Kiss My Knits!

Sept 1942 Better Homes and Gardens.

This ad talks about Westinghouse’s scholarship which was offered equally to boys and girls who showed oustanding promise in engineering. Not bad for 1942. It reminds me of my eighth grade math teacher, Jean Wean, who did engineering work on submarines for the government during WWII.

A couple of weeks ago, someone on vintage_ads despairingly asked whether ALL old ads were oppressive to women, since that’s what we tend to post since it gets the biggest rise. I guess there’s always a bright spot somewhere.

Five hours and two toothbrushings after eating a helping of that cobbler, and these are my teeth. It looks like I’ve been brushing with AquaSmurf. The ladies in my knitting group noticed, but apparently weren’t going to say anything, the dears. Dad, you’ve been warned.

For the record, it was totally worth it.

Note to self: smile with mouth closed tomorrow.

When Tvini gets enough sleep…

Everybody wins!

(Yes, Dad, I’ll be over later.)




By the way, maybe everybody already knew this trick, but if you have trouble opening those clamshell packages that everything seems to come in now, try using a can opener. I remembered this trick after I sliced my finger open, and it worked like a charm. Second fun trick I tried that worked great: instead of cutting chunks of butter into the flour, freeze a stick of butter and then grate it into the flour so it’s already in little pieces. It trimmed my cutting time by 3/4, easy. Tips from Tvini!

Yesterday I went to Michael’s craft store and saw one of my local Starbucks baristas. It led to this exchange today:

Different barista: I heard from a little bird that you went to Michael’s the other day!
Me: Yes, I saw that little bird! I did go to Michael’s!
Emily, to me afterward: What did the little bird look like?

Heh. Language is funny. I explained the phrase, and it led to great comedy wherein we laughed about how birds don’t go shopping. Good times.

This week:

I was nearly brained several times by party members with quarterstaffs. For a while I thought it was all coming at just me, but then the Elf nearly got axed in the nards, so there you have it.

Two party members attempted to set an entire passageway ablaze with a wall of flame to incinerate our enemies. They succeeded in setting a third the passageway on fire in a thin line to a height of about six inches.

The element of surprise gone, we charged into a chamber that we thought had a few skeletons inside, only to find that… well, you know that scene at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Yeah, it was that, but with undead instead of Bolivians.

In the course of the battle, our hireling set himself on fire. It’s not D&D night unless someone’s on fire.

Things took a bit of a turn for the worse when my Dwarf was enchanted by a kobold necromancer and started fighting against the party. Sorry, guys.

In the end, though, we defeated the bad guys and earned enough experience to level. I got shoved down a flight of stairs for some heavy damage, and our rogue came within one point of passing out, but nobody died, so I’ll call it a success. So far, so good!

When I was 16, Akira Kurosawa’s movie Ran came out. Being an artsy girl, I naturally wanted to see it with the artsy boy I was dating. We both loved film. However, we were both also teenagers, so when we actually met at the theater to see it… we wound up going elsewhere and necking (just necking!) in a parked car. I don’t remember if it was his idea or my idea. I really did want to see the movie, but hormones will be hormones.

When I got home that night, my mother was awake but in bed. As I got ready to go to sleep, she called through the wall separating our bedrooms that she had had to leave in the middle when she saw it (that’s reasonable, it runs almost three hours) and she wanted to know if the old man died.

Frozen like a deer in headlights, I said something like, “Uh, I really don’t remember. I think so?”

This was clearly a bogus response. The old man was the central character in the film, and if I’d seen it, there’s no possible way I wouldn’t have remembered. To this day, I don’t know if it was an innocent question or if she was suspicious and asked to see if she could catch me out. (Mom reads my blog, so if she even remembers this, maybe she’ll tell me.) A very unpleasant conversation through the bedroom wall followed, with my mother justifiably angry that I’d lied and me feeling miserable and apologetic. I was a pretty good kid, overall, so parental disapproval was very upsetting. Damn you, hormones!

Anyway. I saw other Kurosawa films, but never did get around to actually seeing Ran before it left theaters. I always wanted to, because I really like Kurosawa and because at some point it seemed ridiculous that I still hadn’t seen it after all that turmoil.

So now I’ve seen it. And I’m glad I did. Two thumbs up. And I get to mark it off of my “things to do before I die” list so it won’t bother me anymore. So today, that’s definitely one in the “win” column!

The nice thing about longer nights in Fall is that we have dark mornings, too. This may not seem like a plus sometimes, but this morning my daughter and I were able to go out the front door and see Orion in the sky. It was a good way to start the day.

Our family went to the Carolina Renaissance Festival this weekend. My husband had won free tickets, although we would have gone anyway. We had a good time. I saw a couple of journals I liked from the booth of The Journal Guy. I’m looking for a good journal for writing down dye combos. Unfortunately, many of the ones he had in person at the fest didn’t seem to be up online (he had a nice green one I was eyeing pretty hard), and I only got a chance to look for about two minutes before my family started wandering off and I had to hotfoot it after them. Ditto with a spinner and fellow ravelry user. I stopped to talk to her for several minutes, and my penance was quick-stepping all the way back to the entrance and then back to the rear of the fest again to figure out where my husband and child had gone. Answer: watching the belly dancing. Em was fascinated with the belly dancers. I have a cousin who belly dances; maybe I can get her to give us a few pointers.

Sadly, I do not have a picture of the belly dancers, so here’s Em on one of the rides. There was a good Browncoat showing among vendors and staff, by the way. Mr. Tvini wore his Captain Hammer shirt and I wore my Serenity shirt. Mr. Tvini got maybe two “hey!” recognitions, and I got about ten (including Journal Guy). I handed out Jayne hat cards liberally (which is the way I do everything – heyo!). Renfest is a good venue for geeks of all stripes.

A giant package of 100 6x6x6 cardboard boxes came in, so I’m ready to stamp up some more and ship out some Jaynes. The wait right now is about seven weeks, so I want to stay on top of things so that the maximum number of people get theirs by Christmas. Everyone in line now will, of course, but I want to be sure there are many, many happy Browncoats this holiday season!

Right now, I’m going to finish watching Ran and knitting, then go for a little run while it’s still cool. Good times.