I've decided to start a new life - a life of crime.  Because I have hot glued all my fingertips off.

Still better than trying to sew!  Take that, sewing machine!  Screw you, needle and thread! 

I wanted to ask if the folks who'd read some of my screenplay wouldn't mind telling me their thoughts based on what they've already read. Don't feel pressured to hurry up and read more, and if you haven't started, no worries. I'm uploading it tomorrow or the next day for a couple competitions/festivals, and if there's anything I can change or add or take out, that would be great. Thanks again in advance!

So, I've hinted a couple times about a crafting endeavor that Laura and I have undertaken. We finally set up our very own Etsy shop! Cantus Nox. The jewelry is all made by Laura, she made the black box with the hand-painted flowers, and I made the green and pink box. I have a shelf that I have yet to list, and we're both in the middle of a few other things; Laura also has a TON of jewelry she's made but hasn't taken pictures of yet. (Our camera is rather persnickety.) Don't feel like you have to buy anything, hee, but we're trying to spread the URL around.

The Caprica mid-season finale was EPIC. Although I am totally sick of the network's insistence on splitting up a season with a long hiatus; the show won't be back until October. That's ridiculous.

It had been three months since my last sleep paralysis incident, so I suppose I was due. And it was my own fault for thinking about Slenderman so much. A couple of nights ago, I dreamed that I heard my bedroom door open, and when I rolled over Slenderman was standing in the doorway; I immediately woke up, and thank goodness my door was actually shut. I fell back asleep pretty quickly. Then I dreamed that my bedroom door opened again, but in the dream I assumed that someone had pushed it open because I was late for work, so I scrambled out of bed and made my way into the hallway only to find myself face to face with Slenderman. This time when I woke up, I was frozen, and it was a good, solid thirty seconds before I unlocked. When I'm desperately trying to move and I can't, I end up feeling like I'm vibrating or even shaking, sometimes very violently, even though I'm sure I'm not actually really moving at all - it's very unpleasant. I don't have this type of paralysis as often as the other kind, where I wake up normally enough and only gradually realize I can't move, usually in conjunction with some kind of hallucination. Even though waking up from a nightmare and not being able to move sucks, I prefer it to the latter kind, because I usually don't feel like I'm going to die and I'm not actually feeling anything, just freaked out and unable to check my surroundings out.

Aside from that, it's been pretty boring 'round these parts. I'm so, so close to being done with this draft of my Lizzie Borden script, and I figure it'll take me about a week to do a light edit and polish, so that's scheduling up pretty well. Laura and I are thinking of renting a table at the local craft fair coming up next month; I'll have some pics maybe this upcoming week.

It's been a pretty good last couple of days! We've had temperatures up in the 50s, which is normal for this time of year but is a good, solid 20-30 degrees warmer than it's been for about three months, so it feels positively miraculous. We've gone for one nice walk, and I was wanting to go to the park today but it looks like it's raining, but even that's okay; the dozens of snowstorms have required loads of sand and salt to be dumped and everything's just been sitting there since before Christmas, so it's just filthy outside. (Do not shake your head and think, "that's dumb," because it's true.) Hopefully it'll rain long and hard enough to wash some of this junk away, although it won't do anything for the big piles of snow that are still sitting around here and there, so black now that it's like catching glimpses of some steampunk Industrial apparition of great piles of coal.

I used the Hobby Lobby gift card my parents gave me to buy almost all of the materials I need for this Egyptian sampler cross stitch. I bought sixty different colors of embroidery floss! Ridiculous! (Although I'm not letting myself start it until I finish this one, which I started in the fall of 2006 and let me tell you, I'm kinda tired of it.)

My parents also gave me this phenomenal DVD player, albeit by giving me the money with which to buy it. At first, I bought cables to hook my old laptop up to the TV, but that was a colossal failure, so I did some research on the internet and people were talking about this. This? Is amazing! It's just a DVD player, and most of the other features I don't really care about; so-called upconversion and HDMI whatever, blah blah. But there are two really great things I'm tremendously excited about: it has a USB port, so you can just plug a flash drive in the front and watch AVIs. We have already tried it out, watching the beginning of a MST3K, and an episode of MTV's Fear that I downloaded about a year ago but haven't watched since. It's...it's beautiful, you guys. *wipes away tear* I have...A METRIC LOT of stuff I've downloaded over the years, and I don't always like to sit in front of my computer to watch it, so this will probably change my life. Also, it is a region-free player, compatible with both NTSC and PAL, which means that all those wonderful British TV shows and mini-series and movies Laura and I have wanted to watch over the years, but hadn't been released on American DVD and are old enough that no one has them torrented? We can now buy and watch. I am finally going to watch you, Vicar of Dibley!

