It’s Furious Balancing

Why does this reminder me of The Ladykillers?

Today, a Friday, is a pre-scheduled Mental Health Day for Laiane.  Since (a) my boss is on vacation this week, and (b)  law firms are notoriously slow in the summer, it seemed like it was time for some Planned Relaxation.

Unlike a lot of women, I don’t suffer from the “let’s take care of everyone else before I take care of myself” thing.  I indulge myself, gladly.  Today has included:

• Chocolate cake for breakfast.
• A nap on the couch with a purring kitteh curled up under my chin.
• Knitting.
• Online shopping — Some birthday presents to indulge my friends and some organic cotton sheets to indulge The Husband and me.
• DVD watching — Red Dwarf in the morning and a few episodes of Planet Earth for this evening.
• Oh, and a LOLCat.  It is Friday, you know.

Gold stars and special bonus points awarded to those of you who know the literary allusion from the title of this post without Google.

But anyway.

I’ve been completely lost for blog post topics. There have been a few ideas flitting around my head, but nothing that takes on actual substance. I’m chalking it all up to my Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder. I’m looking at the months of June, July, and August as being similar to a prison sentence; there’s a part of me that wants to “x” out each day on the calendar with a black Sharpie. I’m about ready to dig out Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, crank the air conditioning, and camp out on our sofa until the leaves start to turn and I feel like a normal human being. A relatively normal human being, that is.

You’re going to have to bear with me until I have the energy to think and compose coherent sentences. You may have to put up with a few memes and a LOLCat or two in the interim.

I’ll be back. Before September. I hope.

A yep. Uninspired with blogging and sitting in front of computers, in any event. I’ll disabuse you of the notion that I’m out frolicking in the spring sunshine. I hate intensely dislike spring. I’m allergic to everything that even vaguely resembles plant life, so spring is not a Happy Time for me, and don’t even get me started on the “Mr. Sun is Not My Friend” speech.

Cranky blogger is cranky, too, come to think of it.

So, while I’m off Not Blogging I’m spending a lot of time on the sofa watching DVD’s and knitting my little heart out. I’ve got a Baby Project on the needles at the moment that I’m feeling compelled to work on because I don’t think that my pregnant co-worker — no matter how much she likes me — is willing to put off going into labor until I’ve finished.

And then there’s the Cavern Cardigan, and Stefanie Japel’s Cable-Down Raglan Sweater, and the Ysolda Teague Matilda Jane sweater, and the Back-To-School U-Neck Vest from Fitted Knits, etc., etc.

I’ve got my Knitting Mojo on.

I’ll come back soon with pictures. Promise.

Every year for the past 8-10 years, I’ve given up buying books for Lent, and every Easter Sunday for the past 5-7 years, I’ve gotten up at dawn and logged onto amazon.com to break my fast.

This year’s selections are:

• The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, by Barack Obama
• How to Cook a Wolf, M. F. K. Fisher
• Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950’s America, Laura Shapiro
• Moleskine City Notebook: Seattle

Every Easter morning after my book buying spree, I sit and write a check for an equivalent amount to a charitable organization. Lent isn’t just about self-denial — it’s about almsgiving. So what, Laiane, if you’ve not bought a book in 40 days; what have you done for other people?

This year, my donation was to Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres.

Welcome back, Jesus. Pass the Cadbury Creme Eggs.

The brown Malabrigo sweater is more or less done; I just need to re-knit the cuffs. The sleeves stretched an awful lot during the blocking, so I need to rip back 30+ rows and carry on from that point. Easily done, and I should have a Finished Object Photo up soon.

But right now, it’s LOLCat Friday! Then back to knitting…

As every self-respecting geek knows, Gary Gygax died yesterday. For those of you who aren’t Old School Gamers — you know, back in the days when gaming meant paper, pencils, dice and graph paper, and the most sophisticated piece of technology in the room was a calculator — Mr. Gygax was the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons.

