She's crepuscular!
Aug. 29th, 2008 06:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Yesterday was a busy day.
I renewed my license. I went to the Cheektowaga branch of the DMV to do so even though it's not the closest, because I know where it is, and I wanted an excuse to hit the mall, and since they're near one another, there was my excuse.
I'm glad I did go all that way-- that DMV not only was not busy at noon on a Thursday, it also had just this month replaced the cattle-herding queue system of plastic ropes with a grid of comfortable (!) benches, and a take-a-number system. I showed up, got my number, put my things down on a bench to get organized, sat down, and immediately my number was called. I was in and out of there like snap. It was awesome. Got a new picture taken, signed up as an organ donor, re-registered to vote in the right county, et voila!
I then hied me to the mall. I went to J.Jill, because once long ago I ordered a bunch of stuff from their website, including a built-in shelf bra camisole that actually holds my boobs. I won't order any more from their website because they started sending me a hojillion catalogues a year plus they signed me up for about twelve mailing lists and now I get catalogues from eleventy different companies making clothes for older-middle-aged-ladies. There I found a white button-down shirt with room for my boobs, for $14, a pair of brown pants in misses' size 16 (fits me!), and another of those shelf-bra camisoles that fit my boobs! on sale for $9 instead of $30, their usual ridiculous price.
Then I went to Lane Bryant. It is so incredibly amazingly incredible to walk into a store and not only find that every single thing is offered in your size, but also find that your size is mostly the smallest size on offer, and so if you prefer a baggier fit, it's an option. I bought a pair of dress pants and a pair of jeans in size 14, and another pair of jeans in size 16, and also coincidentally there was a short-sleeved jacket/shirt thing on the clearance rack in my size... Let me digress and say how amazing it is to see things on the clearance rack in my size, after spending so long not able to find anything in my size at all. I won't talk about how sharp a sense of disappointment I feel about the whole Cacique store thing-- wow, large-cup bras!! Yay! But... only in large bands. Boo! I am glad someone's offering something, I just wish somebody'd offer me something, and it's not like I'm not big enough to shop at their stores...
Anyway. I spent like $130 all told, all day, and have basically a new wardrobe. OK, not much on shirts, but shirts I either have, can find, or can make. (I am becoming such a snob. I tried on two shirts and said 'Pff, I could make that, and nicer, at half the clearance-rack price', and there were three more shirts I saw, liked, and said 'Pff, that would be cake to make! I wouldn't even need a pattern!')
So I came home from the mall, threw in a load of laundry because OMG we're going out of town this weekend and neither of us has anything to wear, and also I am trying to be the responsible sort of person who washes new clothes before wearing them. Wait, let me just type the phrase "New clothes" again. OMG I HAVE NEW CLOTHES WHAT I BOUGHT AT THE MALL OMG. The Lane Bryant sales ladies were a bit flummoxed when I said I was so glad I'd finally gained enough weight to shop here. OMG YES. So many options. 'Cuz homemade jeans just don't look right, and some days, you just need a goddamn pair of jeans.
Anyway. Got the laundry in and out, and hung it to dry on my indoor clothes line, cuz I am not tumble-drying my new t-shirts, ever. (They are on the small side. If they shrink I will cry.)
Then Z and I piled into the car to go pick up Rose and her husband, Z's best bud from kindergarten, Chris, because we went to a Bills game!!! I know! Do I know a damn thing about football? Not really! (What the hell is a safety???? What bullshit is that? Good Christ, Detroit got two! I don't even... hell, they should have those in roller derby, that you get bonus points just for hitting somebody in a certain area! That's so goddamn stupid it would fit right in with WFTDA 3.1.)
So it was totally cool to go to a football game, and we got to sit in amazingly awesome seats, out of the rain with a sweeping view of the whole field. It is much more interesting to watch football in person than on TV, because you can see the whole thing and see what the players are actually doing, instead of having the whole thing reduced to meaningless impacts and scrambles, so it was neat to see the whole field and sort of grok the strategy thing. (Also, how neat does it look when both teams run out onto the field and line up? It just looks neat! So many people, and they scatter into this pattern. I don't know, it looked cool.)
The only downside is that I could never see the ball. I'd see all these guys run around suddenly, and then they'd fall out into these little piles and patterns, and afterward I'd see the ball get tossed to a ref, so I'd have to kind of go back and figure out what had just happened.
Chris kept being embarrassed because I'm not soft-spoken, so I kept saying, loudly, "So what happened? What the heck does that mean? Who's that guy? What's he doing? Are we doing good or bad? Wait, which end is ours?" I'm sorry, I doubt anyone around me was really that annoyed. Also every time I would say something filthy or full of cuss-words Chris would hiss, "Shh! It's Kids Night!" But there weren't any kids near us until about the third quarter.
I did like how at halftime they had the Lockport and North Tonawanda Pee-Wee League teams play a few rounds. Eight and nine year old boys in ginormous helmets, running around the field in confusion. It was pretty cute.
