If you love bad movies and you haven't yet seen The Room, do yourself a favor and watch it as soon as possible. Like any bad movie, its enjoyability is greatly enhanced by sharing it with friends. There's something about a line like "you can keep your comments in your pocket!" That needs to be answered by a shared look that says 'you heard that, too, right?' 

When it became evident that some of my friends hadn't yet enjoyed The Room, I rounded them up, along with some who already knew and loved the movie, and SHOT THEM ALL. Just kidding, I rounded them up and threw a viewing party!

In The Room, the character Lisa is shown ordering pizza over the phone: one half pineapple and Canadian bacon, and one half pesto with artichoke, easy on the cheese. That's a seriously weird combo- why not get two small pizzas if you and your partner have such divergent tastes? It gets even less sensical, too- a few minutes later she and Johnny are shown happily eating their pizza, which is now your bog-standard pepperoni pie. Transubstantiation! Does The Room contain a covert religious message?

Rather than making them attempt to maneuver around some half-pesto/half-tomato sauce chimera, I showed some mercy on my guests by simply making three whole pizzas. I was super lazy beyond that, though- I just rocked some pizza dough and sauce from Trader Joe's! The pesto was the classic pesto recipe from Isa Moskowitz's Vegan With a Vengeance, a recipe I love to make in big batches during basil season and freeze in single-portion sizes. I opted for Follow Your Heart mozzarella shreds, Tofurky pepperoni, and Yves brand Canadian bacon.

As for dessert, I was considering a birthday cake, as the climax of the film takes place on main character Johnny's birthday and immediately following his surprise party. But I far prefer the scene where Johnny meets his friend in a cafe, the owners of which are aggressively pushing cheesecake on all of their customers. In fact, they're so obsessed with getting their customers to try the cheesecake that they evidently forget to collect money from said customers in exchange for the food and drink provided. So I instead opted to make a lemon cheesecake with a gingerbread crust. It was a (dairy- & gluten-) FREE cheesecake.

One of the more dog-eared pages in my collection of cookbooks is the Lemon Cheesecake recipe in Colleen Patrick-Goudreau's The Joy of Vegan Baking. I used some Mi-Del gluten-free gingerbread cookies to make the Graham Cracker Crust from the same cookbook. Did you know lemon and gingerbread together are a dynamite combo? I did not, myself, until recently, and now this cheesecake is my 'little black dress' of desserts: simple and easy, yet reliably stunning. I love how easily this cake can be made gluten-free in addition to being vegan, so I can share the sweet love with my friends and family who are gluten-intolerant.

When Johnny and Lisa are enjoying their pizza, they probably haven't noticed that it wasn't at all what they ordered because they are getting blasted on scotchka. Yes, that's right: scotchka. It's exactly what it sounds like, scotch and vodka. 

Obviously no sane individual would actually drink this, so it was perfect to serve to the caliber of person who will be friends with me. I want to say I searched intensively, high and low, for the perfect cocktail recipe incorporating scotchka.  In truth I just did some lackluster poking around on Google. At first, I was tempted to go with the King of Poland, because The Room's auteur, Tommy Wiseau, is most likely Polish (he is notoriously secretive regarding his origins and insists, through a thick European accent, that he is from New Orleans). But the King of Poland is pretty much straight up scotchka (the name comes from a particular brand of Polish vodka that's meant to be used) with a twist of lemon- not very enticing in and of itself.

Enter the Whizz-Doodle, a concoction from classic 1930 mixing guide The Savoy Cocktail Book. A local San Francisco blogger's revision of it caught my eye, and, due to my own substitutions and alterations, I decided it needed to be re-named. Gentlefolk, I give you:

THE WISEAU-DOODLE
1 oz. Absolut vodka 
1 oz. Glenlivet single-malt scotch
1-2 dashes Fee Brothers Aztec Chocolate Bitters
1 barspoon Bee-Free Honee (or agave)
So Delicious Coco Whip
bittersweet chocolate & microplane

Mix the vodka, scotch, bitters, and honee/agave until the latter is dissolved. Shake with ice, then strain into a glass. With a spoon, whip up the Coco Whip until smooth, and scoop a generous dollop onto the top of the drink. Top with chocolate shavings. The reviews all around: surprisingly good!

Misc Notes: 

• Those ingredients are just what I used; I wasn't compensated by any of those companies to use them, and I'm sure if you're a hobby mixologist with a refined palate you may wish to make some changes! 
  
