ambientfiligree

Most of you know I'm an advocate for digital books whenever possible. Digital has opened up many doors for me, including the ability to accumulate books again, since I ran out of shelf space many moons ago. That isn't as much of a problem as being able to find them again. If I could swap most of my books for digital, I would, except in a few cases I might want both, such as the following:

Magazines. I like to read physical magazines cover to cover. I find the pattern I want in a digital magazine and ignore the rest. Nowadays, I tend to buy mostly digital, and physical + digital when I'm feeling sorry for myself and need the physical copy to read. It's kind of wasteful, but not as wasteful as all the magazines downstairs I can't find.

Reference books. I would definitely like digital (and searchable) copies of my reference books, but physical are easier to reference, once I have the right page open.

Things that are better as digital:

Mother. Fucking. Comics. I have sold so many comics because I wanted more space, not because I really wanted to give them up. I love my digital comics. I want more titles available to me. I love being able to start a series late and still be able to get every issue. (Just picked up Trees. Very interesting.) I much prefer binging on a series digitally than physically. It's smoother. I'm not bothered by inconsistencies in printing. (I'm looking at you, CMX.) I can collect a 40 volume series based on pleasure and not on shelf space.

Novels, nonfiction without notations or footnotes. I blast through a good book when it's digital. I don't even notice when I'm flipping pages anymore.

Things that need to be improved for digital:
Terry Pratchett books. Seriously, it's a crime against humanity. Anything with footnotes, really. I should be able to glance at the bottom of the page, not jam my finger against the screen eighteen times trying to select the footnote link, then another eighteen times trying to get back to my page.

Textbooks. We need something like giant tablets that fold open (yes, like a laptop, but with two screens), and bookmarking/footnoting programming that allows flipping between pages with ease.

The House of Leaves. I WANT TO READ THIS BOOK. I have so much difficulty because it's monstrous and heavy and I want to read it digitally. This is such a good case for digital. I struggled reading Brave Story. Then bam, got over the "but I already have it" and bought the digital. BEAUTIFUL THINGS. READ THE BOOK. ENJOYED BOOK. House of Leaves? It's has traveled more than your average human. I keep trying. Maybe when I go to the cabin this summer and have nothing else to do. That's how I read the Ramayana. Though House of Leaves would have been more appropriate at the time. I'll have to balance my need for solitude against a paranoia-inducing book.

Maybe I'll finish reading fucking Sakhalin Island too. Whomever put the notations in the back of the book, when they're every other sentence, should be sent to Sakhalin Island. And then shot.

I carefully (tried) to craft a wind-down evening so I could get to sleep earlier than midnight/1am, and I did. Except I got to sleep for less than an hour because Riprap has diarrhea and shit just... everywhere. I don't know why he has diarrhea, probably something dad fed him. It took me an hour to clean up, thank science for carpet cleaners. Dad snored through the whole time, which sucks majorly. I really wanted him to wake up and ask why I was cleaning so long. But nope. Riprap seems to be a little subdued but not deathly ill.

Conclusion: Never having children. Never raising a puppy again.

I just want to sleep more than a couple hours at a time. =/ He usually wakes up after midnight for a pee, then Rogue wakes up at 5am for breakfast. (Dad started him on that.) It takes me a while to go back to sleep, usually because I'm dreading when I'll have to get up again.

Additional conclusion: Parents suck. Mom needs to stop coddling Stephanie (she's driving Stephanie and Evvy back to Idaho... again.) Dad needs to care for his dog for more than a few hours a week.

Oh and additionally, mom tried to break-up a cat fight between Shasta and the neighborhood tom, and unsurprisingly, Shasta bit her. She didn't irrigate the puncture with disinfectant, so it has gotten infected. We have all the amenities the hospital has in this instance; betadyne, H2O2, amoxacillin, but she has been exceedingly difficult about cleaning the wound properly (including knocking over a chair). I know infections are very, very painful, but it will be more painful if she doesn't suck it up and let me irrigate and debreed the wound. A hospital would not give her anything for a pain-killer, either. I finally forced her to take one of my hydrocodone and SURPRI~ISE, her finger doesn't hurt so badly. I've threatened to soak packing material in betadyne and force it through the puncture, so hopefully she'll behave. I would be less annoyed if she didn't whine constantly. She knows she brought it on herself, too. Never use your hands to break-up a cat fight.

