Bastards smashed the passenger side window and stole my GPS. I couldn’t care less about replacing the GPS, but I’m pissed as hell about the broken window. It was parked right outside my house, too!

And I just got the photos last week. Here’s my favorite! (Yes, I’m biased!)

Some of you may have heard of mint.com. It’s brilliant! It tracks your finances, both through your bank and credit cards, and even keeps tabs on things like retirement plans (like 401k plans) and just about anything else financial that you can access through the Internet. (Depressingly, it also keeps track of the value of your house. My net value goes down every week.)

It’s also a little…uhmm…distressing. I always tried really hard to budget my spending on books and other such things, but, since December of 2007, I’ve apparently managed to spend $685 on books, $1200 on yarn, fabric, patterns, and craft projects, $313 on web hosting, $1100 on eating out, and a whopping $2,147 on gas ($5,791 total on my car, including service, repairs, and insurance). Sadly, since my bank isn’t supported, NONE of this includes things I bought with my debit card. Which I used to use all the time and still do for grocery shopping.

I was happier not knowing, but at least I know where my problem areas. I mean, seriously, I spent $2400 in two years on hobbies? Yikes! At least I’m single!

Or rather, 12:34:56 7/8/9. The first one came in the wee hours of the morning.

In other news, I’m on kitten watch. A friend of my mother’s has a cat that recently gave birth to kittens. Once they’re old enough to go out into the world, I have a reservation on a little boy, white with gray patches. I’m very excited about this. I told my cat all about it, but she just blinked at me. I fully expect her to fly into a jealous spat as soon as she’s introduced to her new “brother.”

Otakon countdown commencing…

Turns out Sasha likes the snow. I got off work today, so I spent the day watching too much TV and hanging out with my cat.

Perhaps you’ve seen the previews for an upcoming kid’s movie called Race to Witch Mountain. There was a book I loved as a kid. It was called Escape to Witch Mountain and there were some campy Disney movies and all was well. Now, thanks to Hollywood magic, I didn’t even recognize what I was seeing on the TV screen until they got to the end of the preview. Apparently they got caught, because now it’s a “modern re-imagining” set 30 years after the first book. Even if they hadn’t told me that, I would have figured it out pretty quickly and here’s why:

Book: The boy can talk normally, but the girl can’t. (Apparently she uses the power of her mind! Spooky! And weird!)
Movie: Girl can talk. It’s hard to say if the boy can or not. He is all like “this is my serious face, yarrr.”

Book: Boy and girl are aliens, but (and this is the important part) they don’t know this when the book starts. I mean, they eventually figure it out (their weird powers are a big red flag that something is up), but it’s like a mystery that they have to unravel.
Movie: Not only do boy and girl know they are aliens, if they don’t get to Witch Mountain, there will be an alien invasion! It will be terrible!

Book: The children are on the run from an orphanage and the forces of evil/adoptive parents with the help of a kindly priest, Father O’Day. (This also leads into an important life lesson: if you live in an orphanage and have freaky powers, and if a millionaire wants to adopt you, it is because he wants to use your powers for evil.)
Movie: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is giving the kids a ride to Witch Mountain. He’s apparently a taxi driver, stuck with the passengers from hell whiny alien orphans. I really hope we’re not supposed to believe that he’s a kindly Irish priest too. IT’S JUST WRONG.

So, yeah, thanks, but I managed to figure out that Race to Witch Mountain and Escape to Witch Mountain had nothing to do with each other and I did it all on my own. It wasn’t hard.

Butcherings of the Recent Past:

The Seeker: The Dark is Rising is a great story. The movie added more “action,” an unnecessary love interest, changed the character’s nationality, condensed multiple books into one, and removed one of the major characters. According to Wikipedia, “Susan Cooper was reportedly not happy with the adaptation of her book.” No kidding. Leave my childhood alone!

Inkheart: Wow, they totally miscast this one. Brendan Frasier is way too well nourished to ever be Mo. More plot smooshing, as usual, and Meggie gets kind of sidelined as a character. Maybe this movie just needs less Brendan Frasier. Anyhoo, despite the fact that this movie stars Brendan Frasier, no mummies appeared. Which is a shame, because it might have actually improved things. Particularly if they ate him and let Meggie do all the work like she did in the books.

