A dive into geekiness (geeky+happiness)

As of today, I am an official volunteer at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History!

I get a shirt, badge, two shifts, break, the works ;) And I even hooked the badge to a funky necklace I have, but never wear (the plastic white chain they gave me was horrible and itchy).

The geekiness level here is almost comparable to when I discovered my spider plant sprouted its first offspring:

Or maybe equal to when my mom told me she was going to hide the Venus fly trap she got my brother for his birthday in my room (the only room in the house he doesn't go into).


What are geekiness levels measured in? Newtons? Furlongs? Megawatts? Comments on the subject appreciated.

And it just happens to be my favorite number . . .

Your Expression Number is 7

Very intelligent, you are usually thinking, introspecting, or analyzing. You have a good mind, and you are especially good at finding out the truth. Very little ever escapes your observation and deep understanding. You tend to obsess over wisdom and hidden truths. You are likely to become a authority on any subject you undertake. Operating on a different wavelength, most people don't know you that well. Very logical and rational, at times you tend to lack emotion. So much so, that you often have times coping with emotional situations. You are not very adaptable - you may tend to be overly critical at times.

What's Your Expression Number?

I'm too tired to post. Salsa dancing is a draining activity. *distraction* Here! Look at my mom's garden!

Deep Pink Rhododendron

??? unknown purple flower

Japanese Maple

Bearded Iris


??? unknown pink bush flowers

Kingfisher Clematis

Adventures of the Fair-Weather Fan

Yesterday my brother Will had his last soccer game. Both of my brothers play soccer, and I hadn't seen any of their games all year, so my mom dragged me along to watch the last half-hour.

My brother plays on our school's varsity team, so the moms of a lot of kids in my class were there, and once they saw me, they all yelled out to their sons on the field, 'PICK IT UP! C'MON, MAX, GET THE BALL! QUIN WHAT ARE YOU DOING, WILL'S SISTER IS WATCHING!" Everyone said, "Look, it's the Panthers' good luck charm! Where've ya been all season?"

To top that off, one mom even took my picture, claiming it would have to go into the yearbook for a once-in-a-lifetime event.

I'll be blunt: I am not a sports fan. The only games I ever watch are the Olympics and the Super Bowl (and really, just the commercials ;) ). But this year, the Penguins are in the Stanley Cup playoffs (WOOO!!), and last night for their first game against the Redwings (BOO!!), my parents bought tickets for us to watch the game on the JumboTron at Mellon Arena.
This time, I went along willingly ;)

We got there about ten minutes before the game was scheduled to start and got great seats. The Pens are pretty popular (being so far the only winning team in Pittsburgh). Here's pretty much what it looked like before the game started.

Let me tell you, it filled up FAST.

And of course, seeing that I have projects to finish and the average sports game has many commercials . . .

Yes, I knit. So sue me :P And one of Tatiana's gloves is finished, despite the fact that it was hard to concentrate when some die-hard hockey fan sitting behind you cusses at every missed goal, fight, and bad call.

Both the Pens and my brother's team lost yesterday, though. Maybe I'm not such a good-luck charm :P

Crappy weather=laziness

All this week it has been in the low 50's and high 40's. Oh, did I mention that's it's supposed to be May?!?! Yesterday was my school's Kennywood Day, in which we get a half-day just so people can use the tickets they bought through the school. Guess what: IT HAILED.

But with all this crap weather I somehow have no time to knit. I need to give Paige's first glove a thumb. I need to finish Tatiana's first glove. I also need to draw. I need to finish a report. I need to just lay down and SLEEP.

So bear with me :) You might have another few days of horrible RAIN, erm, no posts :P

Two (2!!) FO's: Claire's Eye Candy Gloves and Laura's Across the Universe Gloves

Two pairs of fingerless gloves finished this week! I'm so proud of myself!

First we have Claire's Eye Candy gloves. I used the rest of the unknown blue yarn in my stash along with some of the recycled Marvelous Mohair from the My So-Called Scarf and the (too-small and frogged) Stirling Cloche. I paired them together and voila; Fair-Isle stripes!


The reason for the name is because my friend Claire attracts some of the weirdest guys in our school. She's a really tiny girl and kind of shy, kind of not, but seriously all the guys seem to have a crush on her: dorks, nerds, jerks, and just plain weirdos! She's a good person and hates letting people down, but this is not the kind of attention from guys that she wants ;)

Ooo, and funny story: I knit these on the bus ride down to Baltimore. Of course people asked questions, so I just said that the gloves were for my cousin, and hey Claire has the same size hands, could I measure hers to make sure I get the right size? She has no idea who they're really for ;)


The second pair I started a while ago, but just finished this week because the embroidery took a while to plan and do and for some reason the second glove came out nearly an inch smaller than the first. But here they are in their mellow glory: Laura's Across the Universe gloves!


