Revenge

I think my house is still peeved about me not taking better care of it and doing things like painting it terrible colors. And now that I'm trying to catch up on housework its striking back.

Why is it that the things that best kill mildew are also the best at killing brain cells? I mean, it says right on the bottle that it's for cleaning showers yet goes on to say 'use in a well ventilated area'. And maybe I'm missing out on a whole realm of experience but I don't think I've met a shower yet that could fairly be called 'well ventilated'.



I like to think that I lost my grasp of arithmetic for a worthwhile cause though. It seems as though the tide of war is finally turning in my favor. I can safely shower without just averting my eyes and pretending that the grout wasn't actually developing rudimentary eyestalks and ogling my sudsy butt.



I know I can't be alone in this, but I seem to be a real winner when it comes to realizing that something is a terrible idea and is bound to end badly but then going on to do it anyway.

The step stool ended up mysteriously broken when we were painting and still hasn't been replaced. So when it came time to clean off the light fixture above the dining room table I figured I could probably get the job done by standing on a chair on tip toe and just leaning brazenly across the table.

Clearly there was nothing that could possibly go wrong here.



I have to admit, damaging my vestigial muscles was probably the least hurtful way this could have ended. While I would like nothing more than to give the finger to the dishes and curl up with a steady stream of gin and tonics for the rest of the summer, at least I didn't completely bust my face open pirouetting dramatically off the chair and onto the table.

Not that I almost did that. No, no, it was fiiiine.

A laundry basket will do just a good a job holding my clothes as the dressers, right? I don't even want to contemplate how folding laundry is going to injure me.

Latent Hipsterism

My iPhone is pretty much my primary camera since it's just about always nearby and for a phone the camera is actually pretty good. The problem is that there are a million apps that encourage my awkward love of filters. I resisted for so long because slapping a 'vintage' filter onto a mediocre photo doesn't do as much to improve it as I think it does.  But I love it so much.

I finally gave up the fight against hipster aesthetics (am I subverting the hipster paradigm if I love filters unironically?) and downloaded a million of them and have been entertaining myself by taking a million pictures non stop for the last few days.

Unsurprisingly, the first handy victims were the kittens:

Sally looking less than amused at my prodding

Sleepy babies.

We went out to The Boyfriend's parents' place this weekend and I took full advantage of the pretty scenery and his mom's flowers:

Drought's hitting the lake pretty hard this year.

The Monkey lined up her collection of Angry Birds plushies next to her and wanted to take a group photo. So, of course, I was only encouraged.

Apparently the holding out her feet/hands is a think now.

Making a picture I took this morning look faded, beat up and a million years old makes no sense, but I can't stop.

Oh, who's that at the door? Flowers? FILTER!

Thanks, Boyfriend!

I wonder if it's genetic, as Pater loves to antique things when dyeing leather, as is evidenced by this super awesome journal cover he made me for Christmas.

I didn't edit this at all and it was hard, let me tell you

Between this and my determination to sign up for every social networking site and then never use them, I think I may need to check myself into rehab for abusing technological time wasters. In semi-related news, google+? Eight and a half million times better than facebook. As soon as I have more than two friends on it I'm totally quitting facebook with their creepy privacy policies and sketchy views on intellectual property rights forever. I for one welcome our google overlords.

HA HA! Estoy Usando El Internet!

Click to embiggen

I'm not sure if this counts for blog week, since comics aren't exactly new here, though I haven't done a full page one in years.

Tidy Mind, Tidy Stitches

Here we are at day three of blog week (2KCBWDAY3) with the following prompt:

How do you keep your yarn wrangling organised? It seems like an easy to answer question at first, but in fact organisation exists on many levels. Maybe you are truly not organised at all, in which case I am personally daring you to try and photograph your stash in whatever locations you can find the individual skeins. However, if you are organised, blog about an aspect of that organisation process, whether that be a particularly neat and tidy knitting bag, a decorative display of your crochet hooks, your organised stash or your project and stash pages on Ravelry.

 Curse you new floors!  That bit about personally daring me to photograph yarn as I find it?  Two weeks ago I could have done that handily and proven that, truly, there are those of us who just don't have anything in the way of organization.

Well. That may be overstating things a little.  But only just.  I have a rather large chest in the corner of the living room next to my side of the couch (the one with my hard won butt dent) that has zip top bags filled with yarn.  But the likelihood of yarn making it from purchase to zip top to chest is pretty darn small.  And if I want to use the yarn right away or just look at it for a while then I don't even have the advantage of knowing which shopping bag it was in.  It could literally be anywhere I might have put it down.  Or hidden it from the cats after putting it down.  Or hidden it from myself because it got in the way.

Despite that my tendency to lose things is actually not that bad.  In fact, I'm more likely to lose something if I've put it away someplace obvious.  Which is why I can tell the Boyfriend that the shopping bag from the trip to the hardware store three months ago is beneath the chair in the dining room near his shoes.  Ask me to find my favorite black bra after I specifically announce to myself aloud, 'I am putting this in this drawer because I have just washed it,' and I'm tearing apart the house.

So, I know my Cascade Magnum was on the DVD shelf next to Zoolander*, the red variegated sock yarn was on the corner of the coffee table, bits and bobs of the cotton acrylic blend for the commissioned monkeys was behind the left hand cushion of the love seat, the Baby Ull and half a fingerless mitt that I really need to start over was in the magazine rack.... I could keep going but why?

Now all my yarn is in three places: the chest (which has no organizational system besides 'what will fit in this bag'), a box packed with all the crafty related shenanigans I could round up from downstairs (and my copy of The Wasteland, for some reason) and the freezer.  I guess, four places if you count the trash.

Why the freezer and the trash? Well, this:

If you see this bastard anywhere in your house just burn the place down and salt the earth.  Even then you'll have nagging doubts about whether it really, truly is this time gone.

I knew there was a point to all those zip top bags when I first started using them.

*Wait, that's a filing system that almost makes sense.  If you squint.