sewing

Return Of T-Shirt Surgery

It had been almost a year since my last t-shirt surgery, so I was getting that hankering for some sewing action. I’ve managed to collect a decent number of XL t-shirts that fit, but are kind of boring. I’d like to turn these into cute Diana-sized girly tees. (Unlike Threadless XL girly tees, which are about two inches’ circumference shy of being comfortable for me to wear out of the house. That does not stop me from ordering them anyway and hoping to shrink into them.)

My first reshaping attempt was using my Otaku Generation t-shirt. Aaron and I got matching Otaku G shirts free from the Otaku G crew at Ohayocon in January, and I’ve been meaning to surgerize it for a while now. It fits just fine, but I wanted to do something to make it a little more distinctive, and easier to tell my shirt from Aaron’s in the wash. 🙂

I followed this tutorial on resizing a t-shirt, for the most part, although I didn’t really have any resizing to do. Mainly, I just wanted to shrink up the armpits and make the sleeves smaller and more girlish. First, I lopped off about an inch and a half from the length of the shirt. Then I put the shirt on and figured out how much smaller I wanted the armholes to be, and pinned the armpit of one sleeve. I then marked the spot with white fabric pencil and removed the sleeves.

Enter the Singer Tiny Serger. While I watched my Logan’s Run DVD, I sat on the living room floor and serged up the armpits of my t-shirt torso a couple of inches. Then I adjusted the length and width of each of the sleeves, serging them up the armpit seam. Finally, I serged the sleeves back onto the t-shirt torso — inside-out, of course, so the seams were on the inside.


Three hours later (including movie-related distractions), this is how it turned out. I haven’t hemmed up the bottom yet (the “real” sewing machine was having bobbin tension issues), and I’m considering altering the collar and adding white bias tape. Until then, though, at least it’s all girly on my figure. I know it doesn’t look all that different, but it definitely *feels* more fitted.

As usual, I did have one or two screw-ups. I accidentally sewed the left sleeve on wrong-side out, so the red-and-blue serged armpit seam on the sleeve shows when I lift up my arm. I decided it adds to the character, though, so I’m not redoing it. I also serged some of the sleeve-to-torso seams a little loose (although I’m unsure how to do it any differently with my Tiny Serger). Once I get the Giant Singer (aka the “real” sewing machine) going right, I’ll probably straight-stitch next to my serges while I’m hemming the bottom of the shirt. And maybe fixing the collar.

For my next attempt at restyling a t-shirt, I’ll probably make the sleeves a little shorter and cuter, and maybe make the shirt itself a little shorter. I’ll also adjust the shoulders, so the sleeve attaches a little farther up my arm. I’m thinking my next victim will probably be either my Relay For Life 2005 shirt (once I find it) or maybe my Youmacon 2005 shirt. Should be fun!

health & fitness

Official Weigh-and-Measure, Month #4

I didn’t do an official measurement for last month, so this represents two months of work. Well, two months of coasting, truth be told, but two months of continuing to eat healthy and stay more active. So, drumroll, please…

Weight: 209 » down half a pound in two months
(The scale said 207 on Saturday morning! I think it needs a new battery.)
Body Fat Percentage: 34.2%
Bust: 45″ » down half an inch in two months
Chest: 38¾” » about the same
Waist: 40½” » down FOUR INCHES in two months?! Huh?!
Hips: 49″ » down half an inch in two months
Neck: 14½” » about the same
Upper Arm: 13¼” » down just a fraction
Lower Arm: 10″ » down half an inch in two months
Thigh: 25½” » down nearly an inch in two months
Calf: 16″ » about the same

I took the waist measurement again just now, for good measure (so to speak), and I didn’t misread the tape. Not sure how that’s possible, but I’ll go with it. Just for clarification, I’m measuring where my pants live, about an inch or two above my navel, not way up under my ribcage where it looks like my waist is smallest.

Well, then. Despite a miniscule change on the scale and in most of my measurements, I’m happy to declare these two months a success. Who knew? Now I’m off to go download my weight-in-progress pics from my memory card and scrutinize them in Photoshop…

house, parenthood, ruminations 9 Comments

Thinking Ahead

Aaron and I are planning to paint several rooms in our house during our vacation in August. The living room will say goodbye to its pastel ragroll of the 1990’s, the dining room will shed its southwestern feel, and the smallest bedroom will start its journey from cat/sewing/storage room to small person’s living space. (Don’t want to call it a “nursery” yet, being that we’re not even trying for kids yet, you know. Don’t want to get Mom all riled up.) 😉

See, I figure that it would be unfair to say that I wanted the bedroom painted before someone — no matter how small — moves in, then to shirk the actual responsibility of painting it because pregnant women shouldn’t be exposed to strong chemical fumes. So, we’re doing the painting together, before we get our bareback going on.

