The Duality of Man

I just watched Full Metal Jacket for the first time the other day. Surprisingly, I’ve seen all of those Vietnam war movies… Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter, Platoon. So R1 (my DH, also referred to as ’son number one’ in his parents house hahaha) was pretty horrified when I told him I hadn’t seen Full Metal Jacket since it’s THE Vietnam movie OMGWTFBBQ.

We’re having people over to our place now that we’re respectable, with places to sit, things to set things on… and honestly I just want to show people my washer and dryer because I am ridiculously giddy about them still. Picture it like a game show… only you don’t win anything, you just get to look at the stuff. (So basically a pretty lame game show. A lame show.)

Cath’s cat Poo is the sechsie model for this picture. I freakin LOVE this cat!

This is the new project I started on, a pair of socks for Granma. Cookie A.’s Hedera… While I know that everyone is crazy about her Monkeys, I thought Granma would appreciate some lace in her life, since that’s our theme lately. BTW, I’m excited for the spring shawl suprise to start up. Although I’m a little worried about the lack of written instructions. Hmmm.

Oh yeah and I’m knitting those in some delicious Lorna’s Laces:

40% off baby!

I got the yarn and sent Granma some in ‘grapevine’ and forgot to take some pictures! So hopefully I’ll get to see the socks she makes out of it and can get a picture sometime. Apparently she has some sort of pattern that curves or something, so you do it differently for left and right feet. Leave it to her to find the crazy patterns.

Have you guys noticed that I have a problem? There haven’t been any FO’s in the past month and every other post I’m casting on for some new project or another. I’m getting too distracted by everything. I hope I can calm down and focus on stuff soon. In the meantime, I set up a thing in my closet for my yarn because I’m tired of it getting tangled in that bucket.

Which brings me to my next question/thing I wonder about… do most people who knit have a desire to collect things?

PS: He loved the blanket

He also loved the game my mom got him for Christmas. In the video he’s playing it with Jimmy. (Which I need to add that I think it’s adorable that Cath and Jimmy are married and both have blogs. TechnoMarrieds.)

Man, these blog entries just keep getting less and less cohesive and more and more wait- what?

Holiday Vortex

I’ve been sucked into one.

Sax doesn’t care as long as she gets fed.

Every year I fool myself into thinking that I’m a ‘Holiday Person’ and every year I get sad when I realize that I’m just not one. Sure I could point fingers and blame other people for me being a Scrooge but it’s really just in my disposition to hate on Christmas. Or at least the commercial beast that Christmas has become.

So yeah, I don’t have kids and they’re kind of what makes this season so ‘magical’. Or what makes things more stressful- jolly. There aren’t too many twenty-something holiday pageants… if there are any, that’s really creepy.

However, I have already gotten an early Christmas present- it was from my dad:

The gift of clean clothes!

Yippeeeee! He got us a new dryer. How cool is that? I’ve done like twenty loads of laundry in the past 24 hours because I can. It’s getting to the point where I’m just washing whatever I see. The cat has gone into hiding and I honestly don’t blame her.

When we were out looking for the perfect washer/dryer that would mesh well with our lives (I totally picked the washer because I liked the clicking noise it made) my dad said something that freaked me out. It was something along the lines of “this is your guyses first Christmas together.” At first my face ticked, what? All of those other Christmases didn’t count? Well apparently it counts now that we’re married and we’ve gone legit.

Then the worry set in. Wait a minute… does that mean this is like a big deal? Then panic. Oh man, the stuff I got him is lame! A quick call to my Granma cleared everything up though. For her and Granpa’s first Christmas together, she made matching pajamas. (His and Hers PJs.) So logically, for our first Christmas together, I should make John something… which leads to the blanket.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a quilter. I am not pretending to be a quilter. I cannot quilt.

Blankey

Half Life, Rush, Princess Peach, PacMan.

I’ve been making this thing for like three years. What it looks like won’t surprise him but probably the fact that I finished it will.

Oh yeah and the ending of that story that Granma was telling me? She said that Granpa still remembers their first Christmas because she left a pin in one of the legs and it stabbed him.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

A disturbing experience.

Okay, so first of all I want you to know that I have been so lazy lately. So I’ll show you the knitting first so you don’t have to skip down to see it.

My good intentions scarf.

I had such high optimistic hopes for this scarf. Had the yarn for a year, its just been sitting around… It was supposed to be for a brother in law for Christmas and I thought, I can do it!

Turns out I can’t. Since I knit so many scarves the first few years I was knitting it turns out that I’m totally burnt out on them. Even though sweaters are just big scarves with shaping, I’m still mildly interested in the sweater I’m knitting…

My progress so far…

See, I haven’t taken any pictures of it lately because the work is slow and unimpressive. Also, for some reason in this picture it looks like I decreased or something but really I’ve been adding stitches in whenever I felt like it. I’m just making all sorts of bad decisions when it comes to this thing!

Oh yeah and Baldy? He just sits in his bag crying.

People were getting all crazy and demanding with their Christmas “requests” but luckily Granma was there to save the day! My MIL is a bit of a… over reactor? She was creeped out by the fact that all the Barbies in her house are naked. What else are Barbies supposed to be? Whatever, Granma to the rescue!

Oh yes and my personal favorite, it’s Hammer Time:

How amazing are those pants??

Okay, so in other news: I’m seriously frightened to go out to dinner anymore.

Earlier this week we went to Longhorn, for what I was hoping was going to be a delicious meal. What I got was pop spilled in my lap and a pretty unapologetic waitress. If you’ve been to one of these steakhouses or types of steakhouse, you can verify that their glasses hold a lot of liquid. a lot. She went to go get a towel and mumbled one “I’m sorry” and I kind of grumbled… it’s okay? Although it wasn’t okay. She completely got me and they had sat us right next to a door (another complaint of mine, since it was pretty much empty when we got there, why did we get sat next to the door…?) so I was pretty much freezing.