• Fee Brothers Bitters contain glycerin; I confirmed through Barnivore that it is plant-derived. 
  
• Although this ends up being quite palatable, remember that it packs quite the wallop. I didn't brace myself properly before taking my first sip and nearly fell over!
  

Now, I'm not judging Lisa's French tips, I'm just saying they really date the movie. My friend's wedding album has some pretty dated pictures of my bridesmaid nails, taken upon myself completely of my own accord. So I'm really laughing with Lisa rather than at her when I put out some bodacious press-on nails for those who wished to play along.  

I do have a hard time, though, not judging Lisa for going blonde and not bringing her eyebrows along for the ride. Lisa's thick, dark brows, when coupled with her bleached hair, overwhelm her face and become a comical focal point. I made thick brows for my guests using black felt and double-stick tape, and they were a hit! The end result was more Devo than Lisa, but it was a good first foray into the fine art form of making silly things out of felt to stick to my face (and those of my dogs). 

If you'd like to host your own The Room party, or if perhaps you're feeling dissatisfied with the lack of variety in your personal eyebrow wardrobe, here's a quick tutorial on how to make your own felt eyebrows at home!

Obviously you can enjoy The Room without all these extra props, but what's the point in that? At any rate, if you absolutely must watch this movie without pizza, scotchka, roses, or insane eyebrows, please do so, but at your own risk. If you've enjoyed The Room and want to know more about it, including a San Franciscan's perspective on the movie's setting, head on over to my other blog, Nortons' Movie Maps, to read my The Room guide!

Via Mr. X Stitch, one of my favorite crafty blogs, why not take your cross stitching mega-sized and yarnbomb a chain-link fence? I positively love this idea and lucky for me, my front yard is enclosed by about 15 feet of 3'-high chain link! I could make my house number much more noticeable, or I could do a rotating installation depending on the season and/or holiday. 

I suppose, if I really wanted to be ambitious, I could spend the rest of 2014 cross-stitching a tetris game onto my fence, moving one square each day and taking a photo, and then animating all the photos at the end of the year in celebration of Tetris' 30th birthday.

But like I said, that would be ambitious, and this is me we're talking about. I'll put up photos of what I do get around to doing for sure!

Well, it's been almost three weeks since the big move into my new home, and I am finally beginning to get settled in and-- dare I say it? --even a little bit unpacked. Now, because I've bought the house, the good news is that I can do whatever I want in terms of color and decoration. The bad news is that half my stuff is in limbo in various rooms and/or boxes while I finish visualizing and executing whatever I want on the walls and floors.

While I was initially trying to rush a lot of projects before my move-in date, eventually I had to settle on just one: finishing and painting the attic floor for what will eventually be my design studio. 

Which meant first pulling up the icky powder-blue rug. That's the easy part- once you find a loose corner and start pulling, the visceral satisfaction of freeing the carpet from the tackboards is akin to popping a handful of bubble wrap. Then, as suddenly as it started, the fun is over, and while the dogs snooze on the discarded carpet, you're left wrestling the foam cushioning from the staples, wrestling the staples from the flooring, and wrestling the tackboards from the tiniest of crevasses and corners. 

The herculean task of filling and sanding all the imperfections in the wood came next. And this wood was a mess- my dad guessed it was pine, which is a very soft flooring wood. The patching and sanding easily took three days to finish. There were some gaping cracks that I first had to fill with nylon rope or folded up newspaper, and two metal plates covering major damage that had to be replaced. And enough wood putty to fill a bathtub.

Of course, the joke's still on me because after the first layer of primer, the notches, scrapes, and divots that I missed became even more glaring and another round of patching, sanding, and meticulously wiping up dust with a wet cloth commenced. 

By the second layer of primer, however, the floor was starting to look a little classier. I finished it off with a third and final coat of primer before moving on to color. Each layer of primer was a low-VOC all-purpose floor and deck primer, applied about 24 hours apart. I was, nevertheless, using a face mask and kept both attic windows open through the whole process. 

I followed up with three layers of Sherwin-Williams floor paint in a white named 'marshmallow,' with just the tiniest hint of pink. No particular reason I went there; they were just having a sale.

With the primer and basecoat applied and cured, it was time to let my anal-retentive Scorpio Scandinavian personality shine: I plotted out and then applied what felt like miles* of painter's tape to prepare for applying the multi-colored stripes to the floor. 

