Because, as we all know, I live to annoy my friends, let's start with Yarn Stuff and get it out of the way.

#1 - Went shopping. Bought the blue and funky black/gray yarn I needed to finish two scarves. Bought a skein of the fire-engine red for the knitted scarf. Bought two skeins of a new cream-and-brown that has been tempting me. Got out of there for under $20 but only by making a run for it as soon as my hands were too full to pick up any more skeins.

#2 - Oddball cream-and-pastel yarn. I redid about two feet of it, looked at it again, and decided there was no way this was ever going to be something I wouldn't be ashamed to put my name on. Ripped the whole thing out, wound the yarn bitterly back into balls and tried not to feel the shame of having been defeated by yarn.

#3 - Scarves, misc. Worked on the funky black/gray scarf. Did about six inches. Looked it over. Decided it was a mess. Ripped out 30 inches. I'm working much more slowly now. Every two or three rows, I lay it out on the floor and eye it suspiciously, watching for the moment when it develops a mind of its own and starts trying to recreate a series of French curves.

#4 - New cream-and-brown yarn turns out, when worked, to just look dirty. Closer inspection reveals it was designed to look good skeined but not otherwise. Disappointing. Crochet was ghastly. Knitting not much better. Will try again later, under the theory that maybe I was just getting discouraged by that point in the evening.

Possibly I need a new blog category. "I Hate Yarn" sounds like a good one.

Never again with the fancy-schmancy funky yarns. From now on, it's mass-produced stuff for me all the way. Solid colors only.

/end yarn stuff

Enterprise managed to annoy me as well.

More specifically, the Science Fiction channel annoyed me. I'd forgotten that all of their announcements about time of program start are for the East Coast. Consequently, when I turned on the television to see the news at 6:00 last night, I saw the last two minutes of the first episode of Enterprise. Since the very first episode was the one I'd most wanted to see, to see how they handled the set-up, I was Seriously Aggravated.

I went ahead and watched the next two episodes they were showing, though. And I have to say--it wasn't magic, was it?

The episode about the Cap'n and the Vulcan lady getting kidnapped? I'm thinking a sledgehammer would have been a much more delicate approach than all of that rolling around on the ground, tied together, and old enemies popping up as new friends and instantly being accepted on face value, and the Mean Vulcan being softened to mush by having his life saved by the Spunky Woman, etc., etc., etc.

The one with the two guys (it takes me a while to memorize character names) trapped on the shuttle with a limit air supply and believing the Enterprise had been destroyed? Had more potential. It was very nearly a strong, character-driven episode. Sadly, the characters were more stereotypes than real people and neither of them did anything even remotely original. (I mean, of course there was a bottle o'booze stashed there instead of in the Cap'n's quarters. And of course they got drunk and bonded. And of course the ranking officer offered to sacrifice himself to save the other guy.) (The only thing they missed was mentioning that if Guy #2 hadn't talked incessantly for two days, they'd have had more air left for breathing.)

Anyhow, I guess my curiosity is satisfied. Even if I'd tried it when it first aired, I wouldn't have watched for long.

/end television talk

I didn't have much evening left for anything else. That's the problem with watching television...you're stuck there in front of the stupid box.