Hmmm yes, I have not posted in quite a while.  But, I thought I’d update for once. 

First off, about the title of the post:  This is a real, live quote from my cell bio class.  I am (mildly) allergic to latex, so I requested that my partner do the steps that required gloves (I can always run upstairs and grab some nitrile from the chem labs, but for the thirty seconds we needed them… not worth it.).  One of my classmates sarcastically said “Well that sucks” when I explained the allergy.  My partner told him he wasn’t being very nice, and his reply was that he has the bedside manner of an autistic vulture.  We had a good five minutes of uncontrollable laughter. 

Other great verbal moments: 

The choir director, who has a chronic issue with mispronouncing words (after however many years he’s been here, he still says the last line of the school song backwards), spent about five minutes lecturing us on how we were singing the line “Thou burning waters,” which would have been fine except the line was “Thou flowing waters” so we weren’t really listening to him.  Another of my favorite quotes from him was, “Basses, please be sure to enunciate at measure 116, where there aren’t any words.”  Uh… doesn’t “enunciate” mean, “To pronounce words clearly?”

Cell Bio professor:  “Some people actually do genetic research in their own homes.  There is a specific word for them… they are…”  Scott (the autistic vulture) “Nerds?”  (Which is even funnier because I believe 90% of the class will end up either as doctors or doing research… so the rest of the world pretty much considers us nerds)

An old one, from our band professor:  (holding up fingers in peace signs).  “Like Richard Nixon:  I have a dream!”  Umm, yeah, that was Martin Luther King, but thanks for trying.  We appreciate your enthusiasm.

OK on to the crafty stuff!

I’ve been making blankets for Xmas presents.  I started with a Margaritaville themed one for my brother, who is a Jimmy Buffett fan, then did one like a bookcase for Christine (the future librarian) and a crooked rail for her twin sister Amanda (the chemist… speaking of nerds…lol all in good fun.  She thinks I’m just as wierd for being in Bio… AND she’s not getting her PhD).  My mom requested a crooked rail, and I did a really awesome retro movie night log cabin for Jaci (future film producer), and a modified around the world for Mike A.  I have a sawtooth star one in the works for myself.  This all leaves me one heck of a lot of leftover scraps… what to do with them? 

of course, make a scrap quilt!  But I can’t just do a simple strips and blocks design, right?  At least, not after I read an article about miniature quilts.  What better outlet for the 1×1 squares I used to make 16-squares for my brothers blanket!?  I can use paper piecing to get the tiny blocks together without ending up with a tangled mess.  Also, I can make hundreds of little blocks and put them together in the world’s wildest quilt. 

What kind of block to experiment on?  99% of people would probably have started with a crooked rail block, maybe something 6″?  Well, I started designing a sawtooth star at 4″, and then decided that I’ll be doing enough of those for my (regular sized blocks) blanket.  At some point, I’ll probably want to stick one of those in, though, right?  So I stuck with a 4″ block, and went in search of just the right block.  Something interesting, but not to hard.  OK forget not too hard.  Something interesting.  Hard is a word for people who don’t want to try.  Ooooooo look, a 12″ block version of the lone-star I still want to try sometime.  I can do that, right? 

Yeah.  This block can NOT be paper pieced.  But not to worry.  I can paper piece most of it and wing the other part.  Sometimes, bigger is not better.  Sometimes, smaller is better.  And sometimes, smaller is just ridiculously difficult.  This was not entirely ridiculously difficult, but it was working very hard on being that way.  For one thing, I haven’t done any paper piecing in at least 8 years.  Secondly… well, there was that whole “cannot be paper pieced… well I’ll just wing that part” thing.  Yeah.  I don’t recommend winging it to anyone else.  Still, I am now the proud owner of a 4″ mini star, which is really, really cute, and has only one tiny hole where I screwed up (and I put super glue on this spot, so it won’t fray… and you can’t even see it from more than 8″ away). 

Needless to say, this will be if not the only one of this particular star in the quilt, at least one of a very select few. 

One other fun item for today.  I did fencing tonight (with the local SCA group… my boss suggests that this stands for “society of crazy adults” but they’re nice, fun people who like to pretend to kill me… which is OK cause I like to try to pretend to kill them, too.  Anyway) and was quite pleased with my work.  Alex decided to have me work on lunges.  After a few of the regular sort (mine being longer than they ought to be, to begin with, but they work well for me), he decided to see how far I could reach.  This “maximum reach” lunge is refered to in our group as the “Hail Mary lunge” because there’s pretty much no recovering before you’re dead, if you miss.  I am 5’4″.  I have almost a 4′ lunge.  This gives me, once rapier and arm are factored in, almost a 9′ max reach.  OK, now that we know that, and since I don’t appear to have caused any permanent damage to myself (by which I mean, I can still do full splits so I was all good on this)… yay lets do about 20 more.  My only problem with this is that I didn’t do any on the other side.  I think I finally have them convinced that I am fairly hard to break.  I got to show off my new gloves, which look very sharp in addition to being very functional.  I didn’t kill anyone, but that’s because they aren’t giving me as many openings, because I’m getting better.  Yay!