Remember when you used to be a teenager...

and you used to lie around on your bed, playing with fire and listening to heavy metal and thinking about suicide and Christian Slater (not necessarily in that order)? Remember those poems you used to write, that you kept in that notebook with all the really deep drawings and drafts of fan letters? No? Must just be me. Anyway, regain your (my) youth at the Bad Poetry Generator. It combines horrible, angst-ridden poetry with another obsession of my teen-hood, Mad-Libs. Here's mine:

Desperate Rain

I feel so desperate and angry sometimes,

sometimes i want to rasp my heart and die,

the rain is so sorry-ass and sad,

the clouds sound like Kali.

I feel so desperate and angry,

nobody understands my redemptive, gloomy pain,

I want to ride and chase in the rain

the rain reminds me of feeling angry, the clouds mock my regret,

sometimes i want to rasp my heart and die,

underneath the sorry-ass, lowering sky

believe it or not, I actually discarded the first one and chose new words after I understood how the script was going to use my choices...how lame...I'm a Mad Libs nerd! P.S. The site is run by a girl named Laura who seems pretty cool...visit her sidebar and at least try out her other "mewlibs" and visit her store...and click on "advice" under "fun" and get some advice. You need it. I know you do. I did.

No post today...

because I don't feel like it. I know that's dumb, posting about how I'm not going to post, but I feel like I'm here at the computer, I can't just ignore the blog, but I really don't feel like writing anything. Tho, I apparently do because I am.
I finished the front to the Shapely Tank and cast on the back, I'm about to the second complete wrap row and I'm having serious 'second sock syndrome' because my hands are tired and I already did this once. I guess at least this time I don't have to do the bust short rows. Unless I get any fatter. And you know I'm already planning the next one, so I don't know why I'd balk at the back of the first one. I'm such a dork. Anyway, I might also cast on for this cute little knitted cat I found on Wool Works. There's no picture, so beyond the basic idea I get from reading the pattern, I have to knit it to know what it looks like. I have some cute cotton yarn in a sort of peachy-to-ivory variegated that might make a cute little tabby. We'll see. And I want to start the front of Noah's sweater, but I don't have a single pair of 6 needles, which is what I need for the ribbing at the bottom. I can probably do it with 5's or 7's, but I kinda want to do it exactly right. Oh, screw it. I'll just cast it on and it'll eventually get knitted. I guess the headline is kinda redundant now. Whatever. There's a good funny post about sex, about three posts down on my other blog (the myspace logo in the sidebar) and you should check out Mighty Girl (also in the sidebar under People/Blogs) because she's awesome. Okay, I'm done not posting. Good night!

I'm in love with a man named John...

I e-mailed Blogger Help last night around 3:30 am about my problem, carefully explianing that I did it mucking around in the template tag and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was. Then I went to bed, hoping against hope that when I woke up it would be magically fixed by some manner of magic. And it was! I had a polite and helpful e-mail awaiting me from a person named John, who not only explained what I had done wrong, but had fixed it for me. I love Blogger and I love John! That's right, his name is John, not Tom.

