So last Christmas I managed to get my finger into my sewing machine and punched a hole straight through my index finder with it.  It hurt like a bastard, scared the bejeesus out of me, and ended with a tetanus shot.  I’ve been hesitant to sew since then, since I seem to have developed an irrational conviction that my sewing machine is merely lying in wait for the next opportunity to sew me.  But today I got back on the horse!  Here is the start of a quilt top I’m putting together.  It’s a very simple pattern in soothing colours, intended for curling up on the couch and reading with:

Here is another view, this time on the Poang ottoman:

So it’s not very far along, but I’m rather pleased with it.  Although it does occur to me that it’s really bland and vanilla colours, which is interested because my apartment is oatmeal coloured, which I often complain about.  I used to blame my landlord for it based on the paint in this place, but maybe I have more to do with it than I’ve acknowledged.  Hmm.

Today is shaping up to be a great day.  It’s sunny, my house is in great shape (the office is clean!), and as a result I am filled with energy for doing projects and making stuff.  I have a bunch of quilt squares that I think I’ll dig in to today - I’m making a very simple quilt top for a couch blanket.  I’ll watch downloaded TV programs or listen to podcasts and just putter around.  Husband got called in to work, which generally means he’s going to be gone all day, so it’s going to be just me today.

And I was thinking, you know what would be good?  It would be good if I had someone who would just come over and hang out.  Like we used to do in high school, where you didn’t need a plan or a destination or even an activity to visit.  You just came over, and we put on Much Music, and we loafed around drinking Slurpees and talking about boys.  Now that I am an adult, it seems like no one does that any more.  And it’s a shame, because today would be the perfect day for companionable loafing.

We could even talk about boys.

I’m back!  Sorry for the sparse posting lately - I’ve been busy with two all-consuming (and paradoxical) concerns: relaxing after the meat grinder semester, and freaking out about my practicum.

The relaxing has been good. After my trip to Abbotsford, I got reinspired to paint again and have been madly working on my Hordes Skorne (if this means nothing to you, don’t worry - it just means you’re not a nerd).  Last night I finished my first Skorne, and even based the model.  This is also a first!  I have never done a proper base before.  This one was meant to represent rocky desert, so I used barley (some crushed, some not) to make stones and gravel that litter the ground at the feet of my menacing model.  Glued and painted up they look surprisingly good!  I’d show pictures but my camera is so suck I can’t get it to focus on the little guy.  Just imagine something cool but small and you’ll have it.

The practicum has been such a cluster fuck that last night I actually cried about it.  I’m not a crier but every once in a while the universe conspires against me in such a way that there are no other options left.  I’m not one to challenge authority, and tend to adopt a deferential and respectful attitude towards folks in charge.  So in planning my practicum, I’ve made the error of sitting back and counting on the administrative machine to do what it’s supposed to do, once I’ve done what I’m supposed to do.  Well, I did my part, and, assuming everyone else would do theirs, didn’t make any fusses and let things go untended for so long that I was in real danger of losing my practicum (for lack of timely approvals).

Last night I had the horrible realization that through my own optimism, naivety, denial, and dislike of tackling administrators by phone, mixed with a dose of irresponsibility and negligence from my school, I might not be able to start the practicum this term.  This is a huge problem for lots of reasons, such as graduating late, deferred entry to the workforce, more tuition bills, and of course the humiliation of having to tell the practicum site that’s offered me a position that because no one at my end could get their shit together, I have to back out.  Which would probably mean they’d drop me entirely, not just defer my beginning for four months.  This is a small community and once you get a reputation for stuff like that, it sticks.

So this morning I finally faced reality and got off my ass and started making phone calls.  Thankfully I got a hold of someone who was very friendly and understanding, and has committed to helping me get everything handled as fast as possible.  Paperwork has been faxed, meetings scheduled, and I’m starting to think I’ll squeak in under the wire after all.  I’m so relieved!

So that’s what I’ve been doing instead of writing.  I’m also really engrossed in a book I just got - Randy Shiltz’s And the Band Played On, about the emergence of the AIDS epidemic in the US and the political snafus that characterized the early years when scientists were struggling to figure out what the heck it was, and how to stop it.   Lack of funding and infighting amongst researchers combined to eliminate the possibility of halting the spread of AIDS when it was still small, and when there might have been a chance to do so (or so the author says).  It’s a fascinating if somewhat horrifying read - I came to sexual maturity in the AIDS world, where it simply wasn’t done to have unprotected sex, or to sleep around with anyone and everyone, because for god’s sake, that can kill you!  It makes my stomach knot up to read about the highly promiscuous and totally unprotected sex that characterized urban gay culture at that time - no one knew how dangerous it was, that it would kill so many.  Shiltz cites a statistic that your average gay man who attended bathhouses in urban centres would have 2.7 different sexual partners every night, totally unprotected, and attended bathhouses multiple nights a week.  While HIV was quietly circulating!  Gah!

