Author: heavenlyevil

Vinyl Kitties Kick Ass!

I got my huge kitty purse from Erin at Anatomy of a Skirt today. It’s amazing and totally is my new favourite thing. I know I sound like a teenage fangirl, but Erin makes really awesome stuff. Take a look, and if you’re admiring any of it I suggest you go for it and buy it. You’ll be glad you did.

I’ve been thinking of getting a laptop backpack for my MacBook Pro when I get it, but this bag is so nice and so functional I’m seriously considering using it with a protective sleeve instead. I brought it with me everywhere today. All my stuff fit: my clipboard, Dean’s laptop, books for class, my current sock project, keys, wallet, phone, pens, pencils, snack. Basically everything that usually involves carrying my huge purse and laptop bag around.

Bow to the awesomeness of Erin’s creations!

P.S. Erin, if you’ve still got the picture of it can I post it up here?


Just a Quick Note

I’m alive, really. I just haven’t been posting because I don’t have time. I’ve got non-stop essays and exams due one-after-another until the 18th. Chances are I’ll be pretty scarce until things lighten up, but I’m not sick anymore and things are going well.


What a Week!

It’s been one hell of a week. I’ve been sick, first with an ear infection and then a touch of the flu. I’ve been all queasy and gross feeling all week, and still am a bit. I had toast for dinner today which helps.

My computer died again. I spent a good 6 hours between Monday and yesteday on the phone with Dell. On Monday they decided my hard drive was busted, and sent me a new one yesterday. It was still busted (which I could have told them) so I called them back and spent some time explaining and trying to get them to listen to me. Eventually they caught on that I have a piece of crap with lots of stuff wrong with it so they told me to send it in with most of the peripherals and they are going to check it all. It’s about damn time. I stole Dean’s iBook for the next week while they fix it so I can still do school stuff.

Tudor visited on Tuesday and delivered a copy of his book, which is amazingly wonderful. Go buy it. I was feeling icky and out of it and forgot about the offer of tea. Bribes work best when you deliver on them.

I crammed like mad in order to finish the WTC quilt squares before Wednesday, but they are done and mailed now. I’m so glad that I’m done. I never should have volunteered for the second one. It was really making my carpal tunnel act up. Oh well. Hindsight.

I got some Koigu KPPPM in the mail that I ordered a few weeks ago. It’s beautiful and amazingly soft. I’m going to love the socks I’m making out of it. It bugs me that it’s made in Ontario but you pretty much have to buy it from the US. *grumble* It’s worth it though.

My amusement for the day: Rocky talked about truthiness and the Colbert Report. Philosophy classes kick serious ass.


MacBook Nerd…Me

While playing with Google to see what people thought about the new MacBook Pros I stumbled across JErm’s blog and the funniest quote I’ve read in a while:

Now my iBook seems like an old fussy girlfriend who doesn’t do anything cuz she’s fat and lazy. I don’t need this temptation.

A really nerdy thing for me to be amused about, I know. Want something even more nerdy?

There’s a t-shirt that Bert wears a lot that I think it hilarious. It says:

“God is Dead” – Nietzsche, 1882
“Nietzsche is Dead” – God, 1900

It certainly makes the point. Not to mention it brings up lots of fun metaphysical questions.

Comment with other nerdy pearls of wisdom. It might be fun.


Boring Health Stuff Mostly

It’s been an interesting week. I missed specialist appointment on Monday though I’m not really bothered by it. I’ve managed to get an ear infection again but it doesn’t hurt this time and it seems to only be one ear so it’s alright too. I had to see the on-call doctor at Health Services about it on Friday to be sure. Much better than last year. I was only with the doctor for maybe a minute. One look and she knew it was infected and gave me a prescription. Now the only problem will be if the eardrops don’t work. I can’t really say how many times I’ve gotten them before, since I know I had a lot of infections as a child. If they don’t, it will probably mean another harsher kind of antibotics. My purse positively rattles now. It’s sorta disturbing. There’s something like five presciptions in there, and three other things that I need to take over-the-counter.

My pill-timer died on me in class. That was fun. It made this really loud disturbing beep and reset to defaults. I tried recharging the batteries and giving it another go, but it did it again the next day so I tossed it. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that. Most likely use the alarm on my cell phone now that I have one. Hopefully it inherits the vibrate settings of whatever mode it’s on. The last thing I need is my Zelda ringtone blaring out in class. I doubt many people would be impressed. I could also get a new watch, but I really like plain analog watches and would rather not. I’m up for suggestions from people.

My carpal tunnel seems to be under control for now. It mostly involves many breaks and not overly using my hands if I don’t need to. It gets difficult, especially latey. I’m trying really hard to finish my quilt square on time but I just can’t cross-stitch as much or as fast as I would like to. It’s a good three names behind now and I’m going to have to catch that up sometime. I’m making damn good progress on the socks in class (and at FR!NGE yesterday) since I’m stressing about all my essays and presentations (6 and 2 remaining, respectively) that need to be done before the end of the month. It’s a lot to do and there just doesn’t seem to be the time.

I’m longing for the summer. From then on I’ll only have three classes per term until I’m done, and will have much more time to myself. School is suffocating me at this point and I just need a break. Of course, give it six or seven months and I’ll probably be bitching extensively about grad school applications. There’s always something to unload on the blogosphere. 😉


The Tower Is Haunted

At least that’s what Felix tells me. After today I’m starting to believe it.

