I’ve learned that if I want to be productive at all, that I just need to go with whatever fancy is catching my attention at the moment. And currently, the bright shiny object that is captivating me is the Pointy Kitty.

I’ve made 6 so far (you can see the others here). They are the equivalent of sewing crack. They use a tiny amount of fabric – less than a 1/4 yard – and can be sewn and assembled relatively quickly. After the success of the Japanese Lantern Kitty, I decided to make some more in assembly line fashion. I cut all the pieces at once, then sewed them all on the machine in a group, etc. I got the next 5 done in maybe about 6 or 7 hours worth of time, and I could have gotten it done more quickly, if I didn’t have to hand-sew the one kitty entirely (blerg). Anyway, I can’t stop making them. It’s a sickness, and I think Travis is afraid to come home from work because of the Great Pointy Kitty Invasion.

I think part of the reason I keep cranking them out so fast is because I am absolutely enamored of my craft room. It went for so long being basically just a storage area in our house (it’s actually supposed to be the master bedroom) that it’s pretty ridiculous to think that all if took was 4 little things to make it a usable and happy place again. After I spent a few hours organizing, Travis got our funky 70s lamp down from the attic and put up, and after that, all I did was hang up the instant happiness LED Christmas lights and bring in a little boombox, and now it’s a place where I can happily spend all day doing things. I feel a lot better now that we’re actually using this big area in our house as a living space again. Of course, Ellie is confused, because she’s used to that being her room. Every once in a while we fight over who gets the ironing board (she likes to hang out on it), but besides that, I think she rather enjoys the company.

Yesterday Travis and I were in the drive through line at Wendy’s, and when Travis pulled up to the order thing, we realized that our windows were frozen shut and we couldn’t roll them down. So we went across the street and wound up getting this:

Yep, we now have a Tim Horton’s.

This morning I got done weaving the piece of fabric I’m going to make Ellie’s bed out of. I used up a bunch of small skeins of handspun that Travis and I have accumulated, so it was pretty nice to be able to stashbust. I only got to take one photo before she was all over it. And let me tell you, I wouldn’t waste my time weaving something like this for someone who doesn’t appreciate it. Just look at her – she loves handspun!

I folded it up and set it by the window in the craft room so she can use it until I actually get to the part where I need to sew it.

The next time Travis is around to help me warp, I’m going to get another warp on the loom to start working on the other piece of fabric I’ll need for Ellie’s kitty bed. I’ve got to do some math though, first, which is going to be a hoot. I heart math!!! (not really)

I can’t remember if I mentioned this before Christmas or not, but one of the things I gave my mom is a ton of fabric that I had accumulated. I went through my quilt fabric stash, which is mighty, and pulled out a bunch of fabric that I didn’t really see myself using anytime soon. My mom is going to start quilting again this year, so she’ll probably use at least a little bit of it.

I gave my mom 4 Whole Food’s bags worth of fabric (many, many pounds! Fabric is heavy!), and I still have a ton left here. The nice thing about doing this is that now I have a pretty good idea of what I have, since I haven’t been working with fabric for about 3 or 4 years, really. It turns out that I have some really awesome fabric. Actually, it turns out that I have a lot of really awesome fabric. I need to get to a mental place where I’m not freaking out because I don’t want to use up the really nice fabric I have, so instead I’ll just use crap fabric. There’s no point in having nice stuff if you’re not going to use it.

Some random thoughts on Iowa’s Raucous Caucus:

