Maybe Can't Blame This On The Cat

Goodbye Irene. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.

We got nearly eight hours of 35-45 mph sustained winds with gusts of 70 mph, something like six inches of rain, then it all abruptly stopped around 10:30pm and with the very occasional whoosh of rain and wind. Due to some magical meteorological anomaly, or perhaps The Vortex, we had stronger winds than Newport News did despite the eye passing right over them or near them or something. Somehow the power stayed on in my block so I have AC today and they say the water coming out of the faucets is OK to drink. Like it was ever OK to drink in the first place.

The winds sent a huge cloud of stink and haze up our way Friday morning from the Dismal Swamp fire. It's now completely out so I don't have to wonder if a sofa in my building is smoldering every morning when I leave for work. Probably had something to do with that foot of rain they got last night.

The worst was when the giant weatherman came along and slapped his hand right over Richmond. I hate when that happens.

Since my apartment windows face a church wall I had to go outside early this morning and wander around a bit to see what we had going on. The power is out everywhere so it's eerily quiet even for a Sunday morning. Except for the cicadas. How the hell did cicadas not get drowned in the storm? Do they have snorkels??? Did the rain wash new ones out of the ground during the night? Damn things are louder than my air conditioner.

There's a park a block or so east of my apartment and storms (or giant weathermen) usually knock a few trees down every year. There was a pack of homeless dudes on the other side of the park partying like hell so I didn't go any closer.

A casual walk a block or so west of my apartment shows more storm (or giant weatherman) damage and it's pretty minor compared to other parts of Richmond. I went out without coffee so I didn't go as far west as I had intended. I knew there was a huge tree snapped in two a few blocks further up but I kept having to walk out into the street to avoid tree branches and generators on the sidewalks, but then I'd have to get out of the street to avoid all the lookyloos in SUVs. See, I don't count as a lookyloo because it's my neighborhood.


The Spotted Thing was less than impressed by the whole thing. I guess if he couldn't bite it or knock it off the wall he couldn't be bothered with it.


Note added 12:26pm: Hurricane Irene has shifted The Vortex to another room!

Novel Hell

Randomly, here's giant monster Grady checking out the pile of notes I've scribbled to myself at work, stuffed in my pocket, then can't decipher when I come home and sit down to write. He's no help whatsoever because he inevitably tramples his way across the keyboard and I have several of his paragraphs I have to delete. See, he's not terribly good with dialogue and his grammar is haphazard at best.

Oh, and tropical storm winds are beginning to roll garbage cans down the alley because some butthead forgot to put theirs away last night. The doors on my floor are rattling during wind gusts so I suspect there is a window open on one of the other floors but I can't be bothered to go down the stairwell to check.


And for any of you who were concerned about The Vortex (you know who you are), the earthquake did no harm to it whatsoever and brooms still balance. The Vortex also still plays hell with Ocicats' little pea brains and renders them immobile when they sit in that very spot. Eerie, no? No.

Bored With Hurricane Irene Already.

Nine a.m. and not much tropical storm action yet, though the entire city descended upon the local supermarkets like lemmings and bought up all the bread and milk on Thursday. And creamer. I went in Friday morning on the way to work to get coffee for the weekend and saw that they'd wiped the bread section out completely and bought up all the good creamer. You know, the creamer they're discontinuing so I couldn't get the last couple jars and hoard them like a crazy person. Curses.

Don't know why people insist on buying milk when there's a storm coming because the power inevitably goes out. Might as well pour half that gallon jug down the drain first thing. What do I care? I just wanted my fake-ass vanilla caramel creamer, dagnabbit.

On the other hand, I still have cable so I get to watch weathermen getting blown around for a few hours. Instead of putting those little gale-force flags up they should just check the conditions by seeing how many weather guys get blown away. "It's a Two Al Roker storm out there!"

I'm feeling sure that I must've stolen that line from some comedian a few years ago.

This is the extent of my earthquake damage. One old plastered-over 3 ft crack that re-cracked. With every aftershock it gets a couple inches longer. Not my problem because I don't own the building.

Oh, and don't make eye contact with the evil smirking Edwardian child in the painting. Whoops, too late!

Apparently I can sleep through an earthquake. I've claimed that for years but never had the chance to put it to use. Early Thursday morning there was a 4.5 aftershock that I completely ignored. I'm sure if I had woken up I would've blamed it on the cat and yelled at him because having something to blame stuff on is the main thing cats are good for. Broken bric-a-brac, weird smells, that inexplicable sound in the middle of the night, blame the cat. Unless there's a guy around.

Grady says, "What, me? I'm spotted and I'm cute!" Ha! He bites like crazy and hurls his 17-lb. bulk around like a drunken fratboy. Earthquake? Feh. Sometimes I think I have a wild animal loose in the house.

Crappity-Crap-Crap

I still seem to be inexplicably slogging away at that soul-sucking hellbeast of a novel. *shakes fist feebly at computer screen* I'll defeat you!!!

Dammit, it's laughing at me! Make it stop laughing!!!

Each circle on this map represents craters left after that fleet of invading aliens used Virginia for target practice. Notice that they couldn't be bothered to blow more than one hole in Danville but they Swiss-cheesed the hell out of D.C. I'm guessing they tried to drive in D.C. traffic and just couldn't take it any more.

