On Monday, Alan and I bought a house.
Shannon Patterson
Feb 182012
Dec 212011
I made this stuffed dragon for my niece for Christmas. She’s a little over a year old and hopefully she likes it. This was my first attempt at something three dimensional and animal-shaped. I think it turned out pretty well. I got the pattern on Etsy about three weeks ago, after making some small plushies for my cousin’s baby that were incredibly simple but cute.
I don’t think it is fantastic. The wings aren’t aligned correctly, the head is slightly turned, and the neck feels weak to me, but I ran out of time to make a completely new second dragon, so it will have to do. I would definitely make another dragon for friends with kids and think that the next time around I will be able to correct some of the mistakes I made this time around. Hopefully despite its flaws it’s well received.
Dec 042011
Ready Player One
Ernest Cline
2011
Do you ever find yourself wanting a book to take longer to read, because you just want it to keep going and going? Would you neglect your children (if you had any) in order to finish the chapter you’re on, and then read “just a little” into the next chapter, hoping they won’t notice? Do you find yourself thinking of who else needs copies of this book, and how you can afford to buy each and every one of them their own personal copy?
Yep. It’s one of those.
Ready Player One is the nerdiest 80s nerd book I’ve ever read. In the first chapter, there’s about a dozen offhand references to things I loved that originated in the 80s, starting with The Breakfast Club and Heathers. At some point, one character says to another “We can dance if we want to. We can leave your friends behind.” There are puzzles to solve that involve being obsessively knowledgeable about things like Quest For the Holy Grail or WarGames.
The whole thing reads like one giant text adventure. There’s crazy Blade Runner technology. There’s a terrible future and a beautiful virtual reality. There’s a quite touching romance, and a tournament that everyone in the world wants to win. A ragtag group of mavericks fighting an evil cabal who wants to destroy the purity of their world.
It’s just a whole damn lot of fun. Stop reading this post and go find it at your local library. Or buy it. It’s definitely a book worth buying. I’m probably going to buy a copy for myself.
Lookie what I made!
Why yes, that is a quilt! It’s something I’ve been working on for about a year.
What you see in front of you actually started out as the back for a different quilt. When I was done making the back, I realized that I liked it a lot more than the original quilt, and started on a new project with a better quilt top.
I’ve “made” other quilts before. What I mean is that in the past, I have made a quilt top, put it in a plastic bag, delivered it to my quilting mother, and maybe a month or two later, a blanket would appear that looked vaguely like the thing I’d started with, but a billion times cooler and more useful. This time around I did everything.
Which is why this quilt is tied. I don’t really have the time or patience to actually quilt. Sewing a sandwich together for months on end seems like something I wouldn’t thrive at. I almost had a little meltdown when Mom told me I had to hand stitch the binding. (Binding is the border around the outside that glues it all together in one pretty little package.)
One of the nice things about the tying and hand stitching process was that it involved many hours of standing in front of a television. I watched all of the first season of Downton Abbey and most of Misfits which doing the hand tying. The hand stitching was mostly done while watching Archer.
Another nice thing for me about having a quilting project is that I spend my days moving form fields around on a computer screen; making something more blue; or possibly inserting, updating or selecting data from a database. When I go home at night, I can’t really pick anything up and say “This is what I did today”. I guess I could put the subversion repository on a USB stick, but it’s not the same thing. This thing takes up physical space. You can pick it up, throw it across the room, wrap yourself up in it, pretend you’re a quilt monster. Read books under it. That’s kind of cool. I can’t do that with my medical billing software. No matter how cool that database query was.
Now I just need to figure out what to do with it. I don’t really need another quilt, and I probably shouldn’t start on another project until this one is out the door. Bonus points to those of you who stopped to look at what books were on our bedside tables.
Oct 222011
Cat’s Cradle
Kurt Vonnegut
I don’t care that apparently everyone on this planet loves this book. I didn’t. I finished it yesterday and I have already forgotten who characters were and what motivated them. It just didn’t stick with me.
I think I’m done with reading Vonnegut for a little bit.