• Chuck Norris has a colossal head. I was watching Huckabee’s speech, and Chuck Norris was standing a few feet behind him, and his head was still bigger than Huckabee’s. Chuck Norris defies the laws of perspective! Fear him!
• John McCain just seemed really pissy in his speech. Um… way to surge, John?
• Edwards did the first big Democratic speech of the night, and I thought his was the best. I was kind of half paying attention at first, but then he really grabbed my attention about a 1/3 of the way through and maintained it throughout the speech. Anyway, good speech, available to watch here, if you’re interested.
• Clinton’s speech was okay, but there was one line in it that I thought was kind of shitty. She was thanking people for their votes and she said something like, “Democrats, Independents…, Republicans who have seen the light…” and everyone laughed. That just seemed really smug and condescending to me. You know, if someone decides to give you their vote, don’t turn around and use them as a punch line, regardless of who they are. Anyway, the rest of her speech seemed okay, but it certainly didn’t grab me like Edwards’ did.
• Although I was hoping for a 2 or 3 way tie for first place,I think it’s pretty remarkable that Obama won with the margin that he did. I’m with Howard Dean (YEAARHGH!!) though, in thinking that the biggest story last night was the insane turn-out. Check out this post from the Group News Blog for a quick little stat break down of the turn out. Pretty encouraging.
• According to MSNBC, Mitt Romny decided to give his speech at the same time as Huckabee. As a result, the network played the entirety of Huckabee’s speech, and then later on, played about 30 seconds of Romeny’s. Smooth move, Willard.
• I know Giuliani said he wasn’t contesting Iowa, but his finish was an absolute embarrassment. We’ll see how well that “Skip Iowa and New Hampshire and go directly to Florida” strategy works out for you.
• I’m not a huge Joe Biden supporter, but on a personal level he seems like a decent guy, and I always liked his presence in the debates, so I’m a bit sad to see him drop out so soon. Ditto Chris Dodd, except Dodd was a candidate I was actually considering voting for. Anyway, hopefully he’ll continue to kick butt in the Senate, and if I was Harry Reid, I wouldn’t think my Senate majority leader job was so safe.

I’ll leave you with the groovy mood lighting I have in my craft room. Have a great weekend!

Of course, I reserve the right to yank that should the results change, but MSNBC just called it for Obama. I’m totally cool with that, mainly because it gives me an excuse to post this again…

Does it get any better than this? I think not.

Turnout is supposedly crazy-huge for a caucus in Iowa, which bodes well for the general election. Also, so far John McCain has come the closest to saying “Joe-mentum,” by saying the words “Joe Lieberman” and “momentum” within a sentence of each other.

Caucus night tonight! Wooo! C-Span madness awaits!

Over Christmas, I started knitting Travis a pair of socks out of the handspun he had made. The yarn is the thickest I’ve ever used for socks (about worsted weight) so I’m knitting them on size 6 needles, which is kind of crazy. I got the first sock done last night, and thankfully, it fits.

Also got around to taking pictures of the mystery yarn of forgetfulness. I honestly have no idea what the heck is in this yarn. This is not my beautiful house! You are not my beautiful wife! How did I get here?

The pictures make the yarn look prettier than it actually is. In real life, it’s a little more gray and sad. Regardless, I’m calling it Bertie Bott’s Everyflavor Yarn, because it looks like a little bit of every color got thrown into the mix. It’s 156 yards and weighs 4 3/8 oz.

The other yarn that I got done spinning yesterday is Big Pink, so named because of its pinkness, which is strong, and its bigness, which is legendary. It wouldn’t even fit on the Louet jumbo uber-bobbin.

I wound up with 2 skeins, Big Pink (126 yards; 6 1/2 oz) and Emergency Back-Up Pink (43 yards; 2 1/8 oz). I hadn’t initially planned on plying this, but was spinning the big fluffy ply with too much twist in it to be a soft and squishy single ply. Happily, I had just enough of the tussah silk (less than an ounce) left and was able to spin a thin plying yarn out of it.

It’s a very soft yarn, and also is very shiny, due to the touches of silk and tencel that are in it.

I’m plugging away on the Ellie bed woven fabric. Because the warp is so wide, the actual weaving motion is more awkward than what I’m used to, so I’m just trying to get a chunk done per day without killing myself.

Yeah, I’ve kind of got nothing today. Here’s another pretty yarn pic to make up for it.

So, the first project that I started in 2008 began horribly. I had decided a few weeks ago, after Ellie had shown her good taste by loving up my scarf, to make her a kitty bed using fabric woven from some of mine and Travis’ handspun. I thought that this would be a good way to use up some of the small skeins of handspun we’ve accumulated – skeins that are too small to use for a project, junk skeins made from clearing off bobbins, experimental skeins, and some that are just hideously ugly. I also have a collection of commercial yarn that I have no plans for, or have no idea why I bought in the first place. This is what I decided to use for Ellie’s bed.