Oh, and thanks for leaving me here on this shithole planet, guys! Merci buckets.

Spent a few minutes yesterday doing what everybody else on the East Coast was doing--standing out on the sidewalk looking for the gas main explosion or the freight train derailing or any of the other things that happen way more often than earthquakes around here. I suppose we're lucky we didn't get beaned by any shoddily-fastened Victorian decorative doo-dads while we were out there because those are usually the first things that come down when the wind blows harder than 20 mph.

It was pretty helpful to have local newscasters tell everyone several hours later that we all should've stayed inside and crawled under a desk, like we were going to remember fifty years from now when the next one happens. Of course I was standing out front touching a rattling old plate-glass window. Why? Because it was awesome, that's why. Not like I don't get to handle huge sheets of glass every damn day at work but they're not usually shaking. Anyhow, we were way more concerned that a whole creaky old building would come down on top of us to worry about crap from the outside of the building yanking itself loose and amusingly jamming itself in the tops of our heads.


I don't have any photos of earthquake damage but I do, however, have a photo of what last night's 4.2 magnitude aftershock did to a 17-lb. ocicat. What did it do, you say? It knocked him right on his lardy ass, that's what it did.


Somewhere around here I have a map that shows how far north smoke from the Great Dismal Swamp fire has drifted up to but I can't be arsed to find it. Just pretend you care that smoke from a couple hundred miles away stinks up Richmond worse than usual every few days or so. Last week it had drifted as far as D.C. and damn if they didn't think they were special because of it. Of course our earthquake made them way extra-special, at least until the aliens shut them the hell up.

Hurricane Irene (Door #3 in this Unholy Trifecta of Crap we got going on) should put out the fire and sweep the smoke away Saturday but I don't have a map for that either. It'll also be another chance for hundreds of shoddily-fastened Victorian decorative doo-dads to rain down upon the populace. I'll probably be standing out in the rain watching.


Instead, I have this dandy map of future alien targets, stolen by me when I accidentally hacked into the mothership's main computer while trying to Google a recipe for Russian Haired Sausage. Yes, I am fully aware that "Russian Haired Sausage" sounds vaguely like porn, but everything on the internets sounds like porn.

Crafty Hell

Uhhh, apparently I've been sucked away for the past six months to some other dimension by a crappy horror-comedy novel/shitfest I seem to think I'm writing. I've slapped together like 275 pages of pure dreck thus far, but considering the amount of total garbage I've been reading lately that's gotten published I probably shouldn't have any problems selling the fucking thing. I am quite possibly delusional at this point.

Whatever. More on the progress of the 275-page soul-sucking thing later.

Ladies just have way too much damn time on their hands in the South. No, I didn't make this, whatever the hell it is. It hangs on a bathroom door at my parents' house, possibly as a reminder that Southern crafters should maybe find other hobbies before they start making lace toilet brushes, false teeth cozies, and knitted doilies for hemorrhoid cream tubes. It's bad enough they like to crochet toilet paper dolls and fashion decorative fish out of bars of soap and tulle.

On the other hand, I did make this thing. Those googly eyes will follow you to your grave. It's actually a re-do of a pillow I made years ago. A friend had a vile little black and red velvet cat pillow she'd found at the thrift store and I just had to have one so I traced the cat on some newspaper. Unfortunately I only had some nasty brown fake fur and a blue print fabric to make mine.

It started coming un-stitched a couple years ago and the flowers and ribbon came off but I never got around to fixing it. A couple weeks ago I found a huge bag of fiber batting at the thrift store and hauled out some scraps of red corduroy and black velour (both from the thrift store), traced the horrible brown kitty and made another pillow. Everything from the pink ribbon and white flowers to the googly eyes came from random thrift store grab bags over the years. Except for the ladybugs. Those came off a robe or something my grandma made for me when I was like six.

The Spotted Thing is less than impressed and he's trying out a little cat stink-eye on me.

I keep intending to post new knit patterns, but I haven't really done any new things for the past few months. I did manage to finish the gray lace/cable knit stockings and I'll have the pattern up at the Knit-O-Rama in a bit, but I can't seem to get much further than one-and-a-half black lace stockings, mostly because I'm pissed off at the yarn. Cotton has no fucking memory whatsoever so it sucks as a stocking material unless it has some Spandex or elastic in it. Pfffttt. So I'll most likely just photograph the one for the pattern, then re-knit the pair in wool for my own deviant amusement.

I promise you they look way better worn than they do flopped out on the bed like that. Thee was no point in posting the black lace stocking photo I took because there's a way better one here.

I started back on that leaf purse last week. When I run out of plot or my characters won't dance, monkey, dance like they're supposed to I've been stringing beads. I'm almost 2/3 of the way through the chart and will be thrilled all to pieces when I'm done with it because I've got a couple little ones I want to make with roses and such. They'll probably be about half as wide as this one.

Beady crap, left to right. Amber bracelet from Bead & Button magazine June 2009, black and hematite leaf bracelet with purple berry clusters and magnetic clasp, amber/purple/black crocheted lariat necklace six feet long. These I made probably back in September or October before I got burned out by beads and that damn (snort) "novel" came along.

Meh. Back to it.