Distraction tactic

I've got some kind of weird error in my template that's causing each post's font to be half the size of the font in the previous post, so that by the bottom of the page a 500 word rant appears as a single, fine line under the headline. And I can't find it. And it's driving me insaaaaaaane. So I'm going to write about something else until the pounding, pulsing pain in my brain goes away.
One good thing is, it hasn't been raining much today. I saw on the Weather Channel that we had 7.5 inches. This week. Please send water wings and Pina Coladas.
And I took some pictures of me I kinda like. I mean, I look like what I look like in real life, instead of what I look like in my head, so obviously they're totally unsatisfactory, but aside from that and from my camera never, ever, ever taking a focused picture, and from my need to overcompensate for the fact that I couldn't take a squared picture to save my life by making everything cockeyed, they're great.
I hate when my fingers go off the home keys, because I'm totally lost for about 20 keystrokes, just type, backspace, type type backspace trying to figure out what's wrong, and I can't just look down and see what's wrong because if I do my high school typing teacher will leap out of the shadows and disembowel me. And then usually my poor fingers get so disoriented I hit insert instead of backspace, and then I'm really fucked. At that point I know something is really wrong, cause I'm hitting the whole wrong group of buttons at that point, so I snatch a quick look at the keyboard (while clutching a kitchen knife) and stick my hands back on the right keys, and when I start typing again insert is turned off, so when I look at the screen at the end of a paragraph, the place where I jumped back to edit looks insane. Yeah.
Our cat Kelvy had a feral mom and has lived at our house since he was born. When he was about a year old, someone in the neighborhood hurt him really badly so that he can't use one of his front legs, it's broken at the shoulder joint and hangs limp. Or, I should say he can't walk on it. He can move it and he uses it like a hand. It's creepy. Anyway, we kept him in the house for about 8 months after he got hurt, helping him get well, and when he was as healed up as he was going to get, we had him fixed before we started letting him go outside again. But by that time he was two years old, and it didn't change his behavior much. Right now there's two slutty cats in heat circling the house yowling for him to come out and service them. I kind of like the idea of him being the safe-sex gigilo of the neighborhood.
Okay, I feel better now. I'll go do one more hour of troubleshooting before I go to bed, and maybe it'll be fixed before anyone reads this.

this is what it sounds like when doves cry

I'm hungover. I love it when I'm still hurting more than 24 hours after I started drinking. It reminds me of when I was young and stupid...you know, last week.
Yeah, so I had a big date with 11 Lone Stars last night (as Jessica would say) and they convinced me to take a nice little driving tour of the county between 3 and 5 AM. I didn't do anything wrong or get arrested, or kill anyone, or drive in a ditch, and I remember being content except for wishing I had more beer and a few ciggies...and a date, but whatever. You go trolling for sexual healing around here after the bars close you're likely to end up living in a trailer and appearing on Jerry Springer before your next birthday.
So I got home safe, went to bed, and got up at noon today to help mom with all the ladder work in the kitchen. Did you know that if you, while hungover, climb to the top of a ladder, look straight up for a while with your arms over your head, then look back over your shoulder, you will swoon immediately? Now you know.

I'm closing in on the Shapely Tank.

This isn't it, tho. It's my cat:
I put pictures up at the tank-along, the lovely pink button under knit-alongs in the links on the sidebar. Very soon I'm going to have linked myself out of a place to blog at. Oh well. I'm not going to duplicate the pictures here for the simple reason that I MUST POST PICTURES OF MY CAT! It's a rule, I found out. You can't be a knitter and a blogger and not post pictures of pets. Check it out, click some links from the sidebar. They all have pets, and they all post pictures. So here ya go: Her name is Odista, and she's a badass.

Awesome!

You must go to this website and do whatever they say. If you do, you will be rewarded with old-school lovey arcadeness. Do as I will!
Also, since I'm apparently on a cut-paper jag today, go here to make your own beautiful and unique snowflake. It was kind of hard to get the hang of it, but I figured it out and so can you. And check out the gallery for millions of...unique snowflakes.
In addition, not really on the paper-cutting topic but sort of, here is some good practical advice all of us could use, in an easy-to-understand format.
And finally, totally abandoning the theme, take your dog and hie the unto Dogster, for Pete's sake!
That is all.

I'm learning to knit continental

and loving it, largely due to this site and the videos therein. I especially love the caston method with no slip knot. Yayyy! The animated illustrations are neat too, but I'm a little too dumb for anything but video. I think I'll really love continental knitting if I ever get the hang of it.

