Darkoshi

"My belly looks like a marshmallow," I thought, seeing it in the mirror.

A few dress pants of mine had gotten snug. Working from home, I haven't worn them in forever anyway, but that's besides the point.

It's too bad, I thought while looking at the pants, that they can't be made wider. There's no way to do it without cutting the waistband and inserting extra material which wouldn't match and would look bad.

I was debating whether to keep them or give them away.

Then I noticed something. Could it be? Yes, indeed. I was stunned that I'd never noticed it before. The pants were designed with extra fabric in the back. The waistband was sewn together in the center back, folded over on itself on each side. You only need to take out some stitches and sew it back together to widen the pants! Men's pants are so cool.

Two pairs of pants that I'd been debating about have that feature.

Another pair of my snug pants has a snazzy matching suit jacket, so I really didn't want to give them away. These pants don't have the extra fabric in back. However, the waistband folds over on itself on the front sides. And the pants have pleats in the front that could be taken out to provide more width. I doubt these were designed with that intention, but I might be able to widen them too.

Boy's shorts sometimes have elastic bands in the waistband that can be pulled to the desired tension and hooked onto a button on each side to allow for an adjustable fit.

My little light-weight "sew mini" sewing machine can actually sew over folded seams on thick cotton pants, as long as I reduce the thread tension down to zero in those sections. Although jean seams might still be too thick for it. In the past it always got stuck on thick parts like that, so I thought it wasn't meant to handle such "heavyweight" items, and ended up manually sewing those parts.

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Wired magazine is currently having a sale, $5 for a year of ad-free digital access. (I'm not sure why $5, when their regular price is $19.99, and it says 50% off as a Black Friday deal). If any of you on my list would like me to buy you a digital pass gift subscription, PM me your email address and first&last name to enter on their site (it won't bother me if you want to give them a fake name).

I'd been wanting to make these green tea cupcakes ever since Qiao gave me the fabulous vegan cupcake cookbook. I finally bought the essential ingredient - matcha green tea powder - last year, but didn't get around to actually trying out the recipe until last week. The cupcakes turned out soft, fluffy, and super-duper yummy, even without any marzipan flowers on top.

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It is blackberry season. I've seen people gathering berries along the roads. On the way home from work today, I stopped by a patch and picked some myself. I'm glad I stopped at the place I did, as 2 other people were already stopped by the larger patches further down the road which I passed by later. As it was, after stopping my car where I did, it took me a while to gather my courage to get out of the car. I had a silly fear that someone would come out of the commercial building whose driveway I was parked in, and accuse me of stealing their berries. From the car, I couldn't even tell if there were any ripe berries in this patch. But I finally got out, and got me some lovely berries.

Thin dress pants aren't suitable attire for blackberry picking. A branch snagged my pants and tore out a few threads before I managed to get free. Denim would have been better.

After getting home, I checked the bushes across the street and picked some more berries there too. But those were tiny compared to the others.

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I remedied the pinholes in the curtain black-out liners by using fusible web to iron on extra strips of black-out fabric over the seam lines.

The black-out fabric and/or the fusible web gives off fumes while ironing it at the necessary heat level. But at least those fumes were temporary.

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Knoppix! I created a live disk and used it to boot my laptop to Linux. Neat! The last time I created a similar live disk and tried it on my old computer, I never got the internet working as that would have required finding and installing the necessary wireless drivers. But this Knoppix live CD had everything I needed - my wi-fi and internet worked, as did my external mouse and keyboard.

I was using Linux in order to reformat a 256 GB flash drive as FAT32. Windows didn't let me do it. Linux did.

The reason for reformatting the flash drive is a story for another time.

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Partially inspired by this post by gfish, as well as articles such as this one, I've been trying to do more work standing up.

When we moved buildings, I was given a 2nd monitor. Rather than position it side-by-side with my other monitor, I put it on my cubicle's shelf, after moving the shelf down a few notches. That puts the top monitor at a fairly good height for me to use while standing. So now I have one monitor on my desk to use while sitting, and another on the shelf to use while standing. I can position my mouse higher by using a small stack of books. But I can't really get the keyboard high enough to be very comfortable while standing.

I was thinking that rather than moving the monitor and accessories up and down, it would be simpler to have everything up high, and to have a high chair. Then everything would be at the right height whether I was sitting or standing. Maybe someday.

For now, I can only manage to stand for a few minutes at a time before I start feeling tired/uncomfortable, or before I feel the need to sit down to do something that takes my full attention. Working while standing is sort of like trying to write with my left hand - I can do it, but at a slower pace and with more frustration.

Sometimes I stand in a spread-leg or horse-riding position, which brings my torso low enough to comfortably use the lower monitor and keyboard. But I don't do that for long either, as it makes my feet tired, and I feel self-conscious about looking weird to anyone who walks by.

Then again, I do full-body stretches in my cubicle a few times a day, which surely is a strange sight to see, too.

Wow. So much pretty. So much creative.

A video showing how the recycled sweater coats are made:


Video title: Making A Katwise Sweater Coat
Posted by: katwise osullivan
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wC8vu2BoBE
Description: How to make a recycled sweater coat.

