When the going gets tough...

When the going gets tough, the tough take on a slightly hysterical giggly edge. Here is my favorite image for high-stress times (if you read this blog you've seen it before):

Yep, that says it all. Laugh at the picture. Then really look at it and try to figure out why someone in a full Darth Vader costume is at the beach. Laugh some more. Then wonder why he's filtering water into a non-beverage-container bottle - that shape looks like a vinegar or ammonia bottle to me. Not ridiculous enough? Did I mention it's Darth Vader? Standing in the ocean? Did anyone tell him that Brita filters don't remove salt? Is the person in the photo doing this out of necessity or were they inventive enough to think this was a good photo op? I'm always laughing out loud by this point and whatever my problems are seem farther away.

So what's my problem that made me pull out my Sense picture? My company is "restructuring" the entire Marketing department. For anyone who's worked in a big corporation, you know what that means. Because the new positions don't quite align with our current ones (some are eliminated, some are meldings of 2 current positions) they decided the best way to handle it was to "eliminate" all of us and have us apply for the open positions. I updated my resume today, always an embarrassing thing to summarize your current job for your current employer. Interviews are next week. Everyone has told me not to worry, that I'll be hired for the position I apply for. What has me stressed is that the new position is one of the melded ones, so I'll have a much higher workload. And the threat of more travel looming. My current rate of travel is 2 weeks traveling, 1 week home. I'm trying to get it shifted to alternating travel weeks, but stuff keeps popping up at the last minute. I'm still home for most weekends, but not sure how much longer I can keep this pace.  Think I'll just stare at my Sense picture some more.

Maybe the snow slowed down the zombies

I traveled to Atlanta this week for work, the week after their Snowpocalypse that shut down the city for 3 days. This is shocking when you think that ATL is the busiest airport in the world, and when you know this disaster was caused by all of 6" of snow. There were still HUGE piles of snow a week later.  Well, huge for them, rather modest in more northern eyes. Thankfully there was no snow or bad weather while I was down there to delay things.


Do you like zombie films? I love them! My favorite has long been 28 Days Later, which introduced the modern fast-twitch zombies (as opposed to slow plodding Land of the Dead type), and the idea that zombification starts from a highly contagious virus. And if you like silly zombie movies I highly recommend Dead Alive, a Peter Jackson film from New Zealand, where the main character tries to hide the fact that his mum is a zombie with hilarious results.

But my new favorite is the series The Walking Dead which recently aired on AMC. It had great zombie effects and did a really good job creating the zombie storyline without any holes. It also had several shocking twists that kept us guessing. And by this point I'm sure you're wondering how this ties in to my trip. Well, it's filmed in Atlanta and in the previews they head down an empty highway into the city, and it turns out it's the highway we were driving on. I also drove past the CDC to see if I could get a pic from the same view as an episode, but the front entrance is kind of behind another building.

We went to a variety of hospitals in the city, including the famous Northside Hospital, where every Atlanta native is born. I was shocked to see a McDonald's in the main hospital. Not only is it there, but the overhead directions signs to find places like radiology and cardiology always included the McDonald's too, and you knew you were nearby when you could smell the fries in the waiting rooms. We stopped in to get a bottle of water and kill some time, and there were signs up indicating the Weight Watcher's meetings take place in the McD's dining room.  Here I am at one of the entrances:

MEIXD UP

So  the following was posted on Facebook and I thought it was pretty interesting, since it wasn't until the explanation that I gave much thought to the process my brain was using to read the text:

AOCDRNDICG TO RSCHEEARCH AT CMABRIGDE UINERVTISY, IT DSENO'T MTAETR WAHT OERDR THE LTTERES IN A WROD ARE, THE OLNY IPROAMTNT TIHNG IS TAHT THE FRSIT AND LSAT LTTEER BE IN THE RGHIT PCLAE. TIHS IS BCUSEAE THE HUAMN MNID DEOS NOT RAED ERVEY LTETER BY ISTLEF, BUT THE WROD AS A WLOHE. IF YOU CAN RAED TIHS, PSOT IT TO YUOR WLAL. OLNY 55% OF PLEPOE CAN :)

 Now there's a couple questions I have. I know what they say about thinking in words, not letters, is true from my days learning ASL sign language. Reading fingerspelling was very difficult since our beginner brains were still mentally translating every letter. The teacher told us to try and "read" the whole word instead of the letters. I think if she had told us to grab the first and last letters and use our gut for the middle it would've been easier.

So now my analytical brain starts picking apart the post itself. If the human brain reads the word as a whole, why can only 55% of people read the above paragraph? I have to assume everyone was a native English speaker. And does a dyslexic person have an advantage since their letters are mixed up all the time? Does the writing have to be in capital letters?  Wlel, I sopuspe taht one is esay to tset. Tihs guy wklas itno a psiachyrtsit's oicffe wtih a dcuk on his haed. the psiachryrtsit syas can i hlep you? and the dcuk syas yaeh get tihs guy off my ass. 

Another thought is that they didn't do a great job scrambling the letters. They have whole chunks intact :

RSCHEEARCH vs. RCSEEHRACAH - one is a whole lot easier to understand. I think it would be interesting to see the difference between 100% scrambled and phoneme-scrambled. In the end though, it's pretty cool your brain can sort it out with only a small delay in comprehension.

