Still Life, With Cats

Crazy, busy, long day, and more coming. Azzie’s limping and we don’t know why and I have zero time to take him to the vet (thankfully Richard’s schedule is slightly more flexible so he’s going to try to get him in). Home from rehearsal and wired, and still had a bunch of work stuff to do and now it’s nearly midnight (same reason as for the crazy long conference call this weekend), so…here. Pictures from a week or so ago when we put up the tree. Because I know some of you long term readers have come to expect them.

Part 1 – pull tree box from closet. Sometimes it’s heavier than others. Can’t figure out why though.

Part 2 – Open box and remove tree pieces. Sometimes there are extra pieces in the box.

Part 3 – Assemble tree. Sometimes there are obstacles in the way when attempting to do so.

Part 4 – Stand back, and wait a couple seconds. Ah…..there we go.

Part 5 – Decorate tree with whatever happens to be lying about.

Part 6 – Decide tree needs more than one ornament. Add a couple more.

Part 7 – Sit back, relax, enjoy the festive atmosphere now created.

*****

Oh yeah. I’m supposed to be sharing a daily fun thing. Whose stupid idea was that again? Uh…okay, how about this Santa’s Village thing from Google. There. Done.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.

Today was originally going to be busy: the usual Farmers Market trip in the morning, followed by catching up on chores and then wiling away the afternoon and evening in a gaming session with friends. The gaming session fell through – this time of year people are getting sick, or overbooked – so then we thought, oh boy, an entirely free weekend day (a rarity for me in December), so we talked about maybe just spending the day doing a bunch of cooking to restock the freezer, and actually dragging the decorations down from the attic to see if we could make the place look a bit more festive.

And then Friday hit, when everything was waylaid due to some urgent work issues, which is why I have spent the bulk of the day camped out on a conference call. Thankfully I could at least be doing it from home, still in comfy sweats and with some knitting in hand when I didn’t need to be actively involved in the discussion, but by the time the thing wrapped up, it was too dark outside to do any exterior decorating, and any desire, or energy, to spend hours in the kitchen had pretty much gone out the window.

So instead we ordered pizza for dinner (and then got to chase down Sherman, who snuck out the door, sigh), and Richard poked at the Holidailies site (new functionality on the My Profile page, for those of you participating, plus a bunch of cleanup to the participants list, and the return of the entry count), and we watched an episode of the very first season of Great British Bake Off (because I may have developed an unhealthy obsession with BBC competition shows lately), and then I decided by golly, I ought to attempt to do something vaguely festive to the house, and as any home canner knows, if you’ve been canning long enough you start to collect an awful lot of jar rings, so I made myself a slightly lopsided wreath.

This is one of those craft projects where I had the idea and then Googled it because it was so obvious I knew someone else had to have already done it, and I read various blog posts and thought, wow, this is so simple even *I* can do it. And all the while I was merrily gluing ribbon to the lids, I kept saying ‘wow, this really is easy’. And that continued until I actually tried to shape the thing at the end.

There is yarn involved. Also cardboard. Also swearing. Clearly we were just destined to have a vaguely egg-shaped wreath. Fine. I don’t care. It’s pretty, and it used up a teeny tiny fraction of the bazillion extra rings that are lurking in boxes in the canning closet. I am not going to bother telling you directions because I am not sure what else you need to know except ‘glue ribbon to lids’ and ‘see if you can keep the cats from stealing the glue sticks’, and ‘tie into a circle and then hope for the best.’

*****

I admit I was awfully tempted to make ‘how to craft a clever wreath out of canning lids’ today’s nifty thing, but I’m not quite that lazy. So instead I shall point you this rather awesome interactive graphic from xkcd.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.

So part of the fun of being in a musical group is that sometimes the group is asked to perform for other organizations’ events. This month, we’ve got two of those – both of which will be taking place tomorrow.

One of the performances we’ll be doing is indoors, so it’ll be our usual attire. The other, however, starts with us singing for an hour or two outside, which means, considering it’s been rather chilly out lately, that we’ll all be bundled up in heavy jackets and gloves and scarves and hats.

I have a heavy jacket. I have shawls and scarves galore. I also happen to have a pair of fingerless gloves that I made years ago, and which live in my purse for the days when the office temperature is set to icebox. What I did not have, at least prior to today, however, is a hat.