I warped across the entire width of my 32″ loom, but when I was winding the warp up on the paper (paper is used to create an even tension in between layers of warp), I realized my paper was about 1 1/2″ shorter than the width of the warp. I continued winding up the warp anyway, which was a big mistake. When I started weaving, I decided to just ignore the ends that had the wonky tension, and just weave the center bit. This was incredibly awkward, not to mention that for some reason, the tension on the wonky warp was not really loose, like I thought it would be – instead, the yarn was stretched so much I thought it was going to snap.

So after about 8″ of this, I was all, “Screw it,” and just cut the piece off of the loom. I wound up wasting a ton of yarn, but that’s all right – I wasn’t doing anything else with it anyway, and I learned something new. Travis helped me put a new, not as wide warp back on the loom, and I’m back weaving again. Of course, after I got the new warp on, I had an epiphany about how I want to try to actually construct the kitty bed – I was originally thinking it would be a big pillow, but now I think I may actually try to make it with foam walls around the edge of it. That’s going to make it more complicated, and I’ll probably wind up needing to weave another piece for the edge.

Here’s the crappy little piece of fabric from the aborted weave:

I used it today to make a small stuff owl. Here’s an in-progress shot.

It actually turned out to be a good thing that I made the weird piece of fabric, because I have never tried sewing with handwoven before. Of course, because my weft yarn is so thick, the cut piece was fraying like crazy. But now I have a little bit of experience with it, and I have a better idea what to expect when I actually get to constructing the kitty bed.

Two exciting things are coming up today and tomorrow (well, exciting if you’re a TV and politics geek like me). Tonight is the return of the late night talk shows! Dave Letterman’s production company, Worldwide Pants, actually did get the deal struck with the Writer’s Guild, so Dave and Colin Ferguson will be coming back on the air fully staffed, with their writers! Yay! Jay Leno, Conan O’ Brien, and Jimmy Kimmel are coming back sans writers. Boo! And, unfortunately, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are going to be coming back on the air too, without writers (boo!), although I’m not sure what date they’ll be back on the air. Anyway, I know I’m going to be watching Letterman tonight. Go, Dave, and Dave’s writers!

Tomorrow night kicks off the crazy 2008 presidential primaries, featuring Iowa and their kooky caucus system. So it looks like it’s going to be a C-SPAN evening for me! Iowa fascinates me. Their caucus system is so bizarrely unlike any sort of political process I’ve taken part in. It’s such a social event. You can bargain and coerce to try to get votes. You can go caucus without the slightest notion of who you’re going to end up voting for. It’s nutty! And since I’m in the happy position of being okay with the Democratic field (sure, there are candidates I’d prefer more than others, but on the whole, I kind of like all of the Democratic candidates), I’m going to be relatively stress-free while watching it. The Republican field is a hot mess, so I’ll be enjoying a little bit of schadenfreude watching them.

The polls are all over the place – I think I’ve seen polls with Clinton, Obama, and Edwards all in the lead, and Huckabee and Romney have both been in first place, with McCain starting to surge. Apparently, the deeper hole Giuliani digs, the better McCain does. And Ron Paul keeps pulling $20 million quarters out of nowhere. Who is giving this guy money?

It looks like tomorrow night is going to be fun. I only wish I can remember enough of 2004 Iowa’s Caucus night to come up with a drinking game. If I hear anything that even approaches “Joe-mentum,” I’m going to start doing multiple shots. Good times!

Update – Just found out that Hillary Clinton is going to make a surprise appearance on Letterman tonight.  Huckabee is going to be on Leno.  In case anyone besides me cared.  🙂

So, I’m a little bit behind. I’ve spent the last few days trying to get things organized for 2008. I think I’m finally there. If not, I’ll sort it out as I go.

I’m not really the type to make resolutions, because I know I inevitably break them in an embarrassingly short period of time. This year, though, I’m going to do thing a little bit differently. To that end, I’m going to try to keep the following three things in mind:

1. There’s absolutely no point whatsoever in spending your fun time on something that sucks. In life, there’s a lot of things you are obligated to do for a number of reasons. To stay healthy, you should probably go see a doctor once in a while, to get a shiny new car, you’ve got to figure out loan paperwork, etc. But in your spare time, in the time you set aside to do something for your own enjoyment, there is no reason why you should work on something that doesn’t make you happy. Start knitting something and discover you hate the pattern or the yarn? Stop working on it! Pick out a new pattern! Rip out the yarn and use it for something else! But don’t slog through doing something out of a sense of obligation when you really should be using this precious time that you have on making something that you actually enjoy.

