*Nerdgasm*

THIS IS THE MOST AMAZING THING I HAVE EVER SEEN.



To watch it full-sized (without the right 15 pixels cut off) or to send people the link, I got it here, at the Daily Shite.

EDIT: Not sure why the comments link isn't showing up. It can still be accessed by clicking on the post title.

Achey breaky heart

So, my dad's slowly improving. He's still getting chest pains when he walks quickly, and he's dealing with a variety of problems like low blood pressure, irregular heartbeat, water in his legs, etc. His heart took some permanent damage, and now operates at 35% capacity. But he's getting better. My parents' already low-fat diet has gotten even more spare, and they've been making and eating a lot of smoothies.

I may end up needing to make some serious life changes, myself. Reason #1: the doctor said that although my parents have been eating pretty low-fat for the last 20 years, it was what my dad ate in his 20s and 30s that did his heart in. Which sort of sinks my whole eat-like-crap-now, be-healthy-later philosophy. Reason #2 is still up in the air -- I need to get my cholesterol tested. I've never had it done before, and if I've inherited my mother's cholesterol, I'm off the hook. The woman could eat fried chicken every day for the rest of her life and she'd probably be fine -- her numbers are amazing. But if I've inherited my dad's numbers, I'm in pretty serious trouble. No more pizza and buffalo wings -- not if I don't want to go into cardiac arrest in my mid-60s, anyway. And guys, I like pizza and buffalo wings. :/ How depressing would that be.

Good times

I had a great time visiting Michele and Catherine. We ate absurd amounts of really tasty food, did a little window shopping, watched some good tv/movies, and had a lot of really good chat time. Then Cath and I picked out some cds to listen to while we made the 5-6 hr trip back together and never actually ended up turning the music on -- we just chatted the whole time.

And can I just say how incredibly happy I am that it's actually acting like Spring outside? It was *so* lovely all weekend, and although I was prepared for slushy rain on the drive back today, it was partly cloudy instead and gave us a beautiful sunset to drive into for the last two hours. Apparently it snowed here Saturday morning, but it had melted by the time I got home.

I'm really looking forward to Spring and Summer in my little apartment. I'd been considering moving fairly seriously, but now that I've decided to stay, I'm very happy about the decision. My complex has a pool, I'm attached to the place, and I'm quite settled in and wouldn't like the hassle and costs of moving. I might spend some time this Spring throwing away some old stuff I never use anymore and maybe painting the walls. I might even go really nuts and find something to hang on my pathetically blank walls. It's weird -- I don't want to hang up posters under the rationale of I Am Not a College Student Anymore, but buying real art is expensive and I always think, well, geez, I'm an artist, I should just make something. But anything large I've done in the past few years has been of naked people, which might make dinner guests uncomfortable and would definitely make things a little weird when my roommate's baby brother comes to visit.

On a similar note, I've decided I really need to figure out the whole art school thing this year so I can apply somewhere in the fall. I'm really ready for life to move on -- it's good to have a job, but typing someone else's emails for a living can get a bit mindnumbing.

Update!

Regard! Cloth!



I'm trying different kinds of weaves/patterns. (Click to embiggen image.)

A tangled web we weave

Gaah, I'm a bum blogger, guys -- sorry. Part of my excuse is that I was in Virginia visiting family for a while, but, well, most of it is that I was lazy/busy with other things. Like, for example, my first weaving lesson!

I have (am renting) a loom!:



My teacher, Julie, is having me start out by making a scarf. The process of weaving itself is only so complicated -- like knitting or crocheting, it depends on how complex and intricate you want the final product to be. However, while with knitting you start by picking up a couple needles (or with crocheting, a hook), grabbing your yarn, and you're ready to go ...getting a weaving project off the ground is a bit more complicated.

I'd never really thought about how the thread gets on the loom. For a scarf to be 60" long, I can't even remember how many yards we measured out (using a warping board), but it took a while. You take the colors you want and go back and forth, back and forth.... We then took it off the board, folded it up in a funky loopy-chain way (which Julie will have to show me many times over before I get it right), tie it off in a few places, snip here, snip there, and voila, you end up with several threads of a given length which you then have to roll onto a bar at the back of the loom, which, in the picture above, is where the brown paper is, on the left toward the bottom (the paper keeps each revolution of threads from tangling with each other).

At this point, I'll skip a step or two because a) I don't want to put you to sleep, and b) I don't remember exactly what we did. It involved lease sticks. Most of my time since has been spent thusly:




Threading the heddles. See those metal rods? Those are heddles. See the little holes in the middle of each of them? Each of the 160 or so threads had to be pulled one by one through each of the holes in a certain pattern. There is no way to sit up straight to do this, since you have to lean way over the reed to get to the threads, and since it took an hour and a half (then another 1/2 hour when I realized I'd screwed up and had to go back and redo about a quarter of it), I had the biggest knot in my upper back by the time I was finished.

PS, doing this all with a curious, not-declawed tabbycat watching your every move? It's like war... mindnumbing tedium punctuated with moments of blind panic.

Then I grabbed a hook and pulled each of the 160 strings through the reed (I wasn't quite finished when I took this picture, as you can see):




That was less tedious, or at least less painful, than threading the heddles, since I could sit up straight. It also went faster, and was kind of relaxing.

Purdy:



I'm now done until my next lesson, but I'm not ready to start weaving yet -- when Julie comes over this week, she'll show me how to tie down the front end.

Not only do I have the loom set up by the window, I also have a nice view of my beloved little apartment:



So that's the news here.

In which Holly anticipates exerting PAINFUL AMOUNTS OF SELF CONTROL

BSG update! I finished season three this weekend! :) So much awesomeness in one TV show -- I wasn't aware it was even possible. My friend Kathleen and I decided we want to watch the series finale together, but unfortunately she's still back on Unfinished Business, which means I now have to slow way, way, waaaaaaay down if we want to finish at the same time. This may involve physical pain. Courtney's where I am in the series, but while she likes the idea of watching the finale with us, she has yet to show any interest in the slow down part of the plan. I'm a bit jealous, but honestly, I've got family plans later this week, I haven't gotten my hands on a copy of season 4.0 yet, and I do want to slow down and savor the last season because I'm starting to FREAK OUT that soon I won't have any more to watch. (*sob!*) It'll be sort of nice to get back to real life, but really... only sort of. Sigh.