So my parents went with my brother and sister-in-law out to Idaho to help them move in, and I stayed home to take care of the animals. As you may well know, I have three pets, two cats and a dog. They are very tightly bonded to us, since there's almost always two people at home. Though my dad has an erratic schedule, my mom and I don't. So in addition to being tightly bonded, they're also very used to a schedule. Maybe if I was their only person, they would get along better, but they don't. Anyhow, whenever mom is gone, I usually have to sleep in her bed because Rogue won't sleep in mine (to be fair, Shasta does attack him). But this time, I have figured out if I wind down for the night in her bed, then go to my room and pet Shasta for a bit before going to sleep, then in the morning, waking up and feeding them, going back to sleep in mom's bed until it's a reasonable hour, everyone seems to be happy. This is important, because Shasta will use urine to express her displeasure, and Rogue will whine for hours if he feels abused. Pantoufle gets her cuddles during the day, though she sleeps on mom's bed most of the time. It's a lot less stressful for me to sleep in my bed too, since I have everything arranged for minimizing pain. I like having the quiet time, but before I would be concerned about making sure all the animals got enough attention. (When they're used to having at least two people, it's a lot of attention.) Much more fun this time around.

I rented video games for the first time in ages. Rayman Legends and Skyrim. I haven't tried Skyrim yet, but Rayman Legends is super fun. I suspect it's a lot easier with more than one player, but I'm not doing too badly. I'm already at the third world (Fiesta de los Muertos). I really want a WiiU now. It was definitely coded with the WiiU in mind, so on the PS3 some aspects are awkward and/or lacking. Still, totally recommend it to anyone who likes video games.

Might as well add that instead of teaching tomorrow and finding out that I'm totally horrible at it, I would much rather be working on my quilting experiment. I inherited a few quilt tops my great-grandmother made, and I need to figure out how I want to quilt and finish them. So step one will be making a simply pieced top to show off some hand quilting practice. Might finally have a use for all the thimbles I bought trying to find the right one when I do sashiko.

Lately I've been trying a bit of Just Dance or Tai Chi around 2-3am in an effort to go to sleep. Conclusion from tai chi: my knees are weak as shit. Also ballet training is hard to unlearn. I'm going to have to do short sessions until I built up strength, but that's kind of okay because I am a perfectionist. Maybe I should try putting the DVD in my computer and hold my apple remote while I practice, so I can pause and rewind. (TV remote is a heavy sob.) Additional conclusion: re-reading World War Z for the eighth time doesn't make me sleepy.

I'm running out of options for soothing nonfiction audiobooks. I like ones on how things are made, or their history. I've skimmed into history books, but they're too depressing. I've decided my criteria for depressing is "oppression or systematic destruction of people" (i.e. Lost Kingdom, about the Kingdom of Hawaii). Things like Spanish flu (The Great Infuenza), stupid rich people dying on Everest (Dark Summit), or Prohibition Era homicide forensics (The Poisoner's Handbook, there's a documentary now!) don't count. Fiction keeps me awake, if it's any good, because omg I want to know what is next. Le sigh. Le boo-hoo.

I like to make frantic late-night posts because everyone is asleep.

(Except my cat, who is being adorable and does not offer good knitting advice.)

So for my birthday, I got a gift card for my LYS (Ren's Purl Yarn Boutique, holla). Mom said she got it when she heard me talking about all the beautiful Madelinetosh they just got in, and how I've been wanting to make a sweater for a while now. She's an enabler. I looked at sweaters of the right weight, since their recent shipment is a metric shitton of Tosh DK. Picked out a few, asked for Mom's opinion, and of course she picks the most complicated one. (It is beautiful. But goddamn. Might have to become a cloistered nun to manage it.) It doesn't help that I love Rowan patterns and have been meaning to knit myself something really nice.

Anyhow, I bought the yarn in different colors (but I loves the colors, and they looked beautiful all together, even the ones I normally wouldn't pick for myself, which I feel is auspicious.) I have knitting charting software, which was a pricey decision but has proven to be a boon. I've used it to chart written instructions for lace, and it was approximately 1 billion times easier than reading the long-hand version again and again. I digress. I made the chart, and I'm in the process of changing the colors to match what I bought as well as knitting a swatch. I've never knit fair-isle flat. There's a good reason. It's fucking balls. No one should knit fair-isle flat. I know how to fix this, and it gives me the heebie-jeebies. The answer is to steek. Steeking is like the bogeyman of knitting. Most who haven't tried it are terrified of it, those who have mastered it are the brave conquerors of the mysterious beyond. You have to cut your knitting. Cut your knitting. With your precious baby, that took a hundred hours to knit, you take scissors and bisect it like splitting wood. However, if I want a superior product (I do), I will, most likely, have to steek.

