It’s fashionable to complain about acrylic yarn, but Dora and I don’t care much for fashion. I’ve got two huge balls of egg yolk yellow acrylic from when I just started crochet. Such a shame to waste yarn, no matter what people say. The internet reckons it’s just fine if you can find suitable uses for it – pet blankets are one such use, because acrylic is easy to wash and care for.

Now that the weather is cooler, and I’ve had a bit more experience, I don’t mind this fibre as much. When I was little, my dad would tell me only noobs complain about tools and materials, because a skilled craftsman will find a way to make it work. Surely that can’t be right in all situations, but sometimes I find it’s right and nice to aspire to.

So I’m working this Tulip Stitch Cat Cage Blanket I found on Ravelry. I have a personal goal this year to burn through as many of my art supplies as possible. Every time I pick up a new hobby, I acquire and hoard. Supplies somehow find their way into my possession through paranoid over-buying, generous hand-me-down-ing from hobby buddies who decided not to continue, or impulse shopping while hungry. I have a wooden crate full of yarn balls now, some left over from a million years ago when I was obsessed with knitting scarves.

I still wouldn’t recommend learning with acrylic, though. Or even good wool. The more friction-y the fibre, the more easily it snags – better to spend extra on just one exquisite ball of smooth, smooth cashmere, so you can learn technique without the annoying parts. Crochet is great cos if you mess up, you can pull apart and start over, so there’s little risk in using nice things.

The weather in Perth has been super blustery. Perfect weather for crochet. And eating. And gaming. Anything indoors. It’s nice. I’m hanging out for a change, and random stormy weather brings on a different mood. We have a rent inspection next week – not the change in routine I hoped for, but meh, what you gonna do.

What a lovely surprise this morning. My window box sugar snap peas are now 6 weeks old, and one has started to flower. Certainly not as quick as the ones in my garden bed outside, but considering these guys don’t have much room, sunlight or fertiliser (they subsist on old tea leaves), they seem to be doing okay.

I’m tempted to raid the coffee puck bin in the kitchen, so we can get some nitrogen-rich stuff into the soil, but I’m kind of grossed out by that machine. I’ve been burying strawberry tops and other tiny fruit scraps, hoping the centipedes will break them down. Maybe that’s enough for now. I hope we get a good number of peas. That would be swell.

We grew a really tiny eggplant. I’m beginning to feel silly sharing my miniature vegetables with you. Try as we might, we can’t seem to grow anything big and juicy like what the supermarket has. I’m worried my soil quality is poor, but our plants don’t display many signs of nutrient deficiency. This is most likely the result of not getting enough sun. The way our backyard is positioned, with trees and walls, we get about half the amount of sunlight a better garden would expect.

But hey, at least we grew something, right? This little guy went into a curry tonight. We could barely taste him. But oh, we knew he was there with his fibre, vitamins, chlorogenic acid and nasnunin. Mm, delicious nasnunin. (?!?)

Will the cats ever know how much we love them? Not likely. Dora was quite unimpressed when we revealed our plans for the day – refurbishing the scratch post. As you can see, this cat toy has endured years of feline tenderness, but rather than blow $60+ on a new one, we wanted to play smart and fix it ourselves.

We actually have two cat scratch posts, both casualties of a loving home. This was our first time getting our DIY on for something sturdy, so thought it best to go slow and just do one today. We got a 15m natural fibre ‘scouts’ rope for $9, and quickset non-toxic PVA glue for $20. I recommend getting nails as well – will show you why in a minute.

First, we removed all the shit from the post – both old rope and glue residue.

Then we attached the new rope using glue and a substitute for nails. We figure the coil should handle most of the cat-claw tension over the years so long as the ends don’t unravel, so it was important to make sure both ends would be secure.

Lucky lunch was ready, otherwise we would have neglected to give the glue time to set.

So, because we didn’t buy nails, we had to make do with rivets to secure the end of the rope in addition to using glue. I have no idea why we had rivets in our home – not to mention I found them at the back of a drawer of clothes. You can see the first rivet at the top of the post. Somehow we hammered it in backwards instead of the proper riveting way. It looks dumb, and at my most anxious, I worry it’s a death trap, but we were careful to ensure any sticking-out parts were up high and down low where the cats hardly bother to touch.

We wound the rope around the post, gluing the bottom down every round and a half (ish), holding down the rope and closing any gaps as we went.

Then we secured the tail end of the rope to the post. Use glue and a nail if you can; we used glue and a rivet. Also, it turned out 15m wasn’t enough to cover the whole post, so we made up the last 2 rounds with old rope – again, not a big deal as this is the bottom of the base, where the cats don’t seem to scratch.

We gave about an hour of drying time before reassembling.

Apologies for the photos in this post – our place is pretty dark and my camera is pretty old… and Dora doesn’t sit still for long. I hope the rope we picked feels nice to scratch. It feels tough as shit to me, but I don’t have claws and padded paws. We’d opt for nails next go, or at least try to hammer the rivets in the right way, but for a first time DIY project like this, we didn’t do too badly.

