update, sort of, and the friday5
So this last week, my mom and I flew back to NY, rented a U-Haul, filled it with my stuff, and drove back to CA in it. I am tired, and it turns out I have way too much shit, go figure. But still, it's good to have my guitar and my cello back, my spinning wheel, and just generally to feel like this thing is one step closer to done with. Sometimes you think you want something to be a certain way, and then when it turns out to be that way you find that it wasn't what you wanted at all.
We got to stop and visit with Phug, which was awesome because I haven't seen him in months and months, and plus Michigan is pretty when its not covered in snow, and when you don't have to go outside with the bugs much. That was undoubtedly the highlight of the trip.
Also, there's a cool museum thing in Kearny, Nebraska (pronounced "carnie", as in "small hands, smell like cabbage"). From the outside it looks like a bridge to nowhere over a pretty uninteresting part of highway 80, but it's actually really damn cool on the inside. If you're ever driving across the country, you should check it out.
Ended up bringing Falkor back because she was literally dying. She has a terrible mouth infection (mouth rot or stomatitis), and it was messing up her eyes and even errupted out of her little face :( She couldn't see, so she couldn't eat, and she had wasted down to less than half of her former self. So we loaded her up, and took her to a vet in Michigan (thanks to the overwhelming generosity of Phug, who probably saved her life singlehandedly), and now she's on meds and I am nursing her back to robusticity using this stuff called Repta-aid, which is like reptile baby formula. She's being a model patient, eating and taking her medicine very well, better than I had anticipated, and I think I'm seeing marked improvement. Here she is soaking in an ice bucket at one of the hotels we stopped at:
So now we are back, I am wading through a see of crap (even though most of it is still in the UHaul, there's already waaay too much stuff in my room.) Time to reassemble my life, once again.
Also, friday5:
Like professional haircuts? Or self inflicted? If the former, I've gone years. If the latter, probably months at a time.
Any hour spent doing fun things, or the hours after you get out of working.
Not sure, but I imagine Disneyland or the DMV were involved, somehow.
hmmm... I don't think most of my friends are short, but maybe my moms friend Carol
Lets see: Michelle and Phug I've known since junior high, which would be about 17 years now.
posted by Cat Named Eggroll @ 11:45 AM
1 comments 
And here is a photo from the middle of the first crowdleading performance, before they made finals. I didn't take any pics from the second performance because I was far too busy screaming along with them and watching them all go.
Most of the time I was busy up in the seats knitting and doing a bit of good-natured shit talking on the other teams, providing some much needed comic relief for a lot of very tired cheer moms and dads. Plus some of the other teams were bastards and totally deserved it. Just saying. I got a lot done on Louisa... here's a pic from earlier on in the weekend....
And here it is this morning. I transitioned to the smaller needles, at which point I was able to try it on, only to find out it's about 4 inches too big on me. Majorly bummed about that, though of course my mom is very cheerful because it means she'll get to have it when it's finished. We might get me more of the yarn (in a different color, I think, this one is getting old for me at this point) so that I can make myself another in a smaller size. Good thing is that this pattern has 5 sizes, and I will be making the second smallest for myself, which is a bit of an ego boost. I may have lost a significant amount of weight, but I still, in my head, feel like I'm the same size I was two years ago.... that means I overestimate when I chose sizes in patterns, and also probably that my mom is destined to inherit more knitted items from me at some point.
This is a lovely salmon colored yarn, I think theres probably some cotton and nylon in it, just to judge by the feel of it. Half of it is barber-pole with a slightly darker color, and half of it is just single colored... not sure how thats actually distributed in the skein, yet, but we'll see when I wind it into a ball.
Here is a giant pile of cream-colored cotton mystery blend. There is a ton of this, 3 giant skeins, but I figure I can make a few different things from it and it might be good for dying. I might make 
This stuff is cotton sock yarn, and it was seriously $1 a skein. Might dye it before I knit with it, but I'm not sure yet.
This is a grey-blue cotton yarn, no idea yet what it will be.
And this is a total mystery to me, fiber wise, but it's a gorgeous tourquoise/blue and bronze barber pole kind of yarn, and I am a fool when it comes to blues mixed with gold or bronze, not sure why. I don't have a flying clue what I'm going to do with it, it's pretty thin (maybe sock weight, perhaps), and I got three skeins of it because it's so lovely. Here's the best part. I got, what, reasonably a years worth of yarn here to knit with, seriously a trash bag full of the stuff, and it came to $25, of which we were only charged $20. Seriously, ONE of these skeins would cost that much, conservatively. My mom also got a trashbag full, which maybe I'll take pictures of later.
With all the picture taking, Franny was a bit jealous, especially since she missed me all weekend, so I got a picture of her:
