Yarn Zombie

It’s been really cold and snowy here, like much of the country, so I’ve been cooped up, doing indoorsy type crafts (as opposed to outdoorsy type crafts like dyeing, which frankly is not appealing right now). In addition to The World’s Longest Strand of I-cord, I put together something I’ve wanted to do for a while.

I made curtains for our front door out of old Kodachrome slides and aluminum chainmail rings. They are awesome.

Travis drilled all of the tiny little holes using a Dremel tool and a Dremel tool drillpress. He taped a cardboard jig to the drillpress so the holes wound up in the right place. Then I connected them all together with the chainmail rings.

It actually went together surprisingly quick. We worked on it while watching the craptastic NBC Olympic coverage, starting on Friday and finishing it up yesterday afternoon.

The slides I used all came from a single lot of slides I bought in Kansas City last fall. The ones in the curtain are all Kodachrome, and seem to date from 1961 or earlier (the older ones aren’t stamped with a date, unfortunately). About half of them feature a picture of a horse. I guess the people who took the pictures were horse people.

I’m not sure how long the Kodachrome slides will stand up to being in direct sunlight, but since we’ve had about 25 minutes of sun in the past month, I’m not too worried about them fading super quick. And hey, they’ve lasted this long already! If I was a slide, I’d rather be out on display then packed in a moldy box in the dark. Poor slides.

I liked the way these came out so much that I think I’m going to coordinating curtains for my living room windows. Those will probably feature a strip (maybe 2 or 3 slides high) of the slides in the top third of the curtains, and be connected to fabric along the bottom. In my head, it looks really cool. I just need to dig out my sewing machine and go to JoAn Fabrics for a few supplies. Now I’m regretting my decision to chuck the latest JoAn’s ad (“Oh, I won’t be needing to go there anytime soon.” D’oh!).

Besides making mad scientist projects (I made a camera recently, too!), I’ve been watching the Olympics. I freaking love the Olympics. It’s my best sports thing. Unfortunately, my Olympics love has been tainted for the past many, many years by the overwhelmingly horrid coverage by NBC. OH MY GOD, NBC, COULD YOU SUCK ANY MORE? The answer is yes, yes they can. I know this because it seems that every night of coverage they suck a little bit more. They win gold medals in their own network Olympics of Sucking. People on the West Coast are bitching because the events that are occurring live in Vancouver, in the SAME FREAKING TIMEZONE, are tape-delayed. NBC’s response? “Oh, well they’re being shown live in the East and Central time zones, and 80 percent of the country is in those time zones, so that’s how many people are able to watch it live.” Which, okay, I could maybe buy that, except it’s not being shown live on the East Coast, either, NBC! YOU LIE!

Last night, the men’s moguls was one of the marquee events. Men’s Moguls! One of Canada’s best chances to win a gold medal on home soil! Well, yay! That’s actually kind of an interesting story, NBC. So here I am, somewhat invested in the men’s mogul story. I’m also flipping to the Olympics live blog on Jezebel, because it’s the internet age, and I like to have my thoughts validated by anonymous people online. That’s who we are now, NBC! Your audience – it multitasks! And that’s when I saw a bunch of the Canadian commenter start celebrating because their guy won the gold. Which, great for them, Team Canada, yay, but it was 25 minutes before we got to that point on the NBC broadcast. Also, considering how much figure skating is hyped as the glamour sport of the Olympics, did NBC manage to show more than about 40 minutes of that last night? I don’t think so. I probably saw 40 minutes of Bob Freaking Costas and puff pieces about Apollo Ohno (whom I actually like!), but I know I didn’t see but a handful of the pairs figure skating team. People skating to Bohemian Rhapsody? I heard that happened and is something I would really like to watch, NBC, but can’t because you’ve blocked all foreign live streaming and coverage and you don’t seem to be offering the full events like that to watch. Don’t even say Silverlight to me, NBC. You can take Silverlight and choke on it.

Oh, and did I mention NBC’s charmingly ADD type of coverage, where they show one team skating, or skiing, or what have you, and then immediately zip to a commercial? And then they come back, flip to another sport, and then zip to another commercial? All this does is disorient the viewer, who eventually has no idea what the hell is going on or who is in what place or even WHAT EVENT WE’RE WATCHING. I watched something yesterday during the day that NBC actually did a half decent job of covering (because they stuck with the event the entire time it was happening). It was the shooting/cross country skiing event. It was a really exciting race! Yay! But I have no idea what the name of the sport was because NBC never said it or put it on the screen! It may have been Nordic Combined, but I don’t know the distance or if that’s even the right name. I have no idea. Dammit, NBC, I am in your key demographic! Cater to me!

It’s all okay, though, because hopefully NBC will lose millions of dollars on the Olympics and be too poor to ever bid on broadcasting them again. I wish ABC would cover it. I grew up with ABC’s Olympic coverage! I miss it! [sob!]

Enough angst. Here’s your moment of Zen:

Oh, we’re supposed to get about 8 more inches of snow. [sob! again!]