Xena hair...

I found a Xena hair on my coat today... It made me sadder than I expected. I can apparently deal with Clara  asking where Xena is when she visits my parents house or - like she did at Thanksgiving this year - saying that it was too bad that Xena died so she couldn't be here, but I can't deal with a single little coarse white hair on my coat.

For anyone reading this who doesn't know me in real life: Xena was my family's dog growing up. She was a little Jack Russel Terrier with a lot of personality... a lot. And Xena was getting very old and my dad had her put down a couple Christmas's ago. Sadly, she did get really bad health-wise sometime around Christmas and we extended her life a bit with the vet's help until after Christmas, but only by a week or so. I cried so much for her and strangely, I still do sometimes... I guess it's not too strange. I did grow up with her. My brother and I would jokingly call her our sister, so technically when she died, I did feel like I lost a sister.

So, This blog post is for you Xena. I miss you. I love you still. RIP

Ramblings

I've noticed that I'm a rambler - like really seriously a bad rambler. It prevents me from doing things like posting a comment on popular blogs even. Why? you ask. Because as I reach the end of a blog and it asks a simple question - something that most people would take a sentence to answer.. maybe two sentences for some - I start pondering my answer and considering whether I should post my own comment.
Then I realize that if I wrote out my comment, it would take up more space than the entire blog entry I'd be replying to.  ... Somehow that just seems rude to me... and so I don't comment. (A side note: If someone reading this wishes to post a comment that's longer than this post, go right ahead. I will be thrilled, not insulted, I promise) This is a problem since I really do want to comment. I think I have a good response to the prompt at the end of the post... but how to shorten it?
I've always had a problem with shortening my writing. In college writing classes, while everyone else was asking the teacher how long the paper had to be, I was asking how long it could be. Very quickly the teachers always learned to assign papers in a specific manner. I even had one teacher who literally singled me out. It was a classroom joke really. She would assign a paper and look out at the class and say, "I want at least two pages from all of you" and then she'd turn to me and say, "And from you, I want no more than five pages." Then she'd jokingly complain about reading my last eight page novel that I'd submitted for the 3 page writing assignment the class before.
Yeah, I've always had a tendency to ramble.
Actually, now that I think about it... Lol.. I just realized that my boss at my current job has noticed too. Shortly after starting my current job, I learned that he likes anything I email him to be bulleted for easy reading. I probably rambled on in one too many emails to him... Whoops.

But anyway, the comment that I was going to make was to Stephanie Pearl-McFee's blog post about Christmas planning. She asked her readers if they were the "keepers" of their family's festivities at Christmas time and how they managed it. I started thinking about my response and before I knew it, I'd composed a short blog post in my mind. Hence the above ramblings... But am I the keeper of my family's festivities?

