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.

Oh, Summer

It's eaten my face right off.

The beginning of kitten season was a rough one this year. I keep hoping that the longer I do this the less time it'll take to get my 'kitten-legs' back. Didn't happen this time, but even the boss lady agreed that our first set of fosters was a hell of an introduction to the season.

Here's Parsnip (now adopted and probably renamed) from this year's first litter:


We currently have three other fosters driving me batty. Here's Sally, whose siblings have already been adopted, cuddling with Junior:


Then there's the other two.

It started with a call from our very awesome vet, asking if we had room for two bottle babies. We did so off we went.

Instead of collecting just the kittens though we ended up with their mom too. The woman whose balcony they were all living on informed us that while she wasn't terribly friendly the mama cat was manageable, even going so far as allowing herself to be picked up.

This was not entirely true. While the mama cat did have a pretty good relationship with that woman that was pretty much the extent of her people friendliness. So, we ended up with a feral cat in our bathroom.

I wasn't aware, but apparently if you put a freaked out feral cat into a bathroom she'll do her very best impersonation of a hissing, spitting tornado. Walls were climbed, great clouds of fur were released, several things were broken... We decided to go ahead and leave them for a while despite the fact that the kittens had a pretty bad upper respiratory infection, complete with eyes so gummy they couldn't open them.

For the first day or so we managed a pretty awesome co-parenting gig with her. She took care of the feeding and regular bathing duties, we stole them when she was at her most settled to clean up their eyes and medicate them.

And then the Boyfriend broke it. You see, kittens don't like it when you mess with their eyes (who can blame them) and protest the cleaning and medicating quite loudly and insistently. And rather than ferry them off out of earshot he attempted to mess with one there in front of feral mama cat.

She was less than impressed.

After that attempting to steal her babies resulted in growls, hisses and quite a few slaps. We managed to get them only through some luck, a handy towel and a brush handle. There was quite a bit of terror involved, especially as the kittens immediately began squawking about it, risking setting off the feral tornado again.

It ended happily enough though, we have the kittens (who seem to just be a sickly sort as they now have tummy troubles) the mama was fixed and released back into her feral colony and no one is peeing all willy nilly in my bathroom anymore.

Now, they just need names but as sickly as they've been it seems like tempting fate to give them real names at this point.

Tiny brown tabby

Tiny lynx point Siamese.

The downstairs redo turned out pretty great, if more involved than we initially though.  It was a little shaming when a team of industious contractors were able to lay a tile floor in three days while it took the Boyfriend and I a month to paint the walls, but hey. That's why they're professionals, right?

Unfortunately, the glass top to our coffee table was an unintended casualty, so a new coffee table was in order. Add to that, the Boyfriend had bought himself an obscenely large television and the ~ten year old Ikea entertainment center just wasn't going to handle it. After eight and a half million trips to various furniture stores, we ended up with a new sofa as well. It actually looks like adults live here now, something that's not so secretly foreign to both of us.


I'm quite pleased with everything even if I did have to break in a new butt dent. Of course, the cats did their part, immediately covering it hair and chewed off burrs. Also, the fosters with tummy troubles? Totally pooped on it. Buying a white sofa was clearly the best of ideas.

Renovations at Casa del Asterismos

The need for home improvements is quickly becoming more and more desperate. Unfortunately, there are few things I hate more than home improvement.

I know I should try and see the fun in it. I mean, we're completely redoing the downstairs - there are loads of decisions to be made that shouldn't be tedious and frustrating, but I guess I'm just not wired in whatever way it is that makes one have an opinion on whether how much I like the color of one tile outweighs how much I like the texture of the other.

I wish I was, it honestly seems like a good time when Martha Stewart does it on television.

But! The tile has been chosen. A scheme has been made. It would help greatly if the packing was done which is of course mostly my stuff since The Boyfriend is a responsible adult who can take care of his shizz. Well, there's also the heavy furniture but the floor guys will apparently help with that. Except fish tanks. They won't touch fish tanks. Which means that we've got the fifty-five gallon to try and heave somewhere. The very idea of trying to shift that behemoth makes my brain itch. At least The Boyfriend already took care of the twenty and thirty gallon tanks.