And that health thing I've been complaining about finally ended, and I only have to wear my wrist brace at night anymore, and I start teaching a series of screenwriting workshops at the local community college tomorrow! And KU smashed Missouri and Syracuse lost so we'll be number one again on Monday and will probably get the overall number one seed! Yay!

ETA: OMG YOU GUYS that DVD player also plays burned data DVDs. Best thing ever or BEST THING EVER?!

Over the last two weeks, Laura and I made a Halloween village. You may have seen Halloween and, more commonly, Christmas village houses and other buildings available at crafts stores, WalMart and the like, and even some hardware stores; they're already painted and lit up and most now come with sound effects. There's all kinds of accessories you can buy, as well. Each building is anywhere from 25 to 50 dollars, and each individual accessory can run from a few bucks to 10 dollars. And that's not even getting into all the other things you need to set it up: ground cover, roads, lights, etc.

Needless to say, that's way too much money. Besides, there's a cheap, plastic look to these things that isn't very awesome. Last year, we made a Christmas village (pictures when we put that back up this year), and we thought that a Halloween village was necessary, too.

We bought the Christmas plaster houses, which come unpainted; chipped off the snow and painted them a little more gothic, a little darker, with bittersweet instead of holly. Then Laura took modeling clay and made her own pumpkins and scarecrow, and used plaster of Paris and wire to make fences, corn, a brick path and a stone road. We used twigs for trees and I made little ghosts to hang from the branches. Spanish moss for ground cover, and Laura cut up regular-sized fabric leaves to make scale leaves. The only thing we bought straight-up were the piles of skulls, which I think you will agree are awesome and too difficult to make ourselves.

Click on the thumbnails for full-size.



Here's the wide shot. Unfortunately, the flash robs the village of some of its creepiness and makes all the colors too bright, but when I took photos of the Christmas village last year without flash, you couldn't see a thing. Which is why you haven't seen the Christmas village yet. There are lights under the houses, btw.



Two regular houses, along with the stone road.



The barn, scarecrow, and don't miss the corn.



The church - which actually has a red light inside, though it's hard to tell here, and the iron fences in the back. A little brick path, and a pile of skulls (adorable creepy!).



The cemetery - all headstones made by Laura out of plaster. If you look really close, you can see hand-painted moss. It's awesome.

I haven't been on the computer much the past week. There's been something else in the house occupying my time. This whole summer, Marshall has been entered into a drawing at work every time he sells a certain thing (I never found out exactly what); the drawing was held on Saturday, and he won. A Wii.

Marshall won a Wii!

So, yeah, that's all we've been doing. I've mostly just stuck to the Wii Sports, especially tennis and golf; Marshall and Laura bought the Metroid game together, and I started it, but it's going to take a while to get used to coordinating two remotes and pointing to shoot and all of that; just 20 minutes gave me a rather sizable headache. I looked at Wii Fit in the store, but I definitely don't have almost a hundred dollars to spend on a video game, unfortunately.

My quilting class is going well. Yesterday I sewed all my strips into blocks; next week I'll start sewing my blocks together. I was really worried about the sewing process since I've pretty much never used a sewing machine before - we sewed costumes for Odyssey of the Mind when I was in middle school, but to say that we actually knew what we were doing is a profound overstatement. But the women running the class were very helpful and showed me exactly what to do, and by the end of the class I was zipping right along. There's something very rewarding to crafts in general, watching something come together right in front of you. I'm glad I decided to do this.

Warning: I am a horrible photographer. Both of these objects look ten times better in real life than they do in these pictures. Why is flash so hard to figure out? Why do I always get the camera too close? Ah well.



Laura made this for Sarah. She bought a pattern and the fabric, and then whipped it out on the sewing machine all by herself. I find this to be extraordinary.



