Hey! guesswhat.

NEW LAYOUT!!!

well kind of. New picture, anyway, and some minor tweaks to suit. Matt, your comments cut me to the heart, I had to change things. brat. ;p I'm sure you'll still hate it, but I like it better, and that's what matters.

This may well be ridiculous on other peoples' monitors - heaven forbid you have an 800x600 resolution, you're so doomed to scroll sideways. But it looks lovely on my computer. I'll have to see how it is on Tom's later. Unfortunately, this background does not (currently) lend itself well to your screenview being bigger than mine. (Fortunately, only nerds like Tom will have ones bigger than me, and nerds like him don't care enough about people to do things like read blogs. SO I WIN.)

I really wanted to use that shot of an orchid in a layout. This is not entirely what I had in mind when I went into Photoshop, but, when is it ever? All my own photos are layered in there. The oooonly only thing not mine is the pattern I used to overlay on the text area to get lil bits of color. well and the brushes, I used a few star things I picked up around the 'nets.

I also buckled down and made my own little last.fm chart, wooo. (This basically consisted of me copying a chunk out of the full version of the image I made for this background. And then drawing lil swirls on it.)


I also played a little more with the "stone child" background I made the other day, trying to make it into a layout. It's closer. I drew in some viney things and a flower, because I like drawing them, and then I colored them, because I'm currently in love with light aqua and colors that go with it. We'll see if I still like it in the morning. (My tentative plan for that one is an art blog, to post pictures and things of whatever project I just finished. And I can keep things find-able via tags. And it'll be nice and quick to update all the time. A less stressful site/portfolio.)


I baked some chocolate-toffee cookies today, and made the dough for some nice simple nutmeg-heavy vanilla sugar cookies, which has probably chilled long enough by now for me to bake them. My two latest casseroles, Tom will eat, but only if he is desperate. (One's a stewed beef + veggies in a tomato-ish base, with biscuits on top, that wound up a bit dry and mediocre in his book. I enjoy it. The other is an asparagus bread pudding recipe I found on 101cookbooks, that I knew he wouldn't be too keen on, but I find nice and filling.) I have a chicken casserole planned, but I think I'm going to hold off on it until next week, as I have spent enough money this week already. ^^;;

...I'm currently keeping close tabs on every dollar I spend, to see why Tom has waaay more money than me. I'm definitely spending more on groceries than he is on bills, I can tell you that already - that was our initial deal, he'd do bills, I'd do food, and we figured it would break about even. I think that's changed a bit, probably because we're no longer eating solely rice and ramen. (We also raaaarely went out to eat when we started out here. Also didn't drink any alcohol.) I've kept my spending largely reigned in the past few weeks, but... things like wedding gifts and birthday gifts and things keep happening. hmm.


I actually went out the other night! One of my coworkers was plotting a party at her place, since her parents were gone for the weekend - shush, they actually tacitly gave her permission to have a party, as long as there was no mess. ;) She's a pretty fun person to hang out with, and she was all worried no-one was going to come, so I thought hey, what the hell, I'll go for awhile. I tried to talk Tom into it, and I could tell he was tempted, but, he opted out. Uh, it wound up only being me and her and another girl from work (who I also like hanging out with)...but it was actually really nice, and pretty darn fun. We were pretty tipsy by the time I went home around one - apparently half an hour later, two other girls from work dropped in, but, I had to be at work at 9am, so I was good and went home to sleep. 0:)


This weekend was Webkinz Extravaganza weekend...though funnily enough, I was only scheduled to work Saturday. I did my best to get things all organized for everyone else though, printed up paperwork and little slips of paper with prizes on them to put inside balloons for kids to pop, etc. When I got in Saturday morning, I ran around and checked to see what we were out of, updated the lists, filled in the shelves...
And was promptly bored enough to go work on some print jobs out back for a few hours. It wasn't half so crazy as it was last year. We got pretty swamped right at lunch time, and again around dinnertime, but only for maybe half an hour were things non-stop. We had a million people working, so we could spare a few people to dress up in big fuzzy animal costumes and dance around by the road - and I got to face paint. ^______^ I felt bad, there really weren't enough kids to even justify one of us doing it, and Kate had wanted to as well. But we filled in some of the time painting stars and things on other employees (Amanda, who is short and blond and rather doll-like, wanted an "I LOVE MOM" with a big heart on her arm - I made sure to loop barbed wire around the heart for her), and I did get a handful of kids down there to color and get face painted. I filled in the shelves again at the end of the afternoon, and my guess is around 50 Webkinz sold, in that one day. Not as much as last year, but still not bad. When I go in Tuesday, I should be able to cross a few more off the list, and hoooopefully have maybe one less mountain of boxes out back? ^^;;


BUT, I need to stop thinking about work. It's been stressing me out so much lately, and I need to enjoy my days off and stoooop freaking thinking about it. Crochet! Crocheting is good. I ordered some yarn today to start on a quick-to-make throw for a wedding gift (though I need to double-check my colors once they get here, I bought a few options in case the monitor mislead me - I'll rush-order the rest like the next day). On a whim, I'd bought myself a single little skein of 50% linen/50% cotton yarn when I ordered a sample card for the yarn for my skirt, just to test and see what linen felt like. It's surprisingly stiff stuff, holds the stitches in a really exacting way. But everything I've read says it gets all nice and soft the more you use it - so I'm making a simple little handtowel with it, to see how it holds up. My cotton handtowels are starting to pill up and look less pretty...though they've gotten constant use for...I'm not actually sure how long, but I suspect it's been like a year or so. And it was a pretty cheap cotton.


In any case, my neck is freaking killing me. I may have a better computer setup, but, that doesn't change my habit of leaning crazy close to the screen to better see the tiny details of what I'm doing. (ZOOM, MELISSA, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD THAT IS WHY IT IS THERE!!11!) Also, I tend to lean around at weird angles when I'm using the tablet, which I was doing a lot tonight.

But yay I'm so glad I accomplished something. ^__________^