On History

You know those time capsule things that people do sometimes? I think they were popular in the early 2000s. I know my mom had my brother and me put one together when I was around six or seven. We wrapped a Quaker Oats container in a piece of construction paper, drew all over the front, and put things that we liked in there. I don't remember much of what we put inside - I know a Pokemon card was one thing, but I don't remember what else. After we had put stuff in, we put the top back on and put it in a closet. (of course, a week later I wanted my Pokemon card back, so I tried to dig it out of the time capsule and put it back in my binder. I'm not sure where that card is now.)
There's a project I've been working on that has similar implications as a time capsule, but you can't dig it out of the closet and quickly find your Pokemon card. This goes back thirteen years, and the Pokemon card is at the center. (no, I don't start my yarn balls with Pokemon cards).
Yes, I have a ball of yarn scraps that dates back to when I first started working with yarn, when I was around 7. It's now around 28 inches around, not counting the bits and pieces I haven't put onto it yet. It's bigger than my head. It's almost as big as my waist. (It probably will be as big as my waist by the time I'm done with it.) What's great about this, though, is that you have to make an entire project with it in order to peel back the years. It's crazy.
Part of me doesn't want to do anything with it - keep it rolling until I'm an old granny, and then when I have grandkids I'll make each of them a going-off-to-college blanket, because I'll have enough yarn in it by that point. At the same time, I kind of want to start now.
Don't believe it? Here it is:

The beauty of it is that if I have to add more, there are plenty of points where I can stop the main flow of yarn, untie the knots, add in whatever I need to add in, and then keep going. It's a continually growing project.
Of course, the continual growth does affect the time-capsule nature of the project, but if it's a changing project, it needs a changing set of yarn to go with it.
The beauty of making anything with a scraps ball is that nothing is exactly the same. Of course, all the knots lead to a lot of frustration, but the variety of textures adds to the whole experience.

Formulaic Posts: Checking out Checklists

So... here I am... on the couch... trying to think of something to post about... um... TO GOOGLE!

When one puts 'Blog Post Checklist' into Google, there are an astounding amount of hits (well, of course there are, it is Google). Still, there are a lot of people who insist that there are 10-12 points that bloggers MUST hit upon before hitting 'post,' and, as expected, there isn't a whole lot of variance.

1. TITLE
Make it catchy? I think I did... did I?

2. WRITE SOME STUFF. (A cool intro is cool.)
Blah. BlahBlahblahblah. Blargh. Tada! Cool intro done.

3. BREAK UP YOUR PARAGRAPHS.
So I'm assuming that means to not write up mammoth paragraphs that only the most dedicated readers (aka my mother... HI MOM!) would actually pay attention to. I don't think I'm doing this - at least, not in this post. Not yet, anyway. This sub-section might be getting up there. ON TO THE NEXT ONE!

4. INCLUDE A PHOTO
Here is a photo of my shoes from a few years ago. I need to figure out how to format that thing. Leaving that there for now.











5. INCLUDE KEYWORDS.
So.... include words that are easily searchable? Should I add this to the Checklist pileup in Google right now? How do I do that? Google says: "Let's give out diagrams that make it probably more complex than it really is." Can I skip this step? Getting a lot of page views is not my main concern (though more page views would be nice, it's not exactly what I'm trying to do with this... right now).

6. TAG A LOT.
I will do that upon completion of the post. So... 'checklist,' 'list,' 'random ideas from the internet,' 'things other people tell me are important,' 'rant,' 'joke,' 'humor...' am I missing anything?

7. EDIT.
But I'm not done yet! What if I make a major typographical error in writing step 9 that I completely overlook because I only edited steps 1 - 7? THEN what?

8. HIT PUBLISH!
But I'm not done yet!

9. STORM ALL THE SOCIAL MEDIA!
But I don't have any social media for this blog. I'm skipping this step.

10. GO HAVE SOME COFFEE.
Why not? You deserve some caffeine from all that hard writing, titling, paragraph-breaking, photo-posting, keyword-including, tagging, editing, publishing, and social media storming that you had to do in the last nine steps. If you don't like coffee, have some other beverage of your choice.


BONUS TIPS:

- Brand yourself
   Ha. Ha. Ha. Haven't done this at all.

-  Use a Call to Action.
   Yes. My Challenge to You: GO ON THE HERO'S JOURNEY. NOW. (not really; this is supposed to ask a question or ask for responses or whatever).

- Be Cool
  But that's easy, surely.


Right, I can't do any other shenanigans that are part of a cool, legit website, because I'm not a web designer. I don't have huge plans for this blog to go viral or anything like that. Though I do like posting things that I write on the Internet, and I've considered using AdSense on the blog, I don't think it would work very well.
There are two major reasons for this: firstly, because I don't think I get enough hits to actually make anything; secondly, because I dislike ads as much as the next person - if I wanted to run a monetized blog, I would probably create a new blog and follow all the steps and try to make it all fancy like all the sites suggest. That, however, is not this blog. That might change, but I don't know.

Call to action for all you hooligans: what do you think about the content of the post? It's not intended to be a set of Legitimate, Follow-Wild-Card's-Steps-Perfectly sort of thing, but did you like it?

On weddings and stuff

Firstly: I know I've changed the formatting a little. I've been procrastinating a bit on homework by trying to figure out how to do a little bit of HTML - then I realized that HTML is not necessarily something one can just do, and have that just be the end of it.

But HTML code is not what I'm trying to talk about today. I'm here to talk about WEDDINGS! (and by WEDDINGS, I mean the wedding I went to this weekend). It was my cousin getting married, and it was something that has been a long time coming. Most people, after all, can't say they married the person they had a crush on in fourth grade. Most poeple can't say that people argue about who REALLY got them together - and who can say, really, because they met in the fourth grade - thirteen years ago. One account is that the older sisters were the masterminds, because they were good friends and, in their high school logic, wanted a way to become SISTERS FOREVER. The best way they could think of to do it was to make their younger siblings get married - but they should "wait until they're in high school, because then it'll last." It was another person who actually confirmed that each of them liked the other. Personally, I think it was whoever asked the groom to dog-sit when he was in middle school - because nothing is more casually romantic than saying, "hey, do you wanna feed my neighbor's dog with me sometime?"

The wedding itself was nice. The ceremony barely lasted 30 minutes, which was a pretty good amount of time. At the reception, there was a candy bar - not as in 'one singular Hershey bar,' but as in 'a table full of candy.' And it was great. Later in the reception, the flower toss resulted in the flowers landing near my feet. I picked them up, and then passed them off to the five-year-old in the crowd. Why? She wanted them, and she was far less likely to shove them into a suitcase twelve hours later and leave them to die, resulting in nothing but sad memories, laundry that no longer needs to smell good, and a lot of leaves and dried pollen in her clothing.
Also, had I kept them, there might be some more pressure on me for the next family wedding. See, the last wedding I went to was that of the bride's older sister. I caught the bouquet then, too. If word got around that I got the flowers at this wedding, then I would be expected to get them at the wedding of the bride's younger sister as well. I don't want that sort of pressure. I also don't want to be expected to get married before I've traveled the world at least twice.