D&D was my first foray into fantasy role-playing games. Many of the gamers I’ve met online, whether in EverQuest, EverQuest 2, Vanguard, or Lord of the Rings Online, have their gaming roots in D&D. It was the ur-game for many of us.

I’m hardly qualified to write a tribute or obituary for Mr. Gygax. To be honest, I didn’t know much detail about his life or background until I started reading the obituaries and blog posts yesterday. There were many.

He was, directly or indirectly, responsible for my love of RPG’s. There probably wouldn’t be a Laiane Wolfsong without him. Oh, the Real Life me would be here, certainly; no argument about that. But my Ranger alter ego? That’s a different story altogether.

I’ve been waxing nostalgic over my D&D days in high school when five of us would squeeze into the 1976 Ford Pinto my brother inherited from Mom and wend our way to our DM’s basement. We’d scarf down Cheetos and Mountain Dew, roll the dice, and have the time of our lives.

Me: Bridget, the elven assassin. Being Chaotic Evil means never having to say you’re sorry.

My twin brother: Graymaus Jamin Eroquil, half-elven Neutral Greedy thief extraordinaire.

And our friends:

Trebos the magic user. He had issues with casting area-of-effect spells on the monsters and killing his party members in the process.

Seymour the fighter, whose intelligence score was in the single digits. He would lose to his war horse when they played checkers.

Ged Lefto, illusionist, and creator of the songs we would sing on our car ride home. We called them D&D carols since many of them were set to the tune of Christmas carols. I had the Orcish Pirate Sea Shanty in my head this morning:

We love to hear the cannons fart
While we blow your ships apart!
Upwind in battle are we!
Our victims run in fear; they smell us coming near!
Victory - We fight to win!
Victory -We smell like sin!
We are the scum of the land and sea
Oh, Orcish Pirates are we…

Did I mention we were really, really nerdy teenagers?

I found this tribute to Mr. Gygax on an online RPG forum. I think it captures what a lot of Old School Gamers (and Not-So-Old-School Gamers) are feeling at the moment:

No matter what the edition, no matter the ruleset, no matter what the genre, all of our differences aside - in the end all that matters is that we play on. Next time you belly up to the table (even if your table is a computer desk) and have a laugh, next time your heart skips a beat on that saving throw, next time you’re down to the last hit point and the dice come up 20, think of E. Gary Gygax and play, play on. It’s the best way to pay tribute to the man that got us all at the table.

Thanks, Gary.

Amen to that.

moar LOLCats

I am going to admit to being in a bit of a rut.

Looking over my blog posts for this month, it seems that I have been dragging myself from LOLCat Friday to LOLCat Friday with some grumbling (and a lot of knitting) thrown in for good measure. I’m not going to confess to being tired of winter — because I would much rather have snow up to my kneecaps than have to deal with a nasty Michigan summer filled with ghastly 90 degree days and 105% humidity — but I am definitely tired of something.

I have been feeling uninspired, and the No Yarn, No Books, and No Meat on Friday Lenten diet is beginning to wear on me.

Thankfully, there are compensations. The first being Easter candy you eat:

and the second being Easter candy you torture:

If you Google peep microwave you’ll uncover the horrors of which I speak. There are many pedestrian versions of “What happens when you put a Marshmallow Peep in a microwave?” For a more erudite treatment of the subject, I highly recommend the scholarly article Fear Response in Peeps. For a less erudite treatment of the subject, The Washington Post sidebar article on Peep Jousting fits the bill.

Actually, tooling around on the Innernets, one can find all sorts of disturbing/hilarious things concerning the ubiquitous Marshmallow Peeps. Unsettling indeed is the “factory tour” at the Official Peeps Web Site (WARNING: Plays obnoxious music!) Actually, most of the Official Peeps Web Site is unsettling, now that I think of it.