We painted swatches of possible paint colors last night which was probably the most fun I've had with this whole mess so far. Unsurprisingly I got a bit silly with it. To be fair, The Boyfriend started it. Here's what we initially came up with:


Now, for the last few years that I've lived here I've always thought that the walls were maybe one shade away from institutional white but clearly I was mistaken.

I'm not crazy about sticking to white but whoever the dweeb that designed this house was, he was definitely a big believer in the 'open plan.' Which basically means that I have no rooms or even clear delineations of rooms. So the entire first floor of the house? One color. And about half of the second floor. Thank god he believed in something as conventional as doors for the bedrooms other wise I don't even know.

I pitched the idea of declaring arbitrary lines so that I could have my cheery yellow kitchen and my blue living room and my orange entryway, but The Boyfriend was less than impressed. Apparently arbitrary lines would bug him. As well as he, for some reason, has the idea that using color in home decorating is trendy.

No, I don't know where he came up with that either.

At any rate, after being less than impressed with our collection of off whites we went and picked up more samples today. Don't get too excited, they're still safely in the land of neutral, but I think the winner's going to be the one most likely to be called a color.

A million years ago I promised you silly swatches. So here we go:


The Boyfriend did the house, I added the legless robot. Today we were more boring - the 'Y' is for 'yellow.'


And then the wall of punctuation marks.

The darkest color on the far right (the colon) I think is gonna be the one. Fingers crossed it doesn't look terrible tomorrow once sunlight hits it.

Oh Dear

The holiday season was much crazier than I anticipated.  It ended up being an almost entirely hand made Christmas on my end, which ate way more of my time than I thought it would.  Thus, I fell out of the blogging habit.  So, not dead, just forgot how to internet.

But, new year, new start, or something.  Yay?

First things first:  Christmas card swap.  Here's my totally awesome card that I really should have posted about as soon as I received it from Sarah.  Thank you so much!

Front!

Inside!

And then on the back she included the first verse of a German carol along with the translation.  Again: totally awesome.

Here's a few of the things that have been keeping me busy.  Not all, because I'm relying on the cell phone for photos at the moment.

Here's the tote bag I sort of made for the Boyfriend's mother.  I say sort of made because I cut out the pieces, got grumpy, toodled off to raid my parents' kitchen (which was as delicious and de-grumpifying as always) and when I'd stuffed myself stupid returned to the dining room to find my mom had pretty much made it.  So, 'sort of' is a bit of a stretch - it'd be more accurate to say I had an idea and then didn't end up having to do any of the work myself.  Except the running upstairs to do the ironing which I don't think really counts at all.  Thanks Mater, you're the best!

I also decorated a friend's school bag.  Which was one of those things where I could see what I wanted in my head but had difficulty actually making it happen.  This isn't the completed bag, but an in progress photo.  The finished bag had some rather blobby starfish-like flowers because the white paint pen kept not working, then changing it's mind and exploding.  We covered them up with some cute little buttons though, so I don't think she was too disappointed.

But the majority of the winter time crafting was spent on hats.  So many hats.  I don't know if I'm going to be able to even think about making another hat for a while.  I think the total count was nine, eight to be given away and then one for me, because I decided that I needed a hat too, to prevent me from stealing the ones meant for gifts.  I'm a little overdue for a hair cut and frankly slapping a hat on is way easier than spending several hours trying to convince my hair to stop acting like a Rorschach blob.

I would like to say that I made Mater's gift all by myself.  She never once saved me from my own ineptitude, yay!  Though she did seem pretty amused about the fact that the internet would know Mater's face since I had to show it off.  Pattern is Atarimae Beret (Ravelry link).

And here's the hat I made for Pater, since he was coveting my chullo.  Not pictured is the long bow that Mater gave him for Christmas, which if I had been thinking would've been the greatest illustration of our usual Christmas time ever.

There were more hats, obviously, but I don't currently have pictures of them.  But I will bother the recipients to let me take photos of them for great justice the blog.

There.  That's me back from the dead.  Maybe this is the year I can learn to stop being quite so useless about self imposed commitments.  Probably not though.