Meh, sort of. I've sort of always planned things - or tried to at least. I realized sometime in middle school that my friends never did anything as a group unless I planned it. So, I became the unofficial party organizer for my group of friends. I'd plan and plan and plan and then when it came time for the outing to happen... everything would screw up my plan and we'd end up winging it anyway. So, I got pretty used to that eventually and it's still mostly the case today as well.
I'm still the main planner among my friends - even though I'm way too lazy and okay with winging it to be a good planner. If I don't step up and plan something, then usually nothing happens. Take Christmas for instance: I plan our group's Christmas every year. I usually take my dear sweet time and sometimes we don't celebrate Christmas until February... but on those particular occasions... did anyone else step up and tell everyone: "Okay, we're having Christmas on X day, at X time, and we're doing X activities."? Nope.
I should give Sra some credit here. She's usually the one that prompts me into organizing the group parties/outings. Without her we'd probably not have Christmas until February every year. She's actually asked me about Christmas for this year already. I haven't planned anything yet for my friend's Christmas, but neither has anyone else, so I figure, it'll happen when it happens. To be honest, I don't think anyone else would be able to get everyone together like I can. Hell, who am I kidding? I can't even get everyone together anymore. It's hard enough getting mostly everyone together anymore. Okay, now I'm not talking about planning, I'm moping about missing people from my high school days and moping about my friends not getting along anymore, and that's just pathetic. :-(
So with a side note that I should start thinking about planning some sort of Christmas party for my friends.... Moving on:
Do I plan my family's Christmas activities? I sort of do. Between myself and Seth, I'm definitely the one that plans what we're doing when it comes to Christmas parties and the like. And technically, Christmas with Seth's family did move from Seth's dad's house to our house a couple years ago... But I wouldn't say I'm the only planner within that side of the family. Lol.. nope. Mary is most definitely another keeper of the family's festivities - heck, she tries to plan friend stuff too sometimes. She loves Christmas. And sure since we both do some planning, sometimes we butt heads and get nothing accomplished or decided. But other times, it works out pretty well. Christmas is still in its infancy in our family, I think. A lot of the old traditions from Seth's childhood are getting changed and we're slowly coming up with our own.
Within my side of the family... Christmas? There's still Christmas? I thought that ended when my brother and I moved out.. Hmmm.. I suppose maybe unknowingly I was a bit of a keeper of the festivities there too. I always encouraged my mom to have Christmas there even though she would always stress out and say she couldn't handle it. And since I moved out, she hasn't had Christmas at her house. And it's been a family tradition for generations to make our family Christmas cookies every year and I know for a fact that if I didn't force it down my mom and Aunt's throats every year we wouldn't still be making them. So, in a way, I guess I keep Christmas going a bit in my side of the family.
Really thinking about this makes me wonder if I should try to force Christmas activities on more of my loved ones... That sounds bad, but... I mean, when I was a kid, we used to gather with my dad's side of the family for Christmas every year, but somewhere down the line, that just stopped. And on my mom's side of the family, we used to have a big Christmas gathering at a local church where everyone got together and a couple years ago, it just stopped too. My mom had a large number of her relatives over to our house on Christmas Eve for the longest time too but that stopped eventually too. It's weird - and really sad actually - how so many family traditions just died. It does make me feel like I should start up some new family traditions to take their place.
But alas, I never do finish what I start, do I?


Wow... talk about morose. Ouch. I hate to end this post on such a sad note. It's got me feeling all sad now... :-(

Well, not exactly a positive addition to the conversation - okay, ramblings, not conversation - but I do have something to add.  I just remembered that it's hard enough to manage the few holiday things I do have going on without adding more and that is why it's really not as sad as you would think that all those old traditions have died. Afterall, if I add too many things to do, then how the heck am I supposed to cause the Apocalypse by getting all my knitting done?! Priorities!

Really long word vomit w/ me causing the Apocalypse

I enjoyed posting my word vomit so much yesterday that I decided to do it again today! Yay! It's kind of nice to just write and not worry about what your writing really sounds like. I edit and re-edit and edit once more - just to be sure - when I post on my newer blog and since I'm so extremely picky when I'm being picky, that can sometimes mean that something doesn't get posted at all. LOL! I just realized! This is like my split personality blog. The Mission: Spinning is where I post when I'm all about precision and focusing on spinning and being a good girl and doing what I said I was going to do. This one is where I post when I just feel like writing nonsense or complaining about something or going on and on about my bad habits (ie: fanfics, The Sims, procrastinating, not knitting).
This is almost a private journal really since almost no one reads it. Well, I shouldn't say no one. Technically, it's almost a sure thing that eventually Sra will read this (Hi Sra!) but it's unlikely she'll read it until its been up for at least a couple months. Unless she started using an RSS reader or something. I think she's my one follower...  Then, I've told others about my blog and I'm fairly certain that at least Mindy, Michael, and Magz have looked at it before, so there's always the possibility that they seek it out someday. Mary knows about it too, but I warned her that I'm posting Christmas gifts on here sooo... That either means she's going to be good and avoid it until at least after Christmas (at which point she'll probably have forgotten that I ever told her about it) or she's going to be bad and she's checking it daily to see if she can catch a glimpse of hers or Clara's Christmas presents. If that's the case... Bad Mary! :-P Get off my blog and check it again after Christmas instead!
But.. Like I said, it's unlikely that anyone is reading this until Sra decides to check up on my blog months later. So, technically I can post all sorts of Christmas present pictures on here and no one will be the wiser. But.. just to be safe, I'll avoid posting anything I may end up making for Sra. She is the most likely to read this afterall.

