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My sister is famous on a liberal arts college fashion blog, which apparently is a Thing.

Home Sweet Home

While out doing some last-minute shopping today, I spotted this charming shirt on the guy in front of me in line:

If you can't tell, the fabric is a camo print.

It's great to be home in the only red county in Maryland!

Two Cool Things

First, my xkcd cross stitch was featured on Mr. X Stitch yesterday! In the world of needlepoint blogging, that's a Big Deal.

Second, my Unknown Gnome* surveyed all my coworkers for adjectives about me, and created a word cloud that is probably the most accurate description of me of all time:

My favorite parts are "sedentary," "Excel," "Hermione," and the fact that "ice cream" is on there twice.


*Our office's non-denominational version of Secret Santa.

Insert Jack Donaghy Quote Here

Guys, I have a new job! Sort of. It's still within TFA, but it's a promotion and it's on a new team: Admissions. I flew to Chicago for the first part of this week to start training with my new manager, and when I returned this morning my cube looked like this:

The Admissions team is sort of spread out across the country (hence my manager being in Chicago), but there is one other team member who works from the Philly office, and he took it upon himself to welcome me to the team in an awesome way. My three favorite signs are:

The Admissions team refers to itself as the "A-Team."

This one took me a little while to work out.

I'm super excited about my new job, and about going to NYC next weekend to meet some more of my new team members. You know your new job is Serious Business when it involves two pictures of Mr. T in your cube.

Deck the Halls

Well guys, I finally got the condo decorated for the holidays. Now as soon as you walk in the front door, you will see our very own Christmas Tree:

I know. I'm practically Martha Stewart over here.

Then and Now

Since my sister and I moved out, my mom uses our return every Thanksgiving as an opportunity to take our annual holiday card photo. This year she decided to duplicate her greatest hits.

1994

2011

1990

2011

After two days of these painstaking reenactments, we have created our family's 2011 holiday card. I think it's our best one yet.

Front

Back

Maybe in 10-15 years we can recreate these photos again with our own kids. I hope neither of us has boys, or, if we do, I hope they don't mind wearing dresses.

Ready for my closeup

They are filming a movie where I work! Last week a small village of trailers sprang up seemingly overnight, and ever since then there have been guys setting up complicated lighting contraptions and giant camera things all over the block. I wanted to take a picture of all the trailers, which are actually quite fancy, but there are a lot of big scary guys around and I was too chicken.

Based on the fact that one of my coworkers saw Julia Stiles in the sandwich shop next to our office, and another saw Bradley Cooper on the street, we have surmised that this is the movie being filmed. Now we are spending our lunch hours hatching elaborate plans to put on all our TFA gear and try to get in the background of a scene. Some people are also hatching elaborate plans to run into Julia Stiles and/or Bradley Cooper, but those seem less likely to bear fruit.

Antici....

Look what arrived and is just hanging out in my closet taunting me:

Wedding dress!

How am I not supposed to put it on every day when I get home from work and prance around the house in it??

Schmaltz

I am slightly embarrassed to admit it, but I made a horrifyingly cheesy baby sampler:

Ben's sister had a daughter, and she is really into pink and princesses, so I thought it seemed appropriate. It actually turned out to be somewhat difficult to stitch, since it is so detailed:

Unlike the cartoon-ish stuff I usually make, this pattern called for all sorts of complicated shading and other nonsense - it had nine different shades of pink alone. The way it worked was kind of neat, though - after stitching a base of all the different pinks, yellows, greens, and browns in a pixelated mess, you stitch an outline around the main figure and suddenly it looks like something.

Before outlining

After outlining

It's cool how your brain works.

No such thing as a free bed

My parents came up to visit a few weekends ago, and offered to bring us their old bed frame. Our mattress has just been on a cheap platform since we got it, so we were excited about getting a real, adult-looking, and free bed. We hauled the pieces of the bed frame into our building, assembled them, and triumphantly lowered our mattress into place, only to find:

Sadness.

It didn't fit.

You aren't supposed to be able to see that part.

Apparently all these years we have had a full mattress, and for some reason I have mistakenly believed it was a queen. I always thought our sheets seemed kind of baggy, but assumed the sheet companies must just give you extra room, you know, to be nice or something. I am very good at rationalizing.

Anyway, after a few days of precariously climbing in and out of the too-large bed frame to get to our mattress, we finally caved and bought a new, correctly-sized one.

So now we have a nice new free bed, and it only cost us one mattress.

Punoween

Last night Ben and I went to a Halloween party. We both dressed as doctors, I had a sign that said "Ben is lying," and he had a sign that said "Caroline is telling the truth." Nobody figured it out the whole night.

Anyone here get it?

Ben on TV

Penn and Teller have a new TV show where they feature random cool things, and Ben's lab was recently on it!



