So, that was fucking brilliant. For a while now (like three years, almost) I've had a whole mess of cat5 cable that I'd been intending to turn into jewelry, even went out and bought crimp beads, clasps and jump rings so I could get on it when I had the time and inclination. Tonight I decided it shouldn't be hard to throw something together in a short chunk of time, taking a break from my gorram cleaning project (black mold and having to conform to jackass landlord's time frame, goodie!) and was faced with the project from hell.

I had nearly a 50% failure rate on the fucking crimp beads. You'd think crimp beads should be simple, yes? Oh hell no, the damn things kept splitting instead of crimping. Hell, even once I'd finished with getting both ends of each pair of cables crimped, and I started putting on jump rings to bring everything together, I had multiple of the crimp beads fail on me when they'd seemed fine earlier in the project. Then add in that the cable wouldn't straighten enough to allow me to work with it, and I eventually had to just walk away from the project because otherwise I was going to get pissed off.

So now, I'm annoyed and I still have an assload of crap in my storage room I need to sort through, and I don't even have a finished choker to show for my time spent! I think I should just go to bed now, and see what I can do before drwho4 and his son show up tomorrow.

Just a quick note to say, I finished my bio-hazard wife beater project. jrl3001 came over to hang out Thursday, after he got off work, and helped me with the cutting of the stencil. Well, he cut pretty much all of it for me, and declined offered bribery in thanks. I'll have to ponder what to do in return for him, even though he's insisting he doesn't want anything. At any rate, once the stencil was cut, the bleaching was pretty easy to do.

I found out the bleach pens are a lot diluted, as I actually let the bleach sit on the shirt pretty long, and it only bleached it out a little. The second application sat even longer, and it still didn't lighten anywhere near as much as I'd been planning on, but I like the end results none the less. It looks a little more distressed than I intended, the bleach having bled a bit around the edges due to two things I did (blotting the bleach off after the first application, and the shirt being damp during the second), but it looks right for the style that was intended, so I'm happy with it. I have things I'll likely do different if/when I do another one, but it came out pretty damn good for a prototype. ^_^

As for the armwarmer project, I've got one arm warmer done, and I just started the second arm this morning, so it shouldn't take me long to whip it out, now that I've gotten a feel for how to do it. If I am quick enough, I could possible whip up some sort of garter system that'll attach to my bra or shirt so that I can be certain the arm warmers will stay up. The thing I like most about making my own arm warmers is that I can adjust the length to come most of the way up my arms, where most commercially available arm warmers, I'm lucky if they'll make it past my elbow, since so many people are short and stubby, and thus have short stubby arms. Proper opera length black and white stripe arm warmers. Yay! Bonus points that the white glows in the dark. ^_^

I have pictures of the bio-hazard wife beater hanging on a hanger, but I need to unearth my camera dock to be able to share. I figure, if I finish whipping up the arm warmers, I'll wear 'em to the Babyland show on the 26th with the tank top, and get a picture of the whole assemble on my person to show off. Also, I relocated my black lace suspenders, so I could rock those with my pinstriped capris, and be a pretty happy person in the way of what I'll wear to the show. ^_^

From time to time, people comment on my frequent negativity. It gets a little frustrating when I seem to encounter so many things that hold me back for no good reason I can see, and sometimes I forget to focus on the good things instead. This especially slapped me across the face when at work, Paul mentioned it after I'd commented on the flatbed that we were lugging furniture on. I'd been complaining, as I'd quickly determined which of the tools available to me seemed to work best, once I started regularly participating in the furniture pulls at work. The flatbeds are loud, hard to direct, and one of them has a damaged wheel, which leaves it off balance if one doesn't distribute its load just right. One of the dollies got tweaked, and so its right wheel drags on whatever you load on it. Thus I favor the other two dollies that aren't tweaked, and use the pallet jacks instead of the flatbeds when grabbing more than a piece or two of furniture.

At any rate, I didn't intend to go off on that rant here, but that pretty much shows what provoked Paul's comment. Instead of explaining why I better liked the other options for hauling a collection of furniture for customer purchase, I'd just said "Have I mentioned how much I hate these flatbeds?" So it occurred to me that it might do me, and others, some good to list off things I liked and loved, in an attempt to not only remind myself that there are things that don't make me feel obligated to bitch people's ears off, and to let people know I am really not the 100% crazy ball of negativity that I sometimes come across as.

In no particular order, other than how they come to mind as I type, is a list of things I like and love. I'll use an unordered list, and provide explanation where I find it might be needed. If anything is vague, or you're curious about it, please comment and ask me about it. :)

I may come back and add to this list at a later date, but I figure it's a pretty good start for now.

So, by way of snooping through the user profile of this guy from this shiny band I recently found out about (daniel_ap and Abney Park respectively), I came across steamfashion which I've added to my communities friend page filter and started skimming back through the recent posts.

So, how much of a dork does it make me that the first thought I had, upon seeing that someone posted directions on how to make a rosary, was "I should make Spiegel's resistor rosary." I do have a collection of resistors I bought when I still worked at Radio Scrap, though they were intended to be made into a slave bracelet. I haven't gotten around to that project yet. Maybe I should try to do both at the same time. Though, the ones I bought to make the slave bracelet are small, so I might be better off seeking some larger resistors for the rosary project. I'll ponder on this.