So, first on the finished Christmas present list is a slightly slouchy hat for Hannah. I love it! It turned out great (I'll post pictures later, they're on Seth's phone) and it only took one night. One night for finishing work and all! I used this pattern sorta. This is my project page for the hat. I'll be putting pictures up on it as well once I steal Seth's phone.
Ooo... I just found out how to make my project pages shareable by link! I thought they were anyway, so that means that previous posts in this blog probably have a lot of error links that should lead to Ravelry, but don't. Whoops!

Anyway, the hat turned out less slouchy than the pattern because I had to only do two rows of dc into each dc instead of three rows.  Mary says Hannah has a smaller head too, so hopefully that's good. Hannah did just say she wanted me to teach her how to make a beanie, so I'm thinking she'll prefer that the hat isn't overly slouchy but instead more beanie like. I love that yarn I used and I think this hat was a perfect use for it too. I usually get this awesome yarn that I love so much that I'm afraid to use it for anything and then by the time I actually use it, it ends up going toward a project that I don't love so much and it never gets done. ... I am still overjoyed at the fact that I finished - and I mean finished completely and ready to be wrapped - a gift in one night! And I was able to chat with Mary and Clara and Seth while they played Minecraft and then later watch a couple of episodes of Doctor Who. That's got to be a record for me or something! I mean finishing work and all? - and not something that I still have to make the second one or want to add buttons or something. No, it's done - completely done! AND I even ran into a problem, tried to fix it, ran into another problem, etc. and still managed to finish it in one night. That's amazing for me. I realize that at this point I'm starting to sound like I'm tooting my own horn, but I am really surprised at myself. Details on the problems I ran into are on my project page.

The Doctor Who episode we watched last night (the Shakespeare one in Season 2)  made quite a few Harry Potter references which just made my day. I also loved that the Doctor basically admitted to going into the future to read the 7th book before anyone else. And Shakespeare defeated the evil witches by saying expelliarmus! ...Or however you spell that. Like I said earlier - this is word vomit, so I'm not going to bother editing it much, so I'm not going to bother looking up how to spell expelliarmus no matter how much it sits there and taunts me by looking wrong...  Really...

Oh! And I'm also proud of myself for not playing The Sims last night. I fully expected myself to go home and waste the entire night playing The Sims after that dialog from the last post about not doing just that. I was planning on only working on Mary's gift until that was done though, and I realized when I got home that my plan was flawed. Mary was over at my house when I got home, so if I wanted to knit, I couldn't work on her gift. If it was anything else, I would have just worked on it in front of her and told her it was for someone else, but Mary bought the yarn for this gift, so I can hardly pull that one off for this particular gift. I also made the mistake of telling Mary what yarns I planned on using for Clara's gifts so if I want to keep Clara's gifts a surprise for Mary too then I can't work on those when she's over either. Ah well, I have plenty of other knitted/crocheted gifts to keep me occupied when they're over. Then I'll just need to work really hard on their stuff when Mary's not over.