Rosebud Actually

Okay, so I'm up late last night drinking wine and watching movies. The only hitch is, about six months ago my tv decided only to show color when it wants to. So it occasionally would show a few minutes of whatever you were watching in black and white. Kind of like everything was The Wizard of Oz And here I am, pauvre bebe (actually more like 'lazy bitch,' but I can't spell that in French), I do nothing about it. So about three months ago, the whole balance switched so that it showed about half color and half black and white. And now you only get a minute or two of color, lasting maybe 40 seconds.
And, of course, being a child of my generation, I am trained to think of anything shown in black and white as a "classic" movie (not that that means anything now that Rocky has entered the oeuvre), an experience in cinema, a brilliant work by a directorial auteur beyond compare.
Which makes watching Love Actually on this tv a little jarring. Not that it's a bad movie, it's plenty fun and great, but Hugh Grant boogieing down the stairs in the PM's Residence is no Citizen Kane. Y'know?
The other thing I'd like to talk about, concerning Love Actually, is the use of color to signify emotions, but it turns out everything is significant when seen only in less-than-a-minute flashes. Never mind.

I gotch'er knittin' right here...

There ya go. That's the back of a sweet little hoodie I'm making for Noah, my little third cousin. He's three, and I'm knitting the "6" size from the pattern, so maybe by the time I finish it he won't have outgrown it. I got the yarn on sale at (hey, a sale's a sale) Wal-Mart. It's Bernat Denimstyle, I'm doing the hoodie in "Batik" and "Jordache." Yep, that's right. Red and black. I also picked up plenty of "Indigo" and "Rodeo Tan," or as we in the real world call them, blue and beige. I initially bought them because they were $1.75 a skein, but now I'm working with the yarn, I really like the texture and the tweedy-esqe colorway. Hopefully I'll end up making myself a sweater of it, too. Of course, it being a sale, I did'nt find enough of any one color to make an entire sweater, so everything I make of it will be striped. Which is fine with me. I love stripes.

Weeee-haawwww!

I have reliable and free image hosting. Jeezly peete, what a trip. The thing that still kills me is that I was literally surrounded by refrences to different free image hosts, pretty much constantly when online, and it still took me weeks and weeks of trying everything that wasn't easy, reliable, free, or even appropriate before I tumbled to the real thing. Anyway, you can see I now have buttons out the yin-yang down the sidebar...I'm not done hunting them down and putting them up, tho. On the off chance any of the referents down there reads this and you don't have a button, or I've got one you don't like anymore, or you hate me and want me to stop mentioning you, drop me a line. I'd be more than happy to oblige you. Yayyyy! Buttons!

Okay, here's something...

a photo of my dad's nearly finished Broad Street Mitts from Knitty that I started way back when. Maybe by next winter I can finish the thumb and mitten cap (literally the easiest parts...I'm just bored) and actually give them to him. It's about 45,000 degrees here and the air is made up almost totally of water, with a molecule or two of oxygen in it, so he can't use them right now anyway. Maybe if I knitted him some swim flippers...
Anyway, I made a post a while back about how excited I was to be knitting these and I thought I'd show a picture...

Strange but True

For the record, what was messing up the blog was my visible counter, the one on the sidebar that everyone can see, from http://www.nerdsonsite.com (don't bother, they've dissapeared, which is why my counter stopped working and dicked my whole blog). The web-stat thingie has been working all along. I really, really like it and hope everyone who needs webstats will go to www.webstat.net and sign up. Don't go for the free one either, tho that's what I've got and I love it. Pay them. Whether you need the extras or not. (Think I made up yet for calling them dickholes? Even though I meant Nerds on Site?) My favorite thing about it is that it tells which searches resulted in someone clicking on your site. There are lots of odd things that people searched and then picked my blog to click on, like "kellye cash naked" and "kellye spam" (my blog was the first hit for that one, with the bonus that the summary included the line about, "why don't you ever get spam about thorazine?") but the weirdest thing is I got 36 hits from searches on "ElmorePisgah Inc." or some variation, or one of their yarns, because of my going insane a few weeks back over how I couldn't find a single bit of internet presence for the company or their products. And now I kind of am one. Oh, by the way, the website is now here. I don't know where they were all this time. The other high referrer I get is searches for "beastpaint." Go figure. I can't imagine that there are that many people out there looking for it, but more than that, I can't imagine that if you were searching for the real thing you'd click on my little ol' blog. Bizzare.
Oh, if you're scared of what sort of diabolical information I'm collecting on you, e-mail me from the link up there and I'll give you the info you need to look at my stats. I ain't got nothin' to hide.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, the 50 megs thing didn't work out. Why? I'm a retard. Yep, that's the reason. As I was browsing through the photo contests on Fark and B3ta, bemoaning the lack of a free, easy image hosting solution, the answer came to me like a...like a...like a guy on the message board talking about the free, easy image hosting at Photobucket.com. Why am I so stupid?

