Not reviews or anything in-depth, just random things I liked/didn't like.

( Is it really necessary to warn for spoilers on movies over 25 years old? )

We went to Mike's cousin Teresa's yesterday. All the food was amazing. Pecan pie, mmm...

I was going to make triple chocolate cookies, but found out three hours before we were supposed to be there that my baking powder was expired :( I didn't want crunchy-flat cookies, and I didn't really have time to go to the store (also I hadn't even had a shower yet, and my hair was lulzy), so I made brownies. I also tried a recipe for vanilla cookies that turned out okay. Well, I liked them. Hopefully they did too.

Mike's cousins are HILARIOUS. I didn't really have to talk at all, because everyone just sat back and listened to them and their dad tell funny stories the whole time. Plus their dad is Mexican, so it was a lot more like being with my family. XD That was the first time I had the chance to meet Uncle Jess, but hopefully not the last.

Teresa invited us to come over in December for Sharon's birthday party. I think I'd actually like to go. Plus her house is so close, we could drink all we want and then walk home.

Today I'm going to my aunt Maddy's house for Thanksgiving again. This is usual for my mom's side of the family. We almost always celebrate the day after, so that everyone can go to both their families' shindigs without having to leave one early or drive around a lot.

I got baking powder yesterday after dinner (and boy were there some freaky people at the grocery last night). Triple chocolate cookies will be made today. And then we will have a real Thanksgiving feast with tamales and beans. ;)

1. I think these fine ass boots will be happy Hanukwanzmas to me. >_> I haven't bought any new Docs for a while.


2. I saw an episode of Bones, and thought the characters and science were ridiculous. Then I saw another and found it wasn't so bad, it was just like a really fluffy CSI. And now I have been watching it pretty much every night. :( The science is still ridiculous, and Angela kind of annoys me, but I've gotten over it. And David has such nice shoulders. *is shallow*


3. So, girlfag. I had never heard this word before this past week. I don't feel like I could use it in a serious conversation, even though the definition is highly relevant to my interests.


4.

( er, big pic is big )

To summarize, Final Fantasy XIII is coming out soon, and I need it.

I need to get a blu-ray player anyway, purchasing a PS3 is totally sensible. >_>

How someone who makes over $17 an hour doing a job that has no higher requirement than being able to spell, has no children or girlfriend, no house (in fact, still lives at home and is hedging towards 30), and no responsibilities other than a 2007 Civic can rant himself practically into a frothing rage about how the California Not-Income-Tax is going to break him, and he might as well throw himself into traffic now and fucking kill himself because he's barely scraping by as it is...

...

I said, yeah, you might as well. Sounds like your life is fucking over, dude. And he finally laughed and shut the hell up, but I'm pretty sure he thought I was joking.


That's all right though. You know what makes me feel better? Smiling and/or scruffy Vulcans. :D


Look at this GQMF. I don't even know who he is, but I'd like to.


I wonder what they were talking about... "OMG you had a hard-on for your Kirk too?!"


No caption... brain exploded.

Our new dryer is being delivered Saturday, wheeeee.

I bought some new clothes for the first time in a long while. I even found pants that weren't pegged or ridiculously flared. PANTS THAT FIT, PEOPLE. I don't understand the skinny leg fad--it makes 93.6% of wearers look like a big fat wedge. Sadly these awesome pants did not come in black, but I am cool with burgundy and gray.

My mom gave me an awesome fuzzy jacket. When I wore it to the Halloween party last weekend every time I got a hug from someone they said, "Ooooh, soft".

Mom-in-law still hasn't sent me a copy of the pic we took at Halloween. If she doesn't by Saturday, I might get dressed up again and have Mike take pics.

My steam iron hemorrhages water out the holes in the plate at all times. I think it's broken.

My drier spins, but my clothes are still damp and ice cold. In its defense, the drier is 22 years old.

I have been writing Spock/Bones fic on folded pieces of printer paper while at work. It's about the quality you would expect of someone scribbling a story down one sentence at a time every ten to fifteen minutes.

I remember seeing something on one of the ST communities a couple of weeks ago about where to find a beta/sign up to beta for ST fic. It wasn't st_beta, since that just showed up within the last couple days. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Though at the rate I'm going, I won't need one for another month...

The Halloween party is tomorrow. I need to buy a new iron so I can press the collar seams on my skant. I'm not 100% happy with how it came out, but... it's acceptable. I will eventually make a post about why the pattern I used is the devil and should be avoided by fellow novice sewers if at all possible.

Pref McCoy. Dunno why I want to see this so bad.

Also, I got the right color zipper today. My costume shall be completed tomorrow.
I hope I don't fuck it up.

