Does this make anybody else spitting mad? This is the kind of crap that makes me grateful to live in Australia right now. As long as a drug is legal, a pharmacist should be required to dispense it. If you’re not happy with that, you shouldn’t be a pharmacist. Simple. I have a moral objection to Feathers yarn, but you don’t see me withholding it from customers, now do you?
What a bad day. Couple of days. People called in sick to work so I had to serve customers two days running, meaning I had no time to work on our website, meaning I’m even further behind on a project that was nearly impossible to begin with. I dreamed about work all last night, so mentally I just worked, like, a sixteen hour shift. My iMac is officially borked again, so I’ll be desktop-less for another week while it’s getting serviced. I had a stupid, pointless argument with the Snook this morning that left me on the verge of tears. My allergies are acting up. It’s raining and the Golf Umbrella People are out to get me. All I want to do is go home and eat deep-fried macaroni and cheese til I go into a food coma.
Does anybody have any surefire methods of cheering yourself up that don’t require eating lots of crap that’ll ruin my diet?
I officially lost one kilo during Week 2, bringing my total loss to three. And I got another gold star! I totally wasn’t angling for that one, either. Emily just asked if anybody had done anything new that week, and I mentioned that I’d played squash for the first time. (I had my boss Albert, who plays a lot, give me a lesson yesterday. More on that in a minute.) So she gave me another star. Yay! Things are progressing nicely. The Snook and I made an extremely yummy (yet very low point value) Shepherd’s Pie tonight using kangaroo mince. I’ve also noticed that my EXTREME HUNGRINESS seems to have dialed back a bit, and I don’t need to eat as much at lunch to ward off mid-afternoon STARVATION. Several people have told me that I’m looking skinnier (most notably when Amy complimented my actual ass on Saturday) but it’s easy to write them off as just being nice, you know? But the scales don’t lie, baby!
Oh, and as for squash… I thought it would be pretty easy to pick up, given that I played tennis all through high school and I did a rotation of racquetball during college PE. Unfortunately, it took me a really long time to realize that a squash ball doesn’t, you know, BOUNCE. Albert would hit one off the front wall and it would bounce once, and I’d be waiting in the position I’d expect to hit a tennis ball from. And then the ball would bounce again three feet in front of me. It was like playing with the deadest tennis ball in the world. It took me a good fifteen minutes to mentally adjust and get into a position where I wasn’t lunging for every shot. The other big change is that in squash, all raquet speed is generated from the wrist, whereas in tennis you mostly use your arm. But you don’t have time to use your arm in squash, so I had to un-learn four years of tennis swing. We didn’t actually get around to playing a game; I was having enough difficulty just returning the ball reliably. I was getting a hell of a workout though. I think we’re going to make this a weekly event…
If anybody is interested, I just worked out how many WW Points are in the Peters CarbSmart ice cream: 1 Point per 50g. There you go!
I had my first diet-related dream last night. (Or shall I say… nightmare?) I dreamed that I was walking through the kitchen and there was a cookie sheet out with loads of fresh, warm peanut butter cookies, and I just grabbed one and stuffed it into my mouth. And then there was some sort of giant chocolate bar, and I was breaking pieces off and eating them before suddenly I was like, “OH MY GOD, WHAT AM I DOING? I’VE RUINED EVERYTHING!” And I just remember the awful feeling that I’d stuffed it up and that there’d never be any point in trying to continue. I was so relieved when I woke up.
We had little impromptu Aussie craft-blogger meet-up today at Amy’s place to watch some episodes of Craft Corner Death Match. Joining us were Katherine, Helen, and Clinton. I wasn’t hugely impressed with the show, to be honest. I can see where they were going with the concept, but it’s got a few big problems for me:
So overall, I give the show 7.35 on originality, 4.46 on execution, and only a 6.329 on enjoyment. We had a lot more fun watching the fabulous Brini Maxwell afterwards…
And you thought iPod Shuffles were just for listening to… (That one with the Crisco and the poppy seeds makes me wanna barf though!)
Congratulations to my sister Amy, who helped organize the extremely successful Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Inaugural Celebrity Rock ‘N Bowl Event. The auction she put together raised $20,000 more than expected! Check out the pictures to see the celebrities that took place. All I can say is, if a member of my own family was in the same room as Ben Mackenzie from The O.C. and DIDN’T GET ME AND THE SNOOK AN AUTOGRAPH, she can consider herself OFFICIALLY UNINVITED TO ALL OF AUSTRALIA. Ahem. But congrats again, Sis!
US President Turns Off Australian Women. Well, no DUH. I like the picture they chose to illustrate the story though. Heh. Baby fish mouth.
At long last, Cheesylove is finished! This is the Knitty pattern I started well over a year ago. At one point, I completely frogged it back to the beginning and started over (which meant re-casting on A THOUSAND stitches for the ruffle. Do you know how long it takes to do ANYTHING a thousand times? I do.). I was toying with the idea of putting short sleeves on it but in the end I decided I liked it better as a vest
For the body of the vest, I used Heirloom EasyCare 8-ply. I can’t even remember why; it was that long ago. But it gave me the right gauge and it’s not too scratchy. The hearts are done in Heirloom Aristocrat 12-ply mohair/wool, which makes them stand out nicely. As usual, the Knitty pattern had several problems wrong with it. The biggest was that it told you to mark the side seams and then do your shaping on either side of it, without any indication which increases/decreases to use nor where to place them to ensure the ribbing didn’t get buggered. (This is part of the reason I frogged it back. My initial seamlines looked crap and it bothered me.) In the end, instead of merely marking the seam, I actually used two markers to isolate the actual side rib. Then I made paired increases/decreases in the ribs on either side of it so that they grew or shrank organically while the center rib remained whole. (Yeah, yeah, I know. It was a lot of thinking and planning for what basically amounts to the armpit of a garment. But I’m really happy with how I did it, and quite frankly I get a little thrill out of knowing that I did it the best way possible.) For the armbands, I simply picked up around the holes with the smaller sized needle and knitted 5 rows of K1P1 rib before casting off. (That way it matches the neckband.) It’s not the most stylish garment in the world, but I think I executed the design better than any other pattern I’ve tried before.
My name is Kris. I’ve been blogging since the 90’s. I live in Sydney, Australia, and I spent most of my career in the tech industry.
No AI used in writing this blog, ever. 100% human-generated.
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