I already have a very wide theme planned: anime. (Of course.) Totoro would be a good theme for babies of either gender, really, and easily supplemented by either Hello Kitty and general cuteness or mecha and other boyishness. Plus, I think it would be fun to custom-paint some pillowcases and light-switches.

Thinking about furnishing and decorating our future child’s room made me think about this future child, and how we’ll deal with parenthood. It’s finally becoming something that’s planned, that’s going to happen, instead of speaking hypothetically. It’ll be interesting, sure, and exhausting, and everything I’ve heard it is. But I think that, between Aaron and me, we’ll do OK. We were raised differently enough, but turned out similar enough, that I don’t think we’ll screw our firstborn up too much. No more so than most, anyway.

For now, though, I think I’ll stick to thinking about things like what color to paint the bedroom.

weight loss 4 Comments

Diet & Fitness Update, Week #17

This week was definitely an improvement, although I’m still not doing everything I need to do. Despite my continued slackitude, I’m back down to 207, which is only half a pound more than my sick-week weight. My Omron Body Fat Analyzer arrives today from Amazon, so I’ll do an official stats-gathering tomorrow: new weight, measurements, photos, and body fat analysis. *gulp*

According to some online guesstimators, I may be somewhere between 35% and 40% body fat. I’d like to get that down to 30% for a start. Granted, that’s not ideal, but it’s better than I was even in high school. (Yes, I did have my body fat measured with calipers when I was 17, and it came out to 33%, as I recall. Sarge and I did a week or two of morning jogging to get my body fat down to 30%, so I could join up with the Army Band. Thankfully, that didn’t work out, though, for other reasons. Mainly because I came to my senses.)

I did my PUSH workout on Monday, then did some gardening on Thursday. You might scoff at my using gardening as exercise, and it surely wasn’t aerobic, but I did do some shoveling and worked my arms and legs and glutes. I sure felt it for the next couple of days. As always, I also kept with my daily 30-45 minute lunchtime walks, and kicked up the intensity there.

Food was pretty consistent: Breakfast was either a whole-grain English muffin with natural crunchy peanut butter or ¾ cup oatmeal with Splenda Brown Sugar Blend. Morning snackie was either low-sugar yogurt or an apple or strawberries. Lunch was brown rice or reduced-carb pasta or lettuce salad. Afternoon snackie was selected from the same foods as the morning snackie, mainly for convenience’s sake, and dinner was usually a meat and a carb — chicken breast and frozen broccoli, or chicken salad on a wheat tortilla, or unbreaded chicken fingers with reduced-carb pasta.

I would also like to mention that I didn’t go hog-wild this weekend after my weigh-in. Saturday I had some ground sirloin with salad and vegetable beef soup and veggies for lunch, then had the Orange Chicken Bowl at Applebee’s for dinner. Not entirely good, but not nearly as bad as I could have been. Sunday, though, we did go to the Dragon Buffet, just because it was Mother’s Day and they had LOBSTER on the buffet. I didn’t stuff myself too bad, though, really. Dinner on Sunday was curry chicken (with a curry cream sauce, evil me) and frozen broccoli, with a homemade chocolate cream cheese souffle for dessert.

The discovery of the week was this: Although I feel like I crave carbs in the evening (and OMG have I been craving carbs), if I make sure to include a good portion of protein in my evening meal, I tend to stave off the hunger and cravings better. So, if I can just chill out and make myself some chicken, or even turkey burgers, instead of whipping up something fast and meatless, I’m less likely to make myself cinnamon tortilla snackies at 8pm.

My goal this week is to eat more protein, and to do my PUSH workout three times. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Yes, I need to get my podcast done, because it’s horribly overdue (as usual), but taking care of me is more important.

