Rambling ramblyness.

On the one hand, I wonder why any of you read this. On the other hand, in spite of all the interestingness the internet contains, sometimes it can get hella boring. And when youtube has chewed up all of your bandwidth, an oft-updated blog can be a good few seconds of distraction. Or a few hours, depending on how rambly I'm feeling. Today it would seem to be very.

Anyway. Private discussion time now. Should I pull out of going to Birchip? There's a lot of reasons I don't want to go, but I'm not sure that any of them are a reason not to go. I think I still want to go. I don't know.

Reasons.

We will be leaving Saturday, and arriving late. Maybe an hour before the kickoff. Not much time to get ourselves settled; probably end up is a nasty corner miles from the toilets.

No massive support group. Granted, Longy wasn't a massive crew, but we were there early, had time to make ourselves a camp, with a fire, and definite claimed/defensible feel to it. Small group + arriving late = uncontrollable variables = me freaking out that I might start bashing people over the heads with bottles. I do this when I get stressed, and I don't care if the bottles contain drinks, whereas everyone else cries alcohol abuse.

I've kinda gone a bit off Jelly Tots. And after not being able to complete the final stage of the digestive cycle for almost a week after going to Rainbow, I've kinda gone off the idea of eating nothing but raspberry twists for an entire weekend.*

I wont have BJ. For over 4 years my car has been my safe place, and it is into him that I retreat when I've had enough of the drunken antics. And he wont be there. The van is not mine alone. I apparently get to sleep in it, since I do not own a swag, but still. Vera is not BJ. I do not feel comfortable having random, one sided conversations with her.

I just don't really feel like picking up. And there's not much point, as a non drinker, in going to a BnS Ball if I'm not going to find myself a root. I like Casey's idea of collecting randoms, but, well, I'm not that kind of person. She exudes confidence in these situations. I raise an eyebrow and step aside so as to not get covered in food dye. And then get picked up by one random, without even being offered a chance to sample the alternatives, and then, well, thinking about it, it all seems like too much effort.

My dress is in the shed. I put it in a bag and put it out there when I still had hopes of getting my room organised. So I'll have to go out and find it. I've no idea where my coat is, and it still has a big tear up the back, that I will have to hand sew back together, on account of it being real dead animal, and too much for the machine to be able to handle.

I will have to wax my legs. It's about time anyway, but still. I will have to find time in the next 5 days, around working a 35 hour week. It will hurt.

I will have worked 10 straight closes in the lead up to it. 63 hours worth. And because I'll be going away, neither catching up on sleep nor sewing will be getting done**

My cats went mental the last time I went away for 2 days. This was 2 weeks ago, and still their dietary habits have not reverted to pre-absence.

Entry is $100. Which could buy me a half yard of each colour of this in the stripe, the birds and the flowers inside the diamonds. And the postage. And some other stuff too, probably.

The guy I hooked up with at Longy might be there.

Reasons I probably will go.

I'm a sucker.

My Future Husband might be there.

There will be plenty of opportunity to frown disapprovingly at Becky.

I like the drive up there. Not just when I'm driving, but I enjoyed the last trip in the van while Casey was driving too.

I will have the nicest dress there.

If there's a guy in a pimp coat we can look knowingly at each other, and he will acknowledge that my actual fur coat is cooler than his purple-velour-with-a-leopard-velour-collar coat is.

Random people will come up to me and stroke my coat. Then I can imagine I am one of my cats.

If my funky new business cards get here, we can invent interesting fake names for ourselves***

The main reason I'll go.

You never know. It might be fun.


*this is a complete lie. But I do like being able to poop.
**sewing's not getting done anyway.
***but we will have to make sure we aren't wearing our name necklaces, because that would ruin it.

This is not a blog from the bog...

I must say, I'm loving The Mentalist right now.

I'd hired it a few months ago and put it on the laptop (shifty I know, but I did technically pay for a weeks viewing of it, and at no point did they say when that week of watching was) but hadn't gotten around to watching it because of shiny new episodes and DVDs of Psych and a whole host of other to-watch shows. But since the plot and synopsis for the two is the same (except that Psych is a comedy and The Mentalist is a drama) and yesterday my brain was all mushy but I thought it would be daft to fall asleep when it was only 5.30, so instead of putting on old Psych, which I can fall asleep during because I've seen it all already, I loaded the mentalist into Daemon tools and watched the first 8 episodes.