It was a pre-season game, so, as Chris kept explaining, they weren't playing any of their first-stringers, and most of the plays were designed not to win the actual game, but to prove the abilities of various players that were being considered for more important roles during the season. So I guess the Bills have this exciting and expensive new rookie they were trying out, and he had some good plays so that was nice. And they were trying out their like eighth-string newish quarterback, and he did okay, though not great. And various receivers dropped balls or didn't, and various linebacker-types made tackles or didn't, and one dude fumbled the ball again, etc. I could see how it would be interesting to some. Especially if you knew the names of the players, and anything about them. That was the single biggest thing I've learned about sports-- if you know who any of those guys are, then it's fascinating. If not, it's not really much.
I probably still won't follow the season, but having gone I can kind of see how it would be interesting.
So that was my unexpectedly cool evening. Thanks, Chris's coworker who couldn't use his $130 apiece tickets! And thanks, Chris, for thinking of us! That was totally rad.
I got home and there was mail. I don't know; we usually get our mail delivered at around 10 am, but somehow this had arrived after we left the house at 4. I got a gift certificate from Reconstructing History!
So I'm going to go salivate over their patterns now, before buying ridiculous amounts of things from them. Oh yes. Yes yes yes. Joy! Glee! (Amusingly, the certificate was hand-written. So now I know what![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kass_rants's handwriting looks like. Hee!) I am so excited and gleeful.
My friend Liesl sent me a link to a book of knitting patterns by a roller derby girl. Knockdown Knits, by Joan of Dark of the Naptown Roller Girls. How cool is that?
And is it hopelessly derivative of me to be consumed with a desire to make a book of roller derby cross stitch patterns?
Oy. Actually a whole book of Roller Derby DIY would be cool. How to make your own booty shorts, how to cut stencils to put on slogans, Adventures In Iron-Ons, how to make your own skater skirts, t-shirt surgery instructions for when you get your bout jersey and it's big enough to smuggle seventeen Mexican orphans and a llama in it.... THAT would be cool. Don't steal my idea! I'm totally going to get started on this RIGHT NOW.
Except first I'm going to pass out facedown, because Chita woke me up at 5:30 and I only got 5 hours' sleep the night before, and last night, and I'm so sleep-deprived my eyes are burning. Curse you, Chita! (I can't blame her, though. We didn't feed her before we left for the game last night, and then we got home and just didn't get around to it-- she forgot to ask-- and so she was starving this morning. Poor thing. But that's no excuse for the tearing around the house yowling she did after I fed her.)
I renewed my license. I went to the Cheektowaga branch of the DMV to do so even though it's not the closest, because I know where it is, and I wanted an excuse to hit the mall, and since they're near one another, there was my excuse.
I'm glad I did go all that way-- that DMV not only was not busy at noon on a Thursday, it also had just this month replaced the cattle-herding queue system of plastic ropes with a grid of comfortable (!) benches, and a take-a-number system. I showed up, got my number, put my things down on a bench to get organized, sat down, and immediately my number was called. I was in and out of there like snap. It was awesome. Got a new picture taken, signed up as an organ donor, re-registered to vote in the right county, et voila!
I then hied me to the mall. I went to J.Jill, because once long ago I ordered a bunch of stuff from their website, including a built-in shelf bra camisole that actually holds my boobs. I won't order any more from their website because they started sending me a hojillion catalogues a year plus they signed me up for about twelve mailing lists and now I get catalogues from eleventy different companies making clothes for older-middle-aged-ladies. There I found a white button-down shirt with room for my boobs, for $14, a pair of brown pants in misses' size 16 (fits me!), and another of those shelf-bra camisoles that fit my boobs! on sale for $9 instead of $30, their usual ridiculous price.
Then I went to Lane Bryant. It is so incredibly amazingly incredible to walk into a store and not only find that every single thing is offered in your size, but also find that your size is mostly the smallest size on offer, and so if you prefer a baggier fit, it's an option. I bought a pair of dress pants and a pair of jeans in size 14, and another pair of jeans in size 16, and also coincidentally there was a short-sleeved jacket/shirt thing on the clearance rack in my size... Let me digress and say how amazing it is to see things on the clearance rack in my size, after spending so long not able to find anything in my size at all. I won't talk about how sharp a sense of disappointment I feel about the whole Cacique store thing-- wow, large-cup bras!! Yay! But... only in large bands. Boo! I am glad someone's offering something, I just wish somebody'd offer me something, and it's not like I'm not big enough to shop at their stores...
Anyway. I spent like $130 all told, all day, and have basically a new wardrobe. OK, not much on shirts, but shirts I either have, can find, or can make. (I am becoming such a snob. I tried on two shirts and said 'Pff, I could make that, and nicer, at half the clearance-rack price', and there were three more shirts I saw, liked, and said 'Pff, that would be cake to make! I wouldn't even need a pattern!')
