Really Random Thursday 3-28-13

It's the Really Random Thursday, March 28 edition.  Otherwise known as:  

What I have been doing while wishing winter would just go away, already.

Tea Towel "Tess" is a Flimsy
First and foremost, I finished the Tea Towel Challenge flimsy this week.

Now she awaits quilting (ever waiting, that Tess). Also a backing and binding selection, but minor details.

The good thing about March and daylight saving time is that you can take a photo outside at 6:45 p.m., never mind that it is still on top of a pile of snow.

Temps were in the 40s yesterday and today, though.  I went for a walk around the neighborhood, dodging and navigating puddles of mucky runoff, but it sure beats a sheet of ice.  The walk outside was also quieter than my treadmill, which has decided to take up its own kind of moaning and groaning.  The repairman has been summoned.  I have been bucked off a treadmill that was on the fritz in the past.  Not an experience I'd like to repeat, though it does get the heart pumping in a fear-for-your-life, adrenaline rush kind of way.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up
In other news, this headline on the front page of our small town paper seemed amusing, though I'm sure the incident itself was anything but (full article here).

Al Gore may have invented the internet, but this guy may have invented the original Spam attack (i.e., the canned kind). 

A Bona Fide Binge
Other than the aforementioned flimsy, not a whole lot else has happened in the sewing room this past week month.  I blame my 30-day Netflix trial.  And Downton Abbey withdrawals (among other things). 

Nonetheless, I do not regret the diversion.  I watched one costume drama...

(Matthew Macfadyen, Eddie Redmayne)

after another...

(Hugh Dancy and Hugh Bonneville—a Hugh-o duo!)

after another.  

I very much enjoyed this last one, in particular.  Damien Lewis plays Soames Forsyte, a possessive (and obsessed) tyrant, though you do kind of get where he's coming from.  I liked him better in Band of Brothers, but The Forsyte Saga miniseries was very well done.  If you've got a hankering for Downton Abbey era shenanigans, you will like it.

That said, I am so glad I wasn't born in a previous century (well, technically I was, but you know what I mean). Women had it rough, yo.  Sure, the clothes were lovely, if you could afford them, but underneath the veneer was all that repression and constriction.  And I'm not just talking about the corsetry.

I also watched a few documentaries in between.  It's good to balance all that romanticism with a brisk face-slap of reality, you know?  Gotta love Netflix for the variety of documentaries not available at the local Redbox.

My media junkie-ness hasn't been limited to the visual.  I've been listening to some fascinating nonfiction as well, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.  Wow, the stuff you never knew.

But enough distraction.  There will be more sewing soon, sure as spring will come.  Sarah has once again put together the annual Hands 2 Help Charity Quilt Challenge.  If you haven't already checked it out, please do so and join in, if you can.  I have signed on to make a quilt (maybe two?), and the wheels have started turning.

Sing me out, Stacey, and tell it like it is.