2. Use what you have. I know I have a lot of craft-related crap. This year, I intend on using a lot of it. If I’m not using something after a while, I need to get rid of it, because otherwise, it’s just taking up space.

3. And going along with number 2, less is, actually, in most cases, more. The more you have to deal with, the less likely it is that things will receive the proper amount of attention. An analogy? Gardening. Travis and I always loved the idea of having a garden, but the last few years that we had one, it was completely out of control and wretched. So I was thinking about when we had the best garden of our lives, and it turned out to be the first year we tried having one. It was smallish, but in an area of our yard that we were in all of the time. It was manageable. And when we moved to our current house with our much bigger yard, we tried going a lot bigger for our garden – we had the space, so why not use it?

Well, I’ll tell you why. The garden was placed in a poor location. It needed a lot of watering, due to the fact that it got direct sunlight all day. The garden was placed away from a hose, so it was a complete pain in the butt to water. I planted a ton of different seeds, didn’t mark locations for anything, and had no idea what was coming up where. Lettuce bolted before I was even able to identify that they were lettuce plants, things like there. It was too much in too crappy of a spot.

So, this year, after a multi-year garden hiatus, I think Travis and I are going to give it another go. A smaller, more precise, better located go. Instead of getting 14 varieties of tomato seeds, we’ll probably go out and buy 1 tomato plant this spring. I want to grow only what I know we’ll eat (2 kohlrabis a week? Perfect!), and what we really enjoy growing (sunflowers and sorghum!). Hopefully, in severely scaling things back, we’ll have a lot better result.

Besides the above 3 rules that I hope will be constantly hovering around my head in the coming year, there’s another big new thing I’m going to try doing. I started a new blog, an annex to this one, called Craft! Bang! Boom!. Basically, I have very specific crafting goals that I want to accomplish this year, and I’m going to use Craft! Bang! Boom! as a way of keeping track of what I’ve done. It will have mainly pictures of FOs there, and not much commentary (at least, that’s the plan, but we’ll see how it evolves). After thinking about what I wanted to do this year, it just seemed to make sense for me to keep track of all of it in a separate place than this blog, mainly because Yarnzombie would get all cluttered up with daily sketchings of mice. So, if you’re interested, you can check out the Craft Annex and see, in frightening detail, what I’ve been doing.

Hop below the fold with me for the other half of this post, which unlike the first, has shiny pictures!

Continue reading Crafty New Year! →

As I’ve said on here before, my family is all about the food. Besides our traditional Christmas Eve roast beef sandwiches and Zapp’s fest, we added a couple of new food related events to the agenda. The first was Waffle Night, hosted by Brian, Nikki, and Tyler. There were waffles with from-scratch fruit toppings:

And there was the bacon buffet, featuring three different types of bacon:

Dad brought over his items for Luxury Food Night, since we were already going to be having a ton of food on Christmas Eve:

These were some kind of odd, nougat-y Italian candies.

On Christmas Eve, we went over to my Grandpa’s house and had chili, some of Brian’s cheese ball, cookies, dip, and nut roll. After that we went back to my parents’ house for our roast beef sandwiches and the rest of our Luxury Food Night. Brian brought over cheese curds (mmm, squeaky!), and Travis had his small wheel of sheep’s milk Basque cheese to share:

Everyone liked the cheese, even Tyler, who said it was the second best cheese he had ever tasted.

I wound up getting some of the peppermint marshmallows from Whole Foods as my luxury item. Tyler liked those. A lot.

My mom went all out and had ordered ice cream from Jeni’s in Columbus. Jeni’s is a small gourmet ice cream shop in North Market in downtown Columbus, and my mom and I had tried some of the Poached Pear Riesling Sorbet from there in September. It was the best frozen treat either of us had ever tasted in our lives. Anyway, I was completely overwhelmed that she had thought to pick that as her luxury food. We had five flavors to sample – the Pear Riesling, Belgian Milk Chocolate (pictured below)…

…Forest Berry Sorbet, Dark Chocolate Cocoa Zinfandel, and Spiced Pecan Praline. I thought the Pear Riesling and the Forest Berry went especially well together.

And the Belgian Milk Chocolate was quite good smeared on a peppermint marshmallow.

