Incoherent Scribblings

Bah Humbug!

Lately everyone I know has been asking me what I want for Christmas and I don’t have an answer for them. (OK, maybe not everyone I know, but the people who might be considering getting me presents anyway…)

Of course there are a lot of things that I want, but I really prefer that other people don’t buy me things for Christmas. First of all, there is really no reason someone else needs to buy me anything. If there is something out there that I want, I mean really want, I just buy it. I am professional single woman and I have been waiting my entire life to buy myself things I want.

Besides, I don’t really do Christmas. I know people are trying to be nice and spread holiday cheer and all, but I don’t really want any of it. I don’t celebrate the religious aspect of the holiday, I absolutely hate the overhyped materialistic side of Christmas, and honestly I don’t want any presents because if someone buys me something I will feel obligated to get them something in return… and I don’t want to!

Besides, even if I give people very detailed instructions concerning something that they could purchase for me, they will no doubt get me the wrong thing and then I will have to return it anyway.

So why not do everyone a favor? Save us all the hassle and do as I ask in the first place: Just don’t get me anything!

Rotation Gripes

Today over on The Wagon I joined in a discussion concerning current stitching gripes. Though I griped a little bit about the fact that I still have not finished “Above the Clouds,” my main stitching gripe right now is that I somehow seem to have forgotten how to rotate my projects.

I don’t know why I do this to myself. I love it when I have a rotation and it is going places. I get so much accomplished and never get bored.

However, as I mentioned in my reply, the biggest problem I have with rotating is that when I perceive that I am close to finishing something I lose perspective and this stubborn little stitcher emerges and proclaims that she is not going to work on anything else until said project is complete. This attitude works great if I am within 10 hours of finishing the project but unfortunately I sometimes underestimate how many hours I have left and overestimate my enthusiasm for it.

In addition to this tunnel vision that I seem to acquire when I am almost finished with something, it seems to me that when I say a screaming rotation works for me I am just fooling myself. I won’t say I get nothing accomplished when I am using a screaming rotation, but (and I have admitted this before) I feel terribly unfocused.

Honestly I wish I had the luxury of going back to my daily rotation, but I have come to accept the fact that when working full-time I don’t always have a chance to stitch every day. Therefore I believe my best bet is to return to the ten-hour rotation that I implemented this summer. After all, before I got off track with the whole job/moving/working thing it was working rather well, so I can’t see any reason not to pick it back up again.

Sadly, I still have the exact same five projects in my rotation as I had six months ago when I started. But, as you will see below, at least I have made some progress on them.

On May 31, 2007, I posted my ten-hour rotation as follows:

Above the Clouds (~50%)

Spring Queen (0%)

Fairy Flora (~65%)

Four Seasons Cats, Summer (0%, 25%)

Poet’s Heart (~20%)

As of today, my ten-hour rotation will have the following order:

Fairy Flora (~75%)

It has been quite a while since I worked on Flo (August maybe?) and I have really missed her.

Poet’s Heart (~60%)

Spring Queen (~5%)

Four Seasons Cats (~30%)

Last time I worked on this I abandoned the one cat at a time method and decided to work on them all.

Above the Clouds (~90%)

A pox on Confetti! I WILL finish him though! We have been through way too much for him to become a UFO!

I will probably revamp this in a month or so to include some things that I hope to stitch in 2008, but for now this is where I begin (again!).

In Which I Bitch About Internet Speak

I will be the first to admit that even though I was an English (literature) major, my grammar is not always perfect. (I won’t even begin to discuss my spelling abilities here, but in word they are non-existent.) I don’t like being a grammar Nazi and in fact, after learning a second and third language I am pretty lenient on the grammar that I come across on the Internet because I know that a large majority of what I see is written by non-native speakers of English.

However…

The blatant bastardization of the English language that can be referred to as Internet speak has begun to bother me more and more every time that I run across it. I don’t notice it so much on the blogs that I visit, but it creeps up with ever more frequency on places like MySpace, Facebook, and the like.

I know it comes partly from the abbreviations that are semi-necessary when one uses text-messaging, but it doesn’t make it any less annoying. In particular, I am aggravated by im for I’m, ur for your, the idea that vowels are no longer necessary in words, this seemingly incessant need to add z instead of s to words to create the plural, the obvious misspelling of simple words such as the, and deliberately bad grammar such as i iz.

It isn’t that I can’t understand this pidgin language, I can. In fact, I am as guilty as the rest of us and readily admit that I (over)use lol, rotfl, btw and omg (to name just a few) when chatting with friends or posting to bulletin boards.

However, the point is when I write something of substance for the entire world to see, I (mostly) follow those maddening rules of English grammar and spelling that I learned in eighth grade English class and don’t understand why everyone else can’t do the same.

It really isn’t too much to ask, iz it?!