Oh, hello, Friday. Where did you come from?

The problem with have "flexible work hours" is that instead of thinking in terms of Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday, I tend to boil it down to "work days" and "not-work days."

This tends to cause problems when it comes to planning.

So here is a funny story that I shared on Tumblr, because I'm not just a dork, I'm dork who's slightly brain fried at the moment:

So today at work, I discovered that when the alarms on our front doors are in maintenance mode, they don’t make the usual beep-beep-beep noise, but rather they sound like the alarms from the Enterprise. And they were going off a lot:

1st time it happened: “Did we just go to Red Alert?”

2nd: “Is it the Klingons or the Romulans this time?”

3rd: “I’m really glad I didn’t wear the red shirt today.” (Yes, I was planning on wearing red this morning, but changed my mind to blue.)

10th: “Where the hell is Lt. LaForge? That sound is really annoying.” Also, our A/C wasn’t really working and it was really hot. Between the malfunctioning alarms and the environmental controls, a full ship’s diagnostic was needed.

As he was packing up, I walked by the technician. He was wearing a blue shirt.

"Isn’t Engineering supposed to be doing that?"

He just gave me a blank look.

No one appreciates my sense of humor.

Knitting Status and the Manicure of the Week

It seems that I've spent the bulk of the past two months waiting on people to get back with me about various things, mostly job related, which has lead to a lot of anxiety knitting. Mostly, this has been on the livingroom afghan, which has had several rows added this week as Missouri and I work our way through season two of The Murdoch Mysteries. Of course, being that it is a massive project done almost entirely in stockinette, you can't really tell.

I've also been attempting to finish the Christmas socks, but have hit that point of knitting purgatory where they don't seem to be getting any longer, no matter how much I knit on them. I've decided that they have until April 1 to reach the desired length, and then regardless I'm doing the cuff, casting off, and then going back for the afterthought heel. Really, four months for a single pair of socks is far, far too long.

Since I've been concentrating on the socks, I haven't been working as much on the cardigan as I would like. I did start over, and have finished the three-ish inches of ribbing around the hem (I actually don't remember how much ribbing the pattern calls for, but it was in that neighborhood) as well as the first cable repeat. I'm staring at it right now, fighting the desire to work on it some more before I have to leave for my day job.

The Mario nails seem to have gotten me hooked. I've been giving myself decorative manicures every couple of days. Currently, it's a deck of cards inspired by watching Missouri play Alice: The Madness Returns. I did these a couple of days ago, so they're not as fresh and clean as they could be (my sock needles rubbed off part of the thumb). I also discovered that my clear coat seems to cause the other colors to bleed. It's not as noticeable on a darker base color, but you can really tell on the white. I do have a typewriter themed manicure planned in the future, but I'm sure I can do lettering with my left hand. I might try a stencil of some kind. Maybe contact paper would work.

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Anyone know anything about Photoshop? I keep getting an error message every time I try to save, and it's the only software I have that will let me resize images.

Nerd Wars

I find it rather shocking that somehow I managed to make it over halfway through February and forgot to mention my latest activity. I've spent the last three weeks knitting my little fingers to the bone for Nerd Wars on Ravelry (you will need an account to view the page if you aren't a Ravelry member).

Basically, it's a competition between geeky knitters. There are several teams (I'm on Team Enterprise, but there's also a team for Firefly fans, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, RPGs, video games, and others) and every month members compete in six challenge categories to knit an item which answers the challenge in under thirty days. Points are awarded for completing the challenge, and there are also arbitrary bonus points awarded. It's great fun. Yesterday I finished a beret for the Nebula-inspired challenge:


We have two weeks left (or thereabouts) in the first round, and I'm about 1/3 done with my second challenge project, which falls under the team spirit category (basically, making something "for" a character in your fandom. My "recipient" is Spock). I don't have any photos of it yet, but I'll post pictures when the challenge is over.

If you're on Ravelry, it's too late to join this competition, but it runs three months so at the end of April you should be able to sign up again. And you can always watch as a spectator! There's some great people and we've been having a lot of fun.

Short and Sweet

But getting longer.





In other news, this video broke me a little.