This journal is mostly friends only.

If you know me, or if we share an interest and you're just an awesome person, drop a comment or a pm and I'll add you.

...Skirt! Okay, it's a little sad how making something so easy leaves me self-satisfied, but I'm pretty happy with it. I like the pockets; the whole self-fabric buttons on contrast thing (or vice versa) is a favorite theme. I never claimed to be creative. Fabric is Alexander Henry's Koto print, all the other fabric and notions I dug out of my stash (the red doesn't precisely match, but I think it's busy enough not to matter) so the total cost of this was $10. Not too bad.

( Few more pics, etc )


It was so hot today I spent the afternoon sewing with a wet hand towel draped over my shoulders. Chicago, so much hate sometimes. (I know I could just go down and rent an air conditioner on Monday, but then what would I whine about?)

Any suggestions on where one could go in August for ~5 days on $1,200 or less? ($2,400 for two). It's been too long since I planned a vacation and I can't remember how much stuff realistically costs. The only mandate is "no camping," but hostels are okay.


My default is California with a drive down the coast, but there must be somewhere fun and [relatively] affordable I'm just not thinking of. Friends of ours are going to Morocco, which is more than $1,200 because of airfare, but awesome. My first choice would be Napoli --> Calabria (I'm in the mood for fabulous cheese and history dorkery) but airfare is $1,300, so that's not an option. Unfortunately we're stuck in August because he's going to do school stuff in Sept., so we may end up being screwed by peak airfare (airfare to London is $527 in September, but $800 in August. Boo.)

Dear ladies of Chicago:

While these few days of glorious, mid-50s weather have been, truly, a gift from the heavens, I have noticed a disturbing and discomforting trend: y'all seem to have forgotten how to dress yourselves when it is not 20-below. Here is a brief refresher:

1. TIGHTS ARE NOT PANTS.

2. SHIRTS ARE NOT DRESSES.

I understand that the urge to shed one's oppressive layers of wool and thinsulate at the merest suggestion of balmy weather is near-irresistible, but please -- stop short of chucking your pants entirely. The whole post-coital, tossled-hair, in-the-boy-friend's-shirt-and-nothing-else look is sexy... in your bedroom. If you're going outdoors, for god's sake PUT ON PANTS.


P.S. If you simply must cleave to the hideously misguided notion that it is, in fact, acceptable to wear a shirt without pants, at least get opaque tights. I do not wish to be visually assaulted by your sheer tights and oversized dress shirt ensemble when I am casually minding my own business on Michigan Avenue.

Ice flow on the Chicago River, 6:00 pm today. (And at 2:45 pm, looking toward Wabash.)


My day was good -- paid my bills, returned a dress I decided I was never actually going to alter (my torso is three inches too short for normal human clothing, apparently) and despite my best efforts, did not find something to exchange it for. Bought $30 worth of jewelry instead, then had jerk chicken with C at Calypso, and plan to watch the first episode of The Tudors while attempting to brush my cat. It was cold today, and it may have hailed. Or maybe it was just very sharp snow.

How was yours?

I have a final at 9:00 am tomorrow, so of course I've spent the last 25 minutes in the bathtub watching the Office on the Hulu. If you do not hear from me ever again, I have either electrocuted myself or I have failed administration and committed seppuku. (Frankly I kinda hope it's the former. If I were forced to pick.)


...Aaaand I just randomly found out that one of my house plants is "extremely toxic" to cats. Fitz has been chewing on it for a couple months and grooming the pollen off his fur after vigorously rolling in it. See -- this is why I cannot have children. I would let them chew on the house plants and lick themselves for months before bothering to find out if it's going to give them renal failure. (Cat is fine; fang-marked plant is now out of reach.)

( Fails at fixtures )


I am reading Twilight, and have a multi-person waiting list for my copy. I'm not sure why my friends won't spend their own $8.82 to buy their own vamromnov (...dignity, maybe?) but it's gonna be the hot new thing in law school (where nobody has the slightest inclination to read anything but the New Yorker and novels with shiny raised lettering on the cover). Abstinent sparkly Mormon vampires are just such a ceaseless wellspring of awesome. Really, though, the author could not possibly hate on Forks any more than she does, and Forks is a lovely little town. Given the recent press I had my hopes up for something worse, but this novel is decidedly... palatable. Taken in context as an abstinence-is-the-new-sex teen Mormon vamromnov, anyway. (To mix metaphors, it's a train wreck you just can't put down! It's significantly less ludicrous and ridiculous than "Buffy"!) And Edward is a man after my own heart:

"His eyes were gloriously intense as he uttered that last sentence, his voice smoldering. I couldn't remember how to breathe.

'Will you go to Seattle with me?' he asked, still intense."

YES, YES, A THOUSAND TIMES YES, EDWARD! (But only if I can get some of those hot 'n' fresh punk rock donuts at the Market. A girl has needs.)

"A zookeeper displays a newborn Egyptian tortoise at the Bioparco di Roma in Italy." from the May 23 BBC News Day in Pictures.


I'm trying to imagine how impossibly tiny this little guy is. Probably the most adorable thing I have ever seen. (I love tortoises; perhaps it is an empathy.)

I wrote a big, long, boring entry here about DC and Nashville and law and my existential angst but livejournal ate it. Here's a rather bland picspam instead:


Smithsonian asks the tough questions.


The original moon landing was filmed on location here.


The real reason America is made of win, though, is that our national museum has R2D2 and Threepio (in front of a small part of Eniac)... (The puffy shirt is also in residence.)


Needs moar flags?


Aaaand a photo of Shawn playing Love & Berry: Dress up and Dance like the six year old girl we all know he really is. ...YEEA-UH.

Okay, so large chunks of Puget Sound are still out of electricty, 6 or 7 days after the massive wind storm. I empathize, but I really wonder why Q13 is running an informative report on generators and how to power lights and space heater.

... On TV.

... Ah, local news.


(Also apparently we are now in a "poisoning epidemic" as a tiny number of people have suffocated themselves by trying to heat their powerless homes with barbeques and what not. I'm very grateful local news is here to warn me about this potentially deadly epidemic.)




At any rate, very big huge ginormous thanks to everyone who sent me cards and whatnot this season. My last few weeks have been pretty dreary and I'm stuck up here through the new year, so I really appreciate it. My own second batch of cards is really late as, lamely enough, I ran out of stamps. (Consider them new year's cards, I guess. Sorry I only got about half of them out on time.)

Seven very true facts (as of 10:57 am PST):

1. I cannot name a city in South Dakota. (Can you? No cheating.)

2. It's estimated that 100 billion people have died since the advent of humanity. The current world population is roughly 6.65 billion.

3. I still buy cereal that comes with a prize.

4. The largest known object in the universe is a traveling cloud of gas and galaxies 200 million light years across. They're called Lyman-alpha blobs, because scientists always come up with the best names for things. I have no conception of 200 million light years, but that's really, really big.

5. I am roughly .0000000000000000169 light years across. (vertically, not horizontally.)

6. Seattle Central offers a career degree in "marine deck technology." I'm not sure what, specifically, this means, but it may be more useful than English lit.

7. Yesterday two cops on patrol downtown by their cop car asked us if we wanted a 'free beer' (presumably confiscated from some dirty denizens of Pioneer Square?) Way to be, Seattle's Finest.