I'm not as smart as the dumbest monkey.

I've been having a beast of a time getting my photos hosted without paying for it, as anyone who regularly reads my blog (read: me) knows, and the whole time I've had an active free account at 50 Megs. I wasn't using the 50 Megs account for this blog because Blogspot and Blogger are easier to use, and we already established that I'm not very smart. But I can easily use the many photos I already had loaded to the 50 Megs image manager and any others I choose to load there to illustrate my blog. God, I'm dumb. Thank you for your patience.

In which I abuse my (?) readers and bemoan my brother's car:

Sorry the blog was down awhile, I really didn't know. I wasn't checking the blog, but I was checking my e-mails. Sorry if the link is too hard to find, right over there above the sidebar. I checked when I realized that a drunken template "fix" had crashed the blog, but the e-mail link was still operative. Thanks for nothing, dickholes. All three of you, anyway. Yep, my high-powered web-tracker says I had three visitors this month. Oh, yeah, and the code I finally found that was dicking the whole thing up was the code that lets my high-powered web-tracker track my site. Which means I had to delete it, which means I have no more web-tracker anymore. Which means I have to go back to pretending I have the slightest idea who might be interested in this mishmash and why. Again, thanks for nothing, web-tracker dickholes. Oh, yeah, and here's a newsflash:

Non-Insured California Dickhole Totals My Brother's Audi, Nearly Kills Him, and Dissapears.

Check it out--

BEFORE:



AFTER:





I would show you pictures of his stiff neck and numb arms and hands, but those kinds of things don't come across as well in photos. He really is hurt, tho, he went to the emergency room after an hour or two and they sent him right to physical therapy. And they won't let him drive or go to work (he's got three jobs!) for a few weeks, then he can only work a few hours a day and only do "essential" driving. And they've given him all kinds of serious "has a street value" narcotic painkillers. Which he won't share. His neck is killing him, he has to take them so he doesn't scream continuously, and he hates taking medicine, so it must be really really painful, blah, blah, blah. He's so selfish (I kid! I kid!) Yep, he's really hurt for real. I know, I thought he was just a wussy at first too, but I found out different. I could show you a hilarious picture of my cousin Terri and I throwing french fries at his face and him not being able to duck (from before we knew his injuries were so serious, I assure you) but some total drunken idiot deleted them trying to take an evidentiary picture of the greenest hotel bathroom on Earth. Really, it was soooooo seafoam green everywhere I was afraid I'd driven through a time warp into 1953.

knitting knews

I've been away so long I can't remember anything, so I'm slowly reading my own damn archive to know what I've already said ad nauseam. I think I haven't shown this picture before, of the bottom 1/3 of the front of my Shapely Tank (visit the blog-along-pink button, over there somewhere) or the first strip of my afgan, so here they are:

  

Coming later today: a fascinating explanation of how my image hosting solution was literally something a monkey could have figured out all along; pictures of my brother's beautiful Audi before and after some total hosebeast from Cali totalled it and nearly killed him and disappeared with no insurance; pictures of several new and old projects with excruciating, link-ridden explanations of exactly how I'm knitting them; a discussion of Arizona's "The Thing?", and approximately three uses of my new favorite word, 'dickhole,' for which you can thank Jessica.

Anybody out there?

I'm back! I've figured out my photo hosting problems, so there should be a couple pictures down there and more will be coming soon...of course, I pulled my old retard/boner act and accidentally deleted all my trip pictures, so you can't see any of those, (I'm banging my head on the monitor as you read this), but I've got some saved up from before that that I've been waiting and waiting to show you...see you in the morning!