I have had a very, very good birthday, thanks in no small part to my wonderful husband. This is what 44 looks like:
Month: February 2017
Mod Squad
I’ve been consuming a lot of Mad Men lately. You know, to remind myself of the good old days, when America was great. It is disturbingly accurate. But the clothes are to die for. So as angry and heartsick as I get watching the show and understanding that there is much of America who still wants women and POC to “know their place” and gays to hide in the shadows, I try to let myself enjoy the bits that are not about that. At last year’s JDB Xmas party, one of my clothing swap prizes was a fabulous mod dress. I’ve been dying to wear it, and with the heat wave we’re having (70 in February? Tell me again how climate change is a myth.) I decided to go all 60s housewife. I felt adorable (but still pretty uppity) all damn day.
This Isn’t the Post You’re Looking For
I’m still having image transfer problems and I have a hell of a headache so I’m not even trying to fix it tonight.Technically, it’s a post
Okay
. Still have technical issues with phone posts, which is why no posts since Friday, as I was in Boston doing awesome things with the Docstar and then spent two days designing and sewing a Ponce de Leon costume. Like you do.
SO. Details on those things coming up. I’m going to play with my schedule to make sure I have time to actually blog from the computer, which will result in much more interesting blogs. And hopefully I will find a solution to the phone thing soon, because this is supah annoying. 🙁
Something Witty About Buttonholes
You know how sometimes you go to the fabric store for one thing (okay, so like ten things, but not all of them were for me, I swear) and while you’re there you find the perfect fabric for a project you didn’t even know you wanted to make? So that happened the other day and now I have a new sweatshirt wrap skirt.
I’d originally planned to fold over the top and run some elastic through, but it turns out a yard is exactly the right width to wrap around me with plenty of overlap, and also i have a pretty enormous collection of buttons, so I thought it would be fast and fun to just graphics a couple of pretty buttons and make a couple of buttonholes and Bob’s you’re uncle.
I picked out a pretty purple velvet button for the “visible” button (which no one will ever see because it’s not a really fitted skirt and also I kind of fucked up the waistband because I’m a lazy sewer and I knew no one would ever see it anyhow) and a flat mother of pearl button for the inside. Then I sat down at the machine and put the right foot on and adjusted all the settings and…nothing. I mean, not “nothing”, but no buttonhole, just a knot.
Consulted manual, made minor adjustments, still nothing but knots. Thankfully, I was testing on scrap fabric so my skirt was still intact. Now, of course I’d already decided to wear this skirt — this one, not some other skirt — tomorrow, and I’m leaving for Boston first thing, so I needed to get it done.
So I bit the bullet and handsewed the damn buttonholes. I hate hand sewing. Hate it. But I have to say, doing buttonholes wasn’t nearly as bad as, say, hemming pants. And they’re not the prettiest thing I ever sewed, but I think they came out okay.
I Did It All for the Cookie
I’ve always been a sucker for Girl Scout cookies, so it both pleases and dismays me that Becky sells them. We buy a lot, and then I do a mostly decent job of not sitting down and eating entire boxes at one sitting. Since I’ve got an in-house dealer, I don’t usually buy them off the street.
BUT I discovered that one of my derbymates’ daughters was selling cookies from the other bakery this year, so I grabbed a bunch of boxes of cookies we don’t usually get (plus a box each of Thin Mints and Caramel D’lites [aka, Samoas] for comparison purposes when ours come in). Zack and I sat down for a taste test and OMG…they’re SO GOOD!
We started with the S’mores, which are a graham base with marshmallow frosting dipped in chocolate (our bakery has S’mores, too, but they’re a sandwich cookie — completely
different). Zack declared these his favorites. Then we moved on to the Thank Yous, which are much bigger than I expected. Each cookie has “thank you” printed on it in one of several different languages. The cookies themselves are a substantial brown sugary delight, with a coating of chocolate on the bottom. Nom. These were my faves.
