We're Having Rain, Not Zombies Today!

On Friday, the weather forecast for Sunday said it was going to cool off considerably, with a high of 64, but no rain. Yesterday, it said it was going to be closer to 70 today with scattered rain in the afternoon. Today, it was raining by 8 am, and was supposed to rain all through the morning and a lot of the afternoon. Actually, it's supposed to rain on Monday and Tuesday, too.

I called Tim around 9 am, and he said the zombies were all going to be filmed outdoors, and, because of the rain, that wasn't possible. So, he didn't need any zombies today, and because he needed me to put makeup on the zombies, I wasn't needed, either.

Considering that I got up at 8 am, ate, took a shower and checked over all my equipment (cell phone charged, batteries in both cameras, packed w/extra batteries, etc), I was really disappointed. It was better than having Holly drive an hour and me ride for a half hour with her and then find out, but not a lot. We went back to sleep.

So, principle filming on Nudist Camp Zombie Massacre will not be finished today. Tim is doing some indoor filming, and that's good, but the rest will have to be rescheduled. I hope the changing seasons don't make a continuity problem for him!

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I did some errands yesterday.

First, I stopped at the local yarn store in Manassas. The last time I was in there, they had Addi lace needles in every size and length you could imagine. They appear not to have ordered another Addi lace needle since then, and I think they had three assorted ones, none of which were a size 7 in a 16 inch length. They told me the lace needles were a fad that hadn't caught on yet. The last time Holly and I tried to go there, they were closed. It's shaping up to be a total loss as far as a local yarn store is concerned.

So, I went and spent the money I would have spent on a needle on some sock yarn at AC Moore. The two major projects I'm currently doing are either too big at this point to conveniently drag around (the Celtic sweater that I wanted the needle for), or too much of a mess to lug around (the wings wrap which requires a big chart and a way to mark my place). Since there are at least two meetings at the apartment building that I want to attend this week, and an all-day trip to the VA hospital for hearing tests, I'll need something portable to take to all these places to knit. Socks are perfect!

I really don't like to do intarsia (which is what the wings wrap is), but I'm going to love it once it's done. I just have to be really hard on myself and make myself do it!

This is what it looks like at the moment:

Since I couldn't get the yarn specified in the pattern, I changed it a bit. First, I'm putting a seed stitch border around it so it'll have a bit less tendency to roll on the edges. Second, I changed the background color to lavender, and I'm using 4 shades of black-to-white for the wings (which means I'm changing the chart a lot). I'm also making it about 4 inches longer (2 extra inches on each end). But there's still a lot to knit. I really have to force myself to do it.

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Just as there was nothing much to watch on TV this weekend, the library came through with 3 DVDs to loan me.

I watched Coraline last night, finally! I've been wanting to see it for a while. I read the book and loved it, and my friend, Kent Burton, worked on it. So I feel like I have to keep up with what my friends are doing.

That's a photo of Kent doing animation on Coraline from the new book that's out. And below is a photo of John in the foreground with Kent behind him.

John's just a silhouette in the photo, and you can't see much of Kent, but I like this photo anyway.

Now that I've gotten to see the movie (finally!) I really enjoyed it.

The other two movies I got from the Library are Star Trek, and Howl's Moving Castle.

Holly and I saw Star Trek in the theater, and I have to say the story was a stroke of genius. It lets all the previous stories stand while managing to wipe the slate clean, and pave the way for all-new stories about the original crew (although they have to use different actors). It's a movie that is so good that I can't wait to see it another ten times!

A year or two ago, I read a book called Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, and loved it! I just recently found out that there had been a movie made of it! It's about a young woman named Sophie, who is transformed, through magic into an old woman. She goes to see Howl in his moving castle in the hopes of being young again, and details her adventures on this journey.

The book was very good. I've loved everything I've ever read by Diana Wynne Jones, and this was no exception! One of my favorites was Fire and Hemlock. It's kind of an ordinary story of magic. I also enjoyed the Chrestomanci books.

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Well, I'm going to go watch some movies and knit. I hope you're having as much fun with this weekend as I am!

More Star Wars!

I know I just did a Star Wars post the other day, but I have some photos for you, thanks to my friend, Tim Davis.