I chose my palette with the assistance of ColorCombos.com, a great website to check out if you like pretty colors and aren't particularly adept at matching new and novel combinations. Although my palette initially included a burnt orange and a pale, creamy yellow, I whittled down down four colors: two shades of turquoise, a slate grey, and a vibrant, classic car red. Ultimately I think choosing four colors instead of six was not only better for my sanity, but ultimately far less hectic and busy in what is already a small space with a pitched ceiling contributing to the 'coziness' factor.

The colors only required two coats each, except, surprisingly, the red, which required a third. The third coat of red was applied exactly 36 hours before move-in, after about 12 straight hours of packing at my old apartment. Crunch time!

The tape was pulled up exactly 12 hours before move-in. Disappointingly, some of the 'Marshmallow' base coat, primer and all, came up with it. Also disappointing to me was the fact that most of the lines were a little blurred, and some were downright messy. This was, of course, due to the fact that it was old, damaged wood, and the painter's tape, no matter how meticulously applied, simply couldn't get into every groove and crevice in the old wood. 

After thinking about it for a while, though, I decided I liked it. So I spent literally dozens of hours working on this floor and it didn't come out exactly as I'd hoped. Big deal! It's still painfully evident to anyone who looks at this floor that it was a labor of love. I think the messy stripes and the bald patches give it a 'shabby chic' character!

Ugh. Did I really just type that? I think I did. Anyway, forget it. Here are the photos of the finished floor! Taken literally as the movers were unpacking the truck out front. 

There you have it! Now my lovely floor is partially covered by all sorts of furniture and a cute little Ikea rug, but the beauty still pokes out in plenty of areas! I still need to paint the staircase, which my dad wisely advised me against doing until foot traffic could be stalled for a while. Good advice, dad!

While the studio still has plenty of work to be done (I need storage for all my fabric, and pronto!), I'm happy to say I am able to work up there for now, having just sewn my first set of curtains! Finally, I can walk around my house naked! And I'm off to do just that. Thanks for reading!

I've been a busy little bee! Sadly most of my spare time these days is not spent crafting so much as slowly and deliberately destroying all my fine motor skills and digits while working on renovating my newly purchased home. It will look fabulous when it's done, but at the moment I'm just spending a lot of time questioning the previous owners' thought processes (what kind of monster uses a 4" nail in a door hinge?).   Naturally, the room that is subject to the most scrutiny and backbreaking work right now is my future sewing studio, which used to be an attic. I have big plans, including a custom hideaway drafting table that folds out over the stairwell banister and can be folded and hooked out of the way against the wall (gotta love having a family of carpenters). I'll be posting all these projects when they're finished, but in the meantime, here's an update of all the unfinished work that haunts my nightmares!

OK, just a few more links from the proud Mama, and that's all you will hear from me on the topic of The Whole Enchihuahua (at least until 2014):

• The San Francisco SPCA The Whole Enchihuahua album on Facebook.
  
• Slideshow and video of the costume contest from media partner Dogtime Media
  
• The beautiful and talented Laura Beck writes it up on Jezebel. You may have left NorCal, Laura, but we will GET. YOU. BACK. With force if necessary. <3
  

I'm happy to say that Pepper and I recently partook in the apparent glut of worldwide dog costume contests at this year's The Whole Enchihuahua event in San Francisco's Mission Dolores Park. Sponsored by the SF SPCA and 7x7 Magazine, the open-air festival highlights the fantastic chihuahua, which is the most over-represented breed of dog in Bay Area animal shelters: more than half the dogs in our shelters are chihuahuas or chihuahua mixes! 

Although the pint-sized pups from south of the border were the attendees of honor at The Whole Enchihuahua, enrollment in the costume contest was open to well-behaved dogs (and one dove in pants) of all breeds. And here's the exciting part: Pepper's NyanCat costume won first runner-up!

This was Pepper's Halloween costume from 2012. I was kind of amazed that even in the hipster petri dish that is Dolores Park, NyanPep only got about a 25% recognition rate. Most of the responses were along the lines of "... now, what is she, again?" or, "is that a Pop-Tart?" But even if you've never seen NyanCat, it's hard to not be endeared by a cute little dog wearing a Pop-Tart and a rainbow. Ultimately, though, I think it was the effort and attention to detail  evident in Pepper's custom, home-crafted outfit that stood out in a sea of store-bought (albeit adorable) costumes. The judges awarded First Prize and Second Runner-up to pooches who also had custom-crafted ensembles. You can always pay for something ready-made, but us creative types know that quality craftsmanship wins every time. 