Update, 6:30pm: My Omron Body Fat Analyzer arrived this evening, and a preliminary pre-dinner reading shows me at just over 35% body fat. This is no surprise, and is actually better than some online guesstimators had been telling me. We’ll get a “real” reading tomorrow morning.

geekspeak 2 Comments

Revealing The Mystery

During the past couple of months, I’ve alluded to a new job function I’ve managed to acquire at work, but I haven’t gone into detail. Now that I’ve been doing it for nine weeks, though, I think I’m good to let the cat out of the bag. It’s really not much of a bag, to tell the truth, but I’ve been hesitant to jinx myself. 🙂

It all started when our boss, Eric, was looking for someone to “volunteer” to do 1098 duty for tax season. See, people get statements of how much interest they’ve paid on their qualifying loans (usually mortgages), so they can claim it as a deduction. The job of sending duplicates and making corrections to these tax forms is big enough that two people need to be taken out of the normal job rotation to handle it.

I almost got volunteered (by my boss) to do 1098s, but he decided to sleep on it, and ended up choosing someone else for the job. (*whew*) While my boss was giving me the news, Scott (our trainer and my cubemate at the time) mentioned that, if Eric wanted to put me on something different, I knew how to program databases.

Flashback to a couple weeks prior. Some people from Application Services (the people who do most of the techie programming stuff) came to check out our workflow, and were absolutely aghast that we were logging in all of our requests for loan changes (our department’s main function) in Excel. We were getting probably 200-300 requests a day, by email, fax, interoffice mail, and postal mail, and every one of them got logged into Excel, as proof that we received the request. Application Services suggested to our boss that we should be using a real database, like Access — a suggestion that a few team members had repeatedly made in the past, but one that now seemed like a really good idea, since bonafide codeheads suggested it.

Back to me and my boss in my cube, and Scott “outing” me as a geek. It didn’t take Eric long to ask if I wanted to work on the Access database, and it took even less time for me to agree to it. My co-worker buddy, James, had already started on a database a few months before, on his own, and with Eric’s permission. I told him what was up, and asked if I could use the basic database as a jumping-off point. He agreed, and I agreed that this was *our* project, especially since he’d started on it first, and since he knew Access much better than I.

(Funny story: Scott later said that he was in Eric’s office after our cube meeting, and Eric said to him in a scandalous whisper, “I didn’t know Diana was a geek!” Neither of them were sure whether it was something I was comfortable with, apparently. Being called a geek, I mean. I assured them both later that I’m quite secure in my geekiness.)

So, for two weeks, I did my normal job and worked on the database. Luckily, my spot in the rotation for those two weeks was boring and simple and I got done with it by Tuesday or Wednesday both weeks. By the end of those two weeks, James and I had laid out the structure of the database, gotten most of the forms working, and started thinking about what kinds of reporting we’d need to do. We weren’t comfortable with it “going live” yet, though. Not nearly. I told Eric so when he popped his head into my cubicle and asked if it would be ready for April.

Of course, when he told us that we could both get off the rotation to work on the database only, we compromised and agreed to have the data entry portion ready to go in one week, by Monday, April 3rd. We’ve been off the rotation ever since.

I’ve gone from never having used Access in a real database situation (CS 100 doesn’t count) to learning how to build union queries and establish relationships and implement multiple tables with foreign keys and enable referential integrity and all sorts of geekery that I had no idea how to do two months ago. (Actually, some of it I could have done in FileMaker Pro for Macintosh about six or seven years ago.)

As soon as we get our department’s log stable and “finished” (as much as we’ll ever believe it to be), we’re going to be pressed into service for other departments who could use similar tracking databases. James and I have been agonizing over this, because neither of us get paid enough to be a Database Administrator, or even a programmer. This project we’re doing because we enjoy using our brains and skills and getting paid for it. Any other projects would be moving into the realm of potentially being taken advantage of by management.

We talked to Eric today, and laid it out for him (nicely). We basically let him know that, if we’re going to be creating databases for other departments, it wouldn’t be fair for us to still be taking up space in his department, but not doing any actual loan corrections work. We told him that we want to have our job descriptions changed before we do work for any other departments, and that a change in pay grade would be mighty nice, too. We didn’t have to be total dicks for him to get the point, which is good. He says he’s going to go to his boss and see what her thoughts are regarding our positions.

It’s really hard to stick to our guns when it comes to compensation, especially when we’re both still stoked to be off the job rotation. We’re waiting for someone to pinch us and wake us up, or for the other shoe to fall, or for some other dramatic cliche to happen.

At any rate, that’s what I’ve been doing for the past two months. And it makes going back to PHP/MySQL both easier and harder in different ways. (Not IsNull() doesn’t work so well in PHP, but leaving out the Then in my VB If-Then statements doesn’t work so well, either. For the geeks out there.)

For once, I’m sated.