The first one leans a little more toward Star Trek than Star Wars. My friend , Tim Pace (who is a very interesting character in his own rite) used to own a van that was very science fictioney. It had "Klaatu Barada Nikto"" inscribed on the side (from The Day the Earth Stood Still), but was modeled more on the Enterprise on the inside. The dashboard was an array of switches and controls that certainly was more complicated than the space ship. The controls turned on sound effects, lights and other miscellaneous effects, and many fen enjoyed it at various SF cons.

Here it is parked on M Street in Georgetown.

This van was featured in a TV show about the Star Trek phenomenon that was done by BJo Trimble, which showed Tim Pace and Jan Cox in the van, with Tim giving orders and Jan flipping switches and turning on and off sound effects.

Here we see Tim Pace himself (seated toward the back of the photo) with the copy of R2D2 that he built.

R2 was wonderful because he was remote controlled, and could travel around on his own. It was really fun watching him "walk" around a con with a group of people. I was at one con, where some of us were helping Tim pack up everything at the end of the con. Tim walked R2 out to the parking garage, where people were arriving for a wedding celebration, and the non-science fiction people would walk up to R2 and start talking to him, and posing for photos with him while we were loading stuff into Tim's Star Trek van!

Here's a photo of Tim Davis with Bruce Rauscher.

Bruce was a science fiction con regular back at that time, and later was in John Ellis' movies Invader and Twilight of the Dogs.

Tim Pace is an interesting person. He used to own (and possibly still does) a stage lighting company called Light Works, and his equipment cases list his address as "Planet Earth." I've seen some of his home movies, and they're amazing. There are movies of The Rolling Stones, and most other large bands of the time taken from back stage! He also did lighting for science fiction conventions and Invader and Twilight of the Dogs, and stage lighting for The Bayou in DC.

Tim Davis did special effects makeup for the same two movies, and many others. When we were working on Twilight, I pointed my camera at him and told him to look mean. He pasted a mean expression on his face, and pointed a spray bottle of fake blood at me!

He's currently working on his movie, Nudist Camp Zombie Massacre, which, incidentally, stars Bruce!

Have a marvelous Monday!

More Steve Canyon News!

Check out the new post on John's Steve Canyon blog! As usual, John has lots of Steve Canyon news, but he also has a bit about me, too.

John will be going to the San Diego Comic Con tonight and this Sunday, so if you see him there, say "Hello!" and ask about Steve Canyon! Copies of the DVDs will be available to buy at the con.

There's Wi-Fi there, and he'll have his laptop with him, so he'll be Tweeting while he's there, and his tweets will be available in the sidebar tonight and Sunday, along with interesting tweets from others at the con. I'm so excited about all of this!

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Today, before packing to leave for the con, I had a chance to talk to John, and he had just talked to some people at the Smithsonian, and was excited about some stuff on the internet about some of the Star Trek models. You can read these two articles here and here. John was lucky enough to get to see the model before it was displayed, while it was still stored in the old red brick museum building. This was the building where they originally hung Bevo Howard's biplane, the one that I got to stand next to and touch at the air show in Charleston on Armed Forces day in 1963.

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Today is Day Three of Children of Earth. It's been so good so far. I want to say a billion things about it, but I don't want to spoil it for you, so I'm totally frustrated about it. It's fabulous, though!

There's one thing I can tell you about without it being too spoilery. As is usual with these things, they kill Jack. I'm sure you're not surprised. But they do it so thoroughly that he comes back without the clothes that he was wearing. When interviewed about it, Eve Myles said "There was the Barrowman, wearing handcuffs and a bit of dust." She also said "I had nightmares for weeks. It was horrific!" Then she giggled "And I want to see some more!"

So, if you missed Jack in the altogether, you can see him tonight in the rerun of Day Two before they go on to show Day Three, or you can see the whole series rerun in sequence on Sunday on BBC in America. Check your local listings! Oh, and the DVD will be available on Tuesday (click the link above).

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This is a short post today because I'm not feeling especially well. Nothing serious, just really ragged.

I hope you're feeling better than I am. Have fun with Children of Earth tonight!

Happy Memorial Day and Towel Day!

Happy Memorial Day!

I wanted to make that headline red, white and blue, but the white wouldn't have shown up and I had to settle for red and blue.

In honor of the day, I have some clippings from the Maple Shade Progress that I just scanned this morning about me. They fit right in with the Memorial Day theme. If you click on them, you can see them large enough to actually read the text.

The first one was published around the end of October, or the beginning of November in 1962.

