Chaos Attraction

A Crackerjack Ring By Spring

2021-02-04, 7:00 p.m.

recently on Chaos Attraction
Just Angsty Again - 2021-02-09
My First Moth - 2021-02-08
Beverly Hills Wedding - 2021-02-07
LUUV - 2021-02-06
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Cast list as of November 2019

Thankfully, another relatively quiet day at work, other than discovering that my coworkers were somehow still not permitted to use the Quarterly Project Program (my boss included!) today. Sheesh. To quote my boss, "Why are the heavens messing with us today?" But we got our stuff taken care of for the day, so it's all good. I had a quiet afternoon again (like from 4-5 I just read/responded to emails/online chatted and that's about it), so yay. Did schedule a lunch date with Eva for a few weeks from now, yay.

I tried to go outside multiple times today and then every time, someone lit up their pot. Goddammit. Has anyone proven yet as to whether or not I can get the virus through someone else's secondhand smoke for sure yet? I tried Googling and it's still "yeah, you could." Sigh.

I am trying to figure out what the hell to make/get Scott. SIGH. This isn't going well. I need some inspiration and nothing quite seems right. Possible ideas I have been investigating that have more or less bombed out:
* Something Star Trek, particularly Riker--I can't say I liked any patterns I found. I liked one beard slogan but it was for a towel, which....towel?!
* Something Star Trek, involving "Make it sew." I found some face masks while going through Etsy for the above and I really wanted to get that for him (albeit that is not a super fun birthday gift so would have to do something else too), but they're only one layer so never bloody mind, I'm not gonna buy anyone a one layer mask.
* Hamilton amigurumi? If I knew his favorite character, maybe.
* Stuffed Millennium Falcon? That's possible.

I dunno....I am just not feeling any particular thing yet or getting any particularly great idea, and if I come up with a good/complicated enough one, I need to get going on it. The closest I did was finding an amusing Star Trek card on Etsy that I ordered. It says "My mental pathways have become accustomed to your sensory input patterns." I'm not entirely sure WHAT this means, but what the hell, it sounds positive.

Mom called and said, "You will never in a million years guess what happened." That sounded like potential for any kind of story, but sadly it wasn't a fun one: her old supervisor died. Don't know of what. ...Honestly, the lady wasn't great. Perpetually unhappy sort. Kissed up and kicked down, as it were. The kind of person that my perky, cheerful mom would make crazy. I sadly knew this lady would outlast my mom at her job (she is younger), but I wouldn't have figured out she'd be gone so soon. I almost wished I could say, can Mom get her job back, except pandemic. Mom called Angelica and Angelica said something like sorry to hear that happened, but I won't miss her. (As a refresher, Angelica was forced to share offices with her....and got another job.) That sounds about right. Mom feels bad that she never stood up for herself in her reviews at work--she talked to Meg about that too--but I pointed out that it does no good if you have no power and the person in charge of you is crazy, or a jerk, or otherwise not inclined to listen to the likes of you.

I ordered more KN95 masks off the Internet since I don't think the ones I spontaneously ordered actually qualify, sigh. BonaFide Masks came recommended multiple times and were cheap, so I got those. I presume I can get them before I ever leave the house again.

I heard from Robert tonight--he's in a YouTube play at 6:30 tomorrow. Huzzah for him!

I signed up for a shit ton of storytelling events for the next month and a half. That's a lot. Two full on weekend festivals in March, and several other "love" (or "luuv" because someone is being cute) ones this month. Gives me something to do, right?

I watched a Zoom talk on weird yarn projects throughout history, called "Fiber Nation Live: Weird Knitted Sh*t in History." This is for the https://www.interweave.com/category/fiber-nation/ Fiber Nation podcast, which I should get around to listening to sometime since I bookmarked it awhile back.