A few points - Simon Baker looks better with brown hair, so I've no idea why he's blond in this. Their big boss guy is played by the guy who was the dodgy president in 24, so even though he seems to be a good guy, I still find him shifty. They don't give enough time to the supporting characters. But that's a comparison to Psych, and therefore quite unfair. Apart from the lack of hilarity, it's pretty good.

Other things that are good include Jelly Tots, Kinder bars and Peppermint Dairy Milk rolls, but not the blocks, because the green-goo to chocolate ratio is wrong. Other things that are not good include my complete lack of motivation, my indecision about the backing for the mini quilt and the fact that the labels on the tubes of mini m&ms don't peel off cleanly.

Anyway.

Didn't get the boat quilt finished but Dad's have long been known to be distracted by the shiny wrappers of Turkish Delights and Crunchie bars. Spent the afternoon wandering around town looking for a very basic mp3 player, but the only basic (non ipod shuffle) one I found was $50 at Harvey Norman, and I'm not paying that much. Then it was an evening playing with (well, feeding) Ester, who is ludicrously gorgeous, and flicking through old quilt magazines with Helen. And now I'm home, and Honeycat is cross with me cause I wont feed her cause she's going to the vet tomorrow.

And my laptop is running svchost twice, so the coretemp is around 95°C when it should be in the mid-sixties, and I don't know which one to turn off.

Wooooo! Tax Cheque!

Got the BlueGreen finished late last night, but worked all afternoon and haven't had a chance to wash it yet.

Discovered that doing a smokeshop close is an excellent opportunity to get your Quiltmath done - just get some of yesterday's reports form the recycle bin and do your sketches and calculations on the back of them - you pass the time, look vaguely like you're doing something important (keep it all in code, then say its shelf layouts) and don't have to do at at home, when you could be doing something more important. Not the quilt though, (which is a test using the cheap cotton quilt you bought at target as batting and are hoping works well, so you can go back and buy a lot of, because they are $10 cheaper and a lot bigger than the regular quilting batting) cause it turns out you needed 1.25m of each fabric, not .75m.

But its not so bad, because my tax cheque is here! Why doesn't firefox want me to spell cheque like that? Ah, Wikipedia says that Americans spell it "check." Silly Americans.

So, I will be off to spotlight in the morning to redeem my $20 discount for spending $80, buying .5m more of each of my 4 purples, as well as .8m of something for binding, 2m of something for main backing and .6m of 2 contrast backings for the piecing. As I'm making it out of $4/m clearance fabrics, that will be waaaay not enough to make the $80 total, (it comes out a bit over $20) but I can fill out the other $60 with stuff I don't really need, because my tax cheque is here! And it's really big! And even after I spend $500 on my car's rego which I have timed brilliantly to take advantage of my tax cheque) its still heaps!

In other news, I discovered that the Jelly tots sold in specialty stores in Australia are different to the ones in England, ie. they taste shit, and I'm hugely bummed about this fact, especially as my sister just bought me 5 bags. Basically the difference is they they are all artificially favoured, and even though I may have said that 25% fruit juice is way fruitier than I remember, at least it is fruity, whereas the bag I opened last night tasted like plastic. Also a bummer is that the seller I bought the last lot off of says that the combined postage discount is a mere 20p (about 35c) per 8 bags, which is a bit of a rip off, so I have emailed the other seller of jelly tots on eBay, who have no Australian postage costs listed, to see what they can do for me. I've asked for 36 bags.

And I've just remembered that I have an Aunt (Liz) holidaying in England right now. Sweeeeet.

Okay, she's been facebooked. I believe it's late afternoon over there, so here's hoping.

In the meantime, it's a craftalong at one of my other Aunt (Helen's) house tomorrow afternoon. I'll take the retro (which is in dire need of a wash) and the blue/green (I'll put them in together in the morning while I go shopping) as well as the make life bundle, and we can work out how big she wants her baby quilt.

Finally, as well as my nice big tax cheque, I got a 4 fat quarter bundle in the mail today, not much compared to what I'm waiting on, but at least it tided me over for the day and stopped me dashing down to spotlight before I'd done my math.