Me and Laura are both HUGE Beatles fans, only she knows like every one of their songs and I just like the more well-known ones and the album cover art :P But we still get along great and I broke out my dad's old complete Beatles songbook for the tiny photo-shoot above.

I guess I owe it to you: all of these fingerless gloves I've been knitting? They're end-of-school presents for my friends. Next year three of them are going to different schools. I wore my Delovelys once and everybody oohed and aahed over them, so I thought, well why not give them their own?

So far I have three and a half pairs done: I just need to make Paige's gloves and finish Tatiana's (the two fugly gloves look A LOT better now :) ). I'll miss my friends like crazy next year, but hopefully the gloves can link us together!

Class Trip~Part 2

Moving onto:

Day 2
This day was mostly spent at museums: Geppi's Entertainment Museum and the Sports Legends Museum. We started off the day with Geppi's.
If you are going to visit Baltimore, go visit this place! It's all about the history of media and how Americans looked to their favorite comics/TV/icons to pull them out of their everyday lives. It's stocked with first-edition comics for Peanuts, superheros, and hundreds more. Plus our tour guide was really funny and it was just a cool place to go to!

In the pictures, all the movie posters are the originals that were displayed back when the movies were first in theaters, and the comics are first editions. The pictures of scenes from Snow White are the original slides drawn by the Disney artists. If you have any questions about other objects in the photos, feel free to comment :)












Now I don't have a lot of pictures from the Sports Legends Museum, because if you can tell, I am not very much into that kind of stuff. But they did have this station where you can try on famous players' uniforms, and as you can see my friends didn't exactly wear the right size :P



After that, we went to the local mall and ate lunch and bought some souvenirs. I bought a strawberry charm for my phone at a jewelry booth.

A small, sad story: Remember when I went to New York for New Year's? Well while I was there I got a cell phone charm that was a little yellow sparkly ladybug inside a blue ring. Sadly, I lost the ladybug part of the charm and had to replace it with another not-as-sparkly bead. That's why the strawberry is now on my phone. (Picture of the old charm below)

And after the mall came the long, tedious bus ride back to Pittsburgh. Thanks for listening!

P.S. Wanna see more shots of my trip? I'll be adding photos to my Flickr page gradually (as in probably all next month *groan*), since I am about 98% full for my limit this month. This is what happened last time when we went to D.C.! Yeah I know, I can always just upload them straight to my Blogger posts, but hey sometimes that takes too long and you can't always see everything

Plus I almost over that limit, too :P

Class Trip~Part 1

Can you sing, "Good morning, BAAAAAAAALTIMORE!"? ;)

It took a massive pizza fundraiser to afford all this, and we did so much that I have to divide this weekend's trip into two posts (mostly for the amazing amount of pictures I took). So here goes!

Day 1
We had to be at school by 7:00 am, so my wake-up call was 6:00. UGH. Then came the five-hour bus ride. Thank gawd for iPods. Everyone was pretty exhausted though, so I could (try to) sleep in peace and quiet. Towards the end, it got really boring. To entertain myself, my friend Laura posed for a portrait.


First up: The Baltimore Aquarium and dolphin show! Okay, how awesome are dolphins? They can jump like thirty+ feet in the air and do all kinds of cool tricks. Also, Baltimore has a really neat aquarium, with escalators and people-movers instead of tiresome stairs and all kinds of opportunities for great shots.













Then we took a Ducky Tour around the city, and I have some advice for travelers who also want to take this tour: BRING EARPLUGS. They hand out these duck-quacker-noisemaker thingys, and some rude people who names I will not mention will make it their goal to annoy you as much as possible by repeatedly blowing them in your ear.

Now in case you've never heard of it, a Ducky Tour is in this vehicle that looks like a boat on wheels, which it pretty much is. You typically find them in cities near waterways (we have them here in Pittsburgh, too). You go around the said city in the boat, and then the driver literally drives right into the water and you see everything from the boat. It sounds weird, but it's actually really cool.

Oh and by the way, the white tomb is actually the grave of Edgar Allan Poe :0




For dinner, we went to ESPN Sports Zone and ate typical American food (burgers, chicken, hot dogs, etc.) and went upstairs to play games. Then another bus ride to the hotel to collapse into the hot tub, watch The Office reruns (I have the first three seasons on DVD), and go to bed.

Fun :) More to come tomorrow!