Again with the Squid

Secondary characters that seemed more interesting that the leads are the reason I decided to watch Go Go Squid 2/Dt, Appledog's Time, as the leads are both among the reasons I kept watching the first series.

It's a bit confusing at first, as the creators decided to throw out most of the backstory from the original series and reinvent nearly the entire storyline. There's also a big cast shakeup with only a couple of the original actors. I guess they figured out the boring CTF gaming angle needed fixing; this time it's all about attack robots that battle in huge arenas. Which is also a bit silly, but not as much as the first series.

High points: The series is more romantic than the first installment, and there are intermittant scenes of introspection that take place in a dark room lit by many hanging edison type light bulbs that are pretty dreamy. Both leads did a great job in convincing me they were in love. The gaming with the robots is also far superior to the CTF gaming in the previous series, and was quite fun to watch.

Low points: Both leads get drunk in the series (she does twice) and it doesn't serve the story (the cuteness angle of drunken behavior is never going to work for me, either.) This is another sloooooooow burn love story that seems to take forever to get to the first kiss. The ending, while probably wildly romantic to most schoolgirls, was silly and unnecessary. Every time the leads began to act like mature adults they were dragged back down to high school level by the script. The grandfather from the first series comes back and is even more annoying. The conflicts really aren't resolved but just sort of fade away. Someone needs to teach Chinese script writers how acronyms work in English.

I liked the friendships on the club teams and the way the cast handled them, the evolution of the gaming and the secret romance. I thought all the actors did a really nice job with their roles. Do I want to see a third series? Uh, no, I think I'm done now. But this one was okay. Available on Viki.com.

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Other Stashes

Along with clearing out the spare bedroom and tidying my office and our guest bedroom, I decided to reorganize some of my stashes. This is all the yarn I have on hand, sorted by color. It looks like a lot, but lately I've been using up a minimum of half a bin every month, so this is approximately a year's supply. All of my solid color cotton perle thread. I go through a lot of this every year, too. I need a container in which I can fit all of it together, but I haven't found the right one yet. I won't show you all of my fabric -- I'm still reorganizing this stash -- but I went through everything and donated two bins of fabric I won't need to the local quilter's guild.

Downsizing

This was my fabric stash once I sorted everything -- 22 full bins. I spent a day taking out and boxing up what I could part with, with the goal of trying to reduce it by half, so I'd have 11 bins. I was very strict with myself, and removed everything that for one reason or another I was sure I wouldn't be able to use. This is what I ended up with -- 12 bins of fabric that I'm keeping. It's not quite half, but close enough. Half of what I took out went to a local quilter friend, a school and Goodwill. These four tightly-packed bins will be going to the local quilting guild once I make arrangements with them for a drop-off place. I am relieved and a little sad and now determined to control my impulses to thrift more fabric. I don't want to do this again, so until I use up six bins, I can't for any reason bring any new fabric into the house.

In Progress

I promised myself I would show you the good, bad and ugly of my cleaning this year. This is what it looks like when you dump thirty years' worth of stashed fabric on the floor -- and oy, what a pain in the butt to pick up again! This is what it looks like after it's been sorted, folded and placed in containers, which took me about a week. Now the hard part is to downsize my stash by at least half, I think (that's my goal, anyway.) I've already e-mailed the president of the local quilting guild, a local friend who is a quilter, and a public school art teacher I know to see if I can donate some of the excess to them. The rest will go to Goodwill. Already I've reduced my vintage textiles from two bins to one, and my scraps from three bins to one. It's probably the hardest clean-out I've done, which is why I saved it until last. I know I have too much fabric, more than I can use in my lifetime -- but at the same time, I love it. So I have to...

Valerean

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