Month: January 2015

Habit is Great!

(basic character)

(full Healer battle gear)

(with a golden gryphon and a cactus mount)

Hey!  Are you faltering on your resolutions?  Maybe you need HabitRPG to spur you onward.  As you journey along you get fun outfits and eggs to hatch into pets and all sorts of things that don’t really matter but are fun.  Keep track of habits, daily routine stuff and your to-do list.

It’s free, it’s fun, it’s worth checking out.

If you want to read more, here are my more in-depth posts from last year.

Tip #1

Tip #2

Tip #3

Tip #4

Tip #5

Circle Skirt part I

Gertie’s New Book for Better Sewing has a schematic to make a circle skirt. I had material left over from the capes I made last summer, so here I go.

I had very little pattern paper, so I made my right angle in one corner.

And then raided the wrapping paper for the rest of the pattern.

Here are my two pattern pieces, the waistband and the skirt.

I moved the chairs out of the way to clean and then left them while I was working on the skirt.  Sentinel found a new seat to sit on.

Sadly, while I had thread and the material, I did not have a zipper, so this is as far as the circle skirt has gotten.

The preferred method.

This is a moot point because I’ve switched over to an electronic calendar, but I need to point out to nearly all of the planner makers that the above is a better setup than five days the same size and Saturday/Sunday sharing one space.   We have things to do on the weekend.  Lots of things.  It used to drive me crazy, having acres of space to write things Monday through Friday and then squeezing in the Saturday and Sunday details.  Here Monday through Thursday share one page and the remaining three days share the other.

Oscar nerd.

Yes indeed, it’s a few hours after the Academy Award announcements have been made and I have a handy spreadsheet to prioritize my viewing.  As usual, I’m quite behind in my viewing,  but I might be able to make a dent in the list by the time the ceremony rolls around.  First up?  Birdman, which Matt and I have been meaning to see since it came out.

Here’s the number one thing that drives me crazy about the Oregonian.

Longtime readers know that I am quite frustrated with the shell of the paper that the Oregonian has become.  But here’s my number one hatred.  They are so namby-pamby with their changes.  Don’t want to publish a paper copy of the newspaper anymore?  Fine, stop doing it. That would be better than this four-day a week hybrid we’ve got.  Don’t want to have certain features anymore? Just print an announcement that you are discontinuing them.  That would be much better than just ushering said feature/person out the door and  waiting for us to wonder what ever happened to the guy who wrote the local political cartoons for 30 years.  Don’t like the name Oregonian anymore and want to be called OregonLive, even though it’s a stupid name?  Fine!  Just change the damn name. Don’t start using this weird, wordy, dumb looking hybrid Oregonian/OregonLive.  Be the newspaper you want to be and see if we all follow.  We probably will.  We’ve got nothing else.

Three sentence movie reviews: the Skeleton Twins

This was the perfect combination of funny/sad and both actors were excellent in their performances.*  While I could have done with another lip-synching choice** I still appreciated the camraderie of the estranged brother-sister.  And the pain felt very realistic, which is not as common in movies as one would think.

Cost: $3.00
Where watched: Laurelhurst with S. North.

*props to Luke Wilson too, who played affible goofy/odd husband like a champ.
**because I can’t stand Starship

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2014/skeleton_twins.html

Three things from the paper.

Ads like these make me very angry.  I dislike the pressure to look a certain way, especially after putting your body through the reverse boot camp that is the process of creating life.  I also hate how the model’s torso is stretched out to make her look thinner.  And I hate that three surgical procedures (any of which could kill you) are crammed into one day.   When I was growing up, my father often bought the Sunday Oregonian (which was available in Boise) and the plastic surgery ads always disturbed me.  The Idaho Statesmen didn’t have plastic surgery ads.  But I bet it does now.

This is the biggest “duh” statement of the day.

And this just made me laugh.  It reminds me of the “learn multiplication facts AND have fun!” nonsense.