Please, Mummy, please...

First, it was all about the figure in the chair, but the face came out looking so intolerant and annoyed, I had to add in something to prompt that expression, so there it is... a begging child.  Hah.

I've lost my cutsie-drawing-mojo I think.  I can't seem to tap into whatever it was that had me churning out cute office specials like Motherly Hug:

Or Hazelnut Cake:

Or Mr. Corbeau:

Or Wee Spot of Tea:

Or Crumbs and Crawly:

Or AGame of Graces:

Or My Goodness Girls! (one of my recent favs)

I feel like that source has dried up, and that I can't seem to translate what's in my head, down my arm to my drawing hand. Part of the reason is, I put my coloured pencils somewhere and I cannot find them... but even with the computer colouring, some of the older ones were okay... I dunno. Where's my drawing bug? Where's my creativity? When I'm not creating, I'm not happy... And I'm not creating. :::facepalm::: I need inspiration.

Blue is way better than orange.

In true Hungarican Chick style, my first post for 2011 is a grumpy rant, because that’s how I roll ee’yo. This weekend, hubby and I budgeted in a few bucks for some home improvements. So we hitched up the trailer on the Jeep and set out on Sunday to do our errandy things. We went to our local hardware store (love them) to BS with the owners and staff, and to buy some more lumber for our backyard fencing project (to contain our two wild Russell Terriers). We had breakfast at the Maison de Angioplasty (also known as the Barlow Trail Roadhouse). I spent the rest of the day with hellacious heartburn despite my being on heartburn medication every day. It’s *that* bad---yet it’s *that* good and SO (not) worth it.

Anyway, after bogging ourselves down with enough carbs to fuel a marathon, we headed to see the horse, where we made sure we were sufficiently covered in barn-dust, wood shavings and Eau-de-Horse-A-Scent-By-Taggius-McStompington before set off to Home Depot in Gresham.

Our dishwasher has been doing some insanely stupid things this past six months. The door switch was faulty, and whenever we ran a wash cycle, it would stop mid-wash and beep as if the door had been opened. We’d open and close it again and again until it finally stuck for a while... only to trip again a while later. Every blue moon it would run a cycle uninterrupted, but it was just getting worse and worse. And on top of that, it stopped cleaning well. The dishes would come out with all sorts of residue, no matter what products we used. Only 4 years old and it was a piece of junk. We bought it four years back at Home Depot. It was the low-end type, and we sort of got what we paid for. Having it repaired was simply not worth the time needed to wait around for high-lobour-cost repair-folk to come (“We can be there sometime between 8 and 5” – Err No—I am not taking a whole day off to wait for you and using up vacation time); not to mention the prohibitive cost for low-quality plastic replacement parts. It would probably cost more than we paid for it to fix it. So we decided to put that old machine on Craigslist with a FREE sign and a disclaimer about its stupid behaviour (hubby has gotten at least ten enthusiastic emails since he posted it about three hours ago... people are weird).

We went to Home Depot to find a replacement machine, and we were determined not to buy one made of wobbly plastic or put together by toddlers in some third-world country. We found very little selection to begin with as we walked into HD’s appliance area. The staff was in Sunday mode, there were several of them sitting in the kitchen design area being entertained by an employee who was making calls on the radio with a ‘helium’ voice. They were getting a big kick out of that while we and other customers stood there staring at them in utter disbelief.

Now, if you know me even a little bit, you know I don’t really hold back on the bitch when I feel it necessary. Hubby often will point out that I have ‘that look’ on my face when he knows I’m about to go medieval on someone. He informed me that I had ‘that look’. I bit back my punches... barely. I think my statement to start with, when one of the employees, a young lady, finally looked up and asked if we were okay; wasn’t too obnoxious. “Sorry, we didn’t mean to interrupt you guys, but we’d really like to buy an appliance today.” It wasn’t too snide... but I was just warming up. With hubby on patrol against my going medieval on stupid people, it was just a fraction of the evil she would have gotten if Hubby wasn't there to rein me in.

I asked about a particular machine, and she went to look in a catalog to see if it came in a taller version (this one was 32” inches rather than the standard 34”)... while she was looking, hubby found another machine that was just as nice and a reasonable price. She came back to tell me we’d have to special-order the taller machine, and I asked her about the one hubby was looking at, and she said she’d have to special order that one. So I asked her: “Which ones do you have in stock?”

“Only the low-end machines are in stock,” she told me. “You have to order the others.”