ETA: Okay, there needs to be ANY McCoy/Sulu fic, wtf.

Why is it impossible to find the damn zipper I need in red in this COUNTY.

Red, just red. Coats & Clark, this "Atom Red" you produce is not red. It's a salmon-orange abomination.

NO LOVE.

I made a tricorder-purse thing. It was cheaper than buying the real fake ones, and also I can put stuff in it. The second image is what I based it off of. I need to get some velcro to keep it closed properly (it's held closed with straight pins in the pic). And maybe starch it or something so it keeps its shape better. Nobody likes a floppy tricorder.






Way more exciting... the kitties have been in our yard again! I had some flower baskets hung up on the backyard fence that I could see while I was sitting on the couch in the living room. A heat wave almost killed all my flowers, so I took six of the seven baskets down and put them in the shade. The one with the crispified pansies I left hanging up. :(

I randomly looked outside the other day, and there were ADORABLE KITTIES SLEEPING IN THE BASKET asldkfjaskd$(@#!

( Pics of kittehs )

Being able to randomly open my blinds and see kittens in a basket is the most awesome thing in the universe. <3

So almost have everything together. My fabric will arrive Friday. I have Lt. braid and some little red spanky pants on the way. I have beads for earrings. All I am missing are boots. I have four different pairs of black boots in my closet, and none of them are appropriate.

...I would like to clarify that I am not one of those people with a million pairs of shoes. Those four pairs of boots plus a pair of dress shoes are actually the entirety of my collection.

I made a practice skant, because I am not a seamstress and the pattern I bought is not See&Sew easy, like the kind I usually pick out.

It actually turned out pretty good. :D I used the red not-velour I had purchased in error, which looks a bit like crushed velvet. I made a few dumb mistakes at the sleeves and collar, but I figured out what went wrong fairly easily. I feel very prepared for working on the real thing and not screwing it up.

I decided to order the scarlet velour. I already have an engineering/communications patch. When I tried on the practice skant I said, "I look like a damn ice skater," and Mike laughed and agreed. "Or," he said, "like those girls in Napoleon Dynamite, when they did the Happy Hands skit after the presidential speech." Oh god...

But then I held the patch up to my chest, and it was like, DAMN I AM IN STARFLEET. Total geek-out moment. Although! The pattern is way too short. I'm 5'3" and the fabric ended right where my butt cheek meets thigh (about right), but it wasn't even hemmed yet. And when I shrugged, you could see several inches of cheek. This may just be because the fabric I used was light and stretchy, but... I'm adding a few inches on the real one, just in case. You can take more off, but you can't add it back on and all that.

Trying to buy fabric sight-unseen sucks.

I need red velour for a TOS skant, and for some reason this is difficult to find. My local fabric stores only carry burgundy.

I have hit the geek forums and found two suggestions. On my monitor, one looks too bright, the other too dark. If anyone has an opinion, I would be grateful to hear it.

This place has a good red in their generic velour pic, but I'm not sure if it is the 'scarlet' option that is available (because that picture could, in fact, be a generic image). The only other red option definitely looks burgundy.



Then someone at ST Uniforms & Costumes said that the velour below is what they actually used in season 1 & 2, but that they only carry the red now. I asked someone to clarify if 'garnet', the only red available, is still the same red (since it's possible they could have had different shades of red, and discontinued the correct shade).



Whatever I get, I need to place an order by this coming Monday (no time to request swatches; planning FTW). The annual Halloween bash at the in-laws is a whole week early this year, since the actual holiday falls on a Saturday and they never have the party same day (slice of crispy fried hell the year they tried THAT).

This wouldn't be that big a deal, except... damn velour is expensive. I'm looking at $45-$55 shipped, plus other supplies. If I'm going through the trouble of making this, I want it to look really good. And I already wasted time+money buying "red velour" online, and when I got it yesterday it was the right color, but not really velour. It was panne, and so thin that when stretched it was relatively see-through.

( Pics of Uhura under the cut... probably diff seasons/fabrics/lighting/dye lots, argh )

For my TOS recs/archive. Although I've so far only found one author that I like (mou), but it's not really appropriate to my cupcake rec pages since everything else is specifically, yanno, reboot verse. So I need a different page with a different banner. I have the banner done up in my mind, I just can't find the image for it DAMN IT.

Also, I love this shot to little pieces. I may use it for a banner instead, if I can think of good text to put on it. Oh Bones I love you SO.

