Friday, October 14, 2011

Moar Adventures

Current Location: Mom's house, Diamond Springs

  So, it turns out Bookswim's shipping is incredibly slow (10 days to go one way!?), and in order to upgrade to something remotely reasonable you have to pay an extra $7 PER PACKAGE.  Here is the review I left when I canceled the service:

  "I can buy used books on Amazon for cheaper than renting them here, and they're in better shape and ship much faster.  Plus, I don't have to rush to read them and send them back in order to get the most out of my money, there's no limit to how many I can get at once, and if I decide not to keep them I can sell them to someone else for pretty nearly what I paid for them.  Whereas the one book I checked the 'keep' price for on Bookswim would have charged me full retail price on top of what I already paid to rent it and had enormous stickers concealing the entire cover."

  Yeah.  So I bought 10 books on Amazon, most of them with Super Saver Shipping, and the next time I'm craving something to read I'll do the same.  And if I don't like them enough to keep (because I'm treating my Amazon wishlist more like a library than, say, a Borders bookstore), then hey guess what Amazon totally has a resale section.

By the way, there is no post office at the end of the street.  I don't know what Google was thinking.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Adventures!

Current Location: Mom's house, Diamond Springs

I  recently did a search to see if there was a service like Netflix for books, because I thought if there wasn't there ought to be.  I found, and shortly thereafter signed up for, a book rental service called Bookswim.  My mom keeps telling me how expensive it seems, but she never takes me to the library anymore, and this is cheaper than getting all my reading material at the bookstore.  Besides, the one we go to most often is a Borders, which is going out of business.  And this way I can read the books and then decide if I want to keep them.

Anyway, today I have a package of two books to mail back, and I can't just put it in the mailbox because the whole street has a sort of communal mailbox thing, with an outgoing mail slit barely large enough for a standard-size envelope.  So I got to wondering if I could maybe walk to the post office, and I looked at Google Maps to see where the nearest one was.  And it told me. . . right at the end of the street.

The red circle is where the mailbox is.

That is practically visible from my house.  How could I never have noticed it?  Of course, we do always turn in the opposite direction right there. . . .  Still, it seems unlikely.  I had better go investigate.

Photos I Shouldn't Keep But Don't Want to Get Rid Of

Current Location: Dad's house, Rio Linda


Well, I never finished this post and I never will, as all those photos are gone now anyway.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Crafting with Keywords

Current Location: Mom's house, Diamond Springs

My family recently decided to hold a craft swap with each other.  In order for us to have some influence over what we end up getting, but still be surprised, we each wrote down at least 25 keywords for someone else to draw from.  At the time of the drawing, I had well 35, and I keep coming up with more.  I figure if I add them to the pile now, they'll be there for the next time we do something like this, right?  My current count is up to 83.

In order to test the combinations that were likely to get, I tried drawing several (okay, a lot) sets of 3 myself.
  The very first one I got was the amusingly nonsensical ethereal Red Delicious SNERG!
Here are some others that seem inspiring:
Hellboy retelling Ursula Vernon
archaeology mysterious steamer trunk (sounds like something for my "Archaeological Proof of Time Travel" series)
art nouveau robot mixed media
elfin viking oriental rug
dream reading ceiling tiles
costume Harajuku land of Faerie
waste-reducing wind-up castle
Star Trek intellectual humor here be dragons

plus a couple where the third word didn't so much work
white elephant strap hinges
iron rose antlers
Father Christmas Wicked

Friday, February 4, 2011

Chug-a chug-a chug-a

Current Location: Dad's house, Rio Linda

  The past few days I have not been blogging, but this time it is not a symptom of the usual laziness, but a part of the cure.  Having made no progress on my Nova Albion/Wild Wild East products, I decided that the only way to force myself to work would be to stay away from the computer, most especially the internet, where I will always find something else I "need" to do.  Therefore I made a new rule: I am not allowed to turn on my computer until I have worked for three hours on making things.  For a few days, the mental block preventing me from beginning work persisted, but eventually I ran out of "better" things to do.  Yesterday and today each I was able to get three hours in, this time early enough to also check my messages and do some blogging before bed.  I have the four back panels for my first Chinese dress all cut out and sewn together.  Photo will come whenever I have sufficient space on my computer to risk uploading from my camera again.  Hopefully from this beginning I will be able to start building steam, because if I can't make this "making things" thing work, I'm going to have to get a real job (the horrors!).