kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitty!!

here are some pictures of buddy being adorable. i moved his bed into the "office/workroom" so we could keep each others' company while i do computer stuff and he snoozes. i decided to take some pictures of him curled up all cute-like, and then he sort of woke up and indulged me by being cute in several different ways. enjoy :)

yay!

25 things!

This was all the rage on facebook a couple weeks ago, and I finally have a little bit of time to waste, so I am finally going to indulge in telling all of you 25 random things about ME.

1- I’ve never liked taking showers. I find them incredibly boring and I don't like the unpleasant damp period between being wet/in water and being dry.
2- I have to mix my breakfast cereals. Three different kinds is the fewest number allowable, but I’ve mixed as many as five or six in a single bowl. In high school I’d sometimes mix together frosted mini wheats, total, fiber one, craisins, kashi, plain oatmeal, and possibly honey-nut cherrios. Yum.
3- I’m the kind of person who would happily eat plain brown rice and lentils for dinner, and then have a large bowl of ice cream for dessert.
4- In elementary school I laughed hysterically at one of my friends who had, before my very eyes, broken his arm. I thought he was joking when he fell off the swingset!
5- Also in elementary school, I used to draw my own Street Fighter characters. I still have them. One of them was Flair – she had a long ponytail that she could use as a whip. Regrettably, I knew from personal experience that this could be a painful weapon – I had a long ponytail myself and, sadly, used it on a couple of my snot-nosed male classmates once or twice…
6- I was an audacious child, overall.
7- I’ve never had braces and I don’t have wisdom teeth.
8- To my knowledge, I have never seen a famous person in real life. Except for Bill Nye. And Dan O'Brien. Just remembered that.
9- I was a ninja princess in one of my dreams recently.
10- I am very attached to my highly uncommon “maiden” name and would have secretly been disappointed if my married name were “boring”. Luckily, I have nothing to be disappointed about :)
11- My visual art skillz do not include dressing myself or interior decorating. I’ve asked Bart, “does this match?” on more than one occasion.
12- I never once got detention in middle or high school. I don’t think I ever bought a lunch, either.
13- I have almost no memories of 11th grade English, and I’m not sure why. Here’s what I do remember: Kelly, Susanna, Michael, and Neal sat in front of me in the first row. It was the last class of the day. We watched a film…can’t remember the name. We did some Regents prep. Read the narrative of Frederick Douglass. That is all.
14- If there were a contest to see who had had the worst nightmare(s), I’d win! But I won’t tell it/them to you now.
15- I have been known to eat and enjoy uncooked tofu with ketchup.
16- I am a pack-rat. For example: until very recently, I still had in my possession Valentines from my kindergarten class. I don’t even remember those people- my family moved across the country to Idaho shortly after Valentine’s Day. But I trucked that shoe box all two thousand miles with me anyway…and then did it again when we moved to New York. *sigh*
17- When I was born, the doctors noticed that my tongue was completely attached to the bottom of my mouth. They cut it free, so now I don’t have a speech impediment.
18- I was born in Kentucky, about a stone’s throw from the Ohio River and just south of Cincinnati.
19- This is taking me a really long time to write.
20- I was so disgusted by the lack of recycling at Scripps that for a couple months during my sophomore year I combed the dorm trashcans and some of the outdoor trashcans for cans and bottles, which I was able to redeem for a decent amount of cash. But it was too time-consuming and embarrassing to keep up for long. Looking back, I wish I had been bolder and had persevered.
21- If there are specific memories and places tied to a song, I often can’t listen to it anymore - the nostalgia is too pungent (yes, that’s the word I want).
22- I am a scavenger.
23- I would join this website.
24- I like reading the blogs of people I don’t know.
25- I don’t like sleeping on my back.

It’s over!

Buddy vs. Mollie (the free stuffed horse from Wells Fargo)

Part I: the fateful introduction.
B and I opened a joint checking account yesterday and got a free stuffed animal horse gift. Though we both like W-F very much, this fuzzy, cat-sized stuffy gift was and is of little to no value to us, but we quickly thought of someone who might enjoy it very much. That’s right, Buuuddy the cat. Once home, we presented it to our favorite feline friend and, to our dismay, he promptly fled in terror. To say stark terror would not be an exaggeration. I quickly got over my sad feelings of rejection at this display of ingratitude- if the horse would not entertain buddy (I had visions of him gleefully tearing the thing to shreds), then at least I could easily entertain myself by gleefully terrorizing Buuuddy with unexpected appearances of Mollie the Flying Horse of Doom. :) I did so for a while. Then we left the horse in the middle of the living room floor- an innocent, non-aggressive place- and observed Buuuddy navigating the room pressed up against the walls (as far away from it as he could get) or peering at it from beneath the coffee table. We finally hid it in one of the piles of boxes so that he could have some peace.

Part II: the next day
This morning I used Mollie in place of the Buddy Blaster (a squirt bottle filled with water that is used to discourage misbehaving). She sat on the kitchen table to keep Buddy off it, and when he starts clawing the couch, Mollie comes swooping down to prick his conscience.

Mollie, through the eyes of Buuuddy

I find I am of two minds. On the one hand, I do want Buuddy to have and enjoy this new toy- something to wrestle with and claw to death (human flesh is not a good toy, but we don’t have many other options), but it’s also difficult to resist the temptation to send him skittering from the room or watch him do backflips in surprise and fright when Mollie the Death Horse of Doom does something unexpected.

