because there are only 6 of us who work here but man, it's the Mountain Goats and I'm pretty sure that I still have vacation whatsit that I should use before the end of the year and they have a new album out (that I should really acquire soon) and tickets to the show are only $20 and yeah, this huge run-on sentence is basically just me trying to convince myself to do something that I already want to do.

(It's like one of those conversations with my mother where she both asks the questions and answers them. Your job in this situation is to stand there and nod at appropriate intervals.)

Hmm. I will consider it for a few more days, I think. And then email my boss about getting time off. Because yeah, I have pretty much made up my mind but that dithering time is important, somehow.

(Oh, and I guess that the Tuesday isn't really that stupid 'cause it's November 10th and we're closed the 11th. Veteran's Day and all.)

Hi! Thanks so being here for this all-important dithering post. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
darchildre: a cybermat!  text:  "grar!  i'm a scary monster!" (grar!  I'm a scary monster!)
So...I listened to the soundtrack to The Wicker Man in my car on the way to work this morning. Which, in a way, is a good thing because I enjoy the music.

On the other hand, it does mean that I have a constant loop in my head of Christopher Lee singing a bawdy song about a tinker. Which is not precisely library-appropriate.
darchildre: a cybermat!  text:  "grar!  i'm a scary monster!" (grar!  I'm a scary monster!)
I'm not the only one who gets irritated when people use the word "lycanthropy" when they're talking about a person who turns into an animal that isn't a wolf, right? If your person turns into a tiger or a hyena or a rat or whatever, they are not a lycanthrope. They can be a were-whatever, or a shapeshifter, or a theriomorph, if you want to be fancy. But they are not a lycanthrope. Because "lykoi" means "wolf", not "whatever the hell animal I want".

Or possibly I am the only person who gets irritated about things like that. It's like my thing about wyverns.

Still, it bothers me.

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darchildre: a candle in the dark.  text:  "a light in dark places". (Default)
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