Linoleum - Not Just For Floors

I had initially thought that I'd do a water color painting for the one holiday card that I'm sure to send (thanks again to Susie at Useless Beauty Designs for hosting the swap!) but I made the mistake of telling people that I'd be making this card for my swap partner.

And now other people want one.  People that like to think that I care about them and think that a small little something in the mail would be such a lovely way of expressing that, don't you think, and really if you're already making one....

Crap.

The thing is, despite my whining, I would very much like to be the with-it, have my stuff together sort of adult who can manage to send out a few holiday cards.  After all, these people are my friends and I really do like them, and enjoy making things for them.  It really shouldn't be such a burden.  And yet every year I put it off again and again until I realize that it's January and hey, maybe I should make a resolution of it.  Not that I ever keep the rest of them.*

This year I'm determined.  I will make holiday cards, I will send them out before the end of December and I will be a with-it, have my stuff together sort of adult.  In this one aspect, at least.

But I'm certainly not doing an individual painting on each of them, because if being an adult means giving up on being completely lazy then I want no part of it.

Having prints done would be the obvious solution, but that's one more step between making the cards and sending the cards which ups the chances that I'll be sitting here January 3rd, look over and see the painting and then hit my head repeatedly on the table for once again being a failure.  As this would likely cause brain damage and I really don't need that I've opted to go the linoleum print route.  Print making in the comfort of my stretch pants!  I really couldn't ask for anything better.

Of course, I haven't done linoleum carving in about ten years but really.  It's like riding a bike, I'm sure.**

Firstly, the image.  For this one, I chose a simple armadillo motif and copied him (a wee bit smaller) onto a piece of paper.  Through the magic of technology you can of course re-size your chosen image (if you're not winging it) as you see fit but again with the lazy, so I didn't.

Armadillo!

I feel I should point out that he is rather tiny and not for the cards so much as an attempt to remember how the hell this works.

Onward.  I've gone over my pencil lines to make sure they're nice and dark so that they'll transfer.  Image goes onto the linoleum block and with a good rub there should now be an armadillo on the block.  Now, I've never been able to have a nice clean transfer though I hear some people can manage it.  But even if it comes out like this:

A little less armadillo-y.

Never fear.  Filling in the gaps is quick work.

Much better.

And now the carving.  I usually do the big bits, then come in with my smallest blade to do the detail work. Also, slowly and gently, cutting away a little bit at a time because like with a lot of things taking away is easier than adding.  Since I want the background white here, I spent an extra bit of time with the largest blade cutting away the block until the background was well below the central image.

Not pictured: the fit I had when I nicked his ear.

Note to self: dots are way harder than you remembered.  Should probably avoid those in the future.

And now I give it a test run.  Ink up the brayer (thinner is better, here.  Gloopy brayers are no one's friend) and give it a roll onto the carving.  I've never been good at placing the paper down on the block, so I cheat and put the block onto the paper and flip it over.  This has ended badly before, but it didn't this time so I think I'll continue with my bad habits.

This time around, since Mr. Armadillo is about an inch and a half square and I was using a spare bit of rice paper for extra absorbency I was able to get away with just using my thumb to rub the paper onto the block.  Sometimes this will work, most of the time it won't.  There's a fancy tool for this called a baren, but I usually use the bottom of a glass.  Fancy tools are for sissies!  Or possibly professionals. 

Lift up the paper to check it out:

Two!  Two armadillos, ahahaha.

Some of the detail work was lost (spots!  Damn you for being difficult) and I missed a few ridges on the back ground.  So, the stamp gets rinsed off, and I get back to carving.

Round two:

Spots, why you gotta hate?

He could be better, but for a first run I think I'm satisfied.  I've learned my lesson about spots and I think when I'm working on a larger scale it'll be a little easier.  At the very least I'll worry less about slipping with the cutter and taking a gouge of finger instead of linoleum.  Of course now that I've said that....

*  'Become coy sex kitten' has been on the top of my resolution list for about 7 years now.  Mater, don't make that face, it really means cut back on the excessive flailing and not talk at length about Doctor Who at fancy grown-up parties.  Possibly learn ballroom dance and brush my hair on a regular basis.

**  I've never managed to learn how to ride a bike, all attempts have ended in tragedy and bodily harm.  So, I rather hope it's not anything like that.

