Khaki Trench Coat with Green Dress and Grey Boots in honor of Different Chairs and justweather.com

Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.

So my husband’s business is called Different Chairs, and he does a lot of different things, but chief among them is web development using Django. He has been helping put together a new weather site, JustWeather.com, which just officially launched the other day. What’s so great about another weather site, you ask? Well, it shows real-time, helpful weather information, it has great animated maps that you can enlarge and it doesn’t have a lot of other information cluttering up the screen — just weather, right? Frankly, it has more weather information than most decent humans want to know, and my dear husband has been living and breathing weather for months now. (There’s a reason our new cat is named Radar. She narrowly escaped being called “Haircast.”)

So, in honor of Brian and the weather site, Sylvia and Iris can now brave weather in a cute short khaki trench coat, although you wouldn’t want to brave too much weather in a skirt like that, I guess!

The Good Queen’s undead nemesis seems to be catching up…


Dragon Pet and Rat Creature Pet from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

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Yay, I’m recovering! I’m still coughing like crazy and tire out pretty easily, but I can taste things again and my ears are almost starting to be normal again. In celebration, a couple of the paperdoll pets from the old Boutique. The dragon was sort of a mascot for a while, too, gracing the front page, while the brown critter is a baby rat creature from the comic book Bone.

So I was looking at my blog stats today and noticed a new blog, and the paperdoll website done by the blog’s owner. Annissa, I had no idea you drew such wonderful paperdolls! You all have got to take a look at them. The newest set is based on flowers and is fabulous (I love the Iris dress the best). And look – she has a whole book’s worth of clothes for Sense and Sensibility. My favorite, of course, is Princess Liana. I wish I could read her stories! There are a lot of other sets, too, with beautiful details and designs. You can use Google Translate to get an idea of the text; the translation software isn’t really accurate, but it gives you an idea of what the sets are about.


Three More 1800s Dresses from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

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I guess I’m not quite ready to return to that once-a-day ideal with this headache. That’s what you get for reading essays full-time! It’s too bad because now I’m all excited about paperdolling. But that’s OK, I’ll do one tomorrow… or Wednesday, perhaps, when I have a day off. But I’ll try for tomorrow!

These are the final outfits from the 1800 collection from my old site, Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique. I believe that the green caped confection is a reproduction of a bathing suit, although I don’t know what the reference was for that and can’t give any more precise details, as it was something like ten years ago after all.

Here, too, is this week’s poll… So in preparation for the plane rides I downloaded a bunch of short audiobooks off of Librivox, rather at random, and put them on my iPod, but I didn’t listen to all of them. Here are the candidates: what should I listen to next? (Keep in mind a paperdoll usually comes from whatever I’m listening to ;) )
The Big Bow Mystery, Carmilla, The Enchanted Castle, Otto of the Silver Hand, The Lone Star Ranger.


Calamity Jane in Fringed Leather Jacket and Buckskin Breeches

Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.

I’m listening to Deadwood Dick’s Doom, or, Calamity Jane’s Last Adventure, a dime novel western by Edward Wheeler. At three hours long I will probably be done with it by tomorrow, but if you like westerns or Deadwood, which I do, it’s an enjoyable three hours. The reading is a mite uneven, as with a lot of LibriVox books read by many readers, but overall it’s great, and some of the readers really put some life into it. I mean, how can you not love this line:
“Yes, I am Deadwood Dick, the celebrated cuss from Custer clime– the diabolical devil-may-care devotee of road-agency, from Deadwood the hunted hurricane, Harris, just as you see me. And according to a recent act of Congress, if you or any other two-legged individual attempts to harm yonder girl, whoever she may be, I’ll agree to furnish him with a free pass over Jordan by the most direct ