Posts Tagged ‘T-shirts’

T-Day, Observed

Monday, December 1st, 2008

7:00 am: I forgot the pie crust dough would have to be chilled before pre-baking, and the fats frozen before making the dough. So we froze the fats over breakfast and made the dough afterward in the food processor. Now it’s chilling.

10:45 am: Phew! Mocha raspberry trifle assembled. Pie shell baked. Mini puff pastry shells filled with chocolate cream and topped with cool whip. Two versions of cornbread in the oven (sweet & not sweet). Sweet potato casserole assembled.

Monday morning: Well that’s the point at which I stopped having time to post. We made two stuffings (sausage mushroom, and ‘plain’), made the sweet potato pie, roasted the brined turkey, made bacon cheddar biscuits… We filled baked frozen puff pastry mini-shells with an agave tofu chocolate cream and topped them with a little cool whip, and you wouldn’t believe how stunning they were (not to mention I doubt anyone would have guessed they had tofu in them). Then we made garlic broccoli and some lightly buttered & parsleyed carrots at the last minute.

But the best part was all the cool friends who visited. Unfortunately a couple of them are allergic to cats and had to be doped up, but I think they enjoyed the food!

 

“Cyber Monday” at Errant Dreams: We have a holiday special going on at errantdreams.etsy.com, where we sell our handmade jewelry and bookmarks. All of the bookmarks I posted before November have been marked down in price by 20-30%. Also, from now through Dec. 31, if you have us ship within the USA and order a least $20 in products, you’ll get free shipping. :) Just place your order and wait to pay until I send you a revised PayPal invoice.

Here’s a sampling of items:

In addition, if you’re in a more practical and less fanciful mode, we have two cafepress stores (Caffeinaed Chicanery and Gamers’ Heaven) with T-shirts, mugs, etc. in a bunch of designs. Some randomly-chosen designs in each store will be reduced in price over the day today, so poke around and enjoy!

Level 80 & Dance-off!

Friday, October 24th, 2008

We’ve pretty much finished rolling out the level 80 T-shirt designs at cafepress. This means two things: first, we expect to phase out the level 70 designs around the end of the year; we’ll keep them on sale until then, so grab ‘em while you can! Second, we think the level 80 designs are even better than the level 70 designs, and the level 70 designs have been quite popular. So be the first to get your own!

Also, cafepress has added some new items, like travel mugs and the flip mino camcorder. Yes, a pocket-sized camcorder. What will they add next?! Pssst—level 80 items make great holiday gifts for gamers! :D

 

 

In unrelated news, I almost always put brief excerpted versions of my reviews on Amazon, just for the heck of it. I thought it was kind of cool when I went from starting out in the 700,000s (back before there were millions of users posting reviews) to the 700s. Apparently today they started calculating the reviewer ranking differently. Partly to stop people from “ballot-box stuffing”, or finding ways to rate their own reviews. Partly to emphasize whether a person’s reviews are seen as helpful or not, so that quantity doesn’t trump quality. And partly to emphasize newness of reviews, so new reviewers get a chance to climb up the ladder.

And suddenly my rank went, literally overnight, from 679 to 64. That’s pretty cool.

“Our floor is awfully popular”

Friday, August 8th, 2008

I believe I mentioned that whole thing where I posted a bunch of texture images on DeviantArt. Well, hands down so far the most popular one is the hardwood floor texture, which has been downloaded 37 times in the past day and a half. This led to a wry observation on how popular our floor was.

I turned our slate porch surface into an interesting ‘window’ image, which I’m pretty proud of. I’m also playing with part of it to create an eventual banner for a possible craft-selling etsy store. Yeah, fine, that’s more than a little premature, but once I get an idea into my head I just can’t let go. And besides, I think it looks pretty cool!


Decaying Window by ~ErrantDreams on deviantART

 


Craft Banner Play by ~ErrantDreams on deviantART

 

Just to really pile on the artwork, here’s a new cafepress tabletop roleplaying design. It came out of some truly spectacular D&D fumble tales from the last few months:

 

Yes, it really does say “An arrow in the butt is better than a spear in the winkie.” Did I mention that our GMs have some particularly vicious fumble tables? :D

 

Here are the latest book reviews for you: Vicki Lewis Thompson’s Wild & Hexy and the awesome Jean Johnson’s The Storm.

 

The Little White Thing You Stand On (oops… I mean Wii Fit…) is WAY too much fun. We’re contemplating dropping our gym memberships, although we’ll wait to make sure that in the long run (say, a month from now) we still feel we’re getting an adequate workout with this. If that works out, it means the Wii and Wii Fit will have more than paid for themselves.