“How long will it take to get them?”

“About seven days.”

“What if we can’t come to pick it up if it’s on a weekday? You guys deliver obviously... What’s the latest delivery time?”

“Five o’clock.” Urgh! We aren't even home by then.

“What about weekends?”

“Weekends are limited.”

“Wow, that’s *super* convenient for people who work for a living,” I say just oozing sarcasm and throwing out two sardonic thumbs-up. Hubby clears his throat to me in warning. I’m starting to simmer at this point. One of the things we noticed when we were looking around during the fun-time-helium-voice party, was that there was a sign up on the wall that said: We now deliver to Welches! Welches is a town that is less than a mile up the highway from where we live. We were stoked. The Home Depot is in Gresham, and it’s at least a half-hour drive; about twenty eight miles. We already had our trailer because we thought we’d be going home with a machine that day. Suffice it to say, I was pretty pissed that they didn’t have anything in stock except product that absentee landlords and house flippers would buy. We didn’t want a repeat with our last machine and to buy low-end crap. So I was resigning myself to having to wait seven more days of crusty glasses and interrupted wash-cycles--but at least they'd drop it off, even if someon had to stay home ALL DAY to wait for it (it was another of those 'anytime between 8-5' deals).

“We noticed the sign to Welches... we live near Welches.”

“Yes, though delivery to Welches is pretty limited. Let me have your zip code,” she replies, “we deliver by zip code.” I proceed to give it to her. She then says from her computer; “I’m sorry, we don’t deliver there.” Hubby and I share a look of incredulity.

“We live about a mile before Welches. It’s right on the way there...”

“Yeah, but it’s based on zip code. So we can’t deliver to your home.”

“You’re serious? It’s right before Welches and you wouldn’t deliver there? That's ridiculous.”

Speaks for itself, I think. SO terribly inconvient for them...

“No ma’am.” ‘That Look’ must have been glaring holes into her because before I could open my mouth and let my hatred for conglomos pour out on the idiot employee, hubby said:

“Maybe we should just keep looking...” and I got up from the chair I was sitting in and said:

“Yeah. Let’s go to Lowes,” I pronounced loudly.

At Lowes, they had at least 85% of what they had on display in stock; high and low end items alike. A lady working there was attentive as soon as she was freed from an old lady asking questions. She went up and pulled the machine down for us, we bought it, and they wheeled it out to our trailer and loaded it. She also told me if I hadn’t been able to take my machine home that day that delivery was free to anyone within a 75-mile radius. Then, with heartburn and grumpitis, we went to Buffalo Wild Wings to add to my gastric misery. I had the medium heat wings. We cooled off our binge of unhealthy crap with my super-favourite-only-seasonally available hazelnut shake from Burgerville. When I got home, I promptly wrote a scathing email and tried to send it through Home Depot’s customer contact page. It looked like it wasn’t working upon submit, giving me an error page. So I doggedly kept trying, using different browsers, etc, and then finally gave up. This morning I discovered a pile of confirmations of receipt in my email inbox... woops. So they got a billion emails from me bitching at them about poor customer service, about lack of product availability, disregard for customer convenience, and sagely advising that location to change their sign from “We now deliver to Welches” to “We now deliver to Welches but not anyplace in between here and there.”

Ugh. At least our new machine works. We ran the last load we’d done again in the new machine, and all the gritty coatings and grainy exteriors came out squeaky clean. And we didn’t have to monkey with the faulty door to keep the machine going once. :::YAY::::. My recommendation? Go to Lowes. Home Depot only got appliances to compete with Lowes. Otherwise, their customer service prefers to serve contractors rather than just Jim-Bob and Sally-May who smell like horse and look like they were rolling in a stall. Blue is prettier than orange anyway.

The T Family.

Cozied Up By The Fire. Office Special 12/28/10

When I was a kid, my family lived a shortish ride on pony to a large private plot of land with a hunting reserve. It was pretty forested, with large, well-maintained paths winding in and out of this forested area and into the farm fields nearby that also belonged to the same property. We were allowed to ride there as long as we stayed on the main paths and only when it wasn’t pheasant season. This preserve was attached to an old house belonging to an old family. They had a noble title still, but there was little left of the prestige the family knew except their name, their home, their property and their history. Mr. T worked full-time.  Their other income source was their manour-house. It was open to touristsduring the week, and either Mrs. T or teenaged young Master T would give tours. The family had moved into a small part of the manour and the rest of the house was set up as the museum.