The second one was probably published in December of the same year.

If you notice, the second one has a credit for the photo--the photographer asked me to be in the photo partly because I was the only woman in the Aero Club at the time, and partly because he wanted to meet me. We later got married, so I guess it was a good way to meet me. 

Flying was one of the most fun things I've ever done!

Check out John's Steve Canyon blog, because he said he's going to write a Memorial Day post, and going to put my photos in it! That's a generic link to the blog because he hasn't gotten the post up yet. I can't wait to see it!

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Holly and I went out yesterday and visited Michaels, where I got a really nice, tiny vacuum cleaner made especially to pick up spilled beads and other small craft parts, and JoAnn Fabrics where I got a plastic container to replace the broken pencil case I've been using for holding small knitting stuff.

We also stopped at WalMart for a while and I bought a copy of the book with the story of the new Star Trek movie. I had been thinking about going to the movies to see it again (it's soooo good!), but the book was a little cheaper, and it was written by a friend of mine, Alan Dean Foster. John and I met him at MonCon in West Virginia in late Winter or early Spring right before the very first Star Wars movie came out. 

He and John and I were doing advance publicity for the movie. He, however, had been out to the studio where they were finishing it, and he got to talk to a lot of people that were involved that John and I hadn't gotten to meet. The thing that seemed to tickle him most was that the banthas were actually "elephants in drag." That's the way he expressed it. They told him that the elephants seemed to really enjoy dressing up!

One of the best things about meeting him was meeting his wife, JoAnn. She and I got along well.

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Here's where I had gotten to on my shawl two days ago. I was inspired to take the photo because it's about one quarter done in the photo. Yesterday, I did the 8 pattern rows that put 42 flower designs across in one row. I'm a real Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fan, and couldn't resist noticing that.

Today is also Towel Day, by the way. Fans of Douglas Adams traditionally carry a towel with them all day on the 25th of May, and you may remember that I knitted a towel in the Towel Day KAL last year.


As is usual with lace, it looks like something that was wadded up and left in the trash for a week. The true beauty of lace doesn't emerge until it's blocked, so the photo is mainly to show how big it is at the moment. In the photo above, it was sixteen inches, measured along the front edge, and stretched to approximate the stretching that will happen during blocking. 

As of last night when I measured it, it was over 18 inches, and I've done some more knitting on it today. Considering that it averages six more stitches for each right side row, it goes pretty fast in the beginning, and slows significantly as progress is made.

It's intended to be about thirty six inches long measured along the front edge after blocking, so you would think that eighteen inches would be half way, but the halfway point is really at about twenty four inches as measured by yarn usage. The rule with these things is that a section that has a certain measurement uses enough yarn to knit the next section to half of the previous section's length. 

I'm into the second of four balls of yarn that have about 44o yards in each ball. And I'm more than 1/4 of the way through, so I think I'll have enough yarn, with just a little over to make it comfortable instead of close. I'm not so sure about having enough beads, though. I just used 1/4 of the beads that I bought, but I plan to use a pattern for the border that's more heavily beaded, so I may (or may not) need more beads. We'll just have to see.

After two days of perfect, fabulous weather, I woke up to rain today! And the forecast says that it'll be raining for the rest of the week! I'm glad Holly and I got to go out yesterday instead of today.

 

I hope the weather where you are is better than it is here! Happy Memorial Day! And don't forget your towel!

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Addition:

I just read a tweet by Neil Gaiman, and he said something about a show on Sundance tonight called Dreams with Sharp Teeth, and mentioned Harlan Ellison. Read more about it here.

Happy Start of the Memorial Day Weekend!

Memorial Day weekend is here, and it's been frustrating for Holly so far.

She came out her front door today and discovered that the five million people who attend the church across the street from her had, with the help of a bus, double parked all up and down her street and blocked in her car. And as if that wasn't enough, there was a parade, complete with marching band going down her street.

I asked her why Rolling Thunder wasn't also in the parade.

She called to say that she couldn't make it today, but that she'd go out around midnight and move the car to a place where she'd be able to get it tomorrow.

She called back later to tell me that she'd enjoyed the new Star Trek movie so much that she decided to see it again, but that they had sold out all the tickets, and she couldn't go. I wished her less frustration for the rest of the weekend.

