Fugue

I've been in a bit of a funk lately about the house. I love the place, don't get me wrong, but sometimes it seems like things are going wrong faster than I can fix them, and I'm tired. School and clinical work is a huge time commitment, the husband is working insane hours, and when I'm not doing prenatals, homework, or at a birth I'm just so damned tired that all I want to do is read some fluff and pet the cats. Right before we left for Japan, I discovered that the front bathroom shower is leaking massively under the house (all the other showers leaked, so I don't know why this surprised me) and one of our circuit breakers went off and won't reset, so most of our living room has no light or power. However, I did get a tree and some LED lights up in the corner with the only working outlet, and stockings are attached to the mantle with traditional holiday C-clamps. One way or another, we will carry on...and these house doldrums will be over soon. It is not financially an option to pay others to do work for us right now, so I'll have to put my big girl pants on and do it myself if I don't want to be sitting in a cave in the dark come New Year's.

And we're back

Merry Christmas from Japan! I made it back on Sunday morning, sick and miserable with a cold, and proceeded to sleep through most of the next 24 hours. I'm feeling better now, but still slow-moving and not so excited to go back to work tomorrow. Less jet-laggy than usual, more of a culture-lag.

Socks for the road

After way too much dithering and magazine searching, ravelry browsing, and even yarn buying (even though I wasn't supposed to...oops) I decided to make some socks. Really boring thick wool socks, because I found myself about to buy some at a store the other day and thought, F-this. I'm making socks.

I have never made a pair of socks before, but I made this, which is like a giant sock, and I've made lots of other much scarier things, so I am confidant that I can make a sock. Two might be asking a lot.

Of course, that means I had to pack enough yarn for four.

Sleep Deprivation and Yarn Tripping

This week I attended two births, which both ended well, but were long...I missed two nights sleep, and though you can try to catch up, it still takes days to recuperate. That half-gallon of coffee I drank today probably didn't help either.

We head out for Japan on Thursday morning, and nothing is ready. I haven't gotten my homework assignments finished, though I made mighty progress, and I still have the all-important task of deciding what knitting to take with me. It has to be simple enough that I can work on it on trains without buggering it all up, complicated enough to be interesting, doable with stash and patterns I already have, fit in my purse, and generate a finished object that I want in the end. Not too much to ask, right?

I always end up buying yarn souvenirs in Japan, too. They have the cutest cheap yarn, and a nice assortment of the finer-gauge yarns that I like without the barfy baby colors. In case you're ever traveling in Japan and need to know, here's a useful yarn buying guide:

The Girl Cave

is where I spend most of my days now. I'm chaining myself to the desk until I finish my homework (or at least, that's what I keep telling myself). This fall we're going to Japan for a long trip, and I decided yesterday that I was going to finish the next 5 homework sets before I go in three weeks. That's about as much homework as I've done in the last three months, but there's nothing like a deadline, right? Right?

Art Deco-rating

A few years back we ordered these "swimsuit form" mannequins from some mannequin dealer, who met up with me in the parking lot of a Carl's Jr. to make the sale. He wore a cowboy hat and drove a huge white pickup truck whose license plate read SXYMNQN. I love Los Angeles.

I'd been meaning to do something with them for all this time. They started out a strange pink color, so giving them a copper base coat helped a lot, and now I'm working on giving them all tattoos. These 4 ladies will be hanging in our grand room to give it a bit of funky sexy art-deco porn style.

The cats are strangely attracted to them - I have no idea why.

Art School

All the really cool skills I have I learned in art school. People say art school is useless, but if you go to the right kind of art school (the kind where you spend a lot more time buying supplies at Ace Hardware than Dick Blick) you'd be amazed how many problems you can solve.

We bought this motorcycle on Craigslist a few years back. It was a salvage job and had a rough life before we got it, which I made a lot worse by putting in my novice miles on it. I dropped it three times - always while trying to park, or get out of a parking spot - and each time the fairings got a bit worse.

Then another of our intrepid household put in her novice miles on it, and dropped it a few more times (always on the opposite side I did...funny) and the fairings got a lot worse. Some were even lost, never to be seen again. It was time for this bike to see some love, but there was no way I was going to shell out $500 for a new set of fairings for a chop-job bike that is probably going to get beat up by the next n00b who gets their mitts on it.

See above comments about art school, resourcefulness, and my deep, abiding love of 2 part epoxy resins. First:

Second:

Third:

And one more:

In this one, you can really see how bad the damage was. I was able to recreate entire sections by making a waste form out of crumpled brown paper, then layering pieces of fiberglass to make a strong backbone. The surfaces weren't great, so I used Bondo to smooth them, primer, and paint. The colors are pretty close, though the Rustoleum red is a little darker than Honda red...but there was no budget for little $40 cans of colormatched paint in this project. The bike looks better than it ever has since it came to live with us, anyway!