The aerobics stuff, like the running, is definitely enough to work up a good sweat and leave you out of breath. The strength training is surprisingly effective—it uses core conditioning techniques to pit you against your own body mass so you don’t need machines. The yoga stretches and balance exercises, of course, work perfectly with the balance board. Someday I hope they come up with a balance mat version that’ll allow a wider array of activities, but I think this works surprisingly well for now. There are quite a few benefits to working out with this thing, as silly as it may seem at first:

  • The ‘game’ format keeps things fun, challenging, and entertaining, not to mention less chore-like.
  • Since you can do this in your home, you can fit your workout easily in around chores, work hours, dinner, etc.
  • I find it easier to work out when I have the most physical energy and motivation—which for me is usually late morning. That’s a horrid time to exercise outside where I am, as I don’t deal well with heat & humidity, both of which are pretty nasty here. It’s also a time when I can’t get to the gym.
  • The workout pieces seem awfully short at first, but you swiftly ‘unlock’ extra reps and such, quickly building up to a level you’re comfortable with.
  • The board and program are surprisingly good at noting how you’re doing by measuring how shaky, steady, etc. you are.
  • Presumably they’ll be able to put out additional disks later with additional exercises on them—and there are already plenty to begin with.
  • The tracking and charting functions are so well-integrated that you hardly have to do a thing. It measures & tracks your weight, BMI, and exercise levels for you. No more having to remember to write that stuff down.
  • Because there are some easier exercises in there, such as one or two of the yoga poses and some of the balance exercises, I can imagine continuing to get exercises even on days when I’m tired, sick, sore, etc. That means fewer breaks in the routine of working out, which means I’m more likely to keep it up as a habit.

All in all, as silly as the concept seems, the execution is brilliant.

Whatever Happened to Lady Jaye?

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

I was pretty young when I watched the G.I. Joe animated series as a child, but it was one of my favorite shows. So I couldn’t help taking notice—and poking around with a bit of trepidation and excitement—when I heard a G.I. Joe movie was coming. The photos look cool, and hey, it’s got Christopher Eccleston and Arnold Vosloo in it! I eagerly scanned the cast list to see who might be playing my favorite character.

But… wait… no sign of her.

I get why they’ve included Scarlett and Cover Girl as the requisite good-guy females. Really I do. They’re sexy. They’re comparatively girly. Lady Jaye didn’t wear any kind of cat-suit, didn’t have long hair. She isn’t the one the guys are going to drool over, and let’s face it, the movie folks are assuming (for the most part, rightly so) that their audience is made up of guys who want to see explosions, bad-ass combat scenes, and sexy chicks. So if you can only include a limited number of female characters, then you include the sexy ones.

But dammit, she was the character I wanted to be when I watched that show. She was a bad-ass chick who could save her own butt, and that was awesome (particularly back then). One of the things I immediately looked forward to when thinking about the new movie was seeing her re-made… but well, maybe I should count my blessings. After all, I’d rather have her not included at all than re-made as some sort of sex-pot, which is one of the other possibilities.

Still. Sigh… I’ll absolutely go see the movie anyway, but I can’t help being very disappointed.

 

In T-shirt-designing news, we have a new design. This one is both an MMO design, and a grammar geek design:

 

It’s one of those designs that’s really simple, but really versatile. The original concept had to do with the ‘meaning’ of the blue question mark in various MMOs: the repeatable quest. After all, there are so many delightful implications stemming from the idea of having a repeatable quest for the folks around you, particularly when you consider that most repeatable quests have to do with grinding faction. ;)

Then there’s the straightforward grammar geek interpretation of the question mark as punctuation.

And finally, there’s the simple aim of confusing everyone who looks at your shirt and says, ‘huh?’

I guess you could say it has something for everyone. :)

 

And finally, today’s review just in time to still call it ‘today’s’: Linda Greenlaw’s Fisherman’s Bend.

it’s a quest thing

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

Yay! I finally ordered an 8G memory card for my digital camera, so I won’t be limited to 17 (yes, 17) pictures using the camera’s original 32M card. Thankfully, memory cards are surprisingly non-expensive through Amazon these days. The trick is finding out which ones will supposedly work with your camera, of course. My camera says it’ll take all SD, SDHC, and MultiMedia cards. The web site says to check with the card manufacturer to make sure. The card listings on Amazon all say to check with the camera manufacturer to make sure. Finally I found a frobbie on Sandisk’s site (since it seemed that Sandisk had a good rep) that would let me input my device’s info and then tell me which cards would work in it. $30 including shipping for an 8G card!

 

I doubt I’ll be able to finish my current book in time for a review today, but we have a new design up at the cafepress shop called it’s a quest thing:

   

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Sew Nuts

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

A long time ago I got (slightly) into sewing—around the time I dropped out of college, I guess. Who could blame me? All those fun colors and patterns of cloth; the ability to make things that fit YOU rather than some anorexic model (and in any material you want); the ability to make fun things like cloaks. Unfortunately, I was never very good at it and ended up more or less abandoning it.