I've done fair-isle before, but not at this magnitude. I've never steeked. This is rustlin' my jimmies something fierce. I know I can do it, as long as I don't rush anything, include life-lines, and be patient with my fuck-ups. Luckily(?) it super-sale time over at interweavestore.com, so I just downloaded a video on a fair-isle, steeked vest. If I was smart, I'd make the vest first, out of the same brand of yarn. But unfortunately I'm smart but not wealthy. The Izmir sweater is a wrap/cache-coeur, so there's a lot of yarn involved. Knitted on size 2.75mm and 3.25mm needles. For now I'm going to try to make a swatch in the round and try steeking it. I'm seriously doing all sorts of self-comfort gestures while I type this (rubbing my face, stroking my hair back). I keep telling myself that I've been wanting to make heirlooms and if this doesn't count, I will haunt my progeny forever. They will tell mommy/grandma it's beautiful because they love me and value an inheritance without a pissy-ass ghost. Ruh.

This is like extreme knitting adventures.

Also, on another note, when I am queen of the world, all knitting needles will be measured by millimeter because the US/UK/etc sizing is bullshit. A US 2 is 2.75mm, a 3 is a 3.25 and a 4 is a 3.5mm. That's 0.50mm difference between the 2 and the 3, and 0.25mm between the 3 and the 4. This also applied to crochet hooks. 1-B crochet hooks (in an alphabetical system that starts with B, not A), are 2.25 mm. Size 0 crochet hooks are also 2.25mm. (There are "yarn" and "thread" hooks, with yarn being alphabetical and thread being numerical, functioning like shotgun gauges. The bigger the number, the smaller the hook. Because fuck you logic.) When you get small, that fraction of a millimeter matters a lot, and I care a lot about precision in my crafting. We need to use the metric system in general, just to help fight the stupid American image that certain parts of the population are working so hard to cultivate. Rahr rahr rahr rahr.

I had a really bad head cold starting last week, still have a barking cough (thanks, junior year pneumonia!) and a runny nose, and it just... blitzed my brain. I keep trying to figure out where I was in things, totally forgot about gifts for some people, messed up my budgeting for the month, just... all kinds of fucked up. And the more I tried to un-mire myself, the more stressed I got, which made me very aware of how I deal with stress like a toddler at this point. I can't quite verbalize the whole issue yet. I was doing okay, and then mom's ankle made me able to just take care of her and getting enough sleep. Now I feel like I'm being overwhelmed with demands and chores, more than ever, and before mom broke her ankle, I was just trying to focus on taking care of myself. I'm like Tinkerbell, I have a small brain and a small heart and can only feel one thing at a time. Maybe because I was feeling better, and I was trying to work on long term projects. Really small projects, but long term. But I fucked up so many small things in between, and it's crippling me emotionally. I've just kind of shut down for two weeks, not even picked up my knitting. I forget about things I want to do, even though I write them down, and even though they're important to me. I miss working, and having that feeling of self-sufficiency, and not coping with the idea of having too much time and not being able to do shit with it, because so much of that time is eaten by various stages of feeling god-awful. And because I've been feeling better and helping out, now my parents have expectations. I don't get the kind of rest I desperately need right now. And now my joints hurt and my back hurts terribly. Like, I tried to use the massage cushion, which is usually my back pain go-to, and had to turn it off almost immediately. The pressure was too much. I usually lever myself to press against it, and sitting in it probably was too much to bear.

Fuck, this was supposed to be a different kind of post, but it just comes down to: I'm in a lot of pain, I'm really tired, I wanted to have Christmas gifts done proper this year, I want to get my shit together in rpgs, I want to knit beautiful things, I want to have a small business going, I want so many things, but I try to want small things and it's still too much to bear. Every time I try to tackle one thing, just focus on one thing, everything else
looms over me and makes me feel like it's so hopeless.

Anyhow, does anyone know any books that are kind of cheerful or something I could use to distract me? Especially if I can get it in audio.

I got my fabric samples for Maiden Zelda! The color is a balance between the old art and new art, and pretty nice. (Not my favorite blue, but I probably shouldn't burden myself by trying to dye 13 yards of fabric.) It's a linen/rayon blend, though the rayon is barely detectable, definitely comes off as linen or linen/cotton to the average person. The rayon keeps it from wrinkling, since linen wrinkles like all hell. Very nice drape and weight, and good texture. I am not worried about my seams puckering, as a lot of other Maiden Zeldas seem to have struggled with. The texture isn't silky smooth, or even cotton broadcloth smooth, but has texture and a bit of slubbing. I actually like slubbed fabric, even though historically it would have been considered a flaw. Silk and smooth fabrics slip when sewing, texture is friend. Best part was that it's less than $6 a yard. Even though my goals for this cosplay are pretty high, I believe that they are 90% about time invested instead of skill.

Yeah, so right now, this is how I feel about the cosplay: http://youtu.be/_i0bInJWKcw