Spring! Sprung!

Spring has arrived, and brought all its local eccentricities with it. Tornadoes! Wildly fluctuating temperatures! Being too hot indoors because it's not A/C time yet, and easily getting too cold when you do enter establishments with A/C turned on! Everything was brown until a recent spate of thunderstorms, and then seemed to turn green literally overnight.

Plummery is rocking this little mustard yellow helmet from The Crochet Factor! I bought three items from this shop and I'm only opening them up one at a time, to prolong the "new clothes!" excitement. I just love these helmets, though. They're so simple and sweet, but the texture of them is wonderful and the color selection is great. I'm going to buy more sometime!

Also, Plummery is wearing a dress from Sweet By Nim. I ordered these in mid-December (I mentioned them in my end-of-2014 Blythe haul video!) and there were lots of delays in every phase of delivery, so I didn't get them until the end of February. It was crazy.

Still romancing my 50mm lens. It's taking some getting used to since it doesn't have a zoom, but I increasingly enjoy it. I must position myself relative to the framing I want in the picture rather than let the zoom do that for me. But it's worth it for that creamy bokeh. The kit lens my Canon came with is awesome and the lazy part of me loves dat autofocus, but I also love controlling exactly where I want the focus to be with this lens. The kit lens is also very, very long, and very heavy, and the 50mm is so much lighter.

I continue to wait for my replacement light bulbs to arrive. It's been over a week since I ordered them. People have been subscribing to my YouTube channel a lot lately and asking where I am... eek!!

Stuff I've Been Up To:

• tons of spring cleaning! Room in disarray; checklist isn't even half done
• watching iZombie (if you like Veronica Mars, this feels extremely similar) and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (if you like 30 Rock, you'll like this)
• painting pots for my sweet little cacti
• finally attaching a ton of granny squares
• tentatively writing again...
• tentatively knitting again...

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Marching on by.

This weekend my grandmother had her 82nd birthday and we did the whole family gathering thing. The bouquet my mom made for her is still on the table (my grandma has cats who eat flowers, so she couldn't take it home with her) so I took some pictures of it while I was waiting for my lunch to cook. Any excuse for that 50mm, know what I'm sayin'?

So pretty!

Last week I encountered some technical difficulties with my video filming in that one of my lights fell over and the bulb broke!

I've been on the hunt since then for a replacement bulb. The original bulb was part of a cheap kit I bought off Amazon last year, you know, so like, I don't really know anything about watts, lumens, kelvins, et cetera, and returning to Amazon to seek out the exact bulb I need was sort of a dead end. There were customer reviews saying, "Don't buy this!!! It's not what it claims to be!!!" The bulb was marked way down in price, but regardless, it just seemed... untrustworthy! I don't want to spend money on something that is not what I need.

However, I really do want to get this video finished up, but I have more things to film for it. I can't film without proper lighting because I have zero natural light at my disposal, so! I definitely need a bulb. So, I went to two hardware stores here, my broken bulb in a sealed plastic bag in hand, trying to find something comparable, even if it's just temporary. The first store didn't have anything at all like what I was looking for, and a man there who came up and started talking to me and trying to help me (awkward... he didn't even work there, he just seemed lonely) told me I'd have to drive out to some bigger store that I didn't want to go to if I wanted to find something comparable.

I was sad, so on the way out, I bought two cool cacti. They're so pretty. I got terra cotta pots for them but I'm going to paint the pots before transferring them!

Anyway, I ignored the old guy's well-meaning advice and went to a second hardware store that wasn't a big huge drive for me, where another old man -- this time, one who actually worked at the store, hallelujah -- found me something that is not quite the same, but still may be something I can use while I figure out the best solution to fix up my lighting.

I'm trying not to be terribly depressed about this video taking so long, and other stuff. These pointy friends will surely cheer me up.

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Oyasuminasai, PoupeeGirl!

It really saddens me that PoupeeGirl is closing down at the end of this month. I've been on it since 2009. The site has been stagnant for a long time now, but I still liked to log in and dress up! (Here's my "Home.") I dressed up through the end of February, but stopped when the calendar flipped to March, thinking it would be best not to focus on it too much. I mean, I logged in every single day for years. It was like checking my email. Just one of my daily habits.

PoupeeGirl was a fun way to express my style without spending money on real clothes or needing to worry about stuff like sizes and the fact that I can't wear all this kind of stuff in real life. I think PoupeeGirl heavily influenced the way I dress my Blythes, so it's unfortunate that I'm working on a video about Blythe "styling" right now and yet this major influence is shutting down.

I guess the site is just going to disappear entirely, so I logged in and looked back through my calendar of dressups to save some. I didn't look at every day, just picked at random, and if I liked the outfit I screen-capped it to save it.

You can click on this image to zoom in a bit, but the pictures saved by PoupeeGirl aren't terribly bigger than this!

As I was going backwards through my calendar of dressups, it starts with 2015 at the top left (my poupee has peachy-pink hair, so of course!) and ends with 2009 at the bottom left. Funnily enough in the last one I'm carrying the same white purse as in the first. If you're a Chrono Trigger fan, look for my Lucca cosplay day. I don't remember even putting together the vast majority of these super-fly coords, so looking back through them, I veered between impressed and snickering.

I had so much fun with PoupeeGirl! Is it weird that I'm going to miss skirts, shoes, and purses that are just digital vector art? I really will.

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