Blogger does not like me, and then I go wildly off-topic

It's true. It doesn't. Maybe it can sense that I infinitely prefer Livejournal over it. Whatever. It won't post pictures I attempt to upload - hell, half the time I can't get a post actually posted. Seriously. Do you know how much more frequently I would post if this weren't true? Do you know how many times I've attempted to post and given up after getting timed out? I especially like how it waits 3 weeks before notifying me that someone has left a comment on this thing, too. There WAS supposed to be an image in the post prior to this one, but noooo, Blogger won't load it. Rrrg.

Mah, well, whatever.

My arms hurt, thanks to work. All the time. Carpal Tunnel, I'm sure. Add it to the arthritis (yes, at my age) and it just makes using my hands all the more painful. So, that means I haven't been doing a whole lot of knitting lately.

Actually, I finished the blue/green plymouth sockotta sock this past weekend, and I'm wearing them now. I'm slowly catching up on the huge stack of Second Sock Syndrome socks, honestly. Of course, the truth is, I finished that sock because I needed to free up a pair of size 2 dpns for... SockapalOOOza (Yeah, I know, I need to put the link up). Yeah, I signed up for the third one. I've got a pattern picked out already, and after a polling of friends this weekend, a yarn as well (Lorna's Laces Sport in Georgetown). I've already bought it off eBay from a vendor who is in-state, so hopefully I will have it by this weekend.

Speaking of eBay, I've been stalking it lately. I bought a pair of Rip Slyme singles (Blue Bebop and FUNKASTIC) for $9.50 after shipping... not bad considering the original retail for each would've been around $10. Now, let's hope this time it actually GETS here - last time I bought CDs from someone in Japan (a different vendor), I never got them, supposedly 'lost in the mail'. Luckily, I'd only spent $16... And I keep getting sniped on Kimi wa Petto manga. I don't normally read manga, let alone shoujo, but I saw the Kimi wa Petto dorama (Japanese TV show) a few months back and have been mildly obsessed with it (and the guy who plays Momo, Matsumoto Jun, even if he's in Arashi and Arashi is an annoying sucky Johnny's band) since. Unfortunately, Tokyo Pop releases the manga - and under the inexplicable title of 'Tramps like us'... seriously, what the hell? 'Kimi wa petto' translates to 'you are my pet' and is about a career woman keeping a younger man as a substitute for her long-dead pet dog (yeah, it sounds kinky and weird, but it's actually not). Er, anyway, getting back to why Tokyo Pop sucks - I'm not paying $10 for something that costs $5 in Japan, that's just price gouging. And they are taking their sweet time to release the damn manga - 3 months between volumes means that even though the manga finished its original run years ago, TokyoPop is only up to volume 7 of 12. Grr.

... Really, I've been spending a lot of time watching doramas. Most have short runs, between 9-12 episodes, but there are some seriously entertaining shows out there. The above mentioned Kimi wa Petto was the first I watched and has gotten me addicted. Since then, I've watched Densha Otoko, an absolutely endearing show based on a true story about an otaku who falls in love with a woman way out of his league and turns to an internet BBS for help. The members of the board (called Aladdin Channel in the show, but based on the real-life 2ch, you can even find the original Densha Otoko threads archived on the internet) end up being like his Cyrano. Anyway, the whole Densha Otoko ('Train Man') story has become some kind of huge cultural phenomenon in Japan for the past year and a half. Then there's the Trick series, which is a pretty damn funny show about a magician and a physicist out to prove that spiritualists are actually frauds. The two main actors have some pretty good chemistry, especially when they're picking on each other (including running jokes about the woman being flatchested and the man's penis being too big. How can you not love the novelty of a penis size joke about a penis being too big, for a change of pace?). I've only watched the first series of three, but I'm downloading the others now... and then there's Gokusen, which I downloaded mostly because of Matsumoto Jun, but is also turning out to be what I'd call 'delightfully retarded'. It's about a teacher who was raised by her Yakuza-boss grandfather dealing with her delinquent students. In otherwords, very similar to GTO (but hey, Great Teacher Onizuka is like the epitome of the 'teacher turns his bad kids around using unconventional methods' genre), but probably funnier thanks to the teacher, Yankumi, being a complete dork and the antics of her students.


And gee, haven't I gotten way off track? HA. Anyway... the grandma blanket is hovering around 24 inches after briefly getting stuck in knitting purgatory. You know, that place where no matter how many rows you knit, the damn thing never gets any longer. I've also got most of the back of a Dulaan sweater (I'm about 2 inches short) completed... and then I put all the knitting crap away yesterday while I had my little Trick marathon and worked on a cross stitch kit I haven't looked at in three years.


I think I have way too many hobbies, really. I haven't even played City of Villains in close to three weeks (waiting for the I7 update to go live!), actually finished a song translation in months (although I've got the bits and pieces of probably 3 dozen floating around on my hard drive, on my LJ, or on scraps of paper tucked into CD booklets) and, well, forget about any of my graphics ventures. I haven't produced a new wallpaper in probably 8 months.