Bothersome:

The ads for Bridge to Terabithia: The ads for this movie were so bad that I never brought myself to actually watching the movie. All I could think was, OK, so the book had a depressing ending, but postponing the inevitable and distracting from their sweet and simple friendship with CGI monsters and fairies? WTF? I’ve since heard that the movie was quite good, but since I’d already read the book, I knew how it was going to end and really didn’t want to compound that memory with, well, more depressing memories.

Here’s to my mum! Thanks to her, I now have 101 (I counted) gently used scifi and fantasy books. Apparently her library is cutting down on their scifi section and replacing it with an expanded large print section. Their loss is my gain. Some of the authors include classics like Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Brian Aldiss, William Gibson, Frank Herbert, Alan Dean Foster, Harlan Ellison, and Greg Bear. Some of the other authors (whom I’ve never heard of, though perhaps that makes me the scifi version of a hermit) include C. J. Cherryh, Poul Anderson, and too many others for me to track down. Some fantasy books snuck in there too, so I now have a few more Marion Zimmer Bradley books, some Tanith Lee, and a volume of stories by Peter S. Beagle. Apparently I was right to procrastinate buying my own copy of The Last Unicorn. Go me. I’ll post some pictures later, just to get a sense of the scale.

I also bought several batches of yarn, after a long dry spell. From Dizzy Sheep (it’s like Woot, but for yarn lovers), I’m getting some Soft Linen, probably for a tee shirt of some sort (the Victoria Yoke Pullover, perhaps?). I already got some Happy Feet sock yarn from them about a month back in two different colors. Thanks to Emily (I tested those Skyline Mittens for her), I got a gift certificate to The Loopy Ewe, which boasts one of the largest collections of sock yarn I’ve ever seen (and some of the prettiest…it’s like a Mecca for sock knitters and hand dyed yarn enthusiasts). After some careful consideration, I decided to splurge on some Kypria sock yarn (from The Sanguine Gryphon, SanguineGryphon on Ravelry) and some Crystal Palace Panda Cotton (in case the wool socks I plan to make are too itchy). There were some cashmere blends that nearly got me, but I held firm. I can get those later. When I’ve used up my current stash.

Whew…that was a lot of links. And if you’re not on Ravelry, they probably don’t make a lot of sense. Oh well. If you’re not on Ravelry and you do anything with yarn, go and sign up now. There are 300,000 of us now. Embrace the peer pressure!

I know I’ve mentioned Ravelry before. I know quite a few of you are already there (and if you’re not on Ravelry and you knit or crochet, perhaps it’s worth a visit? Yes?). What you might not know is that Ravelry offers all kinds of interesting opportunities. Such as test knitting.

Why? What’s this here? Could this be…a mitten?

I’m a member of the Testing Pool on Ravelry. It’s an enthusiastic group of knitters and crocheters who are willing and able to test new patterns, looking for mistakes, or to create display samples. Most recently, I had the opportunity to test these lovely mittens for Emily:

In case you can’t tell, those are skyscrapers.

The pattern, called Skyline Mittens, calls for the most delicious merino you’ve ever felt, Malabrigo Worsted, in a deep purple and a bright and cheery yellow-orange. The subtle variations in the colors (particularly with the yellow) make for a really marvelous contrast. Can you tell I have some Malabrigo love? Sadly, the very qualities that make Malabrigo so wonderful for mittens make it difficult to use for larger items, like sweaters. Over time, the strands inside will felt together, creating a second layer that will help keep hands toasty. Now imagine that felting process as it happens on the outside of your next pullover. Tears and heartache, my friends. Tears and heartache.

Here’s a closeup of the guts of the mitten, so to speak. In a few short weeks of use, I pretty much guarantee this will be a lot more matted:

And here’s a closeup of the braided cast on and the first inch or so of the corrugated ribbing:

In case anyone’s curious, it only took me a week to make both mittens. Actually, technically I made two and a half of ‘em. The first attempt served as a gauge swatch. I was curious to see what it would look like on the recommended needles. Since I’m such a tight knitter, it really was no surprise that I had to go up a needle size. Now, it is possible to frog Malabrigo, but it must be done soon after making the object and done with care. The texture is not very smooth, so it tends to get sticky.

As usual, you can find more details on my Ravelry project page. Enjoy!

Every once in a while, the woman that stocks our soda fund at work will pick something new for us all to try. This week, it was Izze, a sparkling fruit beverage (and at 70% juice, not that scary). I picked up the Sparkling Clementine flavor, expecting to be drinking clementine juice.