And since I'm making an entry on my various craft projects, I suppose I should document my other currently open projects. First there's the bio-hazard wife beater project. I found a good orange wife beater while out shopping for something else, found it for relatively cheap, and decided it was going to get the bio-hazard logo bleached into it, in an attempt to make something that's vaguely similar to this:

The current hold up is cutting the stencil since I don't think I can freehand the curves of the bio-hazard symbol well enough to keep it from looking like ass. I don't have much experience with an x-acto knife, so the actual stencil cutting is requiring much patience on my part. I will get it done eventually though. I really want the shirt.

While at Michael's picking up some of the stencil supplies, I happened across an end cap featuring glow in the dark yarn. I really shouldn't let myself wander that store and browse, as I have a tendency to go "Oooh, shiny!" and buy things I really don't need. That said, I've been meaning to make myself some black and white striped arm warmers for the longest of times, and now I can make 'em with the white yarn being glow in the dark. I'm almost half way done with those, as I'm mostly finished with the first one and it shouldn't take me long to whip out the second one. I love my round knitting looms. They're awesome.

So, last week the *buntu people released 8.04, Hardy Heron. When I went to grab the torrent for the install iso that day, their server was so slammed that it didn't want to load for me. So I shrugged and decided I could wait a week. Yesterday before work, I snagged the torrent file, and queued it up in ktorrent to grab for me when my downloads started automagically at 10pm. The download had finished around midnight. :) I burned the CD this morning, just in case the standard upgrade failed (like last time), and started the upgrade from Adept Manager. It went swimmingly this time, actually. I sat and supervised it while pulling grommets from my Babyland shirt that I put aside because it'd frustrated me over a stupid mistake I made. Now the shirt's ready to get it's retrofit, and I have Hardy Heron all happily installed on my happy little nilpferd.

Once I was done with the upgrade, I decided it was finally time to jump in and make my LightScribe burner do the labeling right and proper, full disc. The labeler that LightScribe offers in .deb form only does a little band of text and decoration, and gives you no room to use your own images or pull a bigger label, so I never bothered to try it out. Another company, LaCie, offers a full label linux labeler, but it's only packages as an .rpm. No help to me being a happy *buntu user and therefore needing a .deb. No source to be found, so compiling it myself wasn't an option either. Thankfully Kubuntu Forums had a couple posts about using Alien to convert an .rpm over to a .deb, so I was able to do that and install the program. The first label I did, I took the spiffy heron desktop image that was released with the standard Ubuntu install, and fussed with that to put it onto the label of the install disc I'd burned before doing my upgrade. It didn't come out as dark as I would have liked, but it still looks shiny. I saved the image with the contrast knocked up a couple more levels, and turned on the beta higher contrast burning after that.

I decided I'd try a second label after. I still haven't figured out why my computer can't burn me an audio CD that'll play in any of my CD players, so I borrowed one of the mother's boyfriend's computers upstairs for the data side of the burning (ended up on the Windows laptop because the old iLamp didn't know what to do with the LightScribe disc I dropped into it), then came back downstairs to put together the label. I was originally going to use the cover artwork for the album I was burning (Once by Nightwish), but the design wasn't such that it was friendly to having a big gaping hole in the middle of the image for the CD's hole, so I ended up working with a free label design provided by LightScribe on their website, the Gypsy one, and I added gothic lettering for the album title and artist. It took longer to burn the label this time, but it turned out much better between the starker contrast in the starting image and the beta higher contrast burning. :) I'm very happy, and next I get to take it out to my happy Chiana car, and hope her CD player isn't stupid. The CD played in the Bose radio upstairs, so we should be shiny, as Chiana's played other burned CDs for me without a fuss.

Overall, I've been pretty happy with how my day's gone. Now all I have left to do is balance my checkbook from about two months of neglect, and bake cupcakes to take to my "little" brother* for a belated happy birthday. I did call him and wish him a happy on his birthday, last friday, but I hadn't made it over to see him due to conflicting schedules and my inability to get his birthday present back into my car after I purchased it and brought it home. Also, I'm going to see what the mother and her boyfriend have in mind for dinner, I might offer to go pick up Pizza if they're inclined, otherwise I have ideas of things I could construct that would be tasty.

* Little in this case means he's about a third of a year shy of three years younger than me, but he's about nine inches taller than me.

I am officially a whore. Well, not a whore whore, but like a whore of a "I bought something with a logo all over it" whore. There was a wife beater at Kohl's tonight, while I was attempting to come up with present materials for the niece, and it had a purple guitar on it. This alone made it very sexy, and I didn't even notice the Fender logo across the bottom, at first. I actually considered putting the tank top back because of it. However, sexy purple guitar won out, so now I own it.

Today at work, I ended up in a conversation with a customer about art. I didn't mean to, and I usually am really really good about keeping conversation small and focused on product we sell in the store, but she was all excited because she and her husband were building a house. She was buying a photo album to document the project, and a few other things of related bits. They're including an art studio for her in the new house, and that's how we ended up on the topic of art. She actually did most of the talking, but I think she could tell I was interested and sympathetic in the "I couldn't make time, but it's so awesome now that I can!" plight. I even brought up my interest in pottery, and my cousin who does pottery (I think he's a second cousin or something).

I really do need to start setting aside time for me to work on my art, and try to come up with inspiration to do it.