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I have gotten one quarter of the way through my shawl today, which was the deadline for the end of the month for my Charms OWL assignment in the Harry Potter House Cup KAL, so I can quit worrying about that. The yarn for the copy of Hermione's hat hadn't arrived as of yesterday, and the post office has been instructed not to leave packages here on Saturday, so I probably won't get it before Tuesday.

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Practical Magic will be on tonight. Check your TV guide, and enjoy! Have a great Memorial Day Weekend!

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day!

I hope everyone who has born a child had a very happy day today!

I have had an absolutely wonderful day today!

Holly arrived at 10:30 today, just as she said she would. Unfortunately, I woke up about two minutes before she arrived. But it was all OK.

She took me out to get all the stuff from WalMart that I would've gotten last Sunday if I had had the forethought to be prepared for it, thus saving me a lot of discomfort and dampness (this was the first day for two weeks that it hasn't been raining, plus it's supposed to rain Monday, too). My back is a lot better, but still wouldn't have been happy with having to walk to the bus, and come back on the bus carrying a bunch of heavy stuff. 

We went to an early dinner at Ruby Tuesday and had fun (as usual) just being with each other.

This was followed by the new Star Trek movie!

I have to say it was excellent! I loved it to pieces. I will mention some overall impressions, and I don't think I'm giving too much away here, but if you absolutely don't want to know anything about it, skip the rest of this paragraph. It starts back at the beginning, and tells a story about how the Enterprise crew got together. The wonderful part is that they've gone back to the beginning with a whole new group of actors to play the old characters from the beginning. This story involves time travel, and it changes things so that all the stuff that happened originally may be completely changed. So we have the characters young again, and a chance to tell all new stories from the beginning should they choose to do so. And why wouldn't they?

OK, no more spoilers from here on in. J.J. Abrams did a fabulous movie, with a great story. The story had all the old characters, who were acting so much in character that there was a lot of the movie where I knew exactly what a particular character would do, and, in fact, I was able to say some lines along with the characters on the first run-through. At the same time, the situation had so much in it that was unexpected, and so many actions and reactions that were unexpected that it was exciting, non-stop action/excitement/fun all the way through!

I've had a wonderful day!

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I also want to wish a belated happy birthday to my brother, Jeff!

Happy Birthday, Jeff!

I kind of took yesterday off to let my back get in better shape for today. I don't think he'll see it here on the internet anyway, but I still want to wish him a happy birthday, which was yesterday.

I have to get back to being nice to my back instead of sitting here making it hurt more.

All the photos I promised will be up real soon now.

Oh, I nearly forgot: I watched Doctor Who and Torchwood on BBC in America yesterday, and they were full of trailers for the new season of Primeval, which starts next Saturday, and also (and this is the part I'm really excited about) trailers for Children of Earth, the next Torchwood story, which will be on in July (they're not pinning down exactly when). They didn't say anything about the new Doctor Who Season, though, and I'm disappointed about that.

I hope you've been having as good a weekend as I've had!

And the Celtic Sweater Goes On and On...

So, here we are, the day after the Ravelympics has ended, and I'm still not done!

Here's where I am:

To your left, the cable down the front of the sweater is just out of view. To the left (in the picture) is the pocket opening, and along the right side of the photo is the sleeve opening (at the top, the cable on the side, and the increase shaping at the bottom.

I don't like short sweaters or jackets, but if a sweater or jacket is the same diameter as the bust further down, it bunches up when you sit or move, so I wanted the bottom to be a little bigger, hence the shaping, and the space for a knot. 

The knot inside the shaping was started using the knot from Arans & Celtics, but I changed it a bit, and started to add more after the instructions ran out. At this point, there are no patterns, charts or instructions. I'm just winging it. We'll see what happens.

The Middleman will be on tonight with an all-new episode on ABC Family. I looked at the site yesterday, and they had an article up about the last episode, but it's not there now. They said that they had a choice between two episodes, and putting all their budget into one episode. So, we're going to see one episode less than if they had chosen the other option, but they insist that it will be fabulous! I don't know if tonight's episode will be the last one.

Some of the things they mentioned about the last episode are:

They will stumble into an alternate universe where good and bad are reversed a la Mirror, Mirror, the Star Trek episode. To further emphasize that connection, all the people in the evil universe will have goatees, like the alternate Spock. 

They also plan to have Ida be incredibly sexy. Are we talking about the same Ida?

I have lots of forms to fill out, so I'm going to run.

Have a great Monday!