Yarn Zombie

You know, a lot of people in the liberal blogosphere really dislike Chris Matthews, but I could never get on board with that. Sure, he’s kind of embarrassing and cringe-worthy at times (let’s not get into the whole ‘Bush in a flight suit thing’), but for the most part I just think he really, really loves politics and the whole circus that surrounds them.

I don’t watch Hardball a lot, although I find myself tuning into it more frequently as the election approaches, but I was fortunately watching it last night and found myself witness to one of the great television PWNED moments evah. You can click here or here to read about it and watch the clip (skip to about 4 minutes into it for the really good stuff). Actually, here might be the best place to go. Oh, it doesn’t matter, Chris Matthews is everywhere! Needless to say, Chris Matthews gets a free pass for a lot of dumb shit he may say or do in the future because of what he did yesterday. And for the rest of the night, I kept spontaneously saying, “Neville Chamberlain was an appeaser!” at random moments.

The first brown sock is done!

I finished it up last night right at the beginning of The Office, the season finale of which I thought was kind of unsatisfying. But maybe I just think that because Pam was so clearly, “What? I thought Jim was going to propose?” at the end of it, too. I felt so bad for Michael, who was as close to being a human being as he’s ever been. As always, the bits with Kevin, Creed, and Ryan were hilarious. But, I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t really in the mood for pathos.

As for Lost, my two priceless moments were Sawyer tromping pissily after Jack in the jungle, and Sayid at Hurley’s party. “Interesting theme for a party.” “Yeah, they kind of just don’t get it.”

My house is a complete wreck right now. It was all nice and clean-esque for my mom’s visit, but after we got back from Ikea, everything is just kind of everywhere. We still have a few more pieces of furniture to install in the craft/beer room, which also needs to have Travis‘ beer stuff all moved around. So everything is everywhere. I’m still working on the bedroom. Did I mention that Ellie, who almost never goes into the bedroom (except at 6:00 am when she does something bad to wake me up), now is mad in love with the new furniture? It’s her best thing ever.

Surely, no good can come of this.

I added hooks on one of the bookcases to show off my handknit socks:

The weather has been kind of weird lately, cool and wet. I keep waiting for my seeds to sprout. So far I haven’t seen any cucumber or squash sprouts. I think I may have one kohlrabi seed that’s sprouted (at least, I think it’s a kohlrabi). Same thing with the onions I planted. The soybeans look as if they’re gearing up to start sprouting. About the only stuff that’s really taken off has been the radishes and garlic, which started sending up leaves in the past two days:

My container greens that I’m growing in a flat on the porch are doing really well, too:

I developed some more film the other night. The pics came out a bit too light again, but I think that’s mainly because I’m using 100 speed film in bright daylight in a camera that has a slow shutter. So, the next time I develop, I’m going to keep the film in the developer for about 2 extra minutes, to see if that darkens the images up any. It’s not that big of a deal, because I’ve just been scanning stuff into photoshop and adjusting things as I need to:

I got a wicked light leak on the Marcella’s picture, which I think came from respooling the film a few times and using it in two different cameras. It’s pretty cool!

I’ve got a ton of color film that I want to play with, but I’m kind of done with paying to get my film processed. At some point soon I think I’m going to get chemicals to develop color film. I guess a lot of people are scared of that, since the developing has to be done at a higher temp, but since I’ve got years of experience with dyeing using heat, that part doesn’t worry me at all. So I think I’m just going to start taking rolls and rolls of color film, and then have a big developing bonanza once I get the color chemicals.

Anyway, it’s all crappy and cold and wet today, so here are some flowers to make up for it:

Hi! (waves) My mom was here for a visit this weekend, and it was awesome. I’m just now getting back into the swing of things. We went to Columbus on Saturday and hung out in the Short North for a while. Luckily, we had brilliant weather. We had to go to North Market and partake of some Jeni’s ice cream. Apparently, no one cares if you take pictures inside of North Market, as my mom and I and some other random people we saw were all just snapping away.