Shows how to easily replace old worn-out elastic on a fitted sheet. Only applicable for sheets where the elastic is loose in a channel (casing), not where the elastic itself is sewn along the edge of the sheet.
Basically, cut free one end of the old elastic, sew that end to one end of the new elastic, then cut free the other end of the old elastic and pull it out. The new elastic gets pulled in at the same time. Then sew off both ends of the new elastic, and repeat on the other end of the sheet.

At my new cubicle, one of the overhead lights was glaring in my eyes. My former cubicles had the same problem, and in the past I had been able to block the light by putting up pieces of cardboard in strategic locations.

This time it was more difficult, as the offending light was higher overhead. But I devised a solution. It is a cloth shade, with a cord threaded through on one side, and a wire hanger on the other side, to support it. The side with the wire is only supported on one corner, so it needed something stiff to hold it up. Binder clips and paper clips hold the cord and wire in place. I used a relatively thin white cloth as I didn't want to make my work area darker; I simply wanted to reduce the glare a bit. There are also 2 sheets of dot-matrix printer paper on top of the cloth - that is the darker section.





It's not obvious from the photos, but my cube is still rather a mess. I haven't yet finished putting everything in its place. I plan to go through a bunch of papers and books to see what I no longer need.

These are some other ideas I considered, before deciding to make my own shade. I wanted it to be subtle, not something that could be seen from far away.

Success: Both dogs have been microchipped.
Fail: Serena's new "break-away" collar didn't even last 2 days on her. I found it chewed up into little pieces in the yard. I'll need to make her a metal chain collar like Zorro's, with an elastic strip for safety. Unless Zorro takes to pulling that off her too, in which case I guess she can't have a safety collar.

I attended, with Qiao, the funeral of one of his family friends. They are Episcopalian. Qiao kneels and prays in church. It seems bizarre to me how I can be in a relationship with someone so different from me. The first time the congregation was asked to kneel, I stayed sitting. The 2nd time, I thought that it might feel good to stretch my back, so I kneeled too. Boy was I wrong; kneeling in the pews was not at all comfortable for my back. Had I not been able to lean my arms over the edge of the pew, I might not have been able to maintain that position.

I'm using my new kneeling chair; I'm quite pleased with it. Nevertheless, my back is still very achy. It is still possible to slouch in this chair, so I'm not sure whether it will help much.

I wish I knew the cause of my back aches. I feel like I have to wait until the pain eventually becomes excruciating, before I can seek medical diagnostics and treatment. After all, the chiropractor already performed x-rays and said that my spine looked fine. So whatever is wrong must not be wrong enough yet to be detectable.

It seems that I made the crotch a bit too short on the pair of jeans which I altered. The pants are wearable, but it was a disappointing result after having put all that effort into it.

I read some more of the "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" book yesterday. It's interesting, and it makes me want to know the answer to the mysteries, but there's nothing to the story that makes me enjoy it. It's rather grim, actually.

I had also been reading "The Dog from Hell". That story was neither interesting nor enjoyable for me, so I decided to discontinue it.

This New Year's Eve, I went to bed before midnight. I had been feeling down, possibly due to insufficient sleep. The prior night I had likewise gone to bed early, and it felt so good to get a good night's sleep that I wanted to repeat it. But it wasn't repeated. I heard fireworks, so I don't think I got any sleep until after midnight anyway. But still, that may have been the first New Year's Eve for which I didn't stay up.

I sewed elastic into the sides of the waistband of my new white cargo pants to make them fit better. Now I am shortening the pants-legs so that I don't have to wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

As I was picking up my needle from the table, it disappeared. I had my eyes on it, and one moment it was there, and the next, it wasn't. I checked the table, the floor, my clothing, to see where it might have jumped to, but I did not find it. If I were superstitious, I might have believed something spooky was going on. It was certainly odd, one of those moments that makes supernaturalness seem plausible. But I still believed that eventually the needle would show up; things don't just disappear like that. Even if there is some supernatural entity snatching away my needle in order to perplex me, the entity would eventually return it, for appearances sake. And indeed, I did notice the needle not long after, on the floor in back of the chair.

The house across the street was playing Mexican music for a while. But then it stopped and a woman was yelling and it sounded like she was... maybe breaking glass, or banging metal... knives? against each other? A guy is yelling now too, but it is not as loud anymore.

I made brownies. And baked the frozen apple turnovers at the same time, since the oven was on anyway. I ironed the new curtains I had bought for the red room. Perhaps this week I will buy a nice curtain rod for them. I have vacation. And I ironed the shirts I had washed. I stir-fried some parsley.

This morning I was hearing a song in my dream. A man's voice was singing "I've been missing you forever and a day.. for-eeeverrrrr..." From what I've googled, there isn't any song with those lyrics, so my head must have made it up. It surprises me, my head doing that, not just the lyrics but the actual music along with them, because my head doesn't very often do that when its awake. Before that part of the dream, a song was playing on the car radio, with the words "Stop it, stop it, stop it"... a sort of dancy song.

I cut the rest of the grass that I didn't get to yesterday, because the 2 batteries I have for my electric trimmer only last so long before I have to recharge them. I've got 2 shirts for which I plan to sew the sides in tighter because I don't like how they look when they wallow out behind me.

A movie I finished watching yesterday, "Nobody Knows", was macabre near the end. I wasn't expecting that.

Now the yelling is over. Someone was just signal-whistling; a kid probably.

I feel listless. What is life for?