8.10.09

day 23 - one of my pet peeves...

... is this.
you know when you go trick-or-treating, and you walk up to someone's house to ring the doorbell, and you can see they've made an attempt to decorate. some carved pumpkins, whether elaborate or amateurish, a couple of fake bones sticking out of the lawn, that kind of thing. and then they have some artificial spiderweb - you know, like this stuff:
although, i grant you, they usually have the white stuff out. shows up better at night, you know.
... anyway - it usually looks like someone sprayed fake snow on everything. all lumpy. looks nothing like spiderwebs. i HATE that.

chances are, you already know this. but i don't care - i'm going to show you how to REALLY set up fake spiderwebs. consider yourself tutorialled.

the photo above shows how much came in the package i bought. you might have more or less, i don't know - but one or two packages is really all you need to do a whole yard properly. course, that depends how big a yard you have, but honestly, you're not going to need ten to do up two trees and a couple of bushes.

because look at that bit on the right that i pulled off the whole. and see how much is still left. okay? now keep reading.



i'm going to be working with that smaller piece. watch this. (oh yeah and i'm leaving my hand in these photos for an idea of the scale.)



i'm starting to stretch it. it's already at least doubled in width.



same piece, just more evenly stretched. it's probably four times the original width, at least, probably more like five or six. you can tell i didn't measure.



so then i'm putting it on my bedroom door. that bit on the door is just one little side.



and THIS is the rest of it, the bit i haven't put on the door yet. look how much is left!



and the long view of the whole door in progress.



and now for a bit of time-lapse - i totally didn't take pictures of the middle bit. lol. anyway. the finished front of the door.



the finished back of same door.



front, close up.



front, even closer up.



and here's the thing. if i'd had more places to hook the web on, i could have stretched it even further, and it would have looked better yet. and remember, i still have that whole giant piece left over. so the trick, boys and girls, is to stretch fake web as far as you can before calling it quits, and the resulting treat is spiderweb that looks realler than the cobwebs in your attic.

so STRETCH IT!

end tutorial.

6.10.09

hair: the latest installment (in photo-journal format.)

This is me, four days ago; the queen of bedhead. srsly, that is how i woke up that morning. no product or nothin' in there. nasty, hey?



This is what my hair looked like - see those roots.



And a closeup of the roots:



But I decided to cut it all off. cos i didn't want to spend extra money re-dying it. so i asked my dear daddy, last friday, to take the buzzer, with the longest comb he could stick on there, and he buzzed my head. this is the resulting pile of black.



And here again is the black, now on the dustpan, as i'm about to throw it out.



And finally, the resulting squelchie:



from here i'm planning to grow it out again. should take me about two years or so, since that's how long it took me before when i shaved my head the first time.
going into work with my hair like this was fun, got so many comments!
and one of my managers asked to feel it, so i let her. it was funny.

day 25

5.10.09

day 26 - Alas, poor Yorick! ....

... I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.

4.10.09

day 27 - i decided toadstools were appropriate

so once again, i'm post-date-posting.... so sorry guys - i was out all day yesterday. got to see the boyfriend though :)



3.10.09

day 28


... i know, i know. i say countdown, and then - boom. no counting.
most remiss of me. i'll blame it on being busy. i could try posting and making it appear as if it were october second (even though it really is the third), maybe that'll make everything better. we'll see. so happy countdown everyone, while i try to rectify my laziness. ... aaaand guess what? it worked. so now there's a post in between today and thursday. even though i posted it ten minutes after i posted this one. lol.

and since i haven't had a chance to take too many halloweeny photos in the last little while, i guess you'll have to make do with another installment or so of cemetery filler. and i'll try to get some crap photographed tomorrow. sorry guys. <3

1.10.09

a couple of days in the life of lizzi.

so i'm feeling quite good about myself - yesterday at work i caught a couple of oddities.

the first one was a pair of shoes, where the coding didn't match the labelled price - someone had put a different label over top of the original. i think the original said 49.99, and the stuck-on-top label said 29.99. and i caught it. and apparently the girl buying the shoes had been an employee who was fired a few years ago for stealing. i'm not accusing her - but it did look suspicious, no?

the second one was a purse - and again the coding didn't match. the tag on it said 29.99 - but the purse was actually worth 150. and i caught that one too. but the poor lady trying to buy it - she was sad cos it was more than she thought it was. and i'm certain it wasn't her fault for that one. ... you can tell.

and then today i caught a couple more! ... i win!

the first one was a pair of boots - the right foot was an 8, the left was 8½. the customer wanted the 8's. yay me for checking!

the second one was a painting - the price tag said 69.99 - the coding said it was actually worth 169.99. the customers decided that was too expensive.

but just goes to show, girls and boys, always check the coding. :)

oh yes and yesterday there were two different customers who attempted to pay with bad visas - one of them for sure was tampered with.
and they think they can get away with it.
some people are so stupid. oh well, they give me something to talk about :P

and today there was a guy with the most fantastic moustache ever. and another guy who was very loud but was very funny, kept cracking jokes at me - it was awesome.




...oh yeah and it's the first of october. um.

I did kind of promise gothy/halloweeny photos, didn't i.

well, here's the first installment of cemetery filler, on day 30 of the countdown to halloween <3

28.9.09

tungsten wins!

argh. the lightbulb in my bedroom burnt out yesterday. and so i had to change the bulb, of course. and the only spare lightbulb we have in the house is one of those stupid twisty fluorescent ones. ew ew ew. so i had to put it in my room. and now my room is all blue-green. NASTY. i hate those lightbulbs so much. give me a good old tungsten one every time, never mind the energy waste. please. the colour is so much nicer.
now i do have a little table lamp with a tungsten bulb in it - but i can't only use a lamp, i have sewing to do, and i don't have enough light with just the lamp. so i HAVE to use a fucking fluorescent. grrrrr.

i want to go to sleep.

25.9.09

update!

so i'm really quite proud of myself - yesterday at work, i was on cash (supposed to be in the fitting room, but we'll let that be), and this lady tried to buy a shirt and a pair of pants. came to forty-something. she tried to pay with a fifty. it was a fake. and i knew it. the paper was the wrong weight, there was no watermark, and when you look through it, there's supposed to be segments of lines that line up to make a 50, and those segments didn't line up properly. so i got bragging rights at the huddle after closing. *grins*

i'm also contemplating getting my lip pierced. a labret, probably. though spiderbites looks pretty cool too - but i'm not sure if i want to go with two - might be a bit extreme for me :) the only thing would be my dear mennonite grandparents - who don't like piercings or tattoos at all. so i would have to wear one of those plastic things - which apparently you can't put in for four to six weeks. so i would have to do it now, probably.

and i'm thinking i want to go back to my natural hair colour - that'll probably involve me buzzing my hair off in a couple weeks - i'll probably use a medium comb on the buzzer so that it cuts off my hair just below the dye line. i'll still have about an inch left on my head though, it won't be all gone :) and then from there i'll grow it out.

and i think that's about it for now, toodles people!

oh yeah - who's reading that got redirected from levisan? because apparently most of my blog traffic is from there - and i know i used to be on his blogroll (though i can't see the blogroll anymore *coughcough.exposurepleaselevi.coughahem*) ....... anyhow.
and howdy blog traffic in general - comment and let me know where you came from - how you found me, etc!

<3

squelchbaker out.

22.9.09

Advertising!!!

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↑
The website where I'm site moderator.

*cackles evilly*

another lame poem.

backed up against the walls you thought protected you
and there's no excuse now
when you shut people out
you also shut yourself in.

you're haunted by the wolves your twisted mind creates
and they're coming after you
but you have no defense now
you're locked inside your head.

the only weapons within your reach are the ones that you shut out
and your friends cannot help you
you're going to have to break out
to let down your guard and be honest.

backed up against the walls you thought protected you
and now it is time
to let the beasts melt away
in the warmth of the sun
don't shut yourself in
don't shut your friends out
be free.

© Elizabeth Klassen 2009

21.9.09

i'm thinking that i might do a photo-countdown to halloween. halloween is one of my favourite holidays, after christmas - the skulls, the spiderwebs, the gargoyles, the mummies, and the miscellaneous ghouls all make me happy to the bottom of my black black gothy heart. plus the costumes. costumes rock. so look out for photos of halloweeny, costumy and/or gothy stuff - hopefully every day - from october first to october thirty-first. i might fizzle out before the end of it - and i probably won't be able to do them every day either - but i'll do my best. plus i have a whole load of wicked cemetery photos i can use as filler if i don't manage to get one for a day or whatever. so that'll be alright.
haven't got much else to say today, maybe i'll post a poem later.
<3
squelchie out.

19.9.09

Oranges with Cupcakes.

... I was going to try to write a pathetic depressed emo poem in blank verse (non-rhyming poetry all in iambic pentameter) ... but that's too structured for me, and I'm not doing it for school. So I have no reason to actually do it. I got as far as the first line and a half - but I have no drive to finish it. So you lot will have to suffer without my attempt at iambic pentameter.
Actually, if I write a decent length poem in iambic pent, I find myself thinking in it. Which is really depressing. Because it's all da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM - so boring.
I just finished a Strongbow, and I'm missing my boyfriend - the Strongbow's probably exacerbating that, but whatever.
Gahh. My life is so uninteresting. Eat, sleep, miss boyfriend, work, make stupid mistakes at work, miss boyfriend's comforting arms, go on computer, miss boyfriend.
That's a summary of my usual day now.
Lame life.
Oh yeah and this morning I tried to tattoo a cross onto the inside of my left ring finger as a permanent reminder to stay pure - my version of a purity ring (aren't I a copycat? ugh. And by the way, I hate purity rings - so why the fuck am I putting a permanent one on myself?) ... but apparently it's very difficult to tattoo yourself on the inside of your hand. It seriously fucking hurts. And I don't even know if I did it deep enough to stay. I'll find out in a couple of weeks - if it vanishes, then the ink grew out with the skin and therefore wasn't deep enough; and if it doesn't, then I'll really have to touch it up, cos it looks like shit. Oh well.

16.9.09

Adrenaline.

When I put my finger on my neck, I can feel my heartbeat. I can count the beats. I can tell if it speeds up, and if it slows down. And lately, it's been doing a lot more speeding up than usual. I would guess that that indicates higher than normal levels of adrenaline in my blood.

Adrenaline acts on the sympathetic branch of the nervous system. It makes your heart beat faster and stronger; it makes your pupils dilate; it slows digestion; it constricts your blood vessels; and I think it probably also increases blood sugar levels. I get adrenaline rushes when I'm startled, when I'm angry - and when I'm with you. Hell, when I think about you I get an adrenaline rush. My heart beats faster, stronger; my pupils dilate; I go on a little bit of a sugar high.

I don't even have to be around you. But I'd much rather be around you than just think about you. Because when I'm around you, life just feels so much better. When I'm around you, it's kind of like being drunk. Which could be considered unsafe, since alcohol lowers inhibitions, so for you to be like my alcohol could potentially mean that there could be trouble. But I don't think so. I think we'll be fine.

But when I'm around you, and I put my finger on my neck, I can feel my heartbeat. And I can feel that my heart's about to burst, break, explode, and rupture from sheer joy - and also from adrenaline.

15.9.09

explorer.

going
to the edges
of all known maps

searching.

not finding.

the vague
and the unpredicted
lies ahead
a mist clouds sight
dulls hearing
numbs mind

searching

always searching.

© Elizabeth Klassen 2009

14.9.09

cherubim.

earth is invasion
sea
womb of land and sky
safety in
non-existence
dagger to
the heart of things.

shivers
down the spine
cracking
like eggshells
voices cry to the night to bring

oblivion.

memory like clouds
rainfall
sprouts
ideas
in the desert, solitude.

joined one to the other
having
one heartbeat

murder
of crows
crying in the wilderness
like the voice
paths

and corpses.

going, going, gone
and
wheels still spin
beyond jupiter, neptune, pluto

wheels within wheels
the
cherubim
call across worlds
the womb of sea, land, sky, man.

danger
in existence
a dagger
to the heart of things

and the cherubim call.

wings
stand with eyes
bow.

lips
touched
by flame and by fire

waken, awake!
awake, words,
lest you come too late.
tumble from lips touched
by fire.

call, cry out, thou cherubim!
and thou, o seraphim, thou too!
call to all to live once again
fly thou all and take the earth by storm
the air, too, is thine.

surrender thy soul,
womb of man, o earth -
surrounded art thou and
helpless.
seek thou the touch
of thy savior.

cry, cry, o cherubim.
call thou to the earth.

© Elizabeth Klassen 2009

The City.

The remains of once-beautiful spires reached mournfully up to the morning sky, throwing snaggle-toothed shadows across the silent City. A trio of buzzards circled hopefully for any sign of movement. Not the least breath of air stirred the dry leaves that were scattered across the scarred and dusty roads. Rubble lay everywhere, the last vestiges of walls, of houses, of restaurants and shops. The last crumbling sections of the City Walls were a warning of destruction and despair. The only living things within ten miles were the rats who fed on the bones of those who had died there.

And it was to this broken City that she must come. Not knowing what she would find; not knowing, even, what she was looking for. Only that it was imperative that she find it, whatever it was.

The City was built near mountains, rugged and dry, and a desert sat at its doorstep.


...... to be continued, cos i'm off to work, i guess.