Pepper is honored to be runner-up to Ace, a handsome long-haired chihuahua who was dressed as... wait for it... an ace! As in a playing card, with a very stylish plumed hat featuring the whole suite of aces. Sharing Ace's court with Pepper was a chihuahua "Beef Taco!" I've never had a taco that's also wearing a sombrero, but I'm also vegan, so maybe it's just something that comes standard with beef tacos? At any rate, I think all tacos, including vegan ones, should come topped with a wee taco-shell sombrero from now on. Just hold the beef and the chihuahua on mine. 

In addition to the Glory of Victory, Pepper also took home three (three!) swag bags filled with goodies and prizes from generous donors. Here's the little princess enjoying her spoils! She even got a cute new shirt from City Dog Share. I belong to City Car Share here in the Bay Area, so I was a little confused- is this an organization where you just "borrow" a dog for a couple of hours like you would a car? 'Cause that sounds messed up! But thankfully it's nothing of that sort- it's a San Francisco-based website where people can trade dog-sitting hours with other dog guardians! Sounds like a fun way to save money, build community, and make some buddies for your hound.

I'm not sure yet how many lucky pups (and birds!) were adopted out at this year's The Whole Enchihuahua, but there were a number of wonderful organizations with adoptable friends enjoying the festivities. Thankfully, the weather was obliging and surprised us with a gloriously warm and sunny un-San Fransiscan day. As you can see, the whole process was exhilirating and tiring for Pepper, who conked out as soon as we got home. 

Enjoy some more pictures from this and previous years' Whole Enchihuahua events below. This year's photos (the crappy ones) are by me, others are as attributed. 

This is Missy, and boy is she cute! Her human is Ross Fury, a tattoo artist acquaintance of mine who I first met when we were both living in Hong Kong. Ross is back in his native England now, where he and Missy recently attended the 2013 Sci-Fi London Festival. More importantly, they attended the 2013 Sci-Fi London dog costume contest. And Missy here cleaned the eff up! Girlfriend won for her adorable likeness of K-9 of Doctor Who, lovingly crafted for her by Ross. This picture is crammed full of my favorite things: cute dogs, classic sci-fi, crafty dudes smashing gender norms, dudes whose little dogs turn them into marshmallows, etc.  

There are murmurs of some controversy (by the way, have you heard how the British pronounce 'controversy'? It's hilarious), as apparently some dog enthusiasts think the wrong pup was crowned winner. Drama! But as Ross himself puts it, "we took part just for fun and Missy enjoyed herself, which is the main thing." That's right, Ross and Missy! Don't let those jealous haters trip up your swagga!

Thankfully, crack dog paparazzo Ian Morrison (aka Dogstar Photography) was on the scene to capture the best entries. Although Ian's beautiful photos capture the spirit and personality of these pint-sized contestants, one of my personal favorites is the photo of Ian flattened on the ground, trying to get a good angle on a teeny-tiny Marilyn Monroe. Please visit Ian's website for more beautiful dog photos (order some prints of his sassy London dogs! They bark with accents!), or visit his London Sci Fi doggy album on Facebook. 

Below are some of the other contestants, click to enlarge! Can you guess all the costumes?

Courtesy of Mr. X-stitch, enjoy this adorable and innovative "Piñata-Skin Rug" by flickr user Fortuneless_Cookie, made of felt and cotton. 

Normally, an animal-skin rug would conjure visions of some nobility, freshly returned from safari, puffing on a pipe in his library and surrounded by the dead-eyed stares of dozens of endangered, exotic animals. This imaginative project turns that tired old stereotype on its head through colorful, cruelty-free, easily-accessible materials. It's the animal-skin rug for the layman, if you will. 

So far this looks to be a one-off project by the artist, done solely to please a whim. Although I must admit some regret that I cannot get my own piñata-skin rug through Etsy, I can definitely approve of following one's own flight of fancy, salability be damned. 

Apropos, the last piñata I had the pleasure of enjoying was at a friend's baby shower a little over a year ago. It was a "grown-up" piñata, meaning that in addition to delicious candies, it was laden with lotto tickets, novelty lighters, and airline-sized booze bottles! That's a free tip from me for any of you who are having parties.