It wasn’t long before I, and a friend of mine (next door neighbour of sorts) who rode one of my ponies ran into their 2 younger kids on their ponies on the property, and they showed us all sorts of secret paths and wonderful places, and they eventually became our friends. We’d ride over to fetch them, or they come and fetch us... always on the back of a fuzzy Shetland or welsh mix pony. We’d ride right though neighbourhood streets, and bike paths to get there. We’d ride over and the Mrs. T would make us a nice healthy lunch or a goûter of a tartine and some café au lait, and we’d play inside for a while, or make figures out of marzipan to sell to people on holidays door to door in the saddle (the neighbours rarely bought it because we’d made it with our grubby pony-smelling hands). I remember wowing the T family a number of times with my marzipan renderings of Garfield and Odie and such. :)

I loved their home. It was just a few rooms of this huge manour that they lived in all clustered around the neat old kitchen with 30s style appliances. When I slept over, we’d creep about at night into the museumy bit and lie down on the really tiny beds, and play act and so on. The part they lived in was old and beautiful, but also really homey... the elegant paneled walls had these austere portraits of their ancestors hanging on them, against cracked paint and notched plaster. The furniture was elegant, but worn; the rugs rich, but threadbare. The place always smelled wonderful, of leek soup being simmered, of steak-au-poivre with fresh frites, of salad greens with vinaigrette, of baking frangipane, of mussels in white wine.. it was sheer comfort. Their Christmas trees, as most of them were for us, were gangly, very prickly assemblages with tinsel and bulbs, and their table was always welcoming to guests. I spent many hours in that house, admiring Mrs. T in her perpetual chignon, her ever-present string of pearls around her neck, even when she wore jeans, and her class and elegance that oozed from every pore, even when she was kneeling in the soil, yanking up weeds. All of the T family spoke English. And excellent English at that. But most of the time, we kids shifted between Flemish and French when we ran about in a pack of four, the hoofs of our little ponies clattering loudly on the tarmac as we roamed the neighbourhoods.

We’d go riding looking for the elusive red squirrels with the fuzzy ears that were so hard to find, and to see if we could spot some of the hunting stock ... pheasants etc. We galloped wildly along the big paths and jumped small obstacles on the ponies. We pooled our toys and acted out stories with them... We pretended to be a group of hobbits traveling to Mordor.

Every time the holidays roll around I think of the T family. I remember trying to ‘trick-or-treat’ for money dressed as kings on Three Kings day... or sitting in their parlour with the huge clock and drawing horses and ponies, or reading Thelwell Pony picture books, or putting together toys from the kinder-surprise eggs we’d gotten at the corner store. I think about them a lot. I miss you T-Family.

Happy New Year to all of you.  Think of good warm things as much as you can.

Using a Dassenplank Knitting Loom

Measurements below (and a threading guide)..

Made of nice quality hardwood with rounded corners and a simple, plain clear varnish. I forgot to mention that the board's thickness is a little under 3/4". The distance between pegs is measured on-center. The thickness of the pegs is hard to measure with what I have... but they look to be arounnd 3/16" and the ball 3/8".

 Please disregard all my ums and errs. ;)

Encyclopædia Monstrositus.

Don't ask. ::arched brow::

Hard to focus on the little guy... but still so cute. My office this morning.
He's far from monstrous... Or is he?

I am in Holiday Funk mode.  We are not 'doing' Christmas this year because there is no way to afford it frankly.  We have been struggling pretty badly these past few months with hubby's significant pay cut, and we are trying hard to keep afloat.

I have put a Christmas tree though. We bought a potted tree (a kind of scrangly one) and I weighed it down with lights and a few ornaments and it looks pretty pathetic.  I have no spirit for the season, I confess. The closest I got was buying a few things for a Giving Tree at our local hardware store.

Anyways... Just a touch of weirdness on my part. The office special of office specials, I guess. I suppose it's probably not a good idea to open up photo-editor while I'm on the phone for any length of time, that's all I have to say on that. :)

A 'scienterifical' study of cop evilness.

Once upon a time, I thought policemen were the cat’s meow. They were awesome in their pockety pants with their bad-ass swagger, all those tazery implements of torture they get to use, and the license to speed like demons in powerful vehicles... Yeah. They were cool. WERE. My opinion has been strongly influenced towards the negative since I’ve moved to Oregon. In New Hampshire, I had friends who were cops and they were cool & stuff. I've discovered that I don't find cops quite so likeable here in Oregon. Why? Because I’ve discovered that Oregon cops are evil. And after a lot of dogged, 'legitimate' research and data crunching, I think I’ve discovered the fundamental reasons why this is.