I took a meat picture. I’m not sure why, but here it is:

Here’s the big rooster head sign:

On Monday, Travis, Mom, and I decided to attempt the unthinkable and go to both Ikea and Jungle Jim’s on the same day. Keep in mind, we live about a 3 hour drive away. Also keep in mind that we needed to be back in time to let the dogs out and give the animals dinner. And also, none of us have ever been to an Ikea before. But since we’re crazy, this seemed reasonable to do.

We made pretty good time to the Ikea (our first stop), and split up once we were inside. Mom had set the agenda and given us 2 hours to shop. About an hour and 15 minutes into it (we were still in the showroom part), I started to freak out because there wasn’t enough time. Travis and I tore through the downstairs grabbing stuff, and I was frantically trying to call my mom (her phone wound up not working inside Ikea), leaving messages like, “Mom! There’s no way we’ll be able to do this! Travis went to get a cart! I’m in picture frames and mirrors and I’m alone and scared!”

We wound up buying a bunch of smaller stuff in our first purchase, since there wasn’t any chance in hell we’d be able to get to the furniture within the time limit. When we finally hooked back up with my mom, we decided to stop, eat (at the Ikea restaurant), and regroup.

After lunch, Travis and I went back again, heading directly to the furniture warehouse. We’ve needed shelves/bookcases for a million years now, and Ikea is so incredibly cheap and wonderful that we were finally able to get furniture. Woo! It only took us about 20 minutes to load up the handtruck and buy everything, and half of that was spent fuming in line at the check-out because the moron in front of us couldn’t decide whether or not she wanted to buy 20 circular rugs. Note to consumers - the appropriate time to make these decisions is before you’re standing in front of the cashier, who is trying to ring up your purchases.

When I was talking to the Ikea cashier on purchase #2, I was babbling about how this is our first time coming to Ikea, and we’re from 3 hours away, and my mom is visiting us from Indiana for Mother’s Day, and how we’re going to try to go to Jungle Jim’s before we go home.

Cashier, sympathetically: “Oh, bless your heart.”

We wound up not spending very much time at Jungle Jim’s, due to everyone being shopped out. I bought some hard liquor (Midori and Amaretto!), because I needed it after this adventure. Also got some international chocolates, including some chocolate/hazelnut concoction called a Bueno. I didn’t even get a picture of it because I snarfed it down so fast.

Yesterday Travis and I spent the day putting together Ikea furniture and rearranging our bedroom. Not surprisingly, it was pretty tense and the day was filled with stress. Nothing like putting together mass quantities of Ikea stuff to strengthen one’s relationship! Anyway, the bedroom stuff is all done, and I love it. We wound up using our big Expedit bookcase as a room divider. I don’t know why putting a big piece of furniture sticking out in the middle of a room makes the room look bigger, but somehow it does.

The best feature of this bookcase (besides the fact it was the easiest of all of the Ikea stuff to assemble) is that the shelves are so wide, you can fit 2 rows of books in it. It’s double the storage!

We also got a Kullen dresser to use as a nightstand. Note to future Kullen owners - do not stand on the nightstand. Not even at night. Anyway, I have to make a small repair to it and paint one of the crossbraces (I already painted the two middle ones when we had to do the first repair on it - this is Travis’ worst piece of furniture), but no big deal.

The shelves above the bed are Liden. I’m going a little bit batty considering all of the storage possibilities I now have. I spent the morning arranging our books. I now have a separate area for all of my knitting books! Hooray!

I think Travis could wait a long time before he wanted to go back to Ikea, but I’d love to go back as soon as possible and get more furniture. It’s so cheap! Screw Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel, I’m all about the more furniture for less money. I know there’s stuff there I never even saw (specifically, the fabric area - although it was probably good that I missed that, considering I didn’t really need to buy anything more).