Just from writing the above paragraph I already want to play The Sims again. It's a horribly addicting game. I mean really terrible. Once you start playing it's hell trying to stop and then when you do, it takes all your will power not to just go right back to it as soon as you have a bit of free time. And then, when you finally pull yourself away from it and you think you've kicked the habit, someone says something about it or just says something that reminds you of it and WHAM! You want to play it again. Just like that, it's all you can think of all over again. That game is almost as bad as caffeine! Caffeine is also horribly addicting and unhealthy. Actually The Sims is unhealthy as well, because it promotes sitting in front of a computer for hours on end making your Sim live a wonderful life while you get absolutely nothing done. Ya know, its so addictive that if I thought it was possible, I'd say that they're somehow feeding you caffeine or some other drug through the screen when you play it just to keep you playing it. I mean, I woke up one morning to go to work at like 6 ish to find Seth still up playing The SIMs! Seth playing The Sims and the world didn't end - I know, shocking. Seth still being up at 6 am wasn't as surprising as finding out he was playing The Sims all night. I guess that's what happens when he gets me the Supernatural expansion pack and then realizes that he could play a vampire. I haven't played one myself yet, but the new town is just crawling with them. And apparently, instead of hunger they have thirst and they drink these plasma packs they find in fridges instead of eating food. And they start smoking if they are outside in the daylight (at least they don't sparkle). Oh, but there's this one emo looking npc vampire Sim named Dante or something ... and for some odd reason, he has face paint on every outfit other than his everyday. I'm not talking creepy blood around his mouth or something understandable. No, I'm talking rainbows and unicorns on his forehead, clown make-up, and tiger face paint depending on the outfit. It's screwed up. I've even given him a makeover with my stylist Sim and got rid of the face paint, but the next time my Sim went to a party, his face paint was back! How screwed up is that?

Wow... this post is long.

I think I'll make it longer by listing out the projects I have to knit/crochet still:

• Slightly Slouchy Beanie for Hannah
• Slouchy Beanie for Mary
• "One night sweater" for Mary
• Woven hat for Mary
• Baby sweater for new nephew (Oh yeah, Michael and Mindy are having a boy! A big one too! He's apparently in the 99th percentile for weight at the moment... Not so great for Mindy. She's fairly small herself and she's intending to have the baby naturally soo... Ouch?) .. (Oh, I hope they don't mind me putting that stuff on here... Well, Mindy, if you read this and would prefer I take it off, let me know and I will. However, like I babbled on and on about earlier in this post: no one actually reads this anyway. Oh, and if you are reading this, Mindy, stop now! Read it after Christmas!)
• Baby Blanket for new nephew
• Something for Clara with pink and green handspun yarn. Possibly this scarf.
• Something for Clara with white with color spots handspun yarn - possibly something for Mary instead of Clara. She liked the yarn, technically. But I have a lot planned for Mary already sooo.... ? Possibly this hat.
• Snowmobile scarf for Rick - I should get started on this one soon since it's going to be mindless, but very time consuming. I'll have to steal the needles from another project, I think... That's going to suck.
• Link Gauntlets for Seth (two options... I'll probably go with the easier ones if I get to this...)
• Dad asked for a Harley hat, but I don't think I have any orange and black yarn worthy of a hat... I had a little bit of both leftover from the hat I knit for Aunt Tina.. But nowhere near enough to make another hat, and I actually used up most of the black that was left anyway... I want to make him this as a bass guitar case for his little portable bass guitar, but 1) I don't have the yarn (again I would use black and orange for Harley) and 2) it's a felting project and felting hates me and 3) Do I really have time before Christmas?
• Something for Mom? She didn't know what she wanted, but it sounds like she might use some wrist warmers at work. I would probably have something laying around that would work for her, but it can't be bulky yarn because I don't think she'd like bulky wrist warmers... I'll have to look around and find something she'd like that I can make in the short amount of time I can give to a project before Christmas.

I'd really like to not be still finishing Christmas gifts after Christmas, so I'm thinking I should cut my list down to a manageable size. I might have to just buy my parents something... I don't think they actually like knitted stuff anyway... Then again, I don't think I've ever actually completed any of the knitted gifts I've tried to make for them in the past. My mom got a knitted scarf, but that was only because it was supposed to be knit for a paying customer who ended up not wanting it. So, technically, my parents have never really seen any finished projects from me... Hm... It would be really nice to fix that this year... *looks up at list* Hmmm... No idea how I'm going to make this work though... 

