just be.

i love you.

happy valentine's day.

 

animated brain bleach

y'all know how i love me some animation. this is beautiful.

 

must watch marmaduke!

 

toons!

saturday night, mr. bee and i had grownup time! we dressed up (okay, not much, but a little) and went to the toonseum and eleven with our friends liz and manos. it was so fun!

a year ago, i'd finished knitting my sunrise circle jacket but never hemmed it (it has a turned hem around all the edges). it languished for many months; i finally hemmed everything except one sleeve a month or two ago, and then decided that i wanted to wear it last night. so i hurriedly hemmed the sleeve and wore it! it was cozy and soft on a snowy night, so it was perfect (even though it was a little big in the waist--i closed it using a pedestal button, and it puckered a lot).

pics because it happened. i tried posing in front of a decal of bugs on the wall at the museum, but mr. bee kept trying and trying and trying with his phone camera. so that is why there are five shots, and i am sharing them with you because it cracks me up that he kept shooting. he was still unhappy with them, but i was bored of posing :)

the museum is super cool. there was a looney tunes exhibit in the main gallery, then a small keith haring exhibit in the hallway, and finally an exhibit of newspaper comics. AND they do not discourage photography! just no flashes. so i snapped a few shots of things i thought were cool:

the gift shop was excellent. small, but a nicely curated collection of books of and about animation and comics. i bought a copy of metamaus (i have kind of a thing for art spiegelman work and already have the original issues of maus and maus 2, bought a french hardback of maus and maus 2 at an excellent comics shop in switzerland this spring, and bought a copy of in the shadow of no towers this summer finally). i love that it's in our town :)  

a good time was had by all. and of course dinner was delicious :)

in other news, the floors are all finished and the stuff is all back in the house. the radiators are supposed to be finished cleaning tomorrow night. then we get them brought back and loaded into the house, mr. bee paints them, and the plumbers hook them up. THEN the flooring guys come and finish the stairs, and then i can have the organizers come back to finish up the unpacking, and our house will be ours again. AND we're getting a new sofa (espresso, chunky weave). I AM SO EXCITE.

wow. today was a shitty crafting day.

not a shitty day all over, but a really, really, spectacularly shitty crafting day.

i had set aside a few hours today to warp my loom for the first time alone. (i'd done it only once before, in class, with a buddy to help and of course the instructor guiding us every step of the way and checking our work.) i had anticipated that it would be difficult, both physically and mentally, because i wouldn't have my buddy's help and i wouldn't have nancy the instructor there making sure i did this or that and checking my work and telling me what to do.

i planned out my project and wound my yarn, set up the loom and warping peg, and was all ready to do business. sort of. we didn't have two tables on the first floor, where i (unwisely, it turns out) planned to undertake this effort, so i clamped the peg to the arm of a chair. my initial frustrations (so many--our dining room, where i was working, has a litter box in it that at least one of our cats chooses to only *nearly* use sometimes, so the room itself is not exactly sweet smelling; the dining room is also full of my crap that i don't put away; and i hadn't turned the room air conditioner on before beginning, so i was hot and frustrated anyway) were compounded by my asshole cat jack-jack trying to play with the yarn. (he isn't an asshole because he likes to play with yarn. that's just kind of regular cat stuff. but he's an asshole. you'll just have to trust me on this.) i got him to stop that, and he perched on the chair that held the peg and seemed to sort of chill for a while.

the frustrations were increased because my instructions were from class and were definitely written FOR class. not for doing this on one's own with no one to ask questions. so i did some things wrong and wasn't sure about the correctness of other things. but i soldiered on and muddled through and all that.

when i was humming along and being VERY proud of how well i was doing and how pretty the warp was looking--i was using some denim-blue superwash worsted i'd bought at a fiber festival a few years ago and was also very smug about using up stash--and even smiling broadly at how joyful this whole process had finally become after my earlier frustrations, POW. the warps ALL snapped high in the air off the warp peg, and the chair holding said peg tumbled to its side, and i saw jack-jack leaping away into the kitchen.

now, the most likely explanation is that the tension from almost 200 (because yes, i was just a few inches away from being finished) worsted-weight warps became too much for the chair holding 10-pound jack-jack (note to self: not his fault that he weighs only 10 pounds OR that i hadn't put something heavy on the chair, like, say, a case of seltzer or something) and pulled it over, sending jack-jack flying into the kitchen for cover. but my frustration said, "dammit, asshole cat jack-jack! it is your fault that my warps just went into the air!" and i swore up a storm.

i swore up a storm while attempting to solve the problem of the no-longer-under-tension warps. i dragged some furniture around to try to find something heavier to anchor the warp peg to. i tried resmoothing the warps into place and looping them around the peg. i assembled my loom stand and put the loom on the stand and tried using the opposite end of the table as tension. eventually, i thought i had a workable warp. it would definitely be the ugliest, least even warping job anyone had ever seen, but i thought i could try.

i was being an idiot.

i went on to the next steps, again making mistakes because i didn't know some important things not written in the instructions (or maybe they're there and i just didn't understand or see them). but the thing is, those mistakes would have been a lot easier to undo had i not made 10,000 of them already and had i not been in the crappy-ass frame of mind i was in because of the pile of frustrations i'd already been experiencing.

but i had and i was. so those mistakes resulted in such a tangled mess of warps, some not even making it through the heddle any more, that i ended up throwing away the whole thing.

you read that correctly. i had to cut the yarn off the loom, gathered it all up in a huge, sweater-sized ball of beautiful denim blue, and stuffed it all into the trash can.

