I was a brilliant author when I was small. Do you need proof?

Ah, childhood. How I miss you.

I think it’s a good decision on her part; she’s mad at me for failing to post anything I’ve finished over the past few months. At this point, I’m simply trying to figure out what it is that I’ve been doing. Hopefully that means there will be more photos to come? For now you get this:

My Picasso-era travel socks, done since November. For detail:

 Now I’m mass producing handwarmers “for sale”, but how many times have I said that in the past?! We’ll see.

It’s tough to get a detail shot in low light:

Perhaps the next project will have something to do with this:

In other news, I had an infection in one of my molars last March/April. The Kalamazoo dentists told me that my tooth was rotting around a filling, while my Ann Arbor dentist told me there were no visible problems. The first opinion suggested a root canal, while the second said “wait and see”.

Well, guess who was right? Over the holidays that infection flared up again. Basically, it’s been working away at a low level for nine or ten months and I now have significant bone damage. (We won’t even talk about the abscess…yeah.) I’m having a root canal on Wednesday because they can see a likely cause (the decay around the filling), but there’s a good chance it won’t stabilize and I’ll have to lose the tooth anyway. I also have a small crack in the tooth, and if it turns out to be the actual cause I’ll definitely have to lose the tooth.

So. What do you do when your lifelong dentist tells you “I’ve never worked on that tooth”, and you see clear evidence to the contrary? There is definitely a filling, and definitely decay around it. It’s also really helpful that I’m totally uninsured…

For now, the best I can do is to keep making stuff. Hooray, activities?

Next up, I’m reupholstering my rocking chair!!

It turns out there’s only so much cleaning you can do in one day. Not long after my last post, I suddenly ran out of motivation for sorting through everything I’ve ever owned (EXCEPT for Purple Mouse, just to add insult to injury). Odd how that works, don’t you think?

Instead, you get a glimpse of recent times. There’s either “so much more” or “so much less”, depending on your standpoint.

I’ll have to start with this squirrel, because it made me laugh so hard I nearly peed myself:

Clearly, it has yet to discover the Courtois Café. (Free Birdseed! Not just for birds anymore!! Open all day and all night! Watch out for crazy men with helicopters!) I was absently walking to the car when it suddenly rushed past me, tripping over its foil. I was sure I’d never get my camera out in time, but fortunately its destination was within range.

Alright, let’s go back a bit. Picasso was fantastic. (Did I talk about this? Not sure what to say anyway.) I very much miss the whole company, meaning we must have had a little too much fun.

Flowers from my male counterpart, who is probably the nicest man in the world.

My father was not to be outdone:

I feel very well loved.

Okay, this is sort of random selection as I’m an unreliable photographer. Maybe this is only exciting to me, but come on.

67,676. I could hardly believe that it happened while I had the odometer on this setting (I often leave the trip odometer set out of gas mileage curiosity), while I had a camera on me, and while I could reasonably pull over to take a picture in the first place.

What else…OH! I guess you could call this important, huh:

My Sneak came home for the holidays, at least for a while. She eventually left, because Pittsburgh is clearly cooler than sniffly little sisters who crash all your outings. (Yes, I did.)

Next came the (unplanned, almost–) annual G4 Finlayson cousin photo.

I’ll bet you can’t guess how many tries it took to capture us all a)Looking at the camera, b)Making decent faces, and c)Dogless.

Squeaky had a wonderful Christmas.

Oddly enough, so did Pengie…

I never heard them discussing this…It must run in the family.

We modestly supported the local (Sault Ste. Siberia) economy:

Shush, they’re birds. Of course I wanted it?

I’m a softie for anything with feathers and/or giant ears.

Aside from that?

I’m going to make stuff until my hands fall off; thanks for asking.

I’m around…

I have a new camera. Exciting, but it takes HUGE photos. That means I have to downsize them before my version of Photoshop deems them worthy of attention. (As in, Photoshop crashes every time I open one. Urgh.)

For now, you get my most important creature and a promise of updates sometime down the road. (The “soon” kind.)

Well, I’ve gone and done it again. The last two buttons for my sister’s gift are languishing sneakily beneath an auditorium chair in Dexter High School. At least they’re together, and therefore not lonely? I’m hoping to retrieve them after the break, provided that the janitors don’t toss them unknowingly. It’s embarrassing to admit how upset I was upon discovering their truancy, so we’ll just skip over that bit.

So, here I am, impulsively starting a new project. I’m still in the gleeful beginning stage in which I severely underestimate how much time I’ll need to complete it…

It’s going to be awesome. I can feel it. So what if I just now drafted the first element of the design; I’m invincible!

*small voice from the corner* Isn’t that what you said about not taking your broken foot to the doctor? Doesn’t it still ache 18 months later??

Common sense is for ninnies.