If one looks long and hard enough, one can find a Peeps 2008 Wall Calendar; a yellow Peep Costume (adult size); a recipe for Peep Crispy Treats from a blog that had good amount of knitting content and a homemade bookshelf project I would love to emulate; and a March 2007 newspaper article from the Topeka Capital-Journal citing the poll result that if a Marshmallow Peep came to life, the female celebrity it most likely would be — and there’s no surprise here — is Jessica Simpson.

Still, my all-time favorite Peep show is the Flickr photoset collection Peeps for Passover.

Whew.

I’m stopping the blog post right here, right now with my Friday LOLCat. I’ve given myself a remarkable headache with this Perspective of Peeps on the ‘Net, and have found myself well-nigh stunned and overwhelmed (in the best possible way) by a Peep-less candy diorama of The Battle of Helm’s Deep. How in the world did I wind up there? But my, those gummy Urak-Hai look tasty…. Forth Eorlingas!

Dear God, they did the Battle of Pelennor Fields, too.

Where was I? Oh, yes, LOLCat.

Another week has flown by and it’s LOLCat Friday once again.

Enjoy your weekend, cats and kittens. Mine will involve a great deal of knitting — sleeves for the brown Malabrigo raglan sweater, gifts for a baby due to arrive in May, and the project for my appearance on the Kitty Knits Blog Tour coming up on March 4th. There’s going to be some Stash Management thrown in there somewhere, and I need to watch the second tape of The Seven Samurai. Something tells me one of my projects will be dedicated to Akira Kurosawa.

Happy LOLCat Friday! I watched The Lord of the Rings trilogy yet again while The Husband was out of town, so…

* * * * *

That’s about all I’m good for at the moment.  My sinuses have bugging the hell out of me today (and the past several days).   Yeesh.  Couch sitting, knitting, and a DVD are about all I can handle.

In my opinion, Caturday begins Friday afternoon at 5:00 p.m.

I went to the Innernets to find a definitive definition of Caturday and found myself distracted, as always, by completely unrelated links. It started with reading about LOLCats at the Wall Street Journal, then a LOLCat history that bandied about such words as “metacommunication,” and I woke up when I found myself at Cats Who Look Like Hitler.

I even rediscovered the Viking Kittens Flash animation. I hadn’t seen that in years.

Where was I? Oh, yes, Caturday. The weekend. Thank God.

Time to fire up Squeaker and prowl the ‘Net. I’m at the start of a beautifully quiet three-day weekend with just me, the computer, the kittehs, and a can of aerosol cheese. Oh, and a lot of yarn. A serious amount of yarn. Yarn that is almost to the point of Developing a Life of Its Own and pulling an Anschluss in my living room. It isn’t as bad as all that, but I am at the point where an inventory of The Stash needs must be done. I have to see what’s there and what’s what so I can get my wee head around it all. I need some large, translucent storage bins, methinks. Just knowing the yarn is tucked away in corrugated cardboard boxes – without being able to see it — preys upon my anxiety levels.

Sorry; moving along.

Three days. The Husband is off in the Great State of Texas visiting family and I’m here trying desperately to recover my mental health after another hellacious work week. I like my New Boss and I like my clients and I like my job, but it is extremely busy right now. Not only am I getting the New Boss settled in and acclimatized, I’m dealing with High Season in the Death Care Industry. I read somewhere that more people die in January than any other month. I believe it. Come January, they start dropping like flies. Now, for most of you, if your clients die, your work slows down. Mine doesn’t. My clients Take the Big Dirt Nap and it’s time for me to file seven different forms with the Probate Court, and no, I am not exaggerating the number.

<<deep breath>>

Three days. Computer. Cats. Yarn. Aerosol cheese. Not necessarily concurrently.

This accurately summarizes how I feel about typing at the moment:

I’ve got a serious love-hate thing going on with the computer screen right now.  I need to either (a) have a do-over for the month of January or, (b) decide that the New Year actually starts in February, and not necessarily February 1st, either.