Winter-like weather! At last!

Once upon a time (about three and a half years ago), this crazy girl moved from Newport, RI to Raleigh, NC. She moved in with this guy (who's totally awesome) and all was well. Until Thanksgiving came. Rhode Island winters seemed to start on or around Halloween and didn't end until Easter at least. The crazy girl was used to seeing the first frost and the first snow by Thanksgiving. And then, she realized, in North Carolina, you can wear a long-sleeved T-shirt on Thanksgiving to no ill effect.

Year after year, I still expect the wintery weather to start sometime in late October or early November. And it was still in the 60s until earlier this week! But, now here I am, wearing my nice, warm, wool pea coat out of the house and into work in the mornings, waiting for the car to heat up enough that I won't be shivering on the way.

It's also time, now, for me to start working on the annual DIY holiday gifts. This year's gifts: ornaments. For non-gamers, I'll be making swirled glass ball ornaments, for the gamers: faction ornaments, depending on the game said gamer plays. I'll have Horde insignias for WoWers, and Cryx, Khador, Legion, Minions, Mercs, etc. for the WarmaHordes crowd. For myself, I want to knit a Cryx sweater. But that'll take too much time. Why do I always want to knit in the winter, when I know the project I start won't be done until it's too warm and the project is useless?

Also, I bought the Gunbunnies' domain, and am starting to get the blog set up, as well as all the Press Gang's email addresses. Just got to get email set up properly...

When Did Geek Become Cool?

I'm serious. When did it happen?

When I was in high school, the cool kids didn't play video games. Well, not the games I was playing. The jocks had their Madden NFL, NBA 2kwhatever, and the girls...wait. The cool girls didn't play video games. Ever. They were the ones in the hall griping about "My boyfriend just wants to sit and play games with his friends, and I want him to take me shopping. Blah blah." Oh, and don't get me started about the entire physics class that blamed me for them all getting Cs on a test. I wrote two formulas for linear velocity of something traveling in a circle. Both are correct. One is for if you have the time of a SINGLE, FULL rotation, the other if you have the time for a partial rotation or for multiple rotations. But, I digress.

Now, it's almost like geek is chic. An etsy search for "geek" done as I write this resulted in 24,226 results. The same kind of search for "nerd", 6,615. Wow. I can also walk up to a random stranger and ask them "What is Halo?" and get a response of "A video game" from at least 3 of every 10. And that's if I'm wearing my street, non-geeky clothes. Shoes, jeans, basic or decent looking shirt. Nothing that screams "I play video games!"

OK, I get it. It's cool to be seen around town in those geek chic sunglasses, or sporting a Star Trek shirt. And I know everyone uses emoticons now, not just those of us who spent most of our high school careers sequestered in the computer room, hiding from the sun behind a CRT monitor and a forum handle. And I understand that if I say to you "I can has?", if you're under the age of 30, you probably know it's a lolcat thing. But, somewhere along the line, we went from having the video games section crammed in a spot at Target and Wal-Mart somewhere between the music/movies and the edge of the universe to Target having an Assassin's Creed II t-shirt as the third item (top row, center) when you click "Men's Apparel" and go to Graphic Tees.

And let the crafting begin!

Been doing a lot of crafting lately. In the last 2 weeks, I have made:

• A set of 5 sea critter stitch markers
• A model of my WoW main toon
• A handful of cute little charm earrings.

I have started:

• Looking for the yarn and such for a Dr. Who Scarf
• A really pretty blue shawl (it may unfortunately be smaller than planned, unless I can find bigger needles)

I have continued work on:

• A Horde insignia baby Blanket. Lok'tar!

And I believe that is it...

PS: My Bday is in 2 days!