You can see Ben for almost a full second at 1:13. Science!

Open source x-stitch-cd

I've had a few requests for a pattern for my xkcd cross-stitch, and while I (sadly) don't have pattern-making software, I was able to get a somewhat decent scan of the pattern I drew:

• Top half
• Bottom half
• Ball pit (This part was just a randomly generated matrix of R/G/B/Y, thanks MATLAB!) To make the top row of balls look wavy, I alternated 3/4 stitches with full stitches and blanks, so the top row was like /X\_/X\_/X\_/X\

I used 18-count white aida cloth, and 2 strands of floss for pretty much everything - the exception being fine things (like the hair on the female stick figures) and pale lettering (like "internet" and "outernet"), which I did with 1 strand. In addition to black, I used the following colors:

• DMC 3046 (medium yellow beige) for the map of the internet, bakery rolls, and trees
• DMC 304 (medium red) for the sheets, spider, cape, skateboard, roller coaster, and red balls
• DMC 444 (darl lemon) for the yellow balls
• DMC 702 (kelly green) for the green balls
• DMC 826 (medium blue) for the blue balls
• DMC 647 (medium beaver gray) for the transistor

The finished product was about 9" x 12" - which was quite convenient for framing purposes.

Hope that helps any nerdy cross-stitchers out there!

What is this?

It just appeared on our block, and has been there for a week now.

Any ideas?

A Beautiful Map

We had this great idea at work to buy a giant map of Philadelphia, put it on the wall, and mark all of the schools where we have teachers. Then we thought it would be even better to put all of the teachers' names along with their schools, but they didn't quite fit so we thought it would be cute to connect names and schools using color-coded strings:

While we were successful in our aim, the unintentional result is that it kind of looks like the work of a paranoid schizophrenic.

THE KEY TO CLOSING THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP IS DESTROYING THE NETWORK OF SPY SATELLITES THE CIA IS USING TO CONTROL OUR THOUGHTS THROUGH SMARTBOARDS.

Hallmark Occasion

Look what I just bought!

They really do make a card for everything nowadays.

Oh Yeah

I forgot to post this on my actual birthday, but we went out to a fancy restaurant and I wanted to share this prettiness with you:

Believe it or not, that is very fancy, deconstructed s'mores: molten chocolate cake, caramelized meringue, and graham cracker ice cream. It didn't actually taste anything like a s'more, but it was still delicious.

Data Data Data!

Guess where my work sent me today?

Edward Tufte's one-day course about presenting data and information! Not only was it awesome for all of the obvious reasons, it was double awesome because I got a set of all of his books for attending, and a neat little carrying case for them:

AND I got his autograph in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information:

Somehow I am not surprised that his signature is so... concise.

It was a little disconcerting to be back in an academic lecture setting, since I have gotten used to being a regular working adult. It was also disconcerting to be in a room that was probably 80% men, since I don't work in CS. Oh well. I learned a lot, and tomorrow I will go back to work and yell at everyone about their graphs until they regret having sent me!

Perfect square!

Look what I got in the mail:

 

At first I was like, "I can't believe they would send me another guilt mailing, especially since I didn't even give them anything last time!" But then I opened it up, and found:

 In case you can't read the small script:

It's from my aunt and uncle, or - as it says on the certificate - "Lady High Mistress of Muckety-Muck" and "Grand Poo-Bah." And people wonder where I get my sense of humor from.

There was a bunch of other silly stuff in there too:

They crossed out "erasers" on that package, and wrote "mistake catchers" instead.

I think I'm going to wear the "Birthday Girl" ribbon to work tomorrow, and see if anyone comments. I think I'm entitled, after having spent a quarter century among the Muggles of Planet Earth.

In which I complain about getting free stuff

I unexpectedly got a big, thick envelope in the mail yesterday from St. Joseph's Indian School. I knew its contents were going to be odd based on this:

 

But despite its promise of 3 - no 4! - free gifts, I was still surprised by the sheer volume of crap contained in the envelope:

I've gotten guilt-mailings from charities before, but this is ridiculous. In case you can't make out what everything is, there are two notepads:

A personalized calendar, a sticker sheet, and a sheet of address stickers:

A preemptive "Certificate of Appreciation" for my help:

A personalized letter from an Authentic Indian Child, and personalized gift certificates for me to provide said child with food and clothing:

And last, but certainly not least, a real live dreamcatcher:

I can't think of anything that would make me less inclined to donate to a charity than them sending me all this crap in the mail. In addition to making me feel resentful for trying to guilt me into giving them money because of the reciprocal nature of gift-giving, it also casts serious doubt on what they would actually do with my money once they got it - send more dreamcatchers to more random people in the mail? How is that helping any Lakota children?

