3rdragon

I went to sarah-marie's house yesterday. She's mentioned something about a four-foot pig in her e-mail, but I had forgotten about it by the time I arrived at her house. I was forcibly reminded of it when we went upstairs to get said pig, which was at least four feet from nose to rump, not counting several inches of tail. We then proceeded to sew the skin onto the wire frame around the large hole in its side, and to remove as many of the pins as we could managed (the surest method for discovering pins in the fabric that made up the skin was to poke oneself on them). Quite aside from the likelyhood of being poked with pins, this task was difficult to accomplish because we both had to keep stopping our work to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. Between bouts of laughter, however, I did manage to extract the tale of why smb had a pig sitting in a corner of her room:

About a year ago smb was at Hampshire, looking at the classroom where she was to teach. It was apparently in the art building, and either in the room or on the way to the room, she passed this pig, which was about four feet long, made of chicken wire and muslin, and apparently covered with a great many little arms, each about an inch long (this is where the pins came from; the arms were gone by the time I encountered it, but some of the pins that had been used to hold them on remained). smb, being smb, said something to the effect of, "Oh look, it's a pig," and whoever was escorting her around replied, "Would you like that pig?" And her response was, "I could have that pig?" Mind you, these are her italics, not mine; they were clearly evident in her voice when she related this story. Apparently there was some puzzlement as to what value smb saw in a large pig with a great many arms pinned all over it, but everyone was pleased enough to get rid of the pig to not say much.

And this was the pig that we sewed. We then painted it, using the highly scientific method of putting a dollop of paint in a plastic container and then adding a quarter-cup of water, mixing, and then applying to the pig with a foam brush. We couldn't paint all of it, of course, but when I last saw it, the pig was sitting on an island of newspapers in the middle of the kitchen floor, and all of the visible parts of it were yellow.

After that adventure, we sat on the floor and knitted for a while, and a knitting friend showed up and we knitted some more, and then it was suppertime and I went home because there wasn't enough food for me, too. As I was biking back to Morris, I passed the pond, which was covered in mist from the afternoon thunderstorms. I didn't have my camera with me, but as soon as I got back I grabbed the EOS and went for a walk by the pond (completely ignoring all of the lessons learned on my last walk about the number of mosquitoes on that path in the evenings and the sort of clothing it is advisable to wear, but the bugs weren't nearly as bad; I think it was too humid for many of them to fly, so I only have a few more bites on my ankles). The mist had dissipated somewhat, but I got some lovely pictures; maybe I'll post some when I decide which ones I like best.

N.B. Must mention to Damon that it would be a really good idea to put lens cleaning kits in with the EOSes; those lenses are huge, and it's no joke to have to continually clean them off with one's skirt. What if it's a miniskirt? Or what if you aren't wearing a skirt at all? And I'm sure that cotton, soft though it was, is not the best thing for the glass.

I dreamed that

relique was here. This dream didn't have terribly much plot; it was more of a snapshot of a moment in time. We were in the campus center cafe (which it wasn't, actually; the room was bigger and the color scheme had a lot of vibrant red - which went well with

relique's hair - but, in the way of dreams, that's where it was), and she was feeding people. There started out being only a half-dozen of us or so, but in the magic way of college students drawn to free food, there were at least 13 people in almost no time at all. There was pizza and something else that I can't quite remember, but it didn't have dairy in it. That's about all there was to this dream. Then I woke up, and it was 2:00 in the morning, and while my feet (which had the fan blowing on them) were cold, all the rest of me was hot and sticky. I eventually decided that I should turn the fan off, because at least that way my feet would stop being cold, and went back to sleep.

I had a second dream that was very D&D and had lots of plot, only I don't remember much of it at all. I was very much not myself, and furthermore could turn into a deer, only I didn't because I was carrying something that might have been a large ball of modeling clay, and if I'd shifted I wouldn't be able to hold it. We were going into a den of evil and iniquity as backup for an upper-level person, only I don't really recall why because she could totally handle them on her own (she was awesome in many ways, the only one of which that I really remember was that she could turn into a wolf, I think). Perhaps the plot explained it, but as I said, I don't remember that at all.

There was a third dream, which started out being about cooking, but before I had gotten any further than chopping onions, a bunch of those little reddish-brown ants showed up, and then the dream was about having ants in one's kitchen, only in the dream those weren't ants, they were mayflies.