Other food related goodness – Brian and Nikki got my parents and me and Travis big food gift baskets for Christmas. We love food baskets! And so do my parents.

Tyler really likes foreign cookies, so Travis and I loaded up Tyler’s presents with a bunch of cookies we found at World Market. In addition to the cookies, we also got him a small, personal sized chorizo sausage. Tyler loves chorizo!

So, we had a lot of good food for Christmas. Seriously, I weighed myself before and after food on Christmas Eve and there was a difference of four pounds. Mmm, four pounds of really good food… Hope everyone else had a happy holiday filled with good eats!

I’ve been busy the past few days, getting my Christmas stuff ready to go. I actually did wind up making some fabric bags to put my presents in.

I think I made 6 altogether. I thought they came out pretty decent, and I used up about a yard and a half of fabric. It was nice to take the sewing machine out for a drive, too – I’m looking forward to doing more sewing in the next year. I’ve taken about a 2 1/2 year hiatus from sewing and quilting, which I think I needed to do. Now that I’ve had some time apart, I think I have a new perspective and different goals regarding sewing than I had in the past. But more about that after Christmas.

I started knitting a pair of socks out of the Amysbabies yarn that I got from her Etsy shop. Here’s the yarn, but no in progress sock picture because I’m going all drama queen and extending the anticipation. 🙂

I also spun up the fun roving ball set I had combed up the other day from the miscellaneous fibers Travis and I picked out.

It’s called Juvenile Delinquent. It’s spun, for the most part, really low-twist, and has fun random mohair locks trying to escape from the skein. I had over 6 1/2 ounces and about 200 yards of it. I say “had” because after the yarn was finished blocking, I immediately got a warp on my loom and started weaving with it. About 4 hours later, I had a new scarf! It’s very glam rock – the mohair gives it these nice random shiny areas, and the scarf is almost ridiculously wide – 11″. I love it.

Ellie loves it, too. When I had it on the table to try to photograph it, she kept jumping up and laying on it.

Also, you can’t really see it here, but I’m wearing a new shirt Travis got me for Christmas.

He got it from an Etsy buyer called Look For Fiddleheads. Here’s the design on my shirt. I love it. I am all about Etsy and am going to try to honor the Buy (or make, in my case) Handmade pledge as much as possible next year.

Travis and I leave for our Christmastacular family adventure tomorrow, so probably very little (if any) blogging for the next 4 or 5 days. Hope everyone has a happy holiday season!

PS – Wish me luck – god willing, I’ll be hitting Mass Ave Knit Shop’s post-Christmas Sale. All yarn is at least 30% off. Travis and I accidentally found ourselves in the midst of it 2 years ago – I had no idea there would be a sale going on, and I think Travis died a little bit inside. But I’m prepared this time, and my only goals are Malabrigo – lots of it – in almost-solid colors (for colorwork!) and some new needles. Let’s see what actually makes it home with me.

I found myself cleaning out my fabric closet today (yes, sad to say, I have enough fabric to justify having an entire closet devoted to it). I’m culling the fabric herd, so to speak – my mom is going to start quilting again after the holidays, and I offered her a bunch of my fabric, since I’m currently not using it. So that’s part of her Christmas present. Anyway, I’m going through the fabric closet and pulling stuff for her, and after that’s done, I kind of get carried away and start going through the little bit of non-fabric stuff that’s in that closet as well. And who do I run across but Bucky Bear?

Travis and I, in our non-married life, wound up accumulating a lot of stuffed animals. A lot were ones that I had from when I was a kid (I never played with dolls, only stuff animals), and we’d randomly add another to the club – mostly turtles or manatees, it seems. But we both wound up having similar creepy stuffed animals from childhood – mine was a bear that I think originally belonged to my brother, and Travis’ was a beaver. At some point, the creepy bear and creepy beaver met, and we dubbed them “Bucky Bear” and “Bucky Beaver,” respectively.

Both animals were creepy and odd, yet still somewhat endearing. We figured they were responsible for some creepy and odd events, and we tried not to piss them off. It was kind of like an “Anthony is going to wish you into the cornfield!” situation. We’re sure Bucky Bear and Bucky Beaver hold mysterious and strange powers, and I want to keep on their good side.

So it was with some dismay when I came across Bucky Bear at the bottom of the closet, appearing that he had somehow contracted the mange. I don’t know if he had gotten damp at some point and there was mold on him or what, but it was quite disturbing. And kind of gross.