Some quick googling revealed that not only have they been doing this trick for awhile, but that St. Joseph's Indian School is actually pretty negatively reviewed by the BBB's Charity Reports Index - for, among other issues, only spending 51% of their money on their actual program. I guess the other 49% goes to dreamcatchers and postage.

More Harry Potter!

Look where I went this weeekend!

Me and my friend DJ at "Harry Potter: The Exhibition" in NYC

That's right, even though the last movie has come out, I still found a (sort of) new method of experiencing Harry Potter! Unfortunately, you weren't allowed to take pictures inside, so this photo is all I have to show you.

The exhibit had a bunch of the props and costumes from all eight movies, it was crazy how detailed they were. The annotated potions textbook from HP6 in particular was a work of art - they actually made up an entire book of potions, and then wrote all kinds of crazy stuff all over it. Other props were less meticulously crafted - the small print on Prof. Umbridge's educational decrees from HP5 (you know, these things) was just "blah blah blah blah blah."

The craziest thing was how tiny the main actors' costumes were from the first several movies - I mean, I knew they were only 10 and 11 when they started, but seeing those little kid clothes really hit home how young they were. It boggles my mind. Also, I always thought Snape's robes were black, but apparently they were really dark blue.

Next item on my agenda of perpetual HP excitement: the Harry Potter set tour in London?

(lambda (cross-stich) (awesome cross-stich))

Behold, my latest nerdy cross stitch:

Yes, that's right, they make black cross-stitching cloth!

Figuring out the pattern for this one gave me quite a headache. I kept thinking, "Okay, I'll base this lambda's height off of the shield next to it, but I need that shield to be big enough for a lambda inside of it, but I need that lambda to be the same height as the shield next to it..." and recursing into frustration. But thanks to lots of arithmetic, I finally did it!

See, it is really cross-stiched:

And it is really recursive (to a point):

Bonus nerd feature: The outer shield is 128 stitches wide, the next one is 64 stitches, the next one is 32, etc... I am a nerdy cross-stitching genius!

Hurricane!

Actually, Hurricane Irene was pretty anticlimactic here - mostly it just rained for a long time. But today Ben and I walked down to the Schuylkill, and there was definitely some stuff underwater that wasn't supposed to be there:

The water was also moving much faster than usual, so it's a good thing neither of us fell in.

In conclusion, it was a good excuse to spend the entire weekend inside in my pajamas, cross-stitching and watching TV. I would appreciate more weather that prevents me from having to do anything (without causing major damage) in the future.

Random Updates

1. I successfully contacted Randall Munroe, and (based on his excitement at my offer) mailed him my cross stitch! I sent it about a week ago, so it should be in his hands at this very moment (or will be very soon). Yay! I also finished the pattern for my next big project, and while it's not quite as epic as the xkcd one, it should be pretty cool.

2. I bought a wedding dress this weekend! It is pretty and makes me look like a girl. I am very excited about wearing it again... in 14 months.

3. I've spent the last few days on the beach at the Chesapeake Bay, at a retreat for work. It was very fun, but I kept getting in trouble during the team-building activities because I am not good at thinking metaphorically. Examples:

Facilitator: Now we're going to do trust falls. Remember, if you drop your partner, it means that they can't trust you at work.

Me: I don't see how arm strength and trustworthiness are correlated.

Everyone else: Shut up, Caroline!

...

Facilitator: If you flinch before you fall into your partner's arms, it means that you don't trust them.

Me: Or that you have a functioning vestibular system.

Everyone else: Shut up, Caroline!

Also, while I was at the retreat there was an earthquake, but I didn't know that's what happened until the internet explained it to me later, so I don't think that really merits its own number.

I love to cross stitch!

UPDATE: I ended up getting in touch with Randall Munroe and mailing it to him! He thanked me and said he was "delighted" to have it - life dream achieved!

ANOTHER UPDATE: I posted the pattern for this project here.

Alternate title for this post: x-stitch-cd.

Okay you guys, check it out:

Just to be clear, that is not a framed printout of "xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel," that is a framed cross-stitch of it.

It took about a month of obsessive stitching, as well as an entire skein of black thread. For context on how much thread that is, I have yet to go through a full skein of any other color with all of my other projects, combined. Ben kept calling it my "magnum opus" while I was working on it, but I'm not entirely sure if he was being a supportive fiance or making fun of me for waking up early to cross stitch before work.

Now that it's done, it is my dream to send it to Randall Munroe and have him acknowledge my existence in some way, but so far it's still in my house because:

1. I can't find a PO Box on the xkcd website, and
2. I am afraid that Randall Munroe hates cross stitch and will laugh at me while throwing it in the garbage, and then I will be sad.

So if anyone knows where Randall Munroe gets his mail and/or how he feels about cross stitch, let me know! And in the mean time, you can click on the pictures below to see close-ups of the different sections. If you only look at one, you should check out the ball pits. Oh God, the ball pits.