Part III: the tides turn in favor of good-kristin
I pulled out a few hairs from Mollie’s mane for Buuuddy to sniff, which he did. I think this helped a lot for him to way-lay his paralyzing horror of her, because soon after he was taking experimental swipes at her hooves and face, though whenever his claws caught the fur and caused the horse to move, he’d still leap back in fright. We shall see…

d-o-n-e

and home again. the week before the wedding and the wedding itself were fabulous. i'm still processing everything and enjoying the photos people have shared, but wow- it is soooo niiiiiiice to be done with the planning. DONE. SO NICE.

the only wedding-related thing i have to figure out now is how to eat about three gallons of leftover ice cream before it goes bad :-D

it's going to take me some time to record every detail i can recall of the past couple weeks, but when that's done, i'll post the interesting bits. like the part about how a seagull almost made off with a ziplock bag full of leftover pizza. and the part where we discover a gallery full of original artwork by one of my favorite artists!

things i've been doing to procrastinate, while not actually procrastinating

Stuff I’ve been working on (aside from actual wedding planning):

1) the guestbook. I will not spend $40+ on a guestbook from a store, but I will spend ten hours or more making my own. It has been a bit of a challenge finding the right color of paper for the cover, since green-green isn’t a super popular color these days, though lime green, sage green and olive green are. I was originally planning to go with something amazing, like chiyogami paper, and Bart and I bought a sheet on this stuff in a really pretty white, cream and gold design. Weeks later I realized that it didn’t match anything about the wedding in any way whatsoever. It is a nice color/pattern for a wedding, but not so much this wedding. My next idea was to make a print of the border from the invitations on the front cover of the book, but in my tests, I guess the acrylic paint I used dried too fast and ended up gluing the paper to the linoleum before all the ink in all the details had transferred properly. It made a mess. I was sad. But anyway, I figured something out and will post pictures later instead of trying to describe it now. It will still be pretty (unless I mess something up!).

2) Bart and I ran into similar color troubles when looking for green ties for the groomsmen. I came up with a solution, and if it doesn’t turn out too horrendously, those of you coming to the wedding will see what that solution is. If the grooms are wearing white ties from Men’s Wearhouse, the idea will have failed miserably and you’ll never know what it was. Why all the secrecy? I dunno. I’m insecure, I guess.

3) The veil. Again, I won’t spend $40 on an ok-looking veil, but I will spend hours agonizing over how I’m going to make one for $10 or less. My first attempt was to embellish a generic veil from Michael’s crafts. But the tulle looked cheap and it was the wrong shade of white so I returned it. A couple nights ago, Buuuuddy was playing with the curtains in the bedroom, and while I was worrying that he would slice giant gashes in them, I suddenly realized that a white, sheer, faux-chiffon window curtain could be the perfect material to make a veil with. By the way, I couldn’t just go to a fabric shop- the closest Joann’s is gross and the other fabric stores focus on quilting (no chiffon/organza there!) or carry upholstery fabric (not quite the look I’m goin’ fer). That left Target. Lo and behold, they had exactly what I wanted ($9.99!), and then google very helpfully supplied a well-written website describing all the steps involved in making a veil. Now I just have to do it.

4) Yet another obstacle has been jewelry for the bridesmaids. I know (at least, I think I know) what I want them to wear, but can’t find anything on etsy (which is where I’d want to get them). But then, I also haven’t actually seen any of their dresses in person…maybe I could just buy them what they want to wear? Not sure yet. Another alternative is to make them! (You probably knew that was coming.) I bought all the hardware from Michael’s, just in case, but I really need beads, too, and am at an utter loss as to where to find those. Sigh.

5) Mmmmm…peanut butter. Delicious. I just had some on a banana (this is an almost daily Kristin ritual), but then it’s always tempting to just keep on eating the stuff out of the jar after the banana has been consumed. Another delicious pairing with peanut butter is prunes (I’m serious!), though this is slightly messier to eat.

Hmmm...I’ll leave you with that tasty tidbit o’ knowledge :)

famous!

...well...no...but i did feel special for a bit! i was in a treasury yesterday! anyone registered on etsy can put together a collage of images/products they like (which they find on etsy), based on a theme or not, and then post it in the general treasury section where there are lists and lists of other collages created by other people. since everyone wants to put their treasury online and there's a limited amount of space, there's a lot of competition. so anyway, my diamond-back leather book made it into this general treasury :) it's expired now, but i managed to capture it before it went. what's really a big deal is when your treasury (the one you made or the one you're in) gets chosen by the etsy admin to go on the front page for an allotted time of one hour, after which another treasury gets to take its turn. but it's really valuable publicity because everyone who goes to the etsy homepage in that hour will see your shop.

also, there's a small fuzzy staying with me at the house now (temporarily). a little friend...a little...buuuuddy :) i slept pretty well last night, considering he was determined to sleep on my face or on my neck. buuuddy seems to have slept tolerably well, since he's now running around the house like a crazed lunatic-kitty. hehehe. i hope i can still get some stuff done today...

if you invite them to southern california in february, they will come

...apparently. there's probably nothing more appealing to someone in, for example, canada, idaho, new york, south dakota, or even ohio or kentucky, than an excuse to escape to socal in the dead of winter. i mean, why else would all these far-flung family, family friends, and high school friends be coming to the wedding?? ;) and what a terrible problem for us to have- we were planning for about a hundred, but looks like we'll be getting about a hundred and fifty. whoohoo! my smile muscles are going to get the workout of a lifetime. :-D