Did a manager show up to ask if everything was okay? No. The hostess watched it all happen and didn’t do anything either. They were all talking to the waitress like they were all BFF’s. She brought me some chicken fingers and dropped one of those two and was just like, oops! Seriously- worst waitress ever. She was completely uncaring about treating us like crap. Every time I looked for a manager to complain to, nothing. There was a guy who looked like a manager, who I’d make eye contact with and then he’d go the other way. This place was ridiculously shady.

Then the final insult? She charged me for the drink.

Anyways, I emailed them and got ahold of the district manager who assured me that’s not how they typically do things and would I like some gift cards…? Did my pants need dry cleaned? Am I going to murder everyone who works there? Honestly, when people give you the worst possible service, why is it always protocol to give them gift cards to get them back in again? Why not just refund their original meal? Anyways, supposedly I’ll be getting some giftcards and we’ll probably use them at a different location to see what the deal is. (If you live in or near Columbus- NEVER go to the one at 161 and Cleveland.) The real burn is that we went waaay out of our way, passing other better steakhouses (Texas Roadhouse) to get to this one to have dinner with my mom.

Also, since I’ve been insanely lazy (you have no idea how bad I’ve gotten) and haven’t been cooking ANY food, we’ve been going out a lot this week. Last night was our first time going to Jason’s Restaurant and Bar… I feel like this blog post is getting long since there haven’t been any pictures for a couple of words, so I’ll skip right to the reason I’m terrified right now. We ordered potstickers and they were the most delicious potstickers I’ve had, maybe ever. However, we get to one and guess what? There was a metal shaving on the bottom of it!

A freaking metal shaving guys!

Why does the food industry just have it out for me? I think it’s telling me to be less snarky or something… otherwise they’re going to kill me through sharp metal things in my food, or through hypothermia from spilled drinks combined with being next to a door in winter. Yikes!

At least at this place the waiter was awesome. He was upset, explained how it had happened (metal wok, metal wisk = internal bleeding) and comped our wonderful potstickers. Then made a joke about it, which put me at ease and we finally got some attention.

I’m not a food critic, I just eat out when I can, so you can disregard this next part. Something about Jason’s was totally not jiving with me. First of all, it was really busy, there were these huge parties there and they were all quite loud. So I’m not about to blame them for the Really Loud Person (RLP) that was next to us. Not only was she an RLP but she was also a clapper. I mean, she clapped about every two minutes. Like we were at a concert or something.

The thing was, the acoustics in the restaurant were just bad. I’m not the type of person to notice that kind of thing either- unless something is really wrong. Well it was really wrong. On one half of the booth we were in, it was so loud you couldn’t hear the other person. On the other half it was still kind of loud but it wasn’t too bad and it made you go… why is the person across from me yelling?

Jason’s seems like the kind of place where the owner, Jason, makes really good food. However… that doesn’t necessarily mean you should have a restaurant. The parking, like all parking in Old Dublin, sucked. It was really loud. It seemed like a nice place and all but then they had white sheets of paper on the table. That takes the class right out. The acoustics were messed up and there was a metal shaving in my food. However, the food was really good. I think we might go back… on a night that’s really dead. Although, I wouldn’t order what I got because it kind of sucked, since it’s me… and there was probably rat poison in it or something.

You’ll never take me alive food industry!

Complete fluff.

I just decided, why not make a completely fluff post? (We can pretend all of these aren’t usually that and act like me acknowledging it this time gives the other ones some substance, kthx.) Most of these I found through this forum that I’m on… it’s strictly for robots though.

Wizard Swears:

Heh.

You wanna buy a ghost?

Disturbing alternate DuckTales intro:

Also, if you don’t live around Ohio, we actually got some snow. It’s winter before February this year. Weird.

I was feeling so stressed out by holiday knitting and just decided to give up on the projects I’m working on right now and read the rest of Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. Wow! That book was so lame at the beginning but it definitely picked up. Well everything good happened in like a three day span that made me think we could’ve just cut through the preceding months of back story and gotten right to the chase. Of course back in the day I guess people wanted to get their monies worth when it came to books… or something.

Real Talk.

(If you click it, obviously since it’s R. Kelly, it’s NSFW… probably not safe for most living organisms either, hehehe.)

A story about my dad…

I didn’t edit this picture… he’s just wearing two pairs of sunglasses.

My dad is an enigma. Sometimes infuriating and sometimes really great, he’s a mixed bag- you never know what you’re going to get with my dad. Anyways, my parents don’t get along, which leads to stories both terrible and hilarious, one of which involves my birth certificate. Neither of which will take credit for losing it.

However, when I got home from my trip to Minnesota I realized that I had lost my license and in order to get one I needed a copy of my birth certificate. My dad’s solution:

My baptism certificate.

I was like, what, in case I get Jesus at the BMV? Good looking out dad.

But Christmas time is rolling around (had you noticed?) and of course, he needs a list of what to get me. To which I’m like, yarn! BUT very specific yarn. Poor guy. So I tell him specifically what yarn I want and his head almost explodes. Which means that I have to spell things out and he’s scribbling all of this nonsense down about what color and what type of yarn and you can just hear the strain in his voice. You know, that ” oh man, I love you but I have absolutely no clue what you are talking about right now” kind of panic creeps into his voice.

Today he just quit fronting. He called me and was like: “Yeah, so about that yarn… How about I just give you my credit card number and you buy it and send it to the house. Then maybe you can act surprised when you open it or something.”

On a completely unrelated note, knitpicks anybody?