so · dig · this · big · crux

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io9 has a kind of random-seeming clip from the forthcoming dollhouse.

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there's a lot of really pretty, slightly girly art out there, much of it really good. i just find myself a little desensitized to the prettiness. but i like this pretty kris chau print a lot anyway. via this stylebubble post.

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this extreme craft post about the piece "purl drums" is pretty excellent. this fellow corey fogel plays the drums and knits at the same time.

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ffffound: the real firefox.

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other than brian's birthday celebration, possibly a wii-b-q, and a whole lot of sleeping, i have no idea what i'm doing this weekend.

i'm not really sure why i haven't been feeling terribly chatty on livejournal lately. it seems like a lot of people have been comparatively quiet.

some random thoughts:

my uncle's pretty great.
printing plates smell a little like green beans.
i found the perfect cheap canvas shoes, but no size sevens.
book trimmers are a little scary.
i would like a job where i can wear coveralls. by that i mean a. i like coveralls, they're nice, and b. if your job warrants wearing coveralls, at least if it also involves printing, then it's probably a really cool job.
transparency settings are partly responsible for some of the most horrible newfangled design.
travelling alone makes me feel a bit less like a capable grownup than usual.

anyway, look for some flickr photos of random printing plant stuff in the near future.

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this weekend included iron man (quite good, really), sour notes, sitting outside the dobie parking garage with clarke and andres until almost four in the morning, brian graduation (yay!), meeting brian's family and having a huge pile of thai passion, napping, party, almost fainting for no apparent reason - immediately followed by sleeping for ten hours and three naps on sunday, laundry, makeup bsg time with jon and revenge of the sith. and cat time!

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i'm trying not to get too wound up about going on a work trip tomorrow. i think i'll be able to sleep tonight despite the marathon sleeping that went on this weekend, but i am a little worried about it. anyway, wish me luck. of course, nothing too fun or interesting is allowed to happen in austin while i'm gone.

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tonight's going to be busy. what is it with me and incredibly busy friday nights followed by comparatively slow weekends? not that i know much about what this weekend's supposed to be like yet. all i know i'm doing so far is brian graduation (yay brian!) saturday and maybe a trip to llano sunday.

i'm almost certainly not going to be able to see the old haunts tonight, and this makes the second time i've missed them. that's the version of the old haunts that includes tobi vail, people. maybe i'll make it there against all odds (probably not, though).

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last night and i found (and bought) a shirt that has those little tabs that hold your sleeves in place when you roll them up. i've always wanted one of those.

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some of us at work are trying to come up with a tracklist for a publishing/book-related mix. most of the obvious stuff has already been thought of, and i'm having trouble coming up with anything to add. any thoughts?

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the keyboard sound in "ewan" by the radio dept. is pretty much my favorite keyboard sound. my second favorite is anything super-sawtoothy.

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i suddenly hate most of my clothes. i realize this is mostly mental, but until i figure out how to undo the mental problem i will try and console myself with the fact that i have some good ways of finding cheap clothes.

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i spilled most of my afternoon tea on my keyboard. i now have an identical yet different keyboard pillaged from the office stockpile of computer parts. but in the process i had a rather obvious epiphany - the travel mug is the sippy cup of adult people, office workers especially. (yeah, it's used for actual travelling as well, but i've known plenty of people who use them constantly and never take them in a vehicle.)

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a good moistworks entry on the term "indie" and the recent great plains/big dipper reunion show.

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the last couple of days of work have been incredibly frustrating, thanks to my computer having a catastrophic problem. first i had no computer for most of yesterday (i finally just took time off and went home early), and now today i have a loaner. and it's a fine computer, but the upheaval and the absence of my familiar layout and shortcuts makes everything a struggle. they're just little things, but when all the helpful little things are gone all at once it's pretty tough to deal with.

speaking of work, i've finally nailed down most of the important details of a work trip i'm taking next week. this coming tuesday through friday i'll be in ann arbor to visit printing and shipping vendors and to take a seminar with one printer. hopefully i'll learn a lot. and my first night there i'll get to see my family in detroit: an uncle, an aunt, three cousins and four kids-of-cousins.

my actual free time while i'm there will probably be limited to one wednesday evening, but if anybody has any ann arbor thoughts they'd like to share i'd be happy to hear them.

my one worry is that i may get kind of insane from hanging out with strangers for three solid days. but then i console myself with the fact that i get to have a rental car. i really do kind of need it, but i feel almost guilty because i'm so happy i get to drive myself around.

