I really really like the dollar store. This meshes well with my lowbrow tastes in cuisine and novels and Velveeta. You can buy so much awesome at the dollar store! You can even buy this:
Sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar.
Can you believe this?! I always thought The Dollar Tree was a family-friendly place, but now I’m not so sure. Can someone call The Eagle Forum ASAP? We need to picket. And then how about afterwards I take you back to my apartment for a drink, Big Boy.
Fewer things are more important to us than pimping the hell out of our very own Happy Valley Crafters. Granted, we haven’t been doing a ton online lately, but things are starting to come together after a collectively crappy/busy/fire-and-brimstone summer.
Exhibit A: The poster promoting an embroidery workshop run by our very own Cotton Floozy! Who is now officially an “artist.”
The awesome people of Craft Lake City, a cool summer festival in SLC where the Flooze shamelessly flashed her wares to people walking by her booth, identified her talents and made this happen. About a thousand people showed up (okay, maybe more like 40) at The Garage on Beck bar just north of downtown Salt Lake to learn embroidery, drink beer and eat $1 tacos. It was awesome. I had no idea that bars that big existed in Utah!
I showed up late, as I do, to assist as part of Happy Valley Crafters. Can you believe that Floozy brazenly promised that we would be there without asking us first! I mean, of course we would go to support her and help out. But now we know that Floozy shoots first and asks questions later.
In this case, though, I’m glad she did. And who knows, maybe we’ll even see Craft Lake City expand their workshops and hold them down south in our neck of the woods. If not, well… we’re just going to have to do something about that ourselves.
Utah County represent. (Okay, how many of you actually understood that gangsta reference? Urban Dictionary, let me show you it.)
P.S. Special thanks to Dorothy for creating the cool Utah Craft Watch banner at the top of this post! We’ll use it for posts, like this one, that in-depth craft reporting along the Wasatch Front.
Every year, many Mormons, post-Mormons, and Mormon-flavored people get together and talk about things — openly, intellectually, artistically. It is called the Sunstone Symposium. I took part in a Eve Ensler-inspired session titled ‘The Vagina Testimonies.’ Some talks were serious. Others, downright sad. Mine, of course, was funny and light and full of weird crafts. Here it is:
BERTHA GOES TO HEAVEN
THIS is Bertha.
Full name: Bertha Mason Rochester Brian. My uterus.
Bertha was born sometime in utero a few weeks after her conception. Once she was out into the real world, she grew up mostly ignored. When puberty hit she started spending more of her time hanging out with Stinky the Vagina, Pubella — Empress of the Map of Tasmania, and . . . Dolores.
Bertha looks nice in her blue bra and fig leaf merkin.
That was when Bertha first started showing signs of her impending madness. Bertha got her period.
Who doesn't love a menarche party?
Bertha didn’t mean to wreak havoc on me. She didn’t know what she was doing. The new monthly schedule of hormones and effluvia gave me bouts of depression and feelings of shame and confusion that bled into my nights.
I hallucinated. Saw things that weren’t there.
Disclaimer: this ghost in no way looks like a penis.
Translated them into a Mormon context and knew that they were demons and spirits, meant to tempt or comfort, damn or save.
Bertha mellowed out and normalized to a reasonable degree. She lived a rather dull life. Not much action. Occasionally, Dolores would buzz about the latest gossip about a boy, and then would fizzle out. Everything became numb and shut down in Bertha’s world. If it wasn’t for the occasional tingle from taking a bath, (Oh, Dolores!) I would have completely forgotten I even had a lower half.
And then, when I was still a virgin and a teenager, I got married.
And Bertha waited.
I gave birth to my son shortly thereafter.
Bertha did great. She held him and fed him and walled him from the threatening world. But something went wrong hours after the birth. Bertha went crazy.
Bertha started spasming with her powerful hormones. Sending waves of chemicals that crashed and destroyed. Bertha heard voices. She disassociated. She didn’t know who this small thing was, this baby, that she had expelled from her body. She felt trapped. Paranoid. Suicidal.
She had become The Hysterical Woman.
She became Mrs. Rochester, jailed in her cell of insanity, wanting to burn the world down.
Bertha did not self-immolate.
She took pills instead, that made her feel normal and took her night terrors away.
Bertha handled herself through two more pregnancies. Birthed two more beautiful children into the world. She could be managed with medication and therapy, for great periods of time, but occasionally her darker side got out, regardless of the remedies used to soothe her. Bertha took a toll on my libido. When you’re bedridden with pain and bleeding three weeks out of the four, not a lot of action happens. Poor Stinky and Dolores. Poor, poor me.
It’s not easy to euthanize someone you love. But Bertha’s condition monopolized all of my time.
And I wanted my life back.
Almost a year ago from today, July of 2011, I had a hysterectomy. I never saw Bertha as she truly was. Raw from my stomach. While I was under anesthesia, they put Bertha in a bag and delivered her to the hospital incinerator. Bertha finally got the immolation she always wanted. I never got her ashes.
Sometimes I wonder if Bertha moved on without me. If she is playing a harp in heaven with her fallopian tubes, skipping through vagisil-scented clouds, waiting for our reunion. Will she be celestialized without me? My wickedness parting us forever? I have no answers about the hereafter. And it saddens me that I don’t even have an urn of her ashes to place on my mantle.
I forgive you for the madness you caused, Bertha. I hope you went to heaven.
[Floozy’s plush uterus is from I Heart Guts. No, this isn’t a sponsored post. But maybe it will help Floozy pitch her line of Crochet Fashion for Uteri. -DameToadstool, Ed.]
Welp. I made an awkward silence on the blog. A really long awkward silence. But, it’s too late to apologize! So let’s move on with things.
[Disclaimer: I can’t get any more of my images to upload, so maybe those will come later.]
SO EXCITED
As you can see, I got the The Book of Jer3miah DVD! Yay! And it has deleted scenes! Yay! However, unless they are an easter egg (boo) or otherwise hidden (boo), there’s a bunch of web content that is NOT on the DVD (BOOOO). Like the character vlogs and the Davenport interview. I can’t even find those anymore on the site, but they are still on Vimeo as per the link above (I, of course, highly recommend Simon’s channel). More frustrating though, is that I keep finding more content! See, I didn’t really do the extra stuff when the series came out, so now it’s like I’m catching up. I have to chase everything down 3 years later. I hate chasing things down. Despite my love for this series, I hate trans-media experiences because I want everything to be all together so I don’t have to work to get the whole story.
I’ve recently come into the acquaintance of a young fellow who is possessed with a happy obsession with ancient Rome.
I know it seems odd, but I actually don’t care much for ancient Rome, even though my ‘nym is associated with it. Rome has a lot of awesome things about it, but in the end it’s too political for me. I just want to ride on my horse, spearing people in battle, not bother with elections and social status signifiers. But I certainly do have an interest in the garb of almost all historical eras.
Zappy, as we will call my young friend, furnished me with the interesting information that the proper size of a toga (which is, of course, constructed of a flat rectangle with curved corners, or sometimes diagonally-cut corners) is twice the height of the wearer by three times the height of the wearer. The true formula is more complicated than that, but I didn’t want to think that hard about it.
This seemed exceptionally huge to me–for a 6-foot man, the toga would be a rectangle 12 by 18 feet. I did the math and found that the smallest yardage you could use of 60″ wide fabric is 16 yards. Sixteen effing yards. Continue reading