Next up were the shortbreads. In retrospect we should have started with these, as they have such a delicate flavor I could hardly taste them after the rich S’mores and Thank Yous. Reserving judgement on these. Finally, the Lemonades. These were delish — similar to the Thank Yous, but more delicate. And also, you know, lemony. Much better than the Savannah Smiles we get, IMO.
It seemed a little ridiculous to buy all those cookies when I’ve got my own personal Girl Scout, but it was totally worth it.
Where’d You Come From?
Back in the dawn of the World Wide Web, I was a web designer. I haven’t been a professional web designer for a good long while now, but I still have cause to pull out the ol’ HTML toolbox every now and again. Like tonight, when I finally got around to setting up a redirect so that you (and I!) don’t have to type in the /blog part of the address anymore to get here. Woohoo!
(No picture tonight because I don’t have my phone handy and I’m tired and I considered just posting a screenshot of HTML but that’s like the still version of the typing montage from a hacking movie so no.)
Test Baby, Test Baby, 123!
A Blog About Blogging. And Counting.
So apparently my WordPress app has completely shit the bed. I’m working on it, but for now I’m going to cut myself a break on weekend posts. I’ll update again when/if that changes. I considered just doing some posts ahead of time and scheduling them to post on weekends — and I might do that for this weekend since I’ll be out of town — but there will also definitely be some weekend days were I actually do sit down in front of the computer so I don’t want to be locked in to pre-set posts for those days. Blogging is hard, Barbie!
Now I just have to decide if I am blogging (hopefully) every day over a period of 365 days, and thus will be ending this project on Feb. 7, 2018 OR if I’m posting 365 times and attempting to do it on as many consecutive days as possible, thus ending after the total number has been reached. I’m thinking the latter is easier to keep track of.
I Blue Myself
I love my birthday. I think having a birthday is awesome, and I will tell literally everyone I encounter that it’s my birthday on that momentous occasion. I don’t care about getting older, I just think it’s neat to have a day where people are nice to you for no reason other than you were born and have managed to stay alive this long.
Also, I like cake and presents. Because who doesn’t like cake and presents? This year, though, I thought I’d like to do it up a little differently than I have in the past. This year, I wanted my birthday present to be taking the family to see Blue Man Group.
Kit took me to see them while we were still in the long distance phase of our relationship, and I was less than thrilled with the idea. I was not at all a performance art kind of girl — still not, really. That was also when Stomp and Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk were really big, and I suspected it would be similar, which did not excite me. But Kit had seen the show and assured me it was different than that, and not too performance artsy-pretentious. I trusted him (and figured it was only a couple hours out of my life anyhow), so I agreed to go. I had only one condition: I did not, under any circumstances, want to participate.
We had front row seats, and the show was AMAZING. I even had to participate (because of our seats — the particular component is no longer in the show), and it was totally okay. I’ve wanted to go back for years, but we just never managed to make it happen. Then we had kids and it definitely wasn’t happening while we had two little ones at home.
But the kids are finally old enough, so I really wanted to take them and share the joy. Even though my birthday isn’t until the end of the month, we decided to go ahead and go sooner rather than later (ticket prices are going up in March and I am frugal cheap, so saving the $$ makes it even more of a present for me). We had thought we’d maybe go in early and wander around the village for a bit, but the weather had other plans. We did try to stop by Dō, but the line even in the freezing rain was regoddamndiculous — I was going to snap a pic, but it didn’t seem prudent to take my phone out in the aforementioned freezing rain. I’d only wanted to go there because I thought it would be a fun treat, but I can make (and eat!) cookie dough any time I like — I don’t need to wait in a crazy line for it.
So we just made our way over to the theater and hung out at KMart of all places until the doors opened (hey, it was warm and dry, which we were not by then). I was worn out and snappy when we finally got to our seats, but sitting and warming up and Kit being awesome really helped a lot, and I was able to relax and thoroughly enjoy the show. We did not have front row seats this time, but the theater is so tiny that there really aren’t any bad seats. The show has changed somewhat in the past 19 years, but it has also retained a lot of the same components. It was just as amazing and fun as I remembered, and seeing and hearing the kids’ joyful reactions was truly the best birthday present ever.