Now that we’ve fallen in with some SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) folk and my husband is picking up fighting (he qualified as a fighter just a couple of weeks ago), we’re giving the sewing thing a shot again. We got a good sewing machine at the beginning of the year. To be honest, the first two things we made really weren’t that good, but we were working with a sub-optimal downloaded pattern and a (very!) short deadline, not to mention we’re beginners. So we haven’t given up.
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Save vs. Moving Van

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

I think we’ve come up with a decision for approaching that possible moving quandary. We’re going to work on the house to get it ship-shape for putting on the market, which gives us time to make sure this is what we want, and keeps us from having to rush. (After all, we don’t lose anything by doing this—if we decide not to move it just means we’ll have our house all cleaned up and properly landscaped.) When it’s ready, we’ll call up a realtor and get it listed. When/if it sells, since there are so many houses for sale around here, THEN we’ll go buy a house. I’d love to buy a house sooner rather than later, while there are so many foreclosures that can be snapped up for almost half their usual sale value, but everything’s a whole lot easier if you sell your own house first—particularly in this market, when it could take a week or two years.

In that spirit, I finally planted butterfly bushes out front. I wish I’d thought to take a “before” picture of the jungle of brambles in that area by the street. The last owner planted some fairly high-maintenance stuff down there, and there were wild raspberries going crazy in the middle. We ripped everything out, and this morning I laid out the bags of soil and worked them in a bit, planted the purple butterfly bushes (three), put down heavy-duty twenty-year anti-weed landscaping fabric (not plastic—I hate trying to clean that stuff out of a garden), and put pine bark mulch on top of that.

I’ve also gotten a few reviews done since the last post: of Annette Blair’s Gone with the Witch (fun, but it has some issues) and Katherine Shay’s Taking the Heat (which I didn’t like all that much). Next up, a non-fiction book, although it won’t be ready for review today.

And finally, I’ve also put up two new designs at cafepress: shirts, buttons, stickers, mugs, etc for tabletop roleplayers. The first is ‘Drow are people too’:

The second (and my personal favorite of the two) is, ‘I always fail my save vs. pun’:

Reviews & More

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

First, two new book reviews. I had a chance to read the advance uncorrected proof of Tobias Buckell’s Sly Mongoose. Books like this are why being a reviewer makes me so happy. I might not make much money, and I might be fighting a losing battle against my review stack, but who could resist the delight of getting to read their favorite authors’ books whole months early?! I also read Tess Mallory’s Highland Rogue. I still don’t understand why the Scottish Highlands time-travel romance sub-sub-genre is so surprisingly populous, but at least I can now appreciate it properly—this was better than the other two I read! Tomorrow’s review should be of a slow cooker cookbook.

 

Second, a new cafepress design. This one is still in our gardeners & outdoorsy folks section, and is aimed at women. Phloxy lady is a variation on ‘foxy lady’ for phlox lovers. Although it might be a little tough to tell in the image below, the letters themselves are filled with real phlox flowers:

It took a little work to get it just right; I had to make sure the image would show up well on both light and dark backgrounds, and that the flowers would be recognizable in the image.

 

Next, we put up a small bookcase in our dining room. Normally this would not be worth sharing photos of, but I think you’ll understand why I’m doing so when you see them:

cats, furniture

cats, furniture

Yes, that’s Cahlash, trying his best to be a bookend. Or maybe he figures I’ll not notice he’s there, and put something yummy on the shelf. Yeah, right!

I’m a little behind in catching up with comments and blogs, but hopefully soon!

The Furniture, Revisited

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

First, in non-furniture news, I have a non-review of Patricia Rice’s Mystic Rider. I almost never do this, but I just couldn’t get myself to read the whole thing. While that means I can’t review the book as such, I think it’s reasonable to explain why I didn’t read the book.

 

Wheee! As I mentioned earlier, IKEA did make things right by us. They replaced everything that was damaged without argument. The only minor annoyance was the couple of weeks it took to get everything taken care of. Here’s an idea of how things were damaged; this is a corner of a bookcase shelf:
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Umm, what was I saying?

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

I know there was something I wanted to post about, but my brain seems to be in a fog and I have no idea what it was. Oh well. I can at least link to the new site stuff.

First, the reviews. There’s yummy stuff in The Superfood Cookbook—how can you resist a combination of delicious, easy, quick, and nutritious??

I’ve also posted reviews of Mathias Freese’s enchanting Down to a Sunless Sea and Robert Cutler’s The Secret Scroll. In case you ever wondered whether all those high-scoring reviews indicated that I was too easy on review copies, worry no more—I don’t pan books very often, but that latter one made me want to tear my hair out.

Next, two more T-shirt designs. There’s a bit of relationship humor called going unsteady and a shirt for the Gnomish Air Force:

 

If I remember what I was going to say, I’ll just post again later!