Gee-I'm-a-Tree! (Get it? Geometry?)

[I have no idea how this has to do with geometry, I just really, really, really wanted to use a lame tree joke.]

My green raincoat is awesome. I have just recently worn it due to this crazy week of San Diego rain. Lots of compliments too, although mostly from guys, and they go on to add that their favorite color is green, so I'm not entirely sure that it's all that fashionable. But it keeps me dry [excepting the fact that it has no hood]. The other thing is that:

It attracts bugs.

I might venture a guess as to the fact that it is literally the color of spring that bugs think I am an awesomely large leaf. Do bugs have night vision? I was literally attacked vampire-style at the bus stop the other night. Night: meaning nearly pitch black outside and those awful sodium yellow lights that make everything look monochromatic. This huge praying mantis came out of nowhere and landed on my neck, which I, at first, thought it was my earbud wire brushing against my neck, but very quickly realized it was of the live type. I am not afraid of bugs, but I definitely had a minor panic attack just then. Boy sitting next to me at the bus stop gave me the strangest look, realized why I had screamed, got a newspaper and scooped it into the bushes, thus saving it from a squishy fate. I would not have stepped on it, but the bus stop gets crowded at night as people leave campus for home, and somebody would have eventually stepped on it since it made no obvious efforts to move after I flung it off my neck. Such is the life with a leaf colored coat.

Today, I pretended to be a real live self-sufficient adult.

I kinda win.

I did a massive load of laundry, made my bed, took out the trash, and cleaned out some nasty old food from my shelf in the fridge. Didn't take too long other than the fact that I probably spent at least half an hour trying to figure out how to change the favicon for this page. [See the bunny next to the web address? Cute, huh?]

But, the downside to all of this is that I have severely procrastinated on finishing homework and work related business for tomorrow.

Also, our garbage disposal may be broken.

Let me just go crawl into my bush-house over there and avoid being a civilized person.


Sidenote: here and here. The first is the how-to and the second is the handy tool to creating a .ico file.

I love my coworkers.

This lovely gem was left on our lounge whiteboard. Those are days of the week magnets with a "daily agenda" written under each one. It says "kill worms" under each day except Sunday where it says "break". Reminiscent of Eddie Izzard's "Dressed to Kill" standup?

"Death, death, death, death.... lunch.... death, death, death, death.... afternoon tea...."

Video contains language and mature themes, reference starts at 3:00 minutes into the video.

I have no reasonably useful life skills.

So, I have come to the conclusion that I possess no reasonably useful life skills. Why do I say this? My roommate asked me if I had ever actually bought groceries for myself, I thought about it, had to answer no.

Also, I am sitting here eating bread and cheese. I cannot function the stove or anything that does not simply require boiling water. And sometimes I fail at that, too.

Example: In high school, I wanted to bake a cake for a friend's birthday. I won enough sympathy from my sister that she made it for me. She left me to do the frosting and decorations since she was going to sleep. I discovered that we had no frosting whatsoever, and I really didn't want to get out the mixer to make some. I decided to melt some chocolate chips and use it as a sort of chocolatey drizzle on top. I poured some into a glass measuring cup and heated it for 30 seconds. No change. They looked exactly the same. I decided 3 minutes would be sufficient to melt them into a molten pool of chocolate. After 3 minutes, I opened the microwave door, and a huge cloud of smoke bellowed out. It smelled like burnt happiness. In any case, I panicked and grabbed it with an oven mitt and dumped the contents onto my lawn in the backyard. Remember that it's the middle of the night. So there's this black oozing pile on my lawn now, and I have no cake topping. I ended up sprinkling powdered sugar on top, but I think the cake was still too hot, and I covered it with aluminum foil, so it melted into a sticky mess. That cake looked very much less than appetizing. And I've just remembered that it was for AK's birthday when we were still "going out."

Also, I've only recently tackled laundry by myself. I'm far from mastering it. I did have some white towels come out sort of orange hued because of a futon cover that was not color fast.

On the other hand, of my not-very-helpful-skills-in-everyday-life, I can crochet, MS Paint like a fiend, and hoard ephemera like a crazy person.


Here's my friend, the bus stop bunny:

Getting picked last for dodgeball. In college. Again.

And when I say dodgeball, I really mean that as a metaphor for class teams. Specifically: my ASL class split up into 3 teams with team captains to pick people who they thought had the best comprehension and understanding of video stories as a classroom exercise. Thus the dreaded fear: being picked last. Being implicitly told that we are the worst at something. Who said we were going to have to keep reliving elementary school nightmares nearly 14 years later?

It's just been one of those days.

Take me far away.

Real Simple is Real Awesome.

I came across the Real Simple article about 50 new uses for old things. Which, I love. Their series is always really useful, but when I read too many of them, they all start to sound pretty redundant and sometimes not applicable to my life, but my friend showed me this one and I immediately ran and got a bottle of nail polish. Lucky for me, my house has a couple of polish aficionados, so I didn't have to search too hard (or else I might have gotten distracted along the way).

We have this problem, in our bathroom, with any metal items. Namely, they rust. And if it's a can, it leaves a rust ring on the counter. No biggie, wipe it with some 409. But, we ran out of 409. And now, we have some pretty unattractive rust rings hanging out by the sink, and it just looks bad when we have people over and they need to use the bathroom. Real Simple's solution was to coat the metal bottom with some nail polish. Genius. And so simple. I had been thinking of a way to fix the rust staining, but I couldn't think of anything other than glue some plastic to the bottom, but even then I would have rigged up some sad looking contraption. Plus, nail polish is waterproof so I don't have to worry about replacing a paper towel liner (which I tried for a little while).





I just grabbed the least fancy looking bottle out of our basket and started painting away. I can't believe I didn't think of this/see this sooner.

Fold: Kusudama Flowers

I found this great tutorial somewhere online for these beautiful paper flowers. I have this perfect little stack of colored note papers that I use for notes and other random things (like making origami!) right next to my computer. There are some failed/half-folded things littering my desk, but surprisingly, I actually finished this one. This one is pretty simple compared to some of the more elaborate paper crafts on their site.
















Process photos and full tutorial over at Folding Trees. link here.

Aren't those great, especially the ones made with patterned paper? I don't think I'd ever have the patience to finish a whole ball of them though! I'll just have to stick with the one and put a stem on it for some year round cheeriness.

I used Elmer's white school glue (which btw is pretty much the best thing ever! in my opinion of course) and bobby pins to hold the petals together while the glue dried. The glue stick slowly came apart even after it dried, so I re-pasted with the white glue. I folded all the petals at once, let them dry overnight, and then stuck all the petals together in the flower shape, glue and bobby pin, dry overnight. Pretty easy especially because I don't have a lot of time to spend crafting.