The problem is... that this list actually does look manageable to me right now... But I know myself better than that. One finished project in a month is amazing enough, but 12?! The world will end... Oh, wait... Yes! I can do it, because me completing 12 projects in around a month's time - having done the impossible - will be the cause of the end of the world in 2012! It makes so much sense now. Great! I'm going to cause the end of the world if it kills me! ... Wow... What a statement. (Remember what I said in my other blog about statements like that?- Well, not quite like that... but the same general idea)

So, I believe I just decided that the reason the world is going to end in December of 2012 is because I am going to complete 12 knitted/crocheted projects in the space of less than a month - which of course will spark the Apocalypse. :-D Just in case you didn't figure that out already.

I hope Seth made brownies today...

Word Vomit

My Mission: Spinning blog is a bit more formal-ish, so I sort of feel like I shouldn't word vomit on it, but this one is still okay. So, I felt like word vomiting for a bit. I just organized my projects on Ravelry. They're still far from perfect and definitely only include a small portion of the projects I've worked on, but it is a noticeable improvement from where it was.  I also did some work on my queue for Christmas gifts. I really need to finish Mary's sweater before I start anything else though. Otherwise, I'll just have a bunch of partially done projects come Christmas time... You know, the way it's been for the past 10 Christmas's or so. So, I'm going to try to focus on one at a time... or at the very most two at a time... now. Since, technically I've already started like 10 projects for Christmas gifts in the last 2-3 weeks. But that doesn't count! Starting right now, I'm going to keep my focus on one project until something physically prevents me from working on that particular project (ie: I run out of yarn and can't run to the store until the next day). Then, I will only focus on one other project, not multiple other projects until I can return to my one project (ie: after I pick up the yarn). I should note that my example in parenthesis is expected to happen very soon actually. I don't think I have enough of the yarn for Mary's sweater and I don't think I can substitute a different color for the sleeves or something in this case...*mental images of potential finished sweater* Yeah, no, that would definitely look really bad.  So, I may run out of yarn tonight or tomorrow night and have to make a run to JoAnn's to go on a wild goose chase for the exact same yarn that I bought over a year ago... Yeah, that's not a stretch or anything...
So, when I eventually run out, instead of reverting to the counter-productive Sims 3 playing I've been doing lately, I will start on another of my Christmas gifts (or maybe consider doing some finishing work on something otherwise done to gift it). That's right, I will not be tempted to continue playing my Sims character, Lily Rosewill, who just quit her level 5 Stylist career for a career in Child Daycare.  I will not think about how I haven't quite reached my goal of buying the achievement that will allow my Sim to inherit a large sum of money due to a distant relative dying (the purchase of this lifetime reward and the death of the distant relative are in no way related... really). I will not think of how cool it would be to have a rich Sim that I *didn't* use cheats on.  I usually use cheats like there's no such thing as playing the game without them. I mean, I usually go full out: motherlode 20 times, testingcheatsenabled true on the whole time, dragging bars like crazy, who needs sleep? and eating is for someone else's Sims. Mine sits there and studies all day without a care in the world as I regularly drag its bars from red to green to keep it gaining skills or doing whatever else I have it doing.  BUT! This time, I played a sim who didn't get any of that cheating. She started out poor and got a job. She had to work for her money, while living in a shitty trailer with a fridge that made her food taste bad, an uncomfortable bed, an ice cold shower, and a broken TV on a TV tray. And now, she's a local celebrity who was a renowned celebrity who just quit to become a Daycare nanny. She even earned enough money to build a second trailer on her lot just for all those toddlers she's watching! But no!!! I will not think of that I said! NOT!  Knitting Christmas gifts is much more important. *shifty eyes* ... I will remember that! REally! ... I hope.