inkyblack.net

Sometimes you have to do a reality check, and remember the bits of awesome all around you.  Folks may have noticed that I haven’t blogged recently (not sure if anyone other than family reads this, but it’s true*).  Mostly that’s because life has been crazy lately, particularly with trips to various doctors for various things.  Nothing serious…one doctor who doesn’t believe my blood pressure is perfectly fine had me do a 24-hour heart monitor that, in the end, proved that (for once) I was right.  Yay!  Other trips to doctors were for girlie things that I’m sure the public doesn’t need to know about.  The last visit (yesterday) left me feeling so flattened that I had to take the day off work today to recover — headaches, what felt like a mild fever, and tummy upsets.  Yuck.  Should be all better for tomorrow, though.  A hot bath and a long lie-in will help that.

But instead of wallowing in feeling ugh-ey (yeah, that word?  It’s MINE), I decided to actually write a little & share some bits of awesome.  It’s been a grey, rainy day, so why not a little cheer?

Tulips!  After my chiropractor visits, I have to take a little walk afterwards to loosen everything up.  On one of those trips, I took this picture of one of the gardens along my route.  There are a couple of spectactular gardens to be seen, let me say.

Yep.  These are the kind of folks I work with.  While I may not be approving of the pretentious inner-city gas-guzzling sport pickup truck (I mean…really), I think the bumper sticker is 100% pure awesome.

No, don’t adjust your monitor.  Those cookies are green.  GREEN.  They were even greener in person, and really really tasty.  Last week, when I was doing that heart-monitor thinger, I had some fun in the kitchen.  I took my Mum’s tried & true chocolate chip cookie recipe & altered it to have less sugar and gluten.  Not that I’m gluten sensitive, but every bit counts.  I substituted the sugars with Splenda & Splenda blend, and the white flour with Pea Flour & Whole Wheat.  Awesomely tasty!

That?  That would be BPAL.  Sniffies of various scents from Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs.  Took forever to get here, but well worth the wait…AND they threw in some extra imps (that’s what the wee samplers are called).  Most of the scents in my order were intended for the Husbeast’s use, and most of the extras seem to have been along that vein.  Yay!  And now I have more of my favourite scent, “Gluttony”.  YUM.  These have been camped out in my living room for a couple of weeks, since either we’re too lazy to take them upstairs, or we’re enjoying trying the scents in the much larger environment downstairs (less shower & hair style product smells to interfere).

Just off the needles, a Baby Surprise Jacket!  And yes, even though it’s acrylic, it’s awesome.  What’s also awesome is the fact that I have figured out how to knit using straight needles.  The set shown are a pair of aluminum needles by Boye, which seem to do the trick quite well.   Folks who remember how long it took to make the last two BSJs will be glad to note that this one took maybe 2 weeks.

This is a sock in progress out of Online Supersocke yarn in a pattern by Wendy Johnson of Wendyknits.  They’re turning out rather pretty, and I’m enjoying playing with my circular needles again after spending some quality time with straight needles.  No, this isn’t Wendy’s latest book…I haven’t yet picked that one up.  Expect a review of the older one soonish (really, the books came out rather close together, and while I love a prolific author, I haven’t finished with the first book yet!)

I’ve saved this bit of awesome for last.  Mainly because I have no idea how to be eloquent about it.  My brother and his family brought this little girl back home with them from the US, and my Mum & Dad made sure we brought her home to our place.  I’m hoping that the picture can show just what it is we see in her when we look at her.  It’s a kind of awesome malevolence.  Don’t think we don’t appreciate her…we’re far too scared of her to do otherwise.  Yes, she’s still in the packaging.  Generally, she’s in the glass cabinet in our living room.  Why?  Because if she’s in the sealed package, behind glass, she can’t get out. (And no, we wouldn’t display her if we didn’t think she was cool.  Otherwise, we’d stick her at the back of a closet, probably in a salted circle, wrapped in charmed ribbons.  Yes, seriously.)

And yeah.  You DO see a Douglas Adams book and 3 different varieties of Munchkin.  Because that is exactly how we roll around here.

* I figure that I can never become a hit knit-blogger because I’m just not alternative enough.  I haven’t eschewed all modern conveniences, adopted the latest gizmos, and become vegan.  I live in what passes around here as the burbs, have a mortgage, and like to eat meat too much to give it all up for coolness.  I also don’t have a way-cool alternative-type job that lets me be creative-as-fuck all day.  Otherwise, I’m sure there would be more finished projects.  Sad, eh?
And yes, that was all said tongue-in-cheek

You’d be surprised what I get up to when I’m left alone for any given amount of time.

It started innocently enough…I updated flickr. I updated my blogging (below). I updated Livejournal (bet that’s a name some never thought they’d hear my mention again). I went looking for my old backup HTML of inkyblack.net because I wanted to look over past iterations & possibly incorporate them into Wordpress.

I found some things on CD that never need to see the light of day again.  There’s something to be said for more than 10 years of working on one’s maturity.

But at any rate, that had me looking up inkyblack.net on the wayback machine.  I saw inkyblacks going back to at least 2001.  There have been quite a few versions, particularly when I had other artnerds around me for long amounts of time.  I think that in one year I had over 4 versions of inkyblack.  Yeek!  Even more yeek-worthy?  I’ve used this template since at least 2007.   That’s a LOT of years of artnerd laziness.  Ouch.

I also noticed that I used to keep a couple of different blogrolls.    Three, actually.  One for folks I knew from work (not particularly relevant now).  One from friends on LJ (if they’re still on LJ, then I’m still reading bits & pieces as they’re posted)…and then there was the third, the list of “people I don’t know in RL, but whose blogs seemed interesting”.  Out of that last group of 19 blogs, only 7 are still blogging, at least at the domains they used to use.  I found maybe 2 or 3 who haven’t updated in a long damn time (anywhere from a year to over 4 years).

So in honour of nostalgia (and possibly I will be visiting those sites more often again, we’ll see), I’m listing them here:

Christine - Big Pink Cookie
Joelle - Tenth Muse
Kristine – Kadyellebee (more like a lifestream than a blog now)
Meredith –  Amanita.net (lifestream & blog mashup)
Mikey – electricbugaloo.com
Pamela – blackdaisies.com
Trish - scalewhore.com