Well, the statistics speak for themselves.  The reason comes down to these simple statistics to start:

Police per-capita in New Hampshire: ~ 2.2 officers per 1,000 people ~ 2,900 cops.
Population: 1,300,000
Persons per square mile: 139.0
46th largest state in the country. 9,351 square miles.
= cops that are somewhat affable and who know people.

Police per-capita in Oregon. ~ 1.5 officers per 1,000 people. ~ 5,700 cops
Population: 3,800,000
Persons per square mile: 38.6
9th largest state in the country; 98,386 square miles.
= uniforms full of concentrated evil.

Summarizing just those statistics alone, you can see that in Oregon, there are 2.9 times the number of people than there are in NH. There are only 2 times the number of police than NH, oddly. And Oregon is about 10.5 times the size of NH. Add in the rain half the year and the crappy roads and I’m thinking I can see why these overworked, tired-of-driving all over hell guys are 100% evil.

A 'scientific' study of the distribution of Police officers around the respective states:



Similar distribution patterns emerge.
Outlying communities, you're on your own! 
Incoming out of state traffic... Look out.

 NH Police, general daily cases and challenges:

• College kids using pot.
• Disturbance at Dunkin’ Donuts.
• Lost pets and seniors.
• Speeders.
• Directing traffic around construction sites.
• Directing traffic at the pumpkin festivals.
• Moose-car collisions.
• Massachusetts drivers.

Oregon Police, general daily cases and challenges:

• Meth labs.
• Pot growers.
• Heavily armed hoarders.
• People on shooting sprees
• Landslides and fallen trees
• Recovery of hikers/climbers/Californians lost in the wilderness.
• Speeders.
• Unlit highways
• Catastrophic car crashes with fatalities and sometimes involving wildlife.
• Rampant drug-related homocide.
• Bears and cougars
• This guy:

• Domestic violence calls involving weapons.
• Californian drivers.
• Washington drivers.
• Granolas driving Subarus.

Crime rate comparison using 2009 data:

		Violence	Property	Murder	Rape	Robbery	Aggravated Assault	Burglary	Larceny Theft	Vehicle Theft
NH		30,738	28,624	10	400	455	1,249	4,928	22,572	1,124
OR		123,255	113,511	85	1,168	2,461	6,030	19,377	84,265	9,869

.... further proof that Oregon cops might have good reason for being major jerks when dealing with the public.  I mean, let's consider that there aren't even 2x the number of cops in OR that there are in NH... and look at the disparities between the volume of crimes committed in each state. And we're not even talking emergencies like floods and rescues and all that other crud, or are we even looking at traffic infractions... we're just talking full-on crime here.

Other factors contributing to general cop grumpiness in Oregon:

NH: 1 Dunkin Donuts at least every square mile in densely populated areas, and at least one in pretty much every town.
OR: Only a few Krispy-Kremes in the whole state, and a general lack of any other nearby donut franchises or shops.

NH: Cop shoots skeevy guy who looks like he's reaching for a weapon in an elevated situation. Guy shouldn't have reached into his pocket screaming 'I have a gun!' RIP--natural selection. End of story.
OR: Cop shoots skeevy guy who looks like he's reaching for a weapon in an elevated situation.  Public becomes outraged because cop isn't clairevoyant or able to diagnose mental illness on-the-spot. Cop is fired.

No Excuse:
Morally, none of them should be jerks at all when they get to drive *this* bad-assness every day.

Yeah, high-speed chases and such are dangerous and scary.. but Hello.... CHARGER! Charger with crash-bars and low-profile LED lights and kickass hawtness. Of course, the real evil cops might be the ones freezing on the motorcycles, or the ones stuck driving the old Crown Vics and SUVs. If that were the case. I'd be really pissy too.

THEREFORE: Oregon cops *are* evil.  But I probably would be too if I did their job. AND I'd be forced to wear polyester... which that in and of itself can induce homocidal tendencies. 

Today is also St. Nicolas's day.  YAY! I miss that very much.  

Stunning Art

Humbled by true talent. ::sigh::

Thought of You from Ryan Woodward on Vimeo.

Second Wind from Ian Worrel on Vimeo.