I’m all inspired now to finish up doing the 4 or 5 things I need to do in order to really finish the bedroom. The big one is to quilt the quilt top I made a few summers ago. That’s going to be a monster.

Anyway, off to do more organizing. It’s enjoyable, now that I actually have space to put stuff.

Hey, my creepy Walmart picture made it into the Consumerist’s Friday Flickr Finds. Awesome!

In other news, my mom is on her way over from Indiana for days of fun and excitement/relaxation. Hi, Mom!

Yeah, I lied. I went to sleep before they called Indiana, although to my credit, I lasted until the end of MSNBC’s prime time coverage (either 1 or 2 am, I can’t even remember now). And even though Hillary squeaked by, I’m still all proud of everyone who went out and voted in Gary - I think in some precincts they had like 85-90% turnout, which is amazing.

I managed to get some more seeds planted today, fortunately, right before it started raining. Here’s hoping I’ll start seeing sprouts in a few days! I also went and planted a flat of miscellaneous greens and lettuces. I decided to container garden this rather than just plant it in the ground because I can never tell a proper edible lettuce and green from a poisonous weed. Because of my own scary little paranoia, a container garden seemed my best bet.

For the second time today, I’ve heard Ted Strickland’s (the gov of Ohio) name being floated as a possible veep pick, and for the second time today, I’m all, “What?” Ted Strickland? Don’t get me wrong, I voted for the guy and think he’s doing a decent job (unlike some attorney generals I could name…), but as a veep? Er, no. I could think of a ton of Democrats that would be more inspiring than Ted (specifically, my top three - Wesley Clark, Kathleen Sebelius, and Jim Webb).

I discovered that I if I set my Nikon on manual focus, and zoomed the lens in and out while taking a picture on a slow shutter speed, I can create a really crappy motion effect:

I’m all into the lo-fi camera mood right now.

Turned the heel on my brown sock, and am trucking along in the gusset. DPNs are so slow. Speed up, DPNs! Must.. knit.. more… browness!

So, I had guessed earlier tonight that Indiana would go to Hillary by 6 points, but with 82% reporting the gap is only 4 points, and Lake County, my home county, where Gary and East Chicago are located, still has yet to report. According to MSNBC, the Obama people still think they’re going to lose Indiana by 10-15,000, but still… Thanks for exceeding my expectations, Indiana! Hugs!!

It’s a good night. I’m not going to sleep until Lake County comes in!

I’m having YouTube weirdness. For the past week or so, I can hardly get any YouTube videos to play. I watched the Empire Strikes Back/Obama-Hillary thing a few days ago, and today, after clicking a bunch of videos randomly, I finally got one of some weird bottle orchestra thing to load, but 9 times out of 10 I get te black screen and “We’re sorry, but this video is no longer available.” What’s up with that? I’ve tried logging out and viewing them, watching them on regular YouTube and the new beta version of YouTube, and I still get a massive FAIL with most videos. YouTube, you’re on notice!

Here’s my random brown sock I’m working on:

Yep. Brown. Stockinette. I’m having to knit it on DPNs, because apparently I only have one 12″ circ each of size 2 and size 3 needles, and they’re both occupied with other socks. I’m quite a bit slower with DPNs than with my beloved 12″ Addi circs, so I need to buy a few more sets of those at some point (or, if anyone wants to trade me a set of those for a set of size 2 24″ Addi lace circs, let me know - I have 2 sets of those I want to get rid of. I bought them with the intent of knitting socks on 2 circs, but it turns out I kind of hate that, so I never use those needles).

Anyway, I’m calling the brown socks the Dirty Jobs socks, or, alternately, the I Heart Mike Rowe socks, since I seem to knit on them primarily while watching the Discovery Channel in general, and Dirty Jobs and Deadliest Catch in particular. Also, they’re brown (the color is off in the pic - it’s more reddish than in real life), and similar in color to the poo the Mike Rowe finds himself knee-deep in on Dirty Jobs!