I have been looking through TOS rec sites most of the day, because it's an ancient fandom and statistically there's got to be hundreds of crazy-good fics out there (I mean come on... they've had literal decades to accumulate). I have only scratched the surface, to the tune of maybe nine or ten different rec sites, but I keep finding the same authors rec'd over and over again. And the stories are nearly all ridicu-fucking-lous SAP. Like, used bookstore romance novel, eighteen copies of the same book because everyone gives it away, epic levels of sap. Except instead of a bronzed godling holding a swooning babe on the cover, it's Kirk and Spock on a kawaii background of shoujo bubbles sharing a warm embrace while staring soulfully into each other's eyes.

I can handle a little sap. Depending on my mood, sometimes I even desire it. In small doses. But there'd better be a damn interesting plot, and bang-on character voices, and if it starts to degenerate into the oft dreaded and always hated healed-by-the-power-of-twoo-wuv story, well...! There's not much I can do about it, except grumble and stop reading. Maybe take note of the author's name so as to avoid it in the future. *cough*greywolf*cough* (Seriously, the guy would write self-insertions. When is that ever okay?)

There are some authors from other fandoms that I follow that are so amazing and prolific that their work gets rec'd over and over, and so people new to the fandom should stumble upon them fairly quickly. Where are you, amazing quintessiential TOS fandom authors??

It was foolishly optimistic of me to think that due to the sheer staggering volume of TOS fic that it would be relatively easy to stumble over a few excellent ones right away. Not so today. But I will find them.

I've seen the momma around, but not the babies (we saw five at last count). I'm not sure if she moved them or if someone called animal control. I kind of hope they were caught, because they're little enough that they could still become accustomed to humans and adopted out. The mom is completely crazy-eyed feral, which is too bad because I would like to hug her scrawny little body.

I want to finish my damn fic already, but I ache all over from working on the garden all weekend, and I can't seem to concentrate at all. I'm just picking at it. RREEERMAMRSPRHJS.

The front planter is looking so pretty though. And a cool thing happened. The second I set my kneeling mat down and pulled my first weed, our yard sentinel (the male hummingbird who 'owns' our flowers) flew up to me within arm's reach and hovered for about 10 seconds. Just flat-out stared me down, to let me know he was NOT HAPPY with my plant-molesting shenanigans. I just sat there staring back, wondering if I dared stretch my hand out. I didn't.

He flew back to his perch in the neighbor yard's mimosa tree (about 15 feet away) and basically made a racket the entire time I was outside. So freaking adorable. Though sometimes he sits in the potted laurel tree right outside the living room window, and his little pwwweeeee! sounds actually get a little annoying after the first hour. I never thought I could tire of hummingbird calls, but there it is.

There are kittens in my backyard. I fed a stray last week, and apparently she was hanging around my yard because she laid kittens behind one of the giant daylilies in the planter. Mike said he saw a kitten earlier in the day, and when I got home we saw two kitties on the fence. About an hour later another kitten and the mom cat appeared. They all just hung out up there for a couple hours.

Once it got dark, they all jumped down (the kittens rappelled down, sticking their little claws into the wood). I was only able to get pics of the two kitties while it was still light out.

So we were watching "The Conscience of the King", not because it sounded like something I wanted to see but because of the Kirk backstory. And when Kirk started laying the charm on the 19-year-old daughter (I'm guessing Kirk is 33, because they said 20 years since Tarsus IV) I was like, ARRRGH, that's so wrong! Ditto when Bones said something like "Did you see the little number with the acting troupe?" (paraphrased heavily, I don't remember what he said exactly).

But then I thought about how I have read McCoy/Chekov, and liked when it worked out (i.e. a romantic, maybe-only-slightly-fucked-up relationship). I mean, not that the fics I've read had them ditching everyone to be alone together within five minutes of their meeting, or really blatant flirting from the moment their eyes met, but still.

I think I look at Chekov differently because his character has more to bring to an adult relationship than your average teenager. He's been on his own, he's got a job, he's proven he can handle himself in a crisis. He's got a big sexy brain. Most of the teenagers I know still live at home and complain when their parents make them pay for their own phone bill. Hell, most of the people I know in their early 20s haven't ever had to pay for rent or their own food.

Not that there's anything wrong with family helping out kids while they're finding their first jobs and going to school. It's just that... it seems rare to find kids that also do what they can to help their family back, or who don't take it completely for granted. You know, kids who are responsible for themselves, and can also be responsible for others.

( Cut for mostly naked woman's torso that maybe you don't want to see. Trek-related. )


These are actually kinda sweet though. I'd wear them, if I had shirts that required the use of cuff links.




And yes I am totally going to hell for hotlinking, but I'm too tired to screw around copying/uploading at the moment. And anyway it's ttly free advertising, am I rite.