Rain and packing

The weather has been incredibly wet here lately, not at all the kind of weather you'd want for November... It's been raining and raining and raining and raining... There seems to be no end to it. How boring... The sky is covered in heavy, gray clouds, and it's always dark. I want either sunshine or snow, dammit! I'm sick of this rain!

In other news, I finally finished my album! It's called "The first dozen" and is now available for download. You can use the player on the right to listen to it, or go to my Rainhat website and download it for free, or buy it on my Bandcamp page. The next thing for me to do is to promote it and let the world know that it's there, so that as many people as possible hear it. If you like the music, tell a friend or download and share the music online!

I'm moving to Malmö soon, so I've started packing a bit. We got a bunch of cardboard boxes the other day and I'm trying to pack down all my stuff in them. The hardest part is to figure out where to start... I have lots of stuff, and it's kinda scattered all over the place, but I guess it will get done eventually. I can't wait to move...

Online overload

I've been completely and utterly sick of computers and everything online lately, kind of like when you eat too much ice cream too often and just get sick of it and don't want to see another ice cream ever again. Not sure about the 'ever again' part in this case, but it's like I completely lost interest in everything online. I used to check the metrics for my websites at least once or twice every day, but now I just don't care enough to check more than once a week, if that. Seems pointless somehow, I know me checking the metrics isn't going to change anything anyway. I used to be fairly active in some online forums as well, but lately I just haven't seen anything worth commenting on. So I've been staying away from everything online, and doing more stuff offline instead.

I saw this thing on the news about a big blog award being given out. I couldn't believe my eyes... One of the people who was heralded as a likely winner of the award was this teenage girl, who in only 10 months had managed to gain 40 000 - 50 000 hits per day for her blog by writing about fashion and her colorful fingernails. It's an impressive feat, and well done and all, but seriously? Fingernails? I think another chunk of my faith in mankind just died. The most popular blog is not about science, ecology, society, or even religion, but fingernails? This planet is doomed...

I practised Yang style tai chi for a few years back when I had just started college. I did pretty well at it, I knew the Yang Cheng Fu style long form and practised regularly. Then school and stuff got in the way, and I never had time to go to the lessons anymore, so I quit the classes. Now it's been around 4 years since I practised, and I had forgotten a lot of it. Recently, I got interested in it again and decided to take it up again. With some help from Erle Montaigue's video tutorials on YouTube for remembering the moves, I'm back at it. Most of it is coming back quite quickly, I guess because I already learned the movements once before.

My Etsy shop

I put some of the chainmaille stuff up for sale about two weeks ago on an auction website in Finland. It's a pretty small site, being available only in Finnish, so not surprisingly, nobody even looked at the items. Fortunately, the site is completely free to use.

I've heard some good things about Etsy, so I set up an account there a couple of days ago and put some stuff up for sale. If you liked the chainmaille rings I wrote about in my chain rings post, I suggest you go take a look at the stuff I have up. There are some rings, a bracelet and a necklace available. The address to my Etsy shop is:

http://squigglebird.etsy.com

If you like what you see but can't find a ring in your size, don't worry. I can make you any kind of ring you see there in whatever size you want. Just let me know.

Riding the monkey

So, a couple of weeks ago Gin and I went to Finland to visit my grandparents. It was nice to see them again, it had been a couple of years since I had been there. They have a nice little red house next to a lake, far from everything. It's a very quiet and relaxing place to be. There's a big workshop where I spent a lot of time as a kid. I learned a lot about woodworking there, always building all kinds of stuff. I once made this little wooden submarine. It was hollow and had these little fins on the side that were angled slightly downward, and it had a little hook in the front so that I could tie a string to it and pull it behind a rowboat on the lake. The little fins would pull the sub down under water if I pulled it with the rowboat, and when I stopped it would float up to the surface again. Loads of fun if you're 10 years old. :)

My uncle is always building stuff too. He's good with cars and motors, and he always has a couple of more or less odd projects going on. He recently bought a monkey chopper motorbike. A monkey bike is like a motorbike, but tiny, like if you took a full size bike and just shrank everything on it down to a smaller size. There used to be these monkey mopeds that were quite popular for a while too. This monkey chopper that he bought now is not street legal, I'm actually not really sure what it's for, but it's hilarious to ride around the garden. It's like a real chopper bike with a fairly long front fork, a low seat and pretty fat back tire, but it's much smaller, so you look pretty ridiculous sitting on it. I have no idea what he's going to do with it.

Chain rings

Due to popular demand, here are some pictures of some of the chainmaille rings and other stuff that I've made. I've been meaning to put these up for sale on eBay or something, but I haven't gotten my ass in gear yet.

This first one is a ring made out of titanium, bronze and silver. I made up the pattern and used three different metals as an experiment. I think I like the way it looks.

This is a bracelet made of titanium and steel. I found the pattern for this online, I think it's called Dragonback or something like that. It's a pretty dense weave, so the bracelet took forever to make and is quite heavy, even though it doesn't really look it. The chain is about ½ inch wide.

This third one is a ring made out of stainless steel. The chain is called half-persian 4-in-1, I think. It's not very difficult to make once you get the hang of it, but joining the ends to make it a ring is really tricky. It's a very dense chain, so you need pliers with very thin tips to pull it off. The engagement rings that Gin and I have are made out of this chain, but they are titanium on one edge and rose gold on the other.

Gin has started making rings and stuff too, and between us I think we have around 20 rings, and a couple of bracelets, earrings, and necklaces. It's fun stuff to make. :)