Let’s just say there’s a reason I do not make myself hats. Some people look good in hats. I am not one of them. Not remotely at all. But it’s going to be cold, so vanity has been displaced by practicality. Thus, yesterday I went browsing through Ravelry and found a nice pattern, and then I rummaged through my stash and found a skein of yarn in a nice rich red, and then I whipped up this little number.

As I suspected, I look, with the hat on, a bit like one of the burglars from Home Alone, if one of the burglars happened to have a thing for red and lace. Ah well. At least it’ll be warm.

*****

Today’s fun thing is this Advent Calendar by Compound Interest. If you are not already following them on Facebook, you really should. They post all kinds of interesting information breaking down the chemical components of ordinary things (pro tip, *everything* is made up of chemicals, no matter how ‘natural’ it is, because SCIENCE!).

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.

I wrote yesterday’s entry first thing in the morning, before all the news erupted over the fact that we had yet *another* mass shooting. Oh wait, scratch that. TWO mass shootings.

And then let’s also toss in the news today that the party that waves their religion rabidly around in everyone’s face – a religion based on a guy who actually TOLD HIS FOLLOWERS to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and heal the sick – voted once again to defund healthcare, further restrict a woman’s ability to get LEGAL medical procedures, cut Medicaid, and repeal the ACA; the same party that marches in lockstep with the NRA about how *obviously* the best way to prevent all those mass shootings is to get more guns on the street; the same party that overwhelmingly voted down yet another attempt to require more stringent background checks for gun purchases. Because heaven forbid a woman be able to get easy access to birth control, or a poor family be able to see a doctor without having to go into debt, but by golly, no one better stand in the way of any disaffected asshole buying up as much weaponry as they want so they can waltz into a crowded setting and mow a bunch of unsuspecting civilians to the ground.

All of this is to say that I had something fun and whimsical to share for today’s internet thing, but shockingly, I don’t feel very fun or whimsical. So instead I shall point you to this most marvelous front page article of the New York Daily News (click image to get to article itself), which encompasses perfectly how I have felt every single time yet another domestic terrorist shoots up a shopping mall or a school or a <insert large public gathering spot here>, and the best that certain politicians have to offer is their prayers. And I will point you to the Igorvolsky twitter account. Since the news broke yesterday, he has been responding to all the hollow ‘pray for the victims’ posts from members of Congress by pointing out just how much support each person has received from the NRA.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.

Today is December 1st, which means that once again it’s time for Holidailies. Yay! This is its sixteenth year, which means it’s old enough to get a drivers permit and lurk on whatever the popular social media site for teenagers is and roll its eyes and talk smack about its parents. And now I think I’ve milked that metaphor wayyyy longer than was necessary. Here. Have a picture of Nutmeg in a Grinch hat and let’s pretend this paragraph never happened.

I already talked about this back in October, but for those of you who are new to my little corner of the internets, Richard and I are now your official Holidailies hosts, and we’re going to be spending the next few weeks holding our breath and crossing our fingers that the newly revamped site plays nicely with others. The beta test in October went as well as can be expected, in that nothing major came up, so we thought we were all set, until I came home from rehearsal fairly late last night and it suddenly occurred to me that we had never actually created a new ‘About’ page, or pulled in all the archived participant lists from previous years, and the Blog Badges hadn’t been uploaded, and the random writing prompt functionality was still in hiding, and, and, and….well, all of this is to say that I was up until after midnight last night doing as much as I could, and meanwhile sending Richard a string of emails consisting of lists of stuff we really ought to have done, so he’d see them all first thing this morning when he got up. Shockingly, he was not nearly as excited about all the extra work I came up with for him to do as I was (hah). That could have been because he wasn’t fully caffeinated when he sat down and saw the flurry of emails I sent him the night before, but more likely it was because my contribution to the cause this morning was to say ‘uh…I sent you some emails and I updated a bunch of files and I hope I didn’t break anything, bye!’ as I was dashing out the door far too early in the morning for a meeting down in Menlo Park at the Facebook campus (which, by the way, made me more than a bit nostalgic for the good old days of software consulting, well, except for the long hours and 100% travel, but I digress).

Anyway. I think we’ve now mostly gotten the majority of the ‘holy crap I can’t believe we didn’t think about…’ list I have been obsessively compiling all day, and anything that’s left isn’t (hopefully) urgent, so, uh, welcome to the thing I do every December! If you feel like joining in, go register.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.