Uhm, I’m alive, by the way…

Picasso* was quite successful in November (yes, it’s been that long). I’ve rarely worked with a company I liked that much, so the last few weeks post-show have been rather strange. I’ve managed to get together with most of the company, but it’ll be nice when we have a full reunion.

Not to skip over a lot of time (not that I normally do a lot that’s worth discussing), but I now have a new show. In March I’ll be Prudence in Beyond Therapy with PTD productions. They are native to the Riverside in Ypsilanti.

Speaking of which, I had one of those really strange coincidental moments last night where something happens completely out of order, and everything goes screwy for a few minutes. I went to see PTD’s current production, and as we were leaving they were calling people’s names from the entrance. Apparently they had a drawing for “two tickets to see Beyond Therapy in March”.

I was standing five feet away from this, feeling totally disconnected. We’re cast, but we haven’t had a company meeting yet. I know two cast members by sight, but I won’t even meet the group until the end of January when we start rehearsals. So, these people are winning tickets to see me in a show that doesn’t exist yet, having no idea that I was there or that I’m involved. It was kind of frightening, but also kind of awesome.

Okay, that’s a good start. Somewhere, I have finished knitting. Next time!!

*Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin. I was Germaine. It’s been long enough that I should probably clarify.

I’m learning. Slooowwly.

I’m slowly working my way through a pile of unfinished things I promised people in the dark ages, as well as starting as many sewing projects as I can (and hoping the pressure will force me to finish a few).

Because of the relative everyday nature of those things, I’ll redirect you to the result of a conversation I had with my cousin.

(Thanks for inadvertently writing me a blog entry, Penguin!)

I opened a window and titled it, trying to FORCE myself to go find the darned camera cord.

*Insert Elevator Music Here*

Okay, so I’m doing a terrible job. For a beautiful few weeks I was posting almost daily. Now I’m slipping, but I’m reading a lot of books. Perhaps reading books/the intake of text and writing text/the output of text need to be balanced? Perhaps if I stopped devouring books and wrote more blog entries the world would make sense?

The photos, which I knew to be lacking, are even less thrilling in their real form. Now that I’ve been quacking about the for days, it’s almost embarrassing to post them. Just remember: BROKEN CAMERA, and these photos were taken in the Everything Must Be Pink time of evening.

On the other hand, they also prove that I knit.

This first photo is of a sweater I made for my sister four years ago. Shut up, shut up. I gave it to her, only to take it back 1.5 years later so I could add buttons.* I added the buttons, reinforced the bands with ribbon, and was so waylaid with school and travel that I didn’t touch the project again until last weekend. There may have been and instance of losing said buttons and replacing them somewhere in the mix.

She’s going to hate this picture, but then again she made the face**.

Second, I have Zack’s Socks to show you which shall be referred to (along with any others I may make for him in the future) as “Zocks”. I can’t honestly claim trouble with the phrase, having been through enough tongue twisters in my day to beat most language into submission, but it’s still easier to say Zocks.

See that? Everyone should get that excited about handknit socks. Everyone.

I really wish those photos showed anything useful about the projects, but I guess you can’t have everything.

Now that I’ve “proved” myself to a whole host of people with whom I’m entirely unacquainted, I’m going to go do crossword puzzles in bed. It’s Sunday, and that is the most productive thing I can think of to do with my time.

<:3 )~

*They’re awesome; they say “recycled paper on them”; I didn’t take a close up. *Smacks forehead*

**Sneak, if you’re offended, I can switch it out in exchange for a better one.

Between the fabric stores and the yarn stores, I swear someone’s got a hit* out on me.

Can I even describe this so it makes sense? 75% of the time I am mistaken for an employee while going about my business**. Today I was busy Trying Not To Work (while visiting my Local Yarn Store) when a woman walked directly up to me and started asking me questions. I told her “I’m sorry; I don’t work here”. Uh, yeah. That didn’t mean a shred of negative space to this woman. I don’t think she was even listening.  I politely answered her questions, and directed her to the appropriate area of store.

I really don’t mind; I love teaching people to knit and to sew. It’s just frustrating to help people when that used to be my job.

My tally-total (this year) is five instances of mistaken employment in fabric stores. The yarn store count remains indeterminate. It’s harder to quantify yarn store instances, because I’m quite likely to confuse people due to general comfort in that environment. I don’t always notice when I “work” in yarn stores.

Oh well.

Still missing the camera cord. Maybe everything I own should come with a pager attached? *CoughcoughPurpleMousecough*

*Okay, fine. “Someone’s got an elaborate scheme in place to ensure that I am constantly reminded of my inability to turn my ‘fields of reasonable skill’ into a lucrative employment situation” would be more accurate that “hit”.

**Yeah…most of the time “business” means drooling over people’s merchandise that I clearly can’t afford at this point in time. There are so many projects to be made, and so many materials that need me to acquire them. Need, I tell you!!