Please excuse the blurriness of some of these photos, my friend and I were drinking wine. And maybe trying to be sneaky about it. Also, I think you should all know that we saw many, many more specimens of the hot than this while we were sitting for about 1.5 hours in front of a brasserie, unfortunately, they are really fast  in France and I couldn't always get my camera pointed at them in time.

Pocket Hot. I will keep him in my purse and take him out to let him say nice things to me.

I'd polish this knob any day.

This guy was awesome, he posed for us for a good 10 minutes. Except he didn't even know he was modeling! I really dig his hot pink blazer. You will probably never see this in DC.

"So yeah, my facial hair is effortlessly sexy." "Mmhmm. Does my profile look appropriately dashing?"

French Taye Diggs. I call him Taye Deeeeegs.

It's okay, baby, let me soothe your worries with my vagina.

This was not taken in front of the bar. It was taken at Mont Saint Michel after lengthy staring, and being all, "I'm taking pictures of the wall, of COURSE I'm not taking pictures of you! But please continue to pose for me."

So yeah, the plan now is to retire wealthy, move to France, and be a dirty, filthy old woman.

"The rules of the game get posted at the beginning. Each player answers the questions about themselves. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer."

1) What was I doing 10 years ago?

I was 18, working as a receptionist for a RE/MAX. It remains one of the most miserable jobs I have ever had. Egos, egos, everywhere egos! The worst was this huge woman with extreme maturity issues (but plenty of that good ol' egomania!), and a tiny little pocket man with a worse Napoleon complex than, uh, Napoleon. It would be so cool if I could travel back in time, put on a mask, and slap them with a glove made of razors. Then travel back to the future and get away with it scot-free! I was also dating a man named Bucky (shut up), living with foul roommates and playing lots of hackey sac, if you know what I mean. 1998 was not so much the year of personal growth and development.

2) What are 5 things on my to-do list for today?
a. Work
b. Go back to my house-sitting gig and let the dog out, feed the cats, etc.
c. Worry about moving
d. Watch the Top Chef Reunion
e. Finish packing and tidying up before the people I'm house-sitting for get home.

3) Snacks I enjoy:
- Little Debbie Nutty Bars
- Pizza Rolls
- Taco Bell
- Self-loathing, after eating all the above (see: Tuesday)

4) Things I would do if I were a billionaire:
I would lay on top of my piles of money, wearing only diamond shoes, with a panda as a pillow. Or maybe I'd swim in my tower of gold coins, like Scrooge McDuck. Then I would hire an inventor to create a time machine so I can travel back to 1998, for known reasons. With whatever is left over, I would travel all over the world (and at different times, too, what with my time machine!) and give money to the needy.

5) Places I have lived:
- Fort Sil, Oklahoma
- Osan Airbase, South Korea
- Kadena Airbase, Okinawa
- Luverne, Minnesota
- Minneapolis, Minnesota
- Arlington, Virginia

6) Jobs I have had:
- Gas station attendant
- Factory drone at that Static Electricity OW FUCK IT HURTS Factory
- Receptionist at real estate hell hole
- Assistant to a loan officer
- Administrative Assistant at a financial institution
- Office Manager at same financial institution

7) Friends I want to know more about:

Oh geez, I never know who to tag for these, but I definitely enjoy reading memes so...please do this meme. As a favor. To me. *shakes razor glove ominously*

So I discovered that I can make my own Photoshop actions and preparing these photos just went from an hour and a half to 10 seconds. Woo! Technology! Note that I still forgot to put a border around most of these. Um...boo humanity!

So, to start, we were staying in the Bastille area. There's a few bridges around there, and a lot of people like to do street performances on them. Cuz they're cool like that. I'm not 100% sure what exactly is going on here, but the cute muppet was being manipulated by the cute guy to look like he's playing a French rock song.

This is one of the many, MANY disturbing anthropomorphic ads plastered EVERYWHERE for Orangina. It's natural and has pulp. And a fig leaf-covered abomination.

We also went to the Louvre. I got to see the Mona Lisa and smell a lot of BO.

This is one of the flea markets in the enormous La Puces. I forget what this particular market was called, but it was like your exact fantasy flea market complete with everything from doll parts to human skulls.

