Oh, my Bob, sometimes you do get rewards!

You know, on those silly little plastic cards companies give you, nominally so they can offer you discounts on their products and services, but that they really use to track your spending and thereby tailor advertising just for you?

I got 20% off my total purchase as a 'gift' for my birthday at Michael's -- not my big box store of choice, but it'll do in a pinch. I wasn't sure what I wanted to use it for, but I've been in a deep blue funk lately, so I went anyway. You never know, do you, and it got me out of the house.

I bought these:

Charms!

Don't ask about this:

other than it was big, sparkly and on clearance. And I needed something to use that 20% on.

I don't wear bracelets, in the main, or necklaces, so what, pray tell, was I going to use them for? You may well ask:

Ain'tent I clever?

I love those J Hooks, they are so useful. I revamped my old earrings a few months ago and now this. What's next?

Actually, some of the newer beading supplies (pendants and the like) are pretty cool. I might get a new pack of J Hooks and some beads and make my Giftmas presents for the friends again. Maybe.

Or I might just invest in some Half Price Books gift cards. Everyone I know loves Half Price.

In other news, I am bored, bored, bored, bored. Bored in an existential fashion. I'm not entirely sure how to shake myself out of it, either. I've done it before, by doing new things or something else fun like that, but I might have reached the upper limits of new in a town where I've lived for over 30 years.

Maybe I should learn something new to me, like French, or go back to studying piano. Or take up Legos. Something. Anything, really, to shake myself up a bit.

I feel like throwing myself down on the ground, rolling around growling and tearing something up, like my dog used to do when he was frustrated. I miss him, you know. Having him there sort of gave me a focus, or at least a priority. I need a priority right about now.

Pimp My Cluedo

Oh, yeah, baby.

Whatcha think? I'm pretty chuffed. I mean, the box itself is sloppy, but with a little bit of deco duct tape and a complete lack of concern for archival properties of your materials and you can make the thing turn out!

To be precise, I used these:

Duct tape in what the label called "Lace Vegas" (yeah, right) and a roll of contact paper in nearly matching black and white scrollwork flowers. The tape was to make the box square (you don't want to know the pressures some of those sides labor under) and the contact paper was to do this:

back my cards. They're printed on photo paper (which I will, eventually, laminate to protect the surface from scratches) and you can see through them. So I plopped them down on the contact paper, face up, and trimmed them out. I figure the pattern suits the semi-Victorian feel of the new Sherlock.

I went ahead and backed my weapon tokens and the little colored blots they give you for in case you decide you don't want to steal the pieces out of another Clue game to play, too. Trimmed and tucked up in the bunged-up box -- considering how poorly suited to the task the board I used is, I'm amazed it hangs together at all -- and the thing actually looks halfway good. Makes all the work I put into a properly made box feel a bit...overdone.

I actually had to make a...I don't know what to call it, but the lid was too large by about a half an inch in one direction. So I had to take two strips of board, tape them sideways (which together equals 1/2 inch) and then tape them into the lid of the box to make it fit properly on the bottom. I figure that's neither here nor there, considering I'm only doing this to keep my pirated version of Cluedo safe from kitty claws. I'm not handing this down to posterity.

Heck, grip it too hard and it crumples. I'll be lucky if I'm not making a new one in a year. If I do, though, I'm using better board. Seriously, this crap was torture to work with. It was like trying to build a model of the Golden Gate Bridge out of play dough.

In other news, I've had a very busy weekend so far. Went to a play last night. Not a play I'd normally attend, given my druthers, but it was pretty good. And the sheer wall of sound generated by a gospel choir with a back-up band shifted some of the swelling in my sinuses, relieving the vertigo I'm experiencing at present. If I'd known all it took was a huge drum kit and bass guitar to get that crap to shift, I'd have been playing Parliament's greatest hits at volume. Maybe some disco, too. That's got bass backing it up.

I also took a pet CPR and first aid class today. Tip for anyone out there thinking of taking the same class: Do not be kind or gentle with the creepy dog dummy that looks more like a decaying bear than any sort of dog. Well, come to that, don't be too gentle or kind when performing compressions on a real dog; you've got to push from your shoulder to get proper compression on the heart, which is apparently a slippery little devil in their chests and must be firmly spanked. But, yeah, from the shoulder, not the elbow, unless -- like me -- you want to be unable to close your hand properly for several hours. My forearm is sore.

I hope I am not rendered unable to knit by this injury. I need to get working on a gift for a friend, and I can't take the time to recover from repetitive CPR injury! Although I will confess, it was worth taking the class if only because we got to practice putting splints and bandages on a particularly compliant bulldog. I had to giggle at what we must have looked like -- I had the impression of two little girls, done with playing lame tea deciding to pretend to working in the trauma room of the ER, bandaging gang members, getting harassed by handsome cops who think we hear things in recovery, and maybe marrying doctors who we then divorce to become glamorous divorcees who go to parties and drink grown up drinks like martinis while wearing long gloves with sequins.*

No? Just me then.

Poor dog. I'd have felt sorrier for him if I hadn't thought he was secretly enjoying the attention!

*It's entirely possible that I watched too much television as a child.

Where I've been and what I've been doing.

I've been trying  to make a box for my Sherlock: Unofficial Cluedo set. Not working well. When I'm done with it (probably tomorrow), I'll post you a picture so you can see how sad my box making skills have gotten. Days were, I could knock one or two out an hour -- allowing for glue-drying time.

Then again, to cut myself some slack, I'm using sub-par materials. You can't expect a DaVinci using water-soluble markers and a little bit of mud, can you?

I've also cut the heck out of my aunt's card table. I hope she doesn't want it back.

Pretty Bobbles

I'm branching out, y'all. The first thing I did this week in my course of doing new stuff was repair an old pair of earrings. Well, I say old, but I bought them three years ago. However, the hooks had turned to this:

Blech, you can see the dirty copper! Ewww! So I went shopping -- thankfully I got a few good coupons in the mail from my favorite Big Box Retailer of All Things Craftual -- and got some notions (aka, 'findings', which is now my favorite word for craft supplies evar), so the fish hook earring doo-dads could go from the above to this:

See? Shiny. It's amazing, with the old hooks on, the earrings looked dirty and down-market. With the new hooks, they look clean and brand new again. Which just goes to show, a little bit of maintenance can give you a whole new look!

I also got some extras. I have a blue ton of beads in a box which I only just rediscovered the other day. In light of the fact that I'm stone-broke at present, I decided to make a necklace to give a friend for her birthday. So, I tossed some extra things in my card at Big Box Retailer of All Things Craftual:

Wish me luck.

But the beads are totally her color -- red and purple and black -- so I'm hoping it will turn out alright:

Pretty, no? I don't even remember why I bought these.... Oh, well. Lucky me. I don't have to feel too bad that what she's mostly getting for Festivus is marshmallows. Granted, they are my special, hand made marshmallows, in a variety of flavors (provided I can figure out how to chop up the cinnamon candies I found), so they're not just marshmallows, they are Super Excellent and Moist Marshmallows of Joy.

Which makes them (naturally) superior to just about everything I could purchase. At least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. :-)