At least the cats don’t hate it. :)

Three-ish weeks, rather. Only three of the six peas planted made it. One sprouted, then promptly withered. These are about the size of a plastic fork. The office is still crazy cold, so I’m not holding my breath for a quick harvest. The four-ish hours of sunlight have been hampered by the overcast weather too. I think if we get just one pea pod from each plant, we can call this a success.

First day back at football today. Played like rubbish, but it felt good to be back and now I’m sore and exhausted. I meant to work on my afghan and post about something I’ve been studying lately, but all I could muster was dinner and a couple games of lol. I’m lying in bed right now, struggling to keep my eyes looking in the same direction.

So yes, I’ve been cleared to play. After my lasik re-treatment, it’s all been going well. Eyes still get tired easily, but vision is right now. Don’t know how I could have thought before that it was okay – I can see across the room now and it doesn’t feel like a strain. :) Oh, I also learned of a new lubricating eye drop – Hylofresh. It’s less sticky than the usual single use drops, in special sterile bottle, still free of preservatives, and uses some of the stuff they use during surgery, which is what lets it hydrate without being sticky – more comfortable. Ahh… I love technology. :)

Time to get off the internet eh. Night night!

I get days where I do a lot, yet don’t feel busy. And sometimes days where there’s only one thing to do, but I feel booked up by that one thing. I’d like to bottle some of that first kind of day, save it for the other times.

Yesterday, I was still sports-less. My eye appointment is next Friday, so I hope to be back at football right after, but yesterday had nothing planned for it. Usually I only get short pockets of time between planned activities, but the whole of last Sunday was mine to make up as I went along. I made omelet, crocheted my blanket, watched a movie, listened to War of the Worlds, watered the garden, played games, made a roast – and still had time to space out, staring at cracks and plaster. It was relaxing and agitating. I’m not used to this, but I like it.

I did a usual amount of things, but felt unusually un-busy. It makes me wonder if the debate over the busy-ness of modern life comes down to simply having your life too planned. That it’s not how much you actually do that makes you feel busy, as much as the amount of time spent planning, thinking, anticipating, worrying in advance.

But this was one orphan Sunday in a wild and varied world. I certainly felt rested, though, and refreshed when I started the day this morning. I have a taste for it now, a need to spend more time bored – the good kind of bored with room for adventure. Not at the expense of football, of course. I can’t wait to start up again. :)

81, not 100, is now the magic number for this blanket. I’m 12 squares in and starting to feel aches in my wrist – from this, plus mousing, gardening and a sub-arctic office climate. Bought a ‘bed buddy small joint wrap’ today to stay warm in the greasy tundra of my desk. More on that once I’ve tried it out.

Off to bed now. I’m trying to sleep earlier instead of staying up late on the internet. For now, this means bed before midnight. Three minutes to go.

Oh shit, two minutes. NIGHT!

At half past twelve, it’s the animal show in our room. Each day since we arrived, we’ve seen this tiny cat boss around this huge dog. I think having visitors has upset their usual dynamic. It’s clear we should not be adoring dog so much in the presence of cat. Sorry, cat.

The windowbox tomatoes are long gone. In their place, dwarf sugar snap peas. This photo is 5-7 days after planting. You can see in the periphery some cut-up plastic bottles used for humidity covers. I can confirm this was a waste of time – the seeds that weren’t covered sprouted first, content with airy, damp indoor soil.

This is what it looked like on day 1, complete with plastic forks (and a spork!) and bamboo stakes for a trellis. I’m still deciding the boundaries on recycling stuff found in a workplace – is the plastic fork thing too much? Have I entered office freakshow territory where colleagues talk behind my back about how I smell like mung beans? (it’s this cheap shirt, I swear)

I have a small brag – I just finished a j-rpg parody game as a gift for a friend, finished the morning of his birthday. I can’t share the game itself cos it’s 200MB of inside jokes, so not worth it unless you want an example for learning RPG Maker – but I can show you the awesome box art @niaalist made for it.

Hats off to the RPG Maker software. It makes gamedev so easy. Minimal coding knowledge required (though it helps to be able to think procedurally), with lots of resources and examples around the web. My 40-min RPG would have taken a bit less than 4 weeks to create, stretched out over 2 months.

Right now, I’m working on an adult sized crocheted blanket. I’d like a really big one, but may lose interest before getting that far. I hope to finish before winter officially starts, but I need 100 granny squares to make size, and it’s already taken me 4 days to make 6. I’ll be lucky to complete it before next summer.

We’re off to Sydney tomorrow for a short break. I’ve been procrastinating with packing, but now hearing sounds of LoL in the next room by someone who’s finished packing, I’m starting to feel motivated.

To my blog, not my cat! (Though it’s only a matter of time.)

Sanlive turned 10 years old on the weekend. To celebrate, I spent the afternoon with my sister, cooking dinner for family. That was the first time I’ve eaten with my family since Christmas, because I’ve been down with this stupid cough and cold. We had Vietnamese pork shoulder, ‘claypot’ chicken veggie stirfry, Malaysian chicken curry (Mum made this), apple crumble and red velvet cupcakes (modelled after Caitlyn’s cupcakes).

The last 10 years have been eventful. The year I started this blog, I began a new job as a webdev. A few months later, I developed chronic depression from stress at home and work. I didn’t know it was depression at the time, though it should have been obvious. Pressure kept building up because I had no one to talk to or knowledge for how to solve the problem. The people who offered their input would cut me off with platitudes and clever quips, which were well-intentioned, but distracting and increasingly unhelpful over time.

Some people explode when they reach the end of their tether; I shut down. My heart and mind go into mission mode and I make foot-down decisions. I decided I had enough and started job hunting – that was that. Now, if you think I’m making a big deal of a simple decision, you’d be right. It was a simple decision, yet a huge deal at the time because I was told repeatedly that I wasn’t ‘allowed’ to better my situation, only tolerate it. It took a year and a half of putting my needs and opinions last before it dawned on me that I didn’t have to.

I often experience the kind of coincidence where when I’ve made up my mind about something, suddenly all these things happen. I’d just returned from a job interview over lunch when my head-of-department called me for a meeting. We’d been bought over, they were letting me go… with a big severance package! My manager fully supported my wanting to leave, this made things easy for both of us. Cash start for new life? YES PLS.

I took a month off to paint, sew, draw, cook, take pictures. I adopted two kittens and got to unwind from all the bottled-up stress. Eventually, I got a new job doing the type of work I wanted at the company I had my eye on since leaving school. That was pretty sweet.

The life I wanted included cats, independence, trust, authenticity, learning, exploration, art, science, fun and the freedom to be myself. So, I broke it off with anything that tried to interfere. I travelled. Sometimes would ‘find myself’ abroad, but most of the time it would happen upon coming home and sorting out whatever I needed space from in the first place. I moved to a city apartment – a dream since highschool – and then back to the suburbs for the quiet.

I traded visual design work for UX & content strategy, and completed a professional writing diploma in half the allotted time. I attempted library school and failed abysmally. I got to work on a music project where we released a single, got to play reserve for a State/Div1 football team, got to be patient zero for a cat internet viral, took up gardening and started crocheting. I achieved my 7-years-long goal of donating blood, and my 14-years-long dream of designing a game. I played a lot of League of Legends and Skyrim.

I lost my beloved kittens and adopted new ones. That was sad and then sweet. I ended draining friendships and worked on amazing ones. This was also sad and then sweet. There seems to be a recurring theme.

It’s cheesy and indulgent to write a post like this. But fuck it, right? I think I’ve earned this small luxury after 10 years. I wish I could tell you my life became so perfect since, but I’m still figuring things out and don’t believe in perfection. I still deal with depression, but I have people I can talk to now.

In my excitement to share with you, I struggled with the words. This took me five days to write. Not so long, I suppose, next to the years gone and the next however-many years to come.

Thank you, friends, for reading and following all this time. :) Here’s to you!

I came to bed early tonight with the goal of falling asleep earlier and feeling that much less tired in the morning. But it’s late again – the wrong sort of early – and I’m still awake. TIL antibiotics can cause insomnia. Of all my sicknesses this month, I’m most sick of being sick.

I’ve been eating very non-Primal these last few days. Pizza, puffy pie crust, vegetable fats, probably trans-fats, white bread, white flour, refined sugars… and not exercising. Situations keep coming up where the food I’m trying to avoid is just THERE. It’s not that I’m not ‘allowed’ to eat it, but it wastes the time I need for this eating experiment. I had a chai latte last week while gluten-free, and didn’t get the usual discomfort I get from cow dairy. Being back in a conventional eating habit means I have to wait another few weeks of ‘detox’ before I can test the milk thing again for serious.

Because people have asked – no, I’m not very gluten intolerant as far as I know. Regarding dairy, I’m very mildly reactive to either lactose or casein. I suspect casein, yet can comfortably eat large amounts of cottage cheese and bocconcini. It’s just big cheese platters, giant slices of ice cream cake and actual milk that causes my joints to ache and muscles to feel fatigued. But if all this boils down to gluten-induced gut sensitivity, then I should be able to eat all the ice cream I want if I just give up bread, right? :D (yeah, k probably not)

Food is on my mind a lot. I’m exhausted thinking about Primal meals and ingredients, and kind of wish I could fall back on breakfast toasties again. I’ve been having sushi instead, and it’s great – I wish we had Japanese 7-11s here with their abundance of onigiri. I can smell bread and cooked flour a mile away now. I know when my desk mate opens his bottom drawer by the sweet waft of his lunch loaf drifting in the air. I chew on unsalted sunflower seeds and maintain composure.

This diet isn’t terrible. It’s really the thinking that’s wearing me out. And I’m eating less by accident because I don’t have sport working up an appetite and my brain is too tired to plan meals in advance, so tiredness takes over and I skip meals. This particular habit needs to go. I did buy some delicious fish this evening but had a nap instead of dinner. Subsisted on a bag of snow peas.

Tomorrow, I will eat all four basa fillets, baked in butter, lemon and ginger. Tonight I must work on getting some sleep.