Tis better to dye with friends than to die alone

Over the holidays I visited with Lawre, my garden-buddy, and she showed me some beautiful blue faced leicester and silk roving she had received as a gift and said our friend Liz had also received a gift of the same fiber. I immediately recognized it as the same fiber I'd splurged on at MDSW this year. It was so soft and luminous - one of those over the top fiber blends that makes you cry with happiness to get to spin it. Liz & Lawre were getting together to dye theirs, and I thought it would be fun to join in with my ball of fluff too.

We debated sticking with our mutually favorite colorway of purple-blue-green, or trying to branch out. We settled on red-orange-yellow-purple for a fiery sunset kind of look. With exacting precision and consummate care we measured our dyes [excuse me, I have to get a towel to sop up the dripping sarcasm pooling around that last sentence]. We soaked the fiber in hot vinegary water, squooshed the water out, and laid the fiber on plastic wrap. Lawre went for a long zig zag snake, I spiraled mine in a long oval, and Liz chose short back and forth zig zags. We took turns filling big syringes with dye and squirting it onto our fiber.

I knew I was going to split the fiber in half lengthwise to spin. I had an idea that with a long color repeat it would be possible to have a 2 ply yarn where the colors stay pretty cleanly consistent. It makes sense in theory, I hope in practice it comes out as well as in my mind. I think Zauberball yarn does the same thing. I intended to have longer color segments, but my hands did what they wanted, and now that I'm spinning I think it was a wise move.

 I think I added way more dye than anyone else. I really wanted to avoid any white spots. By the end I was just free-pouring from the dye cups. Though the number of rinses it took to get all the excess dye out makes me think I overdid it a bit. But the colors didn't get muddied, which is all I really care about.

When the fiber finally cooled and dried (a VERY long process that makes you remember that wool is favored for its heat retention and moisture absorption), I was a bit disheartened. The colors were pretty, but the fiber was kind of matted and didn't slip and flow like it did originally. But after some serious predrafting and fluffing it was again wonderful to spin. The colors are a bit weird in this photo, everything should be much warmer colored.

A bit of wave from the wool crimp gives the yarn more life than straight top, and seeing the different colors turn into yarn is really fun. I'm spinning much more now than I have for the last year. Makes me think I need to dye some more fiber soon.

I don't believe in resolutions

Resolutions usually seem to be set up not to succeed. I think the best ones are achievable with small changes in attitude or lifestyle, not these drastic ones touted by the January Marketing Devils. I didn't actively think of a list, but some popped up during conversations with people over the last couple weeks. So here goes, things I'd like to stick to in 2011:

Post to my blog (with photos!) at least once a month.

Visit with certain friends at least once per quarter.

Get back to working out or doing yoga at least 3 times per week.  Try to build up to a barefoot 5k.

Stop wasting so much time.


Yeah, I think that sounds like a good reasonable list. I hope I can keep with it. And in that vein, since I still don't have a cable for my camera, here's some photos I found online. The funny thing is I would totally buy both of them.  Hell, I  may try and make the loafers myself.

Looking at them again, and thinking that I do need a pair of brown shoes, I really wish those giraffe shoes were real.

Jumpin' on the band wagon

I was holding off posting waiting to get the photos off my phone - I finally sit down to do it, can't find the cord, try to use the one from my USB charging mat, and learn that NOT ALL USB CABLES ARE CREATED EQUAL. Apparently some of them can't transmit data, only power. I am not even going to get into that.

Let's start out with my annual bloggy tradition of going back and listing the first sentence of the first post from each month for 2010 and seeing how well it describes the year:

I found a great youtube subscription page entirely of women drumming. (Actually the 2nd post. The true first January post was: "It was so great for 2008, let's see how my 2009 blog review stacks up." But that felt like cheating)

"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it." Edith Wharton

My bellydance class meets at the local dance studio, which happens to be part of the YMCA building, which also houses a thrift store. 

I was out shopping at Marshalls/TJ Maxx and fell in love with this totally impractical pair of shoes.

I had such a good time at Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival (MDSW). 

One thing I love about traveling is finding unusual places to eat with foods out of the ordinary.

It's been hot enough lately that I've avoided taking the dogs on pedestrian adventures.  

I'm ready for yet another pair of socks.

Dangit!  


I'm indecisive.

Wow, life has been ZOOMING by the last few months.

Yes, I have a Facebook account.
 ................................................................
Yep, that does sum up my year pretty well. I was wondering how it was going to do since in truth 2010 went by so fast I had trouble even thinking of what I did all those months. I looked back through my journal, tried to remember months in my mind, and still fell far short of 525,600 minutes worth of memory. And I'm disappointed to learn that there are actually 525,948.7 minutes in a year - the writers of Rent apparently forgot that one revolution around the sun is 365.25 days.

So what did I do to bring in the new year? On the 31st I took the dogs on a long fun ramble through the woods, dropped off all the thrift store donations, returned some items at the store, mailed some boxes, and at 11pm I cleaned out all the leftover food from the fridge & freezer, did the dishes, and emptied the trash. I wanted to bring in the new year without anything hanging over me to do tomorrow. Well, except I didn't finish the laundry. But I think that's fitting.