i did it

I did it. I bought a book of cross-stitch alphabets with a how-to on designing your own patterns. I bought two hoops. I bought some aida fabric thingy in 14 count. I bought some waste canvas because I thought it sounded like a groovy thing to do. I bought only a little bit of embroidery floss because I wanted to see if it was cheaper at Wal-Mart.
Then I found out that Wal-Mart's floss was so cheap because it was going out of stock, and they no longer carry it as of January. Boo.

I will have to go back to the craft store for more embroidery floss. I seem to have bought pearl cotton in black and white, which is not the same thing, but you can needlepoint with it, but not cross stitch? I don't know, I can't really tell, I thought it was the same thing, but I guess it isn't. So I just have four colors of embroidery floss at twenty-five cents each. It's hardly breaking the bank.

I don't know where to start and should have bought a pattern but that just seemed like a terrible idea because they were all bunnies and bears and flowers and geese and shit. I mean, whatever.

Mostly Z and i were trying to not be out in the heat. This was very successful; as one would expect, Jo-Anns is air conditioned. And Z was not horribly bored, and I enjoyed myself more because he was there and could go WTF with me when we saw in the scrapbooking section that they had little pre-packs of stickers about various places like you'd go to on vacation, so you could use these stickers to decorate that page, you know? And they had a New York one. Like with a sticker of the Statue of Liberty, and a text sticker that says "Times Square". And also a sticker that says "Ground Zero."
Apparently it's a tourist thing now.
W
T
F
ALL YOU SARCASTIC BROOKLYNITES SCOFFING AT MY PEOPLE, YOU ARE ALL CORRECT. OH MY CHRIST. I AM SURROUNDED BY AWFUL AND INSENSITIVE HICKS WHO DO NOT DESERVE THE SWEET RELEASE OF OBLIVION BECAUSE THEY ARE ALREADY OBLIVIOUS.

Anyway. It was an odd all-caps moment in an otherwise lower-case, grayscale even, kinda day.

Capped off by my totally missing our team meeting tonight, walking in after everyone was done, and saying, well, at least I'm here in time for the bar. Fortunately, at team meetings, if I miss out on making a decision, I can at least be confident that nothing totally heinous was decided while my back was turned.
If only that was always the case with everything.

I was entertainingly incoherent at the bar, I think. I don't really know. I was going to start cross-stitching tonight, but realized I don't know what the hell I'm doing and I need to just buy a kit to start off with.
I'm really really really trying to resist this one.
So now here's an open thread for you needlework fiends-- suggest your favorite kit, suitable for a rank beginner, of such unique and special untalent that she just gave herself a goddamn fingernail piercing. Please keep that in mind. It needs to be rad, and also, easy.
Have at it!

at least I'm not pregnant

Thank you, buschibaby, for that nice sense of perspective. You must be due soon, right? I have heard tell that the entire point of the last trimester of pregnancy is to be so profoundly unpleasant as to completely outweigh the woman's terror of actually giving birth.
So anyway. No matter how deeply my life may suck, at least I'm not pregnant. Not that there was any danger of this, but really. (People do keep insisting on posting photos of their ridiculously adorable children, and my body is coming up on its 29th birthday, and sometimes hormones poke me unpleasantly.) Also one of my teammates ended a conversation today with "Whoops, gotta go take care of some poop," and I said, "... Human?" and she said, "Child," and I said, "I freakin' love my life." The freedom from responsibility for the poop of others is an underappreciated one.

Anyhow.
( sewing update! )

nifty

My last grocery shopping trip, I took a quick detour to Niagara Traditions Homebrew, which is where I got champagne yeast in the first place to make the mead I wrote about making a little while ago. (How long ago was that, anyway? I've still got one batch chugging along that was supposed to take a month and i've no idea how long it's been. Whoops, will look that up.)

I picked up some plastic "tasting corks", which are meant to be useful in resealing bottles of wine you've opened and want to be able to re-open and re-close easily.

These fit into beer bottles.

Hurrah! I don't need to get a capping system! I never have huge batches of mead going, but I've got so many going at the moment that I don't have any more screw-top glass bottles going spare, and I dislike using plastic bottles for anything long-term.

So today I racked a finished batch into beer bottles and corked them with these cute little plastic caps (hmph, no image available) which have the advantage of being infinitely reusable and fitting wine bottles too. Hurrah.

I still don't have infinite bottles, but I have 25 more than I did before.

I just thought it was nifty. And it's fun drinking home-brewed mead out of a beer bottle.

In other news, I have finished a short apron and a petticoat today, and have assembled the skirt for the blue kirtle. It is very flimsy. I do not give a crap. I like it as it is. Now I have to get the straps onto the bodice so I can put the skirt on it and have... I won't jinx it by saying it'll be finished, but really... there won't be anything left to do.