Cleaning FAIL

New toy!

The lovely Kate from Deth Spïralz was kind enough to give me her mother's old art table along with a bag full of crafty goodness.  This is what prompted the desire to clean out the guest bedroom and set up a studio.  It's all very exciting.

I was hoping to take this week and, if not make it entirely presentable, at least lower the slob rating from 'crack den' to 'bachelor pad.'  Unfortunately, I haven't made much of a dent in it yet.  Why?  Well, the same reason it's taking me eight and a half million years to try and write this blog post.

Kitten pile!

These guys are probably about four to four and a half weeks old.  Already eating solid foods, very active and not the least bit coordinated.  No really.  They'll knock themselves over just walking along.  It's a talent.

Along with these guys we also have a little guy, probably about two to two and half weeks old.  Still very much a bottle baby.  Unfortunately, he's pretty dehydrated so we've had to start him on subcutaneous fluids.

So, this means that instead of trash bags, mops and brooms filling my days like I had been planning on it's been bottles, syringes and this:

Little furry epaulets.

I feel like I should have left all the extraneous kitten typing in here so that you'd get some sort of idea of how underfoot these guys can be.  Also overfoot.  And top of head.  And clinging to legs.

Kitten fight!

For example this is what is currently happening beside me.  The Boyfriend is on the phone and has one squeaking in his other ear.  The baby is feeling left out of the running around all crazy pants fun and is sitting in his nest box crying about it.  Seriously, I don't think he's stopped in the last five minutes.

Maybe this weekend.  Once the little guy is hydrated and needs to be fed less frequently.  Or maybe I should just set up my 'studio' where the art table is currently waiting for it's new home.  I'm sure the Boyfriend would love having even more of my crafty clutter in the living room.

And now it's time to feed the little guy.  When did that happen?

Bebeh!

Next on Hoarders

I once again have an overwhelming urge to have a dedicated studio space.  There are a few problems with this.  The best room for me to use is the guest bedroom.  In fact, it currently has a bunch of my art supplies, a folding table acting as a desk and the broken sewing machine from the last time I decided that I would use it as a studio.  Aside from the so called useful things, like a bed, desk and night stands it's also crammed with an ungodly amount of crap that's accumulated over the years.  Because the Boyfriend and I are both packrats with no real organizational skills.  One a scale of one to exploded meth lab it's about at 'livable crack den.'

That's an unholy amount of stuff.

I can't blame you for judging me for my serious lack of housekeeping skills.  I will ask you not to tell me about how much of an unbelievable slob I am, I'm very sensitive.  So, going through it all, throwing things out (always so difficult for me- what if I need those half finished notebooks at some point?) and organizing the things that remain more effectively than my current system of 'stacks of semi-related stuff' will be more than slightly challenging.

Aside from the desperately overdue spring cleaning there's a problem with the room itself.  The reason why it didn't work out as a studio the first time and therefore became a repository for boxes of random crap and unused furniture is because I find the large picture window incredibly creepy.

As an incurable night owl, I do most of my work at night.  But I'm afraid of the dark.  Especially dark windows.  Especially this window:

HATE

A few years ago the Boyfriend and I redid the floors in the guest bedroom and gave it a much needed fresh coat of paint.  One night I was in there by myself painting trim with the window open to keep from getting too high from the fumes.  Unbeknownst to me, the Boyfriend's cat Tigger, who never goes outside and I'm convinced hates me with the fires of a thousand suns, had wandered out onto the eave just outside the window. 

Rather than doing something sensible like calmly and quietly walking through the open window when she wanted to come back inside, she came flying out of the night with a squawk and gave me about seventeen and a half heart attacks (I can't be sure, it was hard to count) then trotted off wondering why the new girl was such a weirdo.  There may have been some nonchalant butt-licking, I don't remember.

I'm hoping with some ridiculously cheery curtains that actually fit (as opposed to the last set, which is why it's currently uncovered)  I'll be able to use it.  At the very least I'll have a place to put up guests again and I suppose that's nice.

Still, I can't help but feel that my cleaning efforts will end up something like this:

Tell Mater I loved her.

On the plus side, if I die in a landslide of accumulated bits and bobs I won't have to clean ever again.