One of the most disturbing events the book describes is the wide-scale wipe out of severe hemophiliacs in the early 80’s.  They were getting regular blood transfusions just to stay alive - Guess what politically liberal and socially conscious minority group was very committed to blood donation?  Gay men!  When you need regular blood transfusions, the chances of coming across HIV in the blood supply turned out to be nearly 100%.  The tragedy is that at this time, while there was no screen for HIV itself, the screen for hepatitis B was about 88% accurate in identifying HIV tainted blood, but was deemed too expensive to use.  It’s hard now to imagine the kind of stupid short-sightedness that could result in allowing HIV to be knowingly maintained in blood products.  Mistakes happen, but citing cost of screening as an excuse to let people become infected?  Horrifying!

So, I’m also doing my usual puttering around the house and some socializing, which has been most enjoyable.  Classes start up in a few days and I am happy to report that I feel rested and ready to get back in the trenches.  Hopefully including my practicum.

I slept in until after eleven!  Insane!  Must have been all that quilting I did last night… pooped me right out.  I made a tiny little christmas tree skirt for the bird tree - it’s no more than 2 feet in diameter, made of triangles of alternating colour that form a hexagon, like the big skirt.  Here it is in its natural habitat, hiding the ugly plastic legs of the bird tree:

I didn’t realize how much it would look like a radiation symbol until it was finished…. oh well, live and learn.  Beware thou the mutant:

As you know, I sleep like poo poo most of the time, and often the combination of tiredness, restlessness, and lack of distractions while lying in bed produces strange effects on my emotions.  Last night I had a little coughing fit shortly after going to bed (around 1 am!  Ye gods!), and it woke Husband up.  He ended up moving to the office to sleep on the murphy bed because I guess he figured oh shit, the Beast That Coughs Endlessly is back! He has to work this morning and it’s one of those days where he might only have to deal with a few people and he’ll get home for lunch, but then again it might be one of those days where they’re lined up around the block and he’s at work until after dinner.  So losing sleep is a serious concern.  Plus he likes to make sure he’s looking fresh as a daisy for the clientele.

Anyway, Husband gets up and moves beds, and this sets off a long night of fretful tossing as I discover I am unable to enjoy having the big bed (we call him Huggy) all to myself while Husband is sleeping on the flat, hard mattress that smells of stale.  The guilt!  Oh the terrible guilt!  It’s like a, a pounding heart… beating, beating, beating… right under my floorboards!   Wait, that’s Poe.  Okay, it was like a brain that hates to sleep finding something to grasp onto and run with it.  I engaged in long, elaborate discussions with myself about whether to wake him and swap beds (and anyway I wasn’t coughing any more), but would that be worse than just leaving him, if he had in fact fallen asleep?  Husband sleeps like poo poo too, and as anyone who is a poor sleeper can tell you, there is no greater offense in the world than waking you when you have finally fucking gotten to sleep and jesus christ I’ll kill you, you motherfucker!  So I laid there (lay?  Any grammar nazis out there?) and fretted and worked myself into quite a lather because somehow, things are different at night in bed.  You can worry for hours about the stupidest shit.

Anyway, this morning Husband came to see me before leaving for work, and he did this in his traditional manner: he creeps around the edge of the bed to see if I’m awake, because if I’m not, there’s no way in hell he’s going to wake me.  But today I was so tortured about his imprisonment in the spare bed that I snapped to wakefulness the instant he began breathing the same air as me, and I stuck out my arms for hugs of reconciliation.  As I recall it, I was full of apologies and he was totally baffled.  Seriously, what’s the big deal, it’s a bed for god’s sake.  But see?  My brain gets itself all excited at night.  Would that I could focus so intently during the day!

Husband went off to work and I went back to sleep (Huggy is so lovely!).  Now it’s almost noon and I’m having Hershey eggs for breakfast, thinking about how to structure my totally unstructured day.  Ahh, another day of holiday commences!

Update: I saw the litter ad again and apparently the purpose of the colour change is to help you find the clumps.  So you can remove them (and their attendant smell) as soon as possible.  This still does not address the whole poo issue but at least the ad makes more sense now.

I’m down to the last couple of days of work for school and holy crap, I wish I were dead.  So, just to make things more exciting, I’m having chips for breakfast.  Ever noticed how chips go from awesome to wretched instantly?  You’re never on the way to getting sick of them, you’re just loving then and then, next chip, filled with self loathing because you suddenly realize you just ate a pound of grease and anyway they taste like salty cardboard.  Ugh.

And, I did the first chunk of work on the christmas tree skirt I’m making my dad last night.  The top is made and the layers are laid out across the living room floor and pinned together.  Now I have to do the basting (to hold the layers together in place for the quilting), which is easily the worst job of the whole process.  I have to spend a few hours doing hand stitching whose entire purpose is to get ripped out later.  I know it’s necessary but man… feels like a major waste of time, and it’s not fun to do because I have to hunch over the floor while I do it.

