Christian Young

I'm still marvelling at having a hobby that I'm willing to spend money on -- I went to a weaving conference last week (got a first-timer scholarship, which covered admission and room and board, but I splurged and got a single room, so paid a little extra) which meant buying extra yarn for the workshop, and then even though I'm well out of storage room and have said multiple times I need to make some things before I buy more stuff, I bought 7 more cones of yarn (some of it was on sale! the rest was just really pretty hand-dyed!). Some of it I can definitely think of things to do with it, the rest I'll just have to try and keep an eye out for ideas, because I don't want it to sit forever.

And I talked to people too, constantly, the whole weekend. My god. By day 2.5 I was wiped, I am not an extrovert by any means. But folks chatted throughout classes, in the hallways, just wherever. I walked out of the dinner hall and ended up talking with some random woman whose name I never caught for like 10 minutes. Plus, also, I ran into a friend from local fandom cons who I hadn't seen in like 10-ish years (MJ and Con.txt). Neither of us were doing fiber things back then, so it was really a (pleasant) surprise.

Anyway now I am back home and waiting for work to ramp back up -- it always slows down in the summer due to end-of-fiscal-year purchasing deadlines, but today starts the new FY, so I'm just waiting for the word that budgets are loaded into the system, and I can start doing work again. Things are also wonky because DC passed an energy savings bill recently, so in order to comply we're finally getting around to converting the building to LED lighting -- which means shuffling folks' offices and encasing the stacks in protective material. We don't have an end date and the last construction project went on and on and on, so folks are just crossing fingers that impact will be minimal on the full-term researchers starting in the fall. I'm planning to hide in my new office with a fucking door so I can avoid chatty opinionated elder coworker for once in my life. My god this would be an amazing time to finally get a new job and quit.

Oh! I almost forgot. I also managed to blitz through all of Elementary in the last month or so, after having had it on my 'to watch' list for years. There are some parts of it that left me kind of 'meh,' and for someone who's great at identifying prosthetic-forehead Star Trek actors in other roles by only their eyes, I could not for the life of me identify Johnny Lee Miller in 3/4 profile shots on multiple occasions. My brain also kept replacing him in my memory with Darren Nichols. I think it was something about the overly upright posture (and also the dramatics). These things mostly resolved themselves by probably midway through season 2, by which point I could focus on things like how unsexy Mycroft was. It's a shame but unsurprising that there isn't more fic. I need to find something to watch that does have a lot of fic, but I haven't come up with anything yet. Though I think the latest season of Leverage: Redemption just finished, or is about to, and that sounds like it should give me something to sink my teeth into.