Eiffel Tower. The lines for this were fucking insane. We did not ride the elevator, as we were too busy being elbowed in the chest by much more aggressive tourists.

Oh, this is from the flea market too. I told you, PERFECT.

I love this statue I found at the Louvre (it's Cupid and Psyche). I also loved being a foot taller than all the Korean tourists crammed around it.

And this is what happens when you let me loose around "culture." But in my defense, there was weiner everywhere. You couldn't avoid it. You'd turn around and bam! Cock.

Carousels seemed to be really popular (well, I guess compared to DC), I took this one in Paris, but I saw one in Honfleur as well.

This is a homeless man with a bag of cats. FYI, this picture cost me 2 Euro to take. He is holding it in his grubby fist.

This is some adorable racism. So cute, so appalling.

Okay, that's it for the choice pictures. The other 700+ pictures are either repeats, or just not that great. I will try to get around to posting some of the other stuff we did. Definitely more of those awesome Orangina ads.

But no pictures yet, alas, as I am at work. But I won't be here for much longer! I have been promoted and moved to another division of the same company and will actually just be moving down the hall. Next month, actually. And this time they actually gave me a real raise to go with the promotion! (I don't know how this works, is it still a promotion if a job opened up and I had to apply for it? Whatever, I is moving! on! up!)

I don't have much to show for knitting (as evidenced by more of these non-pictures I am posting), though Action is still plugging along nicely, if slowly.

Final TMI into my personal life, but it relates to the blog as posting may be kind of sparse because I'll be moving in another way soon. Monkey King and I are going our separate ways to get our own space and perspective to reevaluate our relationship. We had planned to move to New York City this year, but with my promotion and our mutual (and amicable) decision to stop and think before we make another big life change, that plan's on hold again. He's still looking for a job up there, and when he moves I may go too, or I might get there by myself. I learned a long time ago not to try to predict the future (what's that saying? Man plans, god laughs.), so we'll just have to see. That's all, we'll see when we see.

Just so you all know, Monkey King will probably kill me for posting that picture. The lengths I go to for a laugh.

That's not all I've been sewing, however. This morning, in a fit of "green guilt," I sat down and bammed out a reusable Clorox mop pad. YOU'RE WELCOME, EARTH. Not just because it is so much cheaper than buying those $10 boxes of one-use pads all the time. That had noooooothing to do with it.

For the benefit of other cheap eco-concious sewers, I've prepared a photo tutorial of how I did this. This is my 1st one, so it's not a beauty by any means, though it is plenty functional and can be done in under an hour. And did I mention cheaper than a trip to Target (because you know that you SO do not just leave with one box of anything) and good for the Earth? I'm still trying to figure out how to wean myself off of the bottles of Clorox floor solution, but one green, thrifty step at a time.

Take out a clean mop pad and trace the outline onto the wrong side of your fabric (pre-shrunk cotton fabric, that is). These lines will be good for guiding your seam stitching too. I pre planned that, it did not happen by accident at all. (I'm lying.)

Cut around your outline, giving yourself about 1/2 inch of extra fabric. Also cut out a piece of cotton batting the same size as the "pad" part of the Clorox version.

You're going to sew the pad in the middle of one of the pieces.

Layer your pieces with the 2 "right" sides of the fabric facing each other.

Now pin your pieces together, leaving one end open. Sew all around, using the pencil marks as your guide.

When you're done with the sewing around (leaving your one end open!), snip the corners to reduce bulk.

Turn your work inside out, and poke the corners so they stick out better. Iron your work, and on that open end, turn the raw edges in and iron them flat. I forgot to take a picture of this step, but you're going to sew these together from the right side and you don't want that ugly frayed edge showing.

Here is where I quilted the piece to reduce the fabric shifting around. The stitches didn't show up so good, so I used my vast Photoshop skills to put these squiggly lines in to represent where I sewed.

Voila!

Um...Extra voila!

Why yes, I regularly mop my carpet. What, that's weird?

Did I tell you I'm going to Paris next Wednesday? I'm really excited, it's my first trip to anywhere in Europe at all, and I'll be there for 11 days. SWEET.