So, today’s goals are to finish the laundry and put it away, to do most of this last paper, to baste and begin quilting the quilt, to clean the kitchen, and to get in a nap.  I had a delivery guy come to the door at 7:30am, if you can believe that, so I was up for a while after that.   Time to check the satellite for movies that would be good to stitch to…

First game of the official NFL season tonight!  Andy and Esan have committed to overseeing my football education.  I commit to showing up and drinking beer.

The longer I look at it, the weirder the word “beer” looks.  Does that ever happen to you?

Or it that Zombiepocalypse?

In the perfect zombie story, what would happen?  What elements should be present?  What’s the coolest zombie idea ever?

Comment please.

One of the things I struggle with on this blog is my urge to be totally, grossly honest (”So-and-so is such a freaking idiot, can you believe it? Wait till I tell you…”) while maintaining some sort of decency and respectability. What if my anonymity was blown and people at school or work found this? The consequences make my stomach turn. As a result I can’t just be totally honest. I try to write with the idea in mind that one day someone of significance to my life will find this blog, but I have to say I’ve probably already blown my image if that’s the case. Sometimes I fall back on my fantasy belief that my true identity can never be discovered. Well, by anyone other than the friends who already know me. Of course this is nothing more than fantasy. One day, when I get all professional, I may have to deep six the blog to protect my professional identity (did you like how I used “deep six” totally spontaneously? Fucking cool!). In the last week I’ve read about no less then three law suits that were brought or lost due to content on the person in question’s blog (all three were doctors). That’s a scary thought!

So, assuming my ID gets outed one day, I have to self censor. But what if it never happens and I miss the opportunity to go on and on about my fellow students, my work, my screwy family, my true thoughts about things that happen and interactions I have? I guess that’s the price I pay for having an online blog. Alas! Because I totally have some good dirt I could share.

In a perfect world, this blog would function as a no holds barred venting space where I could focus my ire-ful attention on the minutia that makes me crazy. It would be funny. And possibly grounds for dismissal. Why is life so unfair? (Note: said with sarcasm. Only the bourgeios have these kinds of problems. It’s a very white, priviledged problem and I know it.)

The one thing I can probably talk about is me. I was thinking about doing one of those 100 things about me lists, and I may still. But here’s a taste of my top 10:

1. I hate wearing socks and never do if I can get away with it. When I come home, I take off the socks at the same time as the shoes. I cannot understand people who wear shoes inside. Feet need to be free.

2. I don’t understand people who don’t read. What do you people do? (Except Esan: I know he’s out conquering the world one sport at a time, and is excused from reading. I want my blog url on his Tour de France bike.)

3. I have incredibly vivid, cogent, sensual dreams (sensual meaning involving the senses, not necessarily sexual). Movies play out in my dreams. Sometimes I have serial dreams that last over a course of nights with the narrative picking up and progressing each night. I also get night terrors once in a rare while, which sucks harsh donkey cock. I burst out of sleep gasping and terrified, heart slamming and sweating, clutching the bedclothes but struggling to sit up, jam packed with adrenaline. Of course nothing is there. But you try falling asleep after that happens! Good luck! I’ve lucid dreamed twice and it was the best dreaming of my life. In one I controlled my drifting flight over a tennis court and surrounding buildings; in the other I did naughty things I can’t tell you about. Grrrrrawr!

4. I drink about 2L of diet pop a day. Husband never gets any because I drink it all.

5. I’m phonophobic and often go a week or more without answering it. I just let it ring, telling myself if it’s important they’ll leave a voicemail. Then I don’t check voicemail for a week or so. I am somewhat of a phonophobe. I do however obsessively check email, so that’s the way to contact me.

6. I never lose my keys. Ever. Actually, about once a year I lose my keys, and because I have no skills in place to deal with this crisis, my head explodes. Just ask Glass Hurricane, she can tell you.

7. I clean my ears with Q-tips, even though they say you shouldn’t. I derive inordinant pleasure when I get a good waxy clump. Very satistying.

8. I can’t stand to have my navel touched. No one touches my navel, not even Husband, who would like to. Fingers in my navel make me squirm and feel like barfing. I do clean in there (it’s quite deep with a wedge at the bottom, so stuff gets trapped in there) but I have to brace myself and just power through. I consider navel cleaning only slightly less unpleasant than a pelvic exam.

9. I think Oprah is a bossy, self important know it all who clearly does not know it all - and yet feels compelled to tell you all about it. The woman promoted The Secret, which is utter vomit on the scale of purchases (best being kittens and puppies, worst a pail of steaming vomit).

10 I secretly judge everyone. Even you.

I just finished the first square of my new quilt.  Note the difficult curved seam, my first, which took three tries and still isn’t quite right.  The square is lying on my fabrics for this quilt so you can see the pallette.

After that last post I realized I haven’t posted any finished pics of my first quilt, so here they are!

Quilty, on the chair looking might fine:

And here’s Quilty, showing some naked underbelly.  Sexy!

And finally, Quilty draped all over me.  Husband is jealous!