there was more; that's the reader's digest version, more or less. but the point is that i wasted hours i really didn't want to waste and hundreds of yards of yarn i also wasn't too excited about wasting, and ended the afternoon in one of those frames of mind that really requires a pint of ben and jerry's and a very silly movie.

day 28: a song that makes me feel guilty

i honestly can't think of a song that makes me feel guilty. unless you count feeling guilty for liking it, in which case i direct you to the songs that make me laugh or my guilty pleasures. in which case, those.

day 16: stuff that i used to love but now hate

i rarely turn on stuff. i'd love to think that it's because i have awesome taste. (hello, "all in the family" and "mash" as my growing-up favorites? "barney miller"? "bob newhart"? "chips"? okay, maybe "chips" isn't in the same league as the others. but that larry wilcox was cyooot.) so yeah. i watched a lot of kickass tv in my childhood. and as a grown-up. yes, i've watched plenty of stuff that you might think is ridiculous (i know: "guiding light" and "as the world turns" are not what everybody loves), but i don't hate it. i stand by my taste. or i'm nostalgic when i see stuff even if i know it's not maybe something that i'd have gotten hooked on for the first time now.

i can think of a pundit i used to love and now think it was just his accent: bill kristol (i cannot explain myself. i adore a midwest accent. don't even get me started on bob woodward. i think it's why i fell in love with my michigander husband). oh, and john stossel. i loved both of them in the 1990s. now, not so much.

anyway, tv: the love boat is one that i would.not.miss for anything when i was growing up but now couldn't sit through more than a couple of minutes before thinking, "yeah. nostalgia over. this is bad." but boy did i love that opening-credit sequence and seeing who this week's guests would be. and whether it was a good episode (with lauren tewes) or not. (and i have just now discovered that lauren tewes was born a few miles from where i am writing this!)

movies i can't think of any that don't still make me happy and take me back to wherever i was when i first saw them. however, i imagine that i wouldn't go out of my way to see kiss of the spider woman now; when i first discovered it back when i was 19 or so, i thought it was the most amazing movie ever. probably because my boyfriend at the time thought it was the most amazing thing ever and i wanted to agree with him. don't get me wrong--it's a great movie--but i'd avoid it now. (see earlier posts re avoiding violence. it's violent.)

music is the same way: i don't necessarily feel the need to blast barry manilow's "a very strange medley,"

 

which i totally did as a kid, but hearing it doesn't make me feel anything like hate. it makes me laugh and takes me straight back to singing into my hairbrush in the living room (because i had no stereo in my room, which i think is a criminal thing to do to a kid simply because of the shame of having one's brother walk in while singing "nobody does it better" in the living room).

 

day 14: stuff that no one would expect me to love

though i don't believe in a personal god, i love spiritual music. religious music. gospel, spirituals, christmas music, you name it. i have no idea. it moves me at a level i don't understand, and i'm totally okay with that.

 

having just outed myself on soap operas, i'm not sure that there's *any* tv left that would surprise someone to learn i love it. if you know me at all, you know that i love dr. phil, so that's not "stuff that no one would expect me to love." and cartoons. and "dirty jobs" because mike rowe. and news. i guess the surprise usually comes when somebody (ahem: anna) finds out that i *don't* watch some show. like the real housewives of anything. or vampire anything. or zombie anything. (it's a pretty small list, frankly.)

i'm guessing that at least some people would be surprised to learn that i loved "the matrix." i hate violence, as i've said plenty before, no matter how mild. but i loved that movie. another guilty pleasure. (i didn't LOVE it love it, but i really enjoyed it at the time, and that surprised most people who knew me.)

 

day 13: stuff that is a guilty pleasure

most things i like are actually guilty pleasures. i was raised by a catholic mother and a jewish father. there. you have just learned a Fact That Explains a Lot About Me.

with so many guilty-pleasure songs to choose from, i'll embarrass myself full stop. i'll give you TWO.

this is a truly terrible song. and i LOVE it and sing along with it joyfully.

 

a less terrible but still terrible song that i also love and sing joyfully (no, i do not like the video. but that wasn't the question).

 

and then there's guilty-pleasure tv. well, if you know me AT.ALL, you know that i loved "as the world turns"

 

and "guiding light."

 

like, i still haven't deleted gl's final episode off my tivo, and i am royally pissed that the series hasn't been released on dvd yet. not even one season! how hard would that be? and how much of a moneymaker? and worse, i still haven't even WATCHED the last seven episodes of atwt. i hate that those shows have left us.

and movies that are guilty pleasures? yeah. pretty much any seth rogen movie (whether written by or starring). i have some kind of weird crush on seth rogen. i think i fell in love with him, bizarrely enough, during "zach and miri make a porno." i know! how awful. that's a seriously embarrassing guilty pleasure.

 

day 8: stuff to which i know all the words

i am rain man. i remember lyrics to songs like crazy. i remember being unduly proud of myself when i knew all the words to "american pie."

 

and i know all the words to most of the looney tunes classics, but i'm not nearly so good at those as some folks i know (see: yvonne). and most "mad about you" episodes. and "roseanne." i watch a lot of tv. it's a thing.

movies, well, "it's a wonderful life," of course, because i watch it at least once a year. and "the princess bride" because fezzik. but maybe i should go with "the adventures of buckaroo banzai"?

 

can i live up to that? i know lots of the words, but maybe not all of them. i should. i'll get on that.