I didn’t want him infecting anyone else, and since Bucky Bear is probably older than I am, I didn’t think he could hold up to the washing machine – I know I probably couldn’t. I didn’t see any other option besides to finally throw him out.

But as I was standing at the trash, diseased creepy bear in one hand and the trashcan lid in the other, I realized I couldn’t do it. I had to at least try. If Bucky Bear was game, then so was I. I decided to try the washing machine, chucking Bucky Bear into a lingerie bag and washing him on gentle using the hottest water and the strongest detergent.

With much joy, I looked upon the now disease-free Bucky Bear! He’s heavy like a brick, and I’m hoping his innards dry all the way through (fortunately, the humidity in the house is low right now), but providing that happens, he should pull through. Here he is with his comrade, Bucky Beaver:

So kids, when faced with your own real-life Bucky Bear predicament, remember what Parappa said – “You gotta believe!”

In less surreal news, I finished up the third Christmas scarf:

I’m going to start getting presents wrapped and bagged tomorrow, so I’m not sure if I’ll get the last two scarves I wanted to weave completed. If not, no big deal. I happened to find some of last year’s wrapping paper in the fabric closet, so I figured I could try to use that up first (in order to be environmentally friendly – no good in not using something I already have), and then start making bags for the gifts I have left.

Oh, and here’s a pic of a few of the sloppy mess roving balls I combed yesterday:

I think I’ll start spinning this when Travis gets done plying.

Even though I need to be finishing up Christmas stuff, I took a mini-break from it this morning and had some fun combing up roving balls.  I didn’t spin at all since Travis had heisted the Louet, but that’s fine, since I was just kind of in the mood to play with fiber.  Last night I went through some of our fiber stash and pulled out a selection of red, pink, and lavender fiber – mainly wool and mohair, but with a bit of hot pink tussah silk and some maroon sparkle fiber and this morning I combed them all up.  The balls all look orangey-red on the outside, but they gradually fade into the other colors as the roving strip goes on.  It should be pretty cool when I get a chance to spin it up.

Travis and I also picked out a bunch of weirdo fibers at random, and tonight after he went to work I combed up a bunch of really funky roving balls (I’ll try to get pics of them tomorrow).  These have some chunky mohair locks and some other bizarre bits and pieces in them.  After spinning up the Hanukkah Joy and the Peach Fizz blingy sock yarns, I’ve been in the mood to spin something really artsy and shaggy and messy, so I think this set of roving balls will meet those requirements quite nicely.

The last fibery thing we did today (well, Travis spun pretty much the whole day) was to get out some horrible wool roving we’ve had hanging around for a bit.  The fibers are really short and the wool is not soft at all.  Anyway, Travis had the idea to try and comb it out on the hackle, so we got some of that fiber out and managed to make the wool at least spinnable (even if it still feels a bit scratchy).  So I think an ongoing project is to eventually comb up all of this crap roving, and spin it into some big chunky yarn, and then I’ll weave rugs using the yarn.   It’ll be nice to use up something that otherwise would be junk.

Besides enjoying Ball Day, I finally finished up my Christmas knitting.  Hooray!  I wove in the ends of the last hat I was making this evening.  I’m not completely happy with the hat, mainly because I’m not sure if the recipient will like it, but there’s only so much I can worry about.  I’ve got my third Christmas scarf started (again, I’ll try to get pics tomorrow – hopefully, I’ll get the scarf completed tomorrow) and it looks really nice.  So there shouldn’t be any problem in me getting that scarf done before my deadline, but weaving two scarves after that is starting to look pretty ambitious.  Not sure what I’ll be able to get done, since I still need to sew my Christmas bags.

The good thing about finishing up my Christmas knitting is that I get to start on a frivolous project for me – you know, something I can work on while I’m watching TV.  So I think I’m going to cast on for a pair of socks knit out of some wonderful sock yarn I snagged from Amy’s Babies’ Etsy shop.  I never posted a picture of it because the one I took was on a horribly dark day with no good light whatsoever.  Anyway, the yarn is gorgeous – the deepest shade of black striped with this awesome turquoisey green vibrance.  I can’t wait to cast on!  I may do it when I’m done with this blog post!  Like, right now!