The blanket I just finished. FINALLY. I started it two years ago, but do not take that as an indication of how long it actually takes me to do this kind of thing. It would sit for months and months at a time, especially in the summer, when it's way hot to have an afghan draped all over you; but I decided that I wanted to start new projects, and absolutely had to finish the ones languishing unfinished first.

It's a simple shell stitch, all in seafoam green, with a cream border. Again, I tried to get a better close-up, but not only was it blurry as heck, the flash turned it into this, like, pea green color? And I couldn't fix it in Photoshop, which was frustrating. Anyway, you get the idea. I had nowhere to really lay it out for scale, but it's about 55 inches by 70, or around full bed size. I have a pink one I made back at USC that's around the same size, and let me tell you, it's very warm and heavy.

The babette blanket is very popular; on the Flickr group photo pool, you can see a lot of different color combinations. Some are almost monochromatic, some are very bright but still definitely within a more limited palette, and a lot are somewhere in between. I actually like the kind of retro feel of some of the really bright blankets with a lot of colors - it's that look of an older grandma using up all her yarn scraps, you know? But I would definitely get rid of the brown, in any case.

It's been nice, doing the workshop thing, continuing to write scenes here and there, because usually when I finish a script I'm like...but what do I do now? How will I spend my afternoons? What do I think about in the shower? It's kind of disconcerting.

Nice weather today! Very exciting. I was going to sit and read outside, except that I read all day at work, and I need to take a break so my eyes don't explode.

Sarah and I bought this pattern yesterday, although both of us have blankets to finish before we start on a new one (speaking of which, Sarah wants me to ask you all if any of you would like to commission a blanket, hee).



Although I'm going to go for a more sedate color palette, I think.

It's not wise to talk about how happy you are spring is imminent when it's still March. We lucked out, in that we didn't get the six to twenty inches the local meteorologists were crowing about excitedly as they frighten people and drive up ratings predicting. Instead, we got freezing rain, tiny baby hail, sleet, and finally about two inches of gross, wet snow. Now it's cold and I can't go do anything because the van doesn't drive well when it's cold (yes, we are still driving that van, and no, it hasn't been fixed yet, and yes, that means we have to enter on the passenger side and climb over seats to get into the driver's seat).

We went to my cousin-in-law Heather's baby shower yesterday, and it was okay, as these things go. I never understand the stupid shower games thing. What is its purpose? I am not doing that shit. My mom bought some cute baby dresses and such, and then we made things, because we figured she'd get a lot of stuff bought for her (we were right), and we thought some homemade stuff would be nice.

My mom made this lovely cream blanket. One of Heather's friends came up to her afterwards and asked how much it would cost for my mom to make her one, and just gushed about it. She really, really liked this blanket.



Laura made two adorable little hats; the other one is pink, but this one was my favorite. It's about two-thirds of the length of a new pencil, to give you a sense of scale.



Sarah whipped this one out in no time; straight double crochet, but the cream inner border really makes it smart, and it's got kind of a retro look that we really liked.



And this is the one I made; I just used the pattern on the skein, except that I used a variegated yarn for the border, which I think brightens it up and makes it a little more fun.

Pictures of crocheted things, although I used UT Laura's cheap-o digital camera, which is not of the highest quality. Plus, I suck at taking pictures a lot much.

First up is the first actual thing I ever made besides cell phone covers and little things like that. A big afghan. I spread it out over my full size bed so you can see how big it is.



The corner is folded over so you can see (kinda) how it matches the bed cover, but also because since this is the first thing I did, I was learning how to crochet while I was making it, so it ended up being wider at the bottom. And I did not feel like ripping out a couple months work so it could be even.



A detail of the border, which turned out very pretty. I'm going to make a version of this for UT Laura, with shades of green.

Next, the octopus:



Y hello thar! I thought about crocheting him a tiny eye patch, but didn't feel like buying a skein of black just for that. But just so you know, in my head, he's a pirate octopus.



Or...a sextopus, since I got tired of making legs.



The next blanket I'm working on, a granny square afghan, which will eventually be 48 of those squares in a checkerboard pattern. It was hard to get the colors right, so it's a dark and light green.