This morning I woke up with a kink in my neck, a sore and slightly dislocated jaw, and a swollen lip. I slept in and was almost late for volunteering. For the most part the majority of the day went fine. I went to the Pubs office (a rare occurrence in recent years) to try and get some work done and instead ended up playing with the pretty iMac.

Aside: The MacBook Pros got a free upgrade yesterday. I’m so excited! I’m totally going down to Carbon Computing after Reading Week to touch the pretties.

Once I got back home, I started going through my study notes again, but that didn’t last long. Eventually I gave up and decided to clean up the kitchen. While doing the dishes, one of the glass cups literally fell apart while I was washing it. Somehow I got cut on both the front and the back of my hand on a single piece of glass. I wasn’t being hard on it while washing it. I still remember the time last year when Ben lost a huge chunk of his pinky finger and the skin around it from putting too much pressure on Melynda’s cup. It was very weird.

Then I went to the Blueprint meeting, which was great except for the fact that the service at Wilf’s still sucks. It took them about twenty minutes to take our order after we were seated, and an hour after that for us to get our pizza. All in all, maybe fifteen minutes was spent actually eating. Needless to say, a shitty tip was left for them.

After that I went and got some hot chocolate, and now I’m just wasting time. Again.

I’m going to be a good girl now and try to study some more before I feel completely useless.


Fun With CSS

For a change I got off my lazy mental ass and decided to learn how margins and padding work in CSS. Of course, this was partly procrasination from studying for a midterm I have on Thursday, but mostly it was because I realised that I had only designed one theme for this blog from scratch. All the rest are modifications of existing themes designed by someone else. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to have many like that. There are lots of amazing themes out there that I wouldn’t be able to design if my life depended on it. Mostly that’s because of javascript, which I haven’t bothered to learn yet. But still.

My favourite has got to be the Regulus theme designed by Ben from Binary Moon. Not only does it look good and have pretty much everything built in, but it also integrates into the WordPress admin panel so you can change the style without editing the code all the time. Not that I haven’t messed with the code lots anyway. I changed it to allow me to use more colour schemes than the ones it comes with, and attempted to add more header images. It turns out the code didn’t like two-digit values for that, so I had to replace the old ones with mine. The good news is that after doing that I can change the entire look of the site just by choosing a colour and image from the admin panel. ‘Tis very handy.

Anyway, back to the CSS fun. Since the library book I need is still out, I decided to just play around with the margin and padding values in my theme and see what happened. Personally I think I learned more doing that than I ever would have from reading a book. I learn a lot of things from books, but tend not to fully understand them until they’re put into practice. In this case I just skipped the book-reading step.

I wanted this theme to be easily viewable for people with resolutions of 800×600, since both Emile and Stephanie tend to use that one. They have old computers and it’s not like they really have a choice to be able to upgrade. I know it’s better to design with older hardware in mind, but I don’t usually care because up until a few months ago everyone that knew about this site had relatively new computers and used resolutions of 1024×768 or more. It looks good this way anyway, so whatever.

I’m rambling now, but the point is that I neglected review to learn something new and it was awesome. There’s still a couple kinks I need to work out with this theme (like the size of the comment form, it’s huge!) but all in all it looks good and is functional so I’m happy. If anyone can find out how the hell I styled the comment form before, I didn’t do it in the CSS (my bad) and I hate inline styles so it’s not in the comment.php file either, I’d really appreciate it. I know that it’s going to bug me until I find out.

EDIT: Okay, I figured it out. I realise now that I almost fixed it by accident last night, but the change made the page act weird so I left it at the time. All I needed to do was delete part of the comment code and then style the width. Simple.


Books!

I’ve started reading again. Working at the library can do wonders for a person’s recreational reading. I don’t have a huge amount of books out, but 8 is much better than none. I blame university for taking away my reading time. There was a time when I could easily read 30 books in three weeks. That’s a wonderful dream now, but not something I could realistically do without neglecting school. High school was easy. I want easy school back.


How to Make Mud Pie

My mom called me today with an unusual request: to write up a recipe to make pies out of mud. Apparently everyone invited to Erma’s wedding is supposed to submit a recipe for the favours, and my dad wanted to use this one as a joke. Since my mom has no sense of humour, the job fell to me to get it to seem like a legitimate recipe while still keeping the joke. Erma loves it. Her mother is the one planning the wedding and I don’t know how she’ll take it, but I don’t really care because it’s Erma’s wedding and I love her.

Mud Pie

This recipe is a family favourite, traditionally prepared in the summer months. You should not have to buy any ingredients as they should be things you already have around the house. For simplicity, I suggest obtaining the necessary materials from a neighbour’s yard on recycling day.

Materials;
1 dented aluminium pie tin
1 empty large stew can
1 stew can lid
1 empty soup can
1 mixing stick

Crust:
2 cups fresh cut grass
1 cup wet sand

Filling:
2 cups dry clay; strained
¼ cup mud-puddle water (may be substituted with ditch water in cases of drought)
12 live ladybugs (or whatever insects are handy)

Directions:

Mix grass and wet sand until evenly distributed. Press onto bottom and sides of pie plate. In the empty soup can mix dry clay and water with the stick until smooth. Pour into prepared crust. Place ladybugs on top of filling. Leave uncovered on picnic table in a sunny location for 4-6 hours. Cut into 6 pieces with stew can lid. Serve with pond-water tea.

Note: This recipe requires a unique sense of taste.

It’s essentially my dad’s recipe. I just took the loose version he had and spruced it up a bit.