Wrong!

Ingredients: Pure juice made from white grape, apple, lemon and orange juice concentrates, sparkling water, natural flavor, citric acid, sodium citrate, gum arabic, beta carotene (color), ester gum

Well, at least it’s really made from juice. And at least the juice is the first ingredient. No added sugar or high fructose corn syrup is a nice touch, too (though the juice contains plenty all by itself, going by the nutritional information). It’s definitely citrus-y, just not clementines.

*sigh*

In other news, four very nice things happened all on top of each other.

First, I got a new washing machine. Yay! My old one was leaking and they were running some very good sales and rebate promotions. To all my crafting buddies, yes, it’s a top loader. While I don’t do a lot of felting, I like to leave my options open. Also, front loaders suck.

Anyway, this leads into my second nice thing, which is that I actually got a cash award at work for a project I was working on ages ago. So the washing machine was almost free! An unexpected bonus. I also used it as a justification to buy some of Knitpick’s interchangeable needles (but not the full set, because there are sizes in there I’d never use). So far, the needles are OK. The join where the needles screw in on the first ones I tried juts out ever so slightly and could snag. Actual use will tell me if this is so. The cable is as flexible as I could wish for, though a little thicker than the fixed length circulars. Oh, and I really really wish they’d print the size on the needle tips like Inox does—If Inox ever makes a similar set, I am all over that. But now I finally have a circular set of size 4’s again. Huzzah!

Third, I got to go to Katsucon and visit with Katie. I didn’t get to take very many pictures, seeing as how everyone kept stopping Katie and me to take our pictures (but you can see the ones I did take at Katie’s website as usual). We went as the Ice Climbers from Super Smash Brothers and I have the pictures to prove it:

Why yes, it was rather warm once we got inside. But very, very soft fleece. Mmmm…

And fourth (though no less awesome), I got to diagnose a phone line problem and solve a several month long string of misbehaving phones. I take back anything bad I ever said about FIOS telephone service. I had a bad jack in my kitchen that led to intermittant humming on the line. Not their fault at all…

Basically, on Tuesday night, I came home to that familiar loud buzz, the one I’ve been blaming Verizon for, mostly because it always seemed to go away right after I called them up and complained about it (coincidences can be so cruel). Anyway. So I unplugged the phone cable and plugged it back in, hoping for an easy (though unlikely) fix, only to discover that I went from having a noisy line to no working line at all. It was completely dead, no dial tone at all. I unplugged the phone, went upstairs, tried that phone, no dice. I call up my dad on the cell, he walks me through plugging the phone directly into my ONT, where the phone then proceeds to work. So the problem was with my wiring. Not Verizon’s. Uh oh. We open up some phone outlets and look at the wiring. Nothing was conveniently frayed or obviously corroded, so we were forced to determine that it was probably something in the walls. I call it a night, and go to bed.

But there’s a happy ending! The next morning, as I’m getting ready for work, it dawns on me that I didn’t look in the phone port very carefully from the front, where the plug goes in, not the wiring. Sure enough, in my kitchen, one of the little prongs that connects to the phone cord was bent back so far that it was actually touching one of the other little prongs. I unscrew the plate completely, go back up stairs, and voila, I have phone service again. So all I need to do to fix it is to buy a new phone jack. Yay!

Some of you may know that I spent most of my childhood growing up in a suburb just outside the city of Coatesville, Pennsylvania. Some of you may also have heard about the string of arsons there. Well, last Friday, there was another fire, only this time it happened in East Fallowfield Township, just down the street from my parents’ house. I think that’s reason to be very, very concerned, don’t you? My brother, who still lives at home, has taken to leaving the lights on in an attempt to dissuade any would be arsonists.

Since January of this year, there have been twenty-three cases of arson. Including the cases that happened at the end of last year, that brings the total up to thirty-three in all. The ATF has gotten involved and now some people are saying that it’s gang related. Coatesville has had its share of drug problems and some violent crime, but nothing like this, not at this scale. It’s simply horrible to think about it. Inside the city limits, people are too scared to go to sleep at night. There’s an 8pm curfew for teenagers and residents are being ordered not to leave anything flammable in their backyards, lest it become fuel for the next fire. Sadly, I doubt either precaution will accomplish anything.

Knowing that there are people out there that would do this sort of thing makes me sick.