Worked on the garden this morning. The seeds in the main garden area are all planted - soybeans, kohlrabi, radishes, onions, squash, and cucumbers. We’ll probably buy a few tomato and pepper plants, too. The back half of the garden is the chaos zone. I mixed a bunch of seeds together - random varieties of sunflowers, amaranths, sorghum, and a weirdo ‘Bearded Corn’ - and then tossed them haphazardly onto the soil. Then I raked the dirt a bit to try to work the seeds into the soil. I’m not sure how well this is going to work, or if the birds will come and steal all my seeds before they have the chance to grow, but if nothing happens in about a week, I’ll go through and plant the rest of the seeds properly, individually and in rows, like a real grown up. I hope it doesn’t come to that, though.

I still need to plant the area next to the house, outside of our dining room. That’s where the Tithonia is going to go, but then I also found a stash of old seeds for some random stuff, like poppies, strawflowers, and, oddly, perennial sunflowers (like the kind you see growing on the side of the road in Missouri and Kansas). So I’m going to plant some of that stuff in with the tithonias and see what happens. Oh, there’s also some parsley seeds, too, and I think butterflies dig parsley as well, so I’ll throw that in, too.

My peonies are getting ready to bloom, a bit earlier than I expected:

Beautiful day today. I’m going to go play.

So, in case anyone wondered, I am actually still knitting. I set my colorwork sock aside when I got to the heel, as I’m still undecided on what I want to happen. I’m waiting for the heel inspiration pixies to come. In lieu of that, I started another sock. I haven’t blogged/photographed it yet because it’s pretty boring. It’s a sock. It’s brown. It’s going to be mainly stockinette. Woo, can you feel the excitement?!

Unbeknownest to Travis and myself, another Goodwill opened up here in Mount Vernon. Now we have two. I feel so metropolitan. We discovered this while doing a quick check of the Goodwill we normally go to - it’s right by Kroger, so we’ve been stopping in once a week or so lately to see if there’s any electronics/camera stuff we can get to hack. I found 2 cheapo 35mm cameras to work with (for a whopping $1.50 total!) and when we went to pay, we saw all the crazy Goodwill propaganda advertising the new store.

Of course, we had to go check it out. It’s in a part of town we never go to, so that was kind of interesting. However, the main thing is that the new Goodwill is awesome!! It’s huge! It’s like we were in a Goodwill in a big city. And there were oodles of cameras there, too, so I was a complete embarrassment and wound up with this many total for the day:

Yeah. View my complete and utter lack of self control. All in all, though, I spent about $12 for the lot. The two little cameras were the ones I got at our regular Goodwill. The camera in the front, the Canon Snappy 50, is one I bought primarily because it had an unshot roll of film already loaded in it, and the batteries were still working. I discovered this when I accidentally took a picture inside the Goodwill. Anyway, that camera costs $2, which is pretty much cheaper than a roll of film, so score!

The Lynx, this camera:

just looked like fun to me. I was charmed by the kooky weather pictograms on its lens.

I hope photos taken with this camera turn out to be really shitty/interesting.

The other two cameras are Polaroids. I’ve never been a big fan of Polaroids, although I’ve seen a lot of Polaroid photography that I like. The film is just crazy expensive, and as of sometime in the immediate future, it’s going to be discontinued entirely. It’s hard to find Polaroid film to fit your camera (although Fuji is making some that will work). Anyway, I thought I’d get a Polaroid to try out before it became an absolute dinosaur, but I wasn’t sure which one I could still buy film for. Of course, the most expensive one, the Polaroid Captiva ($3.99), is the one whose film was discontinued years ago, apparently.

A funny thing about Polaroids, and this may explain their crazy price of film, is that some Polaroid cameras need a battery to operate. And on some of these cameras, the battery is actually inside the film pack. Load a pack of film, the battery makes the camera go, and you’re all smiles. However, when you have an obsolete Polaroid of which you can’t get film for anymore at all, then you’re stuck with a $3.99 piece of junk. Anyway, since I can’t use the damn thing, and I’m not about to enter a bidding war on eBay for one of the few packs of Captiva film that still exist, I think I’m just going to disembowel it and see what happens. Maybe I’ll find some parts of interest I can use for some crazy camera hybrid.