So I came home from the mall, threw in a load of laundry because OMG we're going out of town this weekend and neither of us has anything to wear, and also I am trying to be the responsible sort of person who washes new clothes before wearing them. Wait, let me just type the phrase "New clothes" again. OMG I HAVE NEW CLOTHES WHAT I BOUGHT AT THE MALL OMG. The Lane Bryant sales ladies were a bit flummoxed when I said I was so glad I'd finally gained enough weight to shop here. OMG YES. So many options. 'Cuz homemade jeans just don't look right, and some days, you just need a goddamn pair of jeans.
Anyway. Got the laundry in and out, and hung it to dry on my indoor clothes line, cuz I am not tumble-drying my new t-shirts, ever. (They are on the small side. If they shrink I will cry.)
Then Z and I piled into the car to go pick up Rose and her husband, Z's best bud from kindergarten, Chris, because we went to a Bills game!!! I know! Do I know a damn thing about football? Not really! (What the hell is a safety???? What bullshit is that? Good Christ, Detroit got two! I don't even... hell, they should have those in roller derby, that you get bonus points just for hitting somebody in a certain area! That's so goddamn stupid it would fit right in with WFTDA 3.1.)
So it was totally cool to go to a football game, and we got to sit in amazingly awesome seats, out of the rain with a sweeping view of the whole field. It is much more interesting to watch football in person than on TV, because you can see the whole thing and see what the players are actually doing, instead of having the whole thing reduced to meaningless impacts and scrambles, so it was neat to see the whole field and sort of grok the strategy thing. (Also, how neat does it look when both teams run out onto the field and line up? It just looks neat! So many people, and they scatter into this pattern. I don't know, it looked cool.)
The only downside is that I could never see the ball. I'd see all these guys run around suddenly, and then they'd fall out into these little piles and patterns, and afterward I'd see the ball get tossed to a ref, so I'd have to kind of go back and figure out what had just happened.
Chris kept being embarrassed because I'm not soft-spoken, so I kept saying, loudly, "So what happened? What the heck does that mean? Who's that guy? What's he doing? Are we doing good or bad? Wait, which end is ours?" I'm sorry, I doubt anyone around me was really that annoyed. Also every time I would say something filthy or full of cuss-words Chris would hiss, "Shh! It's Kids Night!" But there weren't any kids near us until about the third quarter.
I did like how at halftime they had the Lockport and North Tonawanda Pee-Wee League teams play a few rounds. Eight and nine year old boys in ginormous helmets, running around the field in confusion. It was pretty cute.
It was a pre-season game, so, as Chris kept explaining, they weren't playing any of their first-stringers, and most of the plays were designed not to win the actual game, but to prove the abilities of various players that were being considered for more important roles during the season. So I guess the Bills have this exciting and expensive new rookie they were trying out, and he had some good plays so that was nice. And they were trying out their like eighth-string newish quarterback, and he did okay, though not great. And various receivers dropped balls or didn't, and various linebacker-types made tackles or didn't, and one dude fumbled the ball again, etc. I could see how it would be interesting to some. Especially if you knew the names of the players, and anything about them. That was the single biggest thing I've learned about sports-- if you know who any of those guys are, then it's fascinating. If not, it's not really much.
I probably still won't follow the season, but having gone I can kind of see how it would be interesting.
So that was my unexpectedly cool evening. Thanks, Chris's coworker who couldn't use his $130 apiece tickets! And thanks, Chris, for thinking of us! That was totally rad.
I got home and there was mail. I don't know; we usually get our mail delivered at around 10 am, but somehow this had arrived after we left the house at 4. I got a gift certificate from Reconstructing History!
So I'm going to go salivate over their patterns now, before buying ridiculous amounts of things from them. Oh yes. Yes yes yes. Joy! Glee! (Amusingly, the certificate was hand-written. So now I know what
kass_rants's handwriting looks like. Hee!) I am so excited and gleeful.My friend Liesl sent me a link to a book of knitting patterns by a roller derby girl. Knockdown Knits, by Joan of Dark of the Naptown Roller Girls. How cool is that?
And is it hopelessly derivative of me to be consumed with a desire to make a book of roller derby cross stitch patterns?
Oy. Actually a whole book of Roller Derby DIY would be cool. How to make your own booty shorts, how to cut stencils to put on slogans, Adventures In Iron-Ons, how to make your own skater skirts, t-shirt surgery instructions for when you get your bout jersey and it's big enough to smuggle seventeen Mexican orphans and a llama in it.... THAT would be cool. Don't steal my idea! I'm totally going to get started on this RIGHT NOW.
Except first I'm going to pass out facedown, because Chita woke me up at 5:30 and I only got 5 hours' sleep the night before, and last night, and I'm so sleep-deprived my eyes are burning. Curse you, Chita! (I can't blame her, though. We didn't feed her before we left for the game last night, and then we got home and just didn't get around to it-- she forgot to ask-- and so she was starving this morning. Poor thing. But that's no excuse for the tearing around the house yowling she did after I fed her.)