I look forward to being embarrassed by my lack of French language skills (but I got plenty of frenching experience, I'm sure that counts for something) and eating lots of crepes and cheese and snails and being drunk all the time and spending the entire contents of my savings account.

So, basically a Friday night at my house, but in a foreign country.

Dinner

Knitting (Rowan Action)

Tonight, I sew a duvet cover!

The hat pattern from my last post is finally ready! I wasted a lot of time thinking up a name before I realized that there could only have been one name for it, really, so it is named after Guinan. Here is why:

Yeah, I don't really intend to wear it this way, but if other people do, I promise not to judge them to their faces. Otherwise I think it's pretty cute (when worn like a normal person and not Whoopi), and it's dead easy to execute.

Here it is, looking like a cookie:

So, that's done but it's not all. Remember this?

Well, now it has THIS!

Yep, I sewed a liner up in this mother. I am very proud of this, because I had no idea what I was doing when I slapped it together. Oh, and it is slapped indeed. I'll have to remember to post up a status report after a day of carting around my normal purse contents. You know, makeup, wallet, three bottles of water and ten pounds of pennies. Oh, and my car keys. I machine sewed the liner itself and then hand sewed (hence the crapness) it into the bag.

This concludes the craft portion of this post. Coming up: dork portion.

Now see, Washington DC is famous for its cherry blossoms. Every year citizens look forward to the beauty of the flowering trees and the cultural education of the accompanying Cherry Blossom Festival. It is very Japanese and thus cool.

But there is a wild fringe element. These few look forward to dressing up like the only Japanese subject they care about: anime characters. (And maybe having Kanji tattoos. Or more likely just T-shirts written in Japanese.)

That big one totally wants to cut me with his cardboard sword.

Seriously, though one out of every four attendees was dressed like the specimens above, or in really badly tied and styled kimono (complete with inappropriate makeup & hair chopsticks).

Which is fine, for as long as you make me laugh (at you), you are redeemed. But do you have to inflict this on the animals? Won't somebody think of the animals?!

The seams are really messed up (I think the fabric was too thick in places or something), but I love it all the same. MK was REALLY impressed with the finished item. And then he got a gleam in his eye and told me to start selling them. I declined. Fabric cost + 4 hours of my time = a million dollars per bag. But then, I'd only have to sell one bag...

I used the Tote Bag pattern from Lotta Jansdotter's book, Simple Sewing. I bought the fabric at G Street, it's patterned corduroy and some cotton canvas I found as a remnant. Okay, so this happened when I started knitting so I shouldn't be surprised that it happened with sewing, but I got huge sticker shock while shopping for fabric. Luckily, I am very flexible when it comes to buying crafty items (I know, it's a gift), and was able to come out of a faint long enough to purchase several yards of stuff. That corduroy? $30 frickin' dollars a yard (Note: I totes did not buy a full yard)! Suddenly, a $150 sheet set feels like a bargain.

I've been knitting lots of stuff too. Behold, one Endpaper Mitt:

Just one, I'm not happy with the Rowan Scottish Tweed 4-ply and it's thick and thin consistency, so I'll try this pattern again later with a smoother, more regular yarn. Nice colors, though. I took a free fair isle class at the Capitol Hill Stitch DC, and now I'm a fair isle maniac.

I also knit a hat (pattern coming soon), a robot, and sewed a pillow case and a reusable Swiffer thing. Man, I'm really tired.

Cuttles never thought he'd find the day someone this perfect would fall into his lonely tentacles. Tootie is thrilled someone as interesting as Cuttles is just as fascinated with her. They both feel a deep spiritual connection, enhanced by their shared love of the nightlife.

Both hail from the town of Hansigurumi-ville (different sides of the track), and they are looking forward to having a flock of Knitpicks Highland Wool children in a tree by the sea.

Cuttles is totally copping a feel.

*PS

Thank you all for the sympathy with the car window. The assfucks only (only, sheesh) took a GPS we had in the windshield. We always put it away, and the ONE NIGHT we don't, some motherfucker gets his chance to be a piece of shit. Well, it's behind us now, and I have a new GPS (and window), and that bitchass cockwad has a desperate life of crime that will end in jail and ugly prison tattoos. I WIN.

Not that I didn't hate people before, I just hate them $600 more now.