The other camera is a Polaroid One-Step. It takes film that you can still buy at regular stores right now.

It came with a bag, and looks a bit like a green whale when it’s folded up. One of the things I do like about Polaroid is their Transformer-esque personality. That and the fact that Polaroid cameras are ridiculously huge.

So, I got some Polaroid film (which cost more than all of my cameras put together) and took a few test shots:

Eh. Whatever. It is a fun toy, and I completely understand the charm of an instant picture, but I don’t think it’s my thing. I may buy a few packs of film to have on hand before the Great Polaroid Drought hits, but I can’t really see spending a lot of time with it. $17 for 10 pictures? Dude, that’s like 6 cameras! Also, the instructions for the Polaroid film explicitly say ‘Do not shake.’ Isn’t that kind of the whole point? OutKast would never lie!

On a much more satisfying photographic note, developing film is awesome, even when it all comes out lighter than it should have been. But who cares? There’s an image on something that wasn’t there before, and that’s just pretty damn cool.

That’s what one of the negatives looks like scanned in, with no mods. Most of the negatives came out light, like I said, but nothing that a little photoshop can’t fix.

Also, took the Hannakube pinhole camera out for a test drive on Saturday, and then processed prints for the first time on Saturday night. I took 4 pics - all of them had an image, but one was really light for some reason, one was just ugly and boring, and of the other two, this was the best. I wound up cropping it and adding the sepia tone in photoshop:

No photo fun today, although both Outside Cat and Mr. Bun came for a visit (at the same time!), so that was exciting. We finally got our garden area all prepared. We planted some garlic this evening, and I’ll probably get most of the other seeds planted later on this week. It seems like I’m way behind on doing the gardening stuff compared with what I’ve done in the past, but it’ll be interesting to compare getting a late start vs. and early start. At least I won’t be running outside to cover my plants with sheets or anything this year (hopefully, although with the crazy climate madness now, who can say?). The one thing I really want to grow this year is the tithonia. I absolutely love this flower.  It grows into a big bush and is all bright and obnoxious and attracts hummingbirds and butterflies.  So cool.  Also, if my bizarro-land Japanese soybeans grew, too, that would be awesome as well.  Apparently they’re so tasty you just eat them off the vine.  Yeah, we’ll see about that.

I developed film!

This is the end result of me getting pissed off at Ye Olde Local Photo Place. After I had a crap experience there, I knew I didn’t want to be reliant on them to get my film processed. So, I ordered the supplies and bought a book, and here I am today, with my first roll of film all developed.

I’m pretty lucky, since I happened to have a lot of the stuff I needed to develop film already. Travis and I had been gifted a stash of photo and film processing equipment back when we lived in Indiana from a friend of ours, so we have an enlarger, opaque plastic jugs, tongs, trays, measuring cups, etc. All I really needed was the chemicals and instructions. We also have a film processing tank, but on a whim, I ordered this from Freestyle Photo (a company I would happily do more business with, by the way). It’s a film processing tank specifically designed to hold one roll of 120 sized film, and it was supposed to be really easy to use. Since it was only $5, I figured ‘why not?’, since I read that regular film processing tanks, like the one I already had, have a steep learning curve to them. Unfortunately, the $5 tank came without instructions, but after poking around on some photography forums, I got the gist of how it was supposed to be used.