The host said that "We are a little dark in our subject matter" in that they like to talk about wars, poisons, murders..."but tonight we want to do a little bit more of a frolic." Liz Kristan, historian, had a slide show of bad yarn projects. Sadly I was unable to screenshot this stuff, but notable things were:

Crochet flip-flops. "I live in a glass house and I should be careful where I throw my bricks...I made myself at least four pairs of these..."I suspect we all just wanted to look like rainbow covered hobbits."
There was a filet crochet brassiere that looked like a cute little crop top that would not hold up any lady's anything.
A weird fur dress, "one long tube from head to foot, trimmed in eyelash yarn."
A sweater that says, "I'm A Luxury Few Can Afford." The guy in it has 80's hair and is posing with a large white parrot. This was from a book called "Wit-Knits" and dubbed "Peak Novelty Sweater."
Want to put your phone number on your socks? And "get harassing phone calls in the middle of the night."
Very ugly balaclavas with "funny faces" that would traumatize you for life and make clowns look like Hello Kitty.
A knitted coffee strainer.
A holder "knit in imitation of an ear of corn," with no indication of what it is to hold.
A SILK cover for a ball of twine. Why would you cover a ball of twine in silk?!
A "toilet tidy," actually intended to hold stuff like your makeup.
There was a section on "Questionable Medical Equipment," featuring knee cozies, "cholera belts" (fabric around your waist, supposed to prevent cholera, does not actually do that), eye bandages, a "finger stall" to put over your bandage like a thimble, and a "wool respirator," basically a face mask.

She wound up with a section on how badly knitting patterns used to be written, with no standardization. "It was kind of the Wild Wild West of writing knitting patterns." The examples she had were completely unspecific and sometimes the writer would just make up their own abbreviations that made no sense. She said something like, "use your imagination and send it to the tailor." No wonder I can't follow old patterns, I just thought I was dumb!

Sample (short) pattern example I wrote down: "How many rounds to the heel? 68. How many stitches for the heel? 43. How many for the instep? 42."

And finally, there was some discussion with the host about men's bathing suits of the 1920's. Apparently men were required to hide their nipples while swimming, which led to some very weirdly constructed, full of holes "bathing suits."

I had to try to find these online and this had the best entry on it (scroll down for men):

Moral of the story: people knit/crochet weird things these days, but they did it in the past, too!

Tonight's Viewing: Hallmark, "A Ring By Spring," featuring my girl Rachel Boston. This one involves a fortuneteller who predicts stuff like "You're gonna need a bigger boat." "That's from Jaws." "You will receive a ring by spring, or you will never marry," she spouts out. I will note that she didn't exactly say "THIS COMING SPRING," and I'm pretty sure my therapist, if she ever heard this out of me, would be all "Could be ANY spring." Later, her friends are all, "those predictions came true!"

Her boyfriend (I guess....?) breaks up with her because "you're not marriage material" and "you don't want to get married." Admittedly, she was all "I don't know!" on wanting to marry him, but still! She starts looking up all her exes to ask why they all broke up with her.

Ex #1: "I'm still an army of one." "That doesn't surprise me. You were always so independent, so self-contained." "Isn't low maintenance a good thing?" "I like high maintenance." Ex #2: "I wanted you to fight for me." She didn't seem as interested in him as he was in her, he more or less says. Ex #3: "I knew you weren't in love with me."

Clearly this movie wants Karen to end up with Tom, a guy at her current employer whose dad keeps bugging him to like, marry her already. This seems a bit forward, Tom's Dad. Tom wants to commit. Karen's not even sure if she wants to commit? She was traumatized by Romeo and Juliet as a kid.

Karen goes back to her most recent ex and tells him she IS marriage material after all and tells him about the fortune teller. They kiss. Right after that, Tom finally gets up the nerve to ask her out. Bad timing, Tom! Awkwardness ensues! "We're going to get married," she announces. "If I were single, I really would have liked that," she says of her asking her out. I'm not really into this dude--he's kinda schubby for Hallmark--but I still feel bad for him. But nobody is really into Brice when they meet him, and Tom is all "Does he love you like that?" Good point. It makes her cry. She breaks up with Brice but says she's bad at love, so she won't date Tom either. Just friends, then? "If I'm destined to be alone, I'm fine with that," she declares to her friends.

Karen runs into Madame Rue (with personalized license plate) again. She has the same prediction again..."No, no, I do not predict anything, I just see it." Karen says it's fine that she'll never get married. "Fine? Why should it be fine?" "It has to be, it's my destiny." Madame Rue says she didn't intend to doom her to singledom--and gives her a refund. "I said I saw you with a ring! You didn't get it!" That was just weird and excruciating.

Karen goes to bowling, eats Cracker Jack, and PULLS A RING OUT OF THE BOX. While staring at Tom. Suddenly it's DRAMATIC REVELATION HUG OUTTA NOWHERE! "I'm sorry it took me so long to figure this out!"


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