Posted by barb on Mar 7, 2004 in
Crafty Me,
Pictures About a year and a half ago, my brother showed me a blanket bear that his mother-in-law had bought for my niece. He asked if I could make her another one, because she had become so attached to it, they were worried about what would happen if something happened to the bear. I’ve since made her two more, so she has three, and she’s very attached to both of them.
Once, when my sister-in-law and niece were at a small shop in Bloomington, MN (where I grew up), the owner asked where they had gotten the bear. She told my sister-in-law that if I ever wanted to sell them, that she would happily buy some.
Well, I decided not to do that — it takes too much time to make the bears for me to make any actual money. Instead, I will stick to making them for friends and family. To that end, I finished three this weekend — one for my friend Melissa’s best friend, one for my aunt’s daughter-in-law, and one for the next member of the Mattson clan. Here’s a picture of them:
I have three more that I’m making for another friend. I’ll post pictures when I’m done with those, too.
Posted by barb on Mar 6, 2004 in
Movies 2/5 stars
Actually, this wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, but that might have been because I was sewing while watching the movie. I can imagine that if I had to actually sit and pay attention through the whole thing, I would have enjoyed it less.
Mitzi, a drag queen, discovers that his ex-wife needs his help. So he and two friends, Bernadette and Felicia, head across the desert to Alice Springs (Australia), to put on a show at her hotel. I was distracted, though, because Mitzi is played by Hugo Weaving, the same actor who played Agent Smith in the Matrix movies and Elrond in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I can imagine that the next time I watch The Matrix, I’ll be picturing Agent Smith in drag.
Posted by barb on Mar 6, 2004 in
Around DC,
Pictures I went the the DC Big Flea Market at the Dulles Expo Center today. I was expecting a flea market — mostly filled with other people’s junk where it takes a bit to scour through the booths and actually find something you like. Instead, I found what would be called an antique sale in Minnesota — what fun! (Here, in Virginia, it seems that an antique sale has to be hoity-toity stuff that no one actually buys.)
The flea market took up both of the buildings, which means it was HUGE! I found lots of things I could have bought — slide rules at several booths, a Pigs in Space lunch box, Empire Strikes Back thermos (though I don’t have the lunch box yet, so there’s still hope I could get the two together, and a few gifts for family (which I can’t mention, in case they read this).
In the second-to-last aisle, though, I found the piece du resistance. An armillary sphere. Andrew and I have looked at these before, but they are generally prohibitively expensive, so we figured we would have to wait until we were wealthy. I decided to look at the sphere, though, just to see how far out of my budget it was. But it wasn’t! I thought I had to be missing a number, but I wasn’t. I could afford it! Yay! Needless to say, I got it, and here’s a couple pictures:
Posted by barb on Mar 3, 2004 in
Saxophone Not much to say about this lesson. We played part of one of the duets I’ve been working on, but didn’t actually make it through the whole thing — I kept messing up, losing our place, and coming in too late or too early. Ugh.
Posted by barb on Mar 2, 2004 in
Cute Pets,
Pictures 
Posted by barb on Feb 29, 2004 in
Wedding We’ve interviewed two photographers, and while the work both presented us with was nice, we decided to go with the second one, based on personality.
Photographer I
The photographer we called was not actually available for our wedding date, but he had another photographer that he often worked with who would do the wedding for us, with him acting as contractor. We met with both the photographer and contractor on Feb 14 (yup, Valentine’s Day).
The meeting stretched to an hour and a half, but mainly because the photographer kept bringing us on meaningless tangents. She was very concerned with make-up, which to me is not something that we needed to discuss until just before the wedding, not on the first meeting.
While the contractor’s prices were within our budget, we were not overly impressed with the photographer. If the contractor himself had been available for the wedding, however, we likely would have hired him.
Photographer II
We arranged to meet with Photographer II on Feb 21, a week after meeting the first one. By that time, I had started disliking the first one more and more, and was concerned that all photographers near our price range would annoy me. However we were pleasantly surprised with Photographer II.
We met him near the Bethesda Metro station at the Hyatt Hotel’s lobby. This meeting also stretched to more than an hour and a half, but this photographer’s tangents were interesting and often related to his photography (no discussion of make-up, thank you very much). He was also very excited about the chance to photograph a wedding in a dimmed planetarium. He had already thought about the challenge, and decided that perhaps the best way to deal with it would be to have him take flash pictures (if the officiant allows it) and his wife take natural-light pictures. That way, we would certainly have pictures that turned out, and perhaps have some with the “starlight” as well.
Overall, his prices are going to be more than the other photographer we interviewed. However, we don’t have to worry about paying for the reprints and albums until after the wedding, so I look at that as an after-wedding expense, rather than as part of the wedding budget. We can save up for it separately after the wedding.
Posted by barb on Feb 29, 2004 in
Biking The forecast for today was wonderful — mid 60s and sunny. We decided to take advantage of that by biking into Vienna for the antique show and lunch.
I’m so proud of myself, too. Last year at this time I was barely able to go a mile before making us turn around home. Today, the first time out this year, we biked a total of 8.5 miles! (3.5 miles into town, a couple miles to go from the show to lunch to Michael’s, and another 3.5 miles home) And, frankly, I could have gone further.
Yay!
Posted by barb on Feb 29, 2004 in
Cute Pets,
Pictures I couldn’t pass up this picture opportunity — Andrew and Duncan relaxing.
Posted by barb on Feb 25, 2004 in
Saxophone Andrew and I have decided that I can get a new horn with my tax return, so when Fred bitched again about how out of tune my high A is, I told him that I can get a new sax. Since Rudy wasn’t coming in, we decided to try a couple of the horns the store had in stock.
Yamaha has two models between the student version and the professional line — sort of a step-up and step-up-step-up. After playing both, Fred didn’t really think that the step-up-step-up was actually worth $400 more than the step-up. On the other hand, he wasn’t quite happy with the step-up one, either. So, the store is going to order another step-up to see if it’s better (or at least different). The store is also going to try to order a Jupiter sax, though Jupiter went out of business a while ago, so we don’t know if they can get one.
The benefits of the step-up horns over the student versions is that they are usually made of higher quality brass, and some of the openings are adjustable.
Posted by barb on Feb 24, 2004 in
Games,
Pictures I haven’t actually had much time to work on puzzles in the past 6 months, so this one has been on the puzzle caddy for a long time. But I finally sat down and worked on it for nearly two days straight, and finished it. I think this is the first puzzle that I’ve done where I didn’t complete the frame first — that’s because this was one of those puzzles where it’s way too easy to connect the wrong two pieces without realizing it.