So, I mixed up all the chemicals this afternoon, which kind of took a while (mainly because I was scared and it was my first time). Next, I had to get the film off of the spool and into the tank. This needs to be done in total darkness, which I don’t really have in my house. The best thing to a darkroom is our bathroom (no windows! For once, a good thing!), so I went in there, shoved a blanket against the bottom of the door (where the most light leaked through), turned off the lights, and sat down in the bathtub with the shower curtain closed to try to transfer the film. It was really pretty easy, once I figured out the whole “paper backing on 120 film” thing. When I was done with the film and had it in the tank - I had been in the dark for probably about 5 minutes at that point - I realized that if I looked through the shower curtain, I could see slivers of light from around the door frame. Happily, though, it didn’t seem to affect the film.

The actual developing process wasn’t really any big deal. The developing tank is light-tight, so you can do all of the steps in a normal lit room. The hardest part was trying not to freak out. I think the whole developing process (not counting mixing the chemicals or getting the film in the tank) only took about 20 minutes.

Anyway, now I’m all empowered. I need to let the film dry for another hour or so, and then I’m going to try scanning it in to see what sort of images I got. Travis and I took some pictures using one of our antique store cameras, the Kodak Brownie Twin 20. It’s definitely not the fanciest camera on the block, so there’s bound to be some weirdness.

My next big challenges are going to be trying to figure out how to load 35mm film in the big processing tank and developing photo paper. I’ll need to set up a darkroom area for the photo paper stuff. I think I’m going to try to do it in the garage for now - there’s a ton of light leaks, but I think if I develop at night, I’ll be okay.

I’m excited. Can you tell? I told you, I love learning. It makes my brain happy.

Our neighbors down the road from us are having marriage difficulties. I know this not because of any super powers of perception I might have, but because of the sound of screaming that drifts over to our house. Since it’s spring now, I get to hear it a lot more frequently. Especially since the screamy sessions happen to take place outside, at around 10 o’clock in the morning.

Anyway, it’s all none of my business, but I did have to laugh when one of the member of the Couple of Angst pulled into their driveway absolutely blasting Whitesnake’s ‘Here I Go Again.’ Passive aggressive much?

Of course, the laugh is one me, because now I have that stupid song going through my head. Whitesnake. Gah. Hadn’t thought about them in years. Blerg.

And, on a different subject, can I just say how much more interesting I find Jack on Lost when he’s all messed-up, pill-popping, drunk, and paranoid? So much better than Shiny! Happy! Jack!.

So, Travis has been really sick since last Friday evening. Really sick. Like, scary sick. It was like if someone had taken all of Travis’ previous sicknesses and then rolled them up into a big ball, chopped it up, and made a gigantic Sick Pie, and then Travis sat down and ate the Sick Pie, that’s how sick he was. He was Sick Sickilty Sick from Sicktown, Sicklyvania.

Anyway, he just now has started feeling better. A little. So, the past week has been a lot of trying to find foods that Travis will eat and making sure he’s been plied with a bunch of drugs, and not so much getting done all of the things I was hoping to do. The garlic is not planted. I missed World Pinhole Day (well, I did shoot some pictures in the yard, but I haven’t gotten them developed yet, and it’s not what I was really planning on doing). I have no idea what’s going on in the bloggy world. About the only news that has managed to pierce through the Dome of Sickitude is that Paula Abdul broke the time-space continuum on American Idol, so kudos to her!

So, while Travis was trying not to be an utter mess of Sick, here’s some things that we did do.

1. Slept (or tried to sleep)
2. Watched a lot of Doctor Who
3. Played Scrabble

4. I made Chex Mix
5. I also made peanut butter cupcakes with chocolate frosting

6. Watched for our rabbit friend, Mr. Bun, to come for a visit

And finally, Travis was feeling well enough yesterday to start replaying Fallout, which is always a good time.

So then I had to start replaying it, too. I love Fallout. My character’s name is McGoo.

Anyway, here’s hoping that Travis finally gets better and stops feeling like death. As for me, after I get caught up on Google Reader, I have a whole host of projects and fun things to start working on. Some involve learning and experimentation, which is always really exciting for me (I heart learning!). We’ll see what I’m actually able to get done. I probably shouldn’t have started playing Fallout again…