At long last I managed to take photos of the socks I made.

As poor Harold is well aware, I'm ridiculously picky about my socks. Most womens's socks are too thin for my taste, so I usually wait until October when they put the heavier winter weight socks out and stock up like made. Then I ration them out during the year since I can only get them a couple months of the year anyway. The solution? Knit my own socks, so I have them any time of year I want them!
( Lookee! )

Dear guy on the bike at the intersection,
I understand you're on a bike and all, but when there is a green turn arrow for the cars, and a red light in the direction you're going, it means that it's not safe for you to go. By trying to cross against the light, you forfeit any dirty-look rights towards the car turning.
No love,
undycat.


(Seriously, I don't know if it's the sun or that it's friday, but everyone was driving like Larry King today.)

Harold just sent me this link. It made me laugh. That is all.

Stolen from jenthompson 

What would you do if given:

* $1 - Put it in my wallet and probably spend it on lunch at work
* $10 - save it for work lunches
* $100 - Pay down the credit line on my play account
* $1,000 - Pay off our credit card and put the rest into savings
* $10,000 - Make house repairs with half and sock the other half into our emergency fund.

Sorry, it's kind of boring, but money's been tight the last month and I <3 having savings to cover times like this.

this one's from koshka_the_cat

Woohoo!

That is all.

I don't know that there's anyone on my F-list who wouldn't be voting today, but if there is, get out and vote. 15 minutes of your time can determine the course of the next 4 years.

Stolen from everyone and their uncle
( meme! )

Take Are You a Jackie or a Marilyn? Or Someone Else? Mad Men-era Female Icon Quiz at HelloQuizzy

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Stolen from mcsassypants 

The problem with LJ: we all think we are so close, but really, we know nothing about each other. So I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away. Then post this in your LJ and find out what people don't know about you!

Take a picture of yourself right now.
Don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair - just take a picture.
Post that picture with NO editing.
Post these instructions with the picture.

it's too hot.

And the idea of folding the laundry make me feel ever so slightly ill.
Something about the heat and humidity and not wanting to touch anything.

bleah.

I believe I need some ice cream, freezy pops, and a freezer towel, stat!

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've only read 6 and force books upon them :>

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen (currently reading this one, actually)
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (cheating! This is the first book in the Chronicles of Narnia!)
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (I refuse to read this)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (DEPRESSING)
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I cheated a bit - I highlighted books that I've read part of and then abandoned or thrown across the room because I didn't like them (the Bible, , Catch 22, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Vanity Fair, A Confederacy of Dunces)
I also felt compelled to delete "God" as the author of the bible. People wrote the bible. Apparently book memes make me cantankerous. Sorry!

Stolen from bauhausfrau
Copy and paste to your own journal, erase my answers, and add your own. Use the 1st letter of your name to answer each of the following questions. They have to be real places, names &/or objects, but nothing made up! Try to use different answers if the person you got this from has the same 1st initial. You CAN'T use your name for the boy/girl name question. And Have Fun With It!!!

1) 4 LETTER WORD: Gent
2) BOY NAME: Gregory
3) GIRL NAME: Gretchen
4) OCCUPATION: Go-go dancer
5) A COLOR: Green
6) SOMETHING YOU WEAR: Goggles
7) BEVERAGE: Grog
8) FOOD: Granola
9) SOMETHING FOUND IN A BATHROOM: Grout
10) A PLACE: Germany
11) REASON FOR BEING LATE: Grog
12) SOMETHING YOU SHOUT:  Geep! (very useful for when you discover you're not wearing socks and the kitchen floor is particularly cold. At least it's something I shout.

Check this out!

The City Pages sent a reporter and a photographer to the TCCG costumed dance on Saturday, and the slideshow is already up. Hooray!
I'm really excited about the publicity the costumers' guild has been getting of late. I'm really hoping that it will lead to increased membership!

Well, I've achieved what appears to be a pretty good fit, using the Truly Victorian pattern as a starting point. Now is the time that I need to decide how I want to do this. The TV pattern has a single front piece, and then a back, side back and side. The pattern that I'm trying to copy has obnly a front piece and a back piece.

Option the first: The most easy way. I could leave it as it is, with the multiple pieces in the back. I'm sure that few enough people would notice/care that it isn't exactly how the pattern is in the book. I'm not planning to enter this in any competitions and I need to have it finished and ready to wear in a week.

Option the second: I make another mock up with a single back piece and see how it fits. This means probably adding a couple more hours to the construction, but I've got a week, including all day, the day of the event and the option to take Friday off to work on things. This would bring me closer to accuracy and I think would probably up the ante on the bragging rights, of which I am so fond. While I have no plans to enter this in a competition, I would still like to have the option if I choose.

So, Do I go with the most expedient way in the interest of just finishing the damned thing, or do I stretch a bit further outside my comfort zone to have something that could be close to perfect (or could fail miserably)?

I suppose the one thing I have to keep in mind is that I still need to hem the skirt (don't need to mark it, just sew it), make and trim the sash and cut/assemble/trim the new bodice. Whatever I choose, this won't be the end of it - I still have the day bodice and fichu to make.

Masterpiece's "Sense and Sensibility" totally kicked the ass of 1995's Sense and Sensibility."

That is all.

Harold and I were running errands last night, including a stop at JoAnn to get more thread. While waiting in line I overheard someone at the customer service counter asking if they sold anything like an iron-on or spray on pocket.  I'll give you a moment to let that sink in.

A spray-on pocket.

Well, I've been tagged by brotherwilli .

123 Meme Rules: (1) Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating! (2) Turn to page 123. (3) Find the first 5 sentences. (4) Post the next 3 sentences. (5) Tag 5 people.

This proved more tricky than I would have expected, since the bookcase is immediately outside the puter room, and few of the books on it are fewer than 123 pages, so I picked at random from the books near me. The random choice from the 4 eligible shelves brought me to "The Wee Free Men" by Terry Pratchett.

    "We always just rush in."
    "Aye, Big Yan, point well made. But ye gotta know where ye're just gonna rush in."

Words to live by. I was kind of hoping that the nearest book would have been "Reconstruction Era Fashions" but it was on the table, a good 2-3 feet away from the bookshelf. You would have gotten a couple of very edifying lines about glove fashions from February 22, 1868.

hmm... tagging people... How about mcsassypants, rexspeed, ashamanja_babu, haroldkand kastinkerbell