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this weekend mostly consisted of a trip to dallas, though before that there was chronicle party, scifi time with jon, and laundry. and after that was burger and doctor who with s & b. so i will digress to say that my trip included the best pizza, lots of good sitting around, a little staying up late, the elbow room - the best first impression i can remember ever having of a bar, extra-tasty hummus and aranciata, and a relatively well-behaved lefty.

the one kind of insane thing that happened was running into scott, my first boyfriend's brother who lived with us for a while when we were together. i haven't seen scott in at least 4-5 years, and i haven't spoken to chris in about as long. it would have been kind of nice but also weird anyway, but to add to the weirdness scott told me that about six weeks ago their dad had a terrible car accident (in a hot rod - he always was really into that sort of thing), was thrown from the car, and now has a pretty terrible brain injury. scott showed me a camera-phone picture of glenn with his head clearly sewn back together. yikes. though i have to admit that when scott started prefacing i was thinking he would say that their dad was dead, so i was actually kind of relieved.

and of course there was driving. that was really nice - the country north of austin is pretty, especially now that it's all springy. i really like driving so i was pretty happy, except for the moment when an eighteen wheeler's tire shredded as i was trying to pass it. i couldn't help but run over part of it, but i checked my car over and it looked fine. meanwhile, the trucker kept going and when i caught up with him later his whole wheel was sparking. maybe that's not as weird as it looks to me, but jeez.

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i will have money again at midnight! whee! i wonder how much of mental list of things to buy will actually seem worth buying by then.

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rcrdlbl with the video for a rocket from the crypt song that still gets in my head sometimes.

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saw the thing last night. anytime wilford brimley is or may be evil it's pretty dang creepy.

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i need a tiny cardigan. tiny cardigans enable me to wear baggy t-shirts without feeling schlumpy, and baggy t-shirts are somewhat necessary when it's really gross outside and one gets sweaty. i may have to do some kind of thrift store tour of austin looking for a tiny cardigan. like this one that i still miss after years and years:

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awesome felted & cardiganized sweater.

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i'm toying with the idea of getting a nicer digital camera. an SLR, presumably. i'm not totally sure - i'm thinking i should probably just use my lovely film camera more - but if anybody out there has any camera thoughts let me know. i can't really afford to get anything really top of the line, maybe $300-400 at the most, though i'd be willing to do something used and in good condition.

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i'm having a very slightly tight end of the month (which hasn't been true in kind of a long time), and the old familiar tendency is coming back: my mind is suddenly full of things i must spend money on right now. mostly i want to go to ikea, which is rare for me. i am trying really hard to parlay this enthusiasm for buying stuff into an impetus to clean my room, which is retardedly cluttered at the moment.

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okay, that is kind of cute. actually i think i like pretty much anything that plays off "hello, my name is" stickers. via swissmiss.

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"A florida lawmaker is proposing a $60 fine for motorists who display "trucknutz" - plastic and chrome replicas of testicles - on their vehicles." i don't think there really needs to be a fine involved, but man are those things ever retarded. if you've never seen these, then just be glad you don't live in truckland like i do.

the best part is that miami herald piece in which one of the state senators is quoted as saying that trucknutz are "a statement of truckyness."

this weekend included scifi friday, eggy sandwich, susan time, laundry, bsg with snacks at brandi's, taco xpress, thrifting, forbidden kingdom for the hair fighting, knitting, casino, and super-smoky pool hall. sometimes with april and jason, hooray!

oh, we saw stephen malkmus at curra's on saturday night.

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this is my favorite cat theremin youtube video so far.

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this weekend my brain was doing its usual thing where i segue from song to song, and i ended up with one in my head that i'd only heard on life on mars. so i decided to try and find out what it was, and thanks to this handy page i now know that it's "when the city sleeps" by barclay james harvest.

looking at that list reminded me that they used the ultra-ubiquitous israel kamakawiwo'ole "over the rainbow" in the series finale.

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hungry!

oh, and there are fonts people have made with it that you can download under creative commons licenses. could be a nice way to find a neat display font.

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i have been having really intense, unusually vivid dreams this week. last night i dreamed that a creepy stranger got in my car and grabbed me, and i woke up and couldn't go back to sleep for a while. then i dreamed about a storage facility for dead soldiers' bodies where you put sd memory cards (like in my point & shoot camera) into little slots in their tanks. (they were stored in water, hence tanks.) my dad and stepmother were there and kept saying ultra-conservative stuff until i asked them to stop. and there was another one where i parked a giant bus in the middle of a store.

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ah, the great ambivalence of friday afternoon. i need enough productive time this afternoon to finish two important things, but i really want the afternoon to be over and to get out of here. at the same time, i have no idea what i'd rather be doing.

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yall, please help me remember that record store day is saturday. i want to go by end of an ear and maybe antone's. but since it's saturday i may very well forget. you know me, i've forgotten about free comic day like three years in a row.

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bridget cross recorded an album in austin? i feel like i missed something.

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i think i'm caught up at work. not caught up as in not behind, caught up as in no projects on my desk. this could change any minute, but for now it's 90% wonderful and 10% bizarre. this very rarely happens, no matter how over-the-top-hard i work for how long.

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i had an incredibly vivid dream this morning that i was a teenager and my boyfriend was trying to get me to rob a yarn store. i had a gun in my shopping basket, but then i freaked out and ran in the bathroom. i kept thinking i should hide the gun, probably put it in the waistband of my pants, but i kept picturing myself accidentally getting shot in the foot. finally the robbery was called off. it's like the dream consisted of too much anxiety for it to continue, or to get worse anyway.

oh, and for part of the dream i was looking in the mirror trying to make my lips look normal, but they were gone and instead my mouth was a slit. that's what i get for rereading pkd books before bed.

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this dress from seller shaybelle on etsy is pretty great, via this storque entry. i would snap the last one up if i didn't have a huge bill to pay this month, but i'm warning you now that one of those is mine once may is here.

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i gotta go knit. hopefully it will help me forget some of my work stress...

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got a new phone last night. it's pink. i got the pink phone because it was free and i liked it better than the next best thing that came in black. plus i think it's kind of funny.

my old phone didn't have a sim card, so i couldn't transfer my numbers en masse to the new phone. actually entering all of them wasn't too bad; i don't have all that many numbers in my phone. but it was a little weird deciding which ones to edit out. there were a few i moved over for sentimental reasons even though they're old as hell, and there were a few that i didn't reenter that made me a little sad. oh, well.

after having the same super-basic phone for nearly three years, this new one's pretty slick and has a camera. and that's kind of novel even though i don't intend to really use it except to make wallpaper for my phone.

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the alamo ritz is fixing to serve booze. i wouldn't mind going to their thin man screening in may. i love that movie.

related to the alamo, i kind of like this shirt.

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hitachino smallcaps.

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jordan crane's awesome triple-belly-band cover for the new michael chabon book.

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ugh, still busy.

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p.s. another good t-shirt.

this weekend included erasure dance party, book work, many hours of couch time with duder (see above) watching old bsgs and doing said book work, longbranch, tasty susan tacos, porch time, pseudo school pictures, stomach ache, april phone time, popcorn tofu, etc. etc.

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i meant to write more, but it's been a long work day and i'm all worn out. i will say that somebody apologized for someone else's work-related rudeness. that never happens. it's a banner day!

what kind of people have a loud party on a sunday night? my back neighbors, apparently. at least it's not the next door neighbors, who had their own party last night (nothing wrong with that, of course).

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nick lowe's playing in austin soon, but i doubt he'll have elvis costello and robyn hitchcock with him like at this show.

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well, i went and got on ravelry after all. i wasn't sure i wanted to do the whole thing at first, but especially now that the rush has calmed down slightly i thought i may as well. i only have a couple of incredibly dinky projects documented on there right now. mostly i'm hoping it will help me pick out future projects.

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speaking of knitting, since i've been working on my forecast sleeve i've gotten some laddering for the first time ever (for some reason it was never a problem before). knitter-friends, do i need to rip back to where i started using dpns and change something, or is there some hope that i can block this looseness out of existence later? i would hate to lose progress. meanwhile, since i came to terms with the fact that it was happening, i've been moving the stitches back and forth among the needles to help the problem.

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work has me pretty frustrated at the moment, and i'm trying to let go of that so i can do megan's going-away happy hour and knitting night. hopefully this scott pilgrim userpic will help.

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do grownups cop out on the clothes you wear?

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i forgot to mention that i helped rescue an iguana this weekend. i found him in a shopping center parking lot, called animal control, ended up helping to catch him with along with a group of random parking lot people, and finally left him at the petsmart nearby to get taken either by animal control or a very strident lady who runs some kind of small nonprofit rescue. poor dude was missing some toes and the end of his tail. i'm happy that he's certain to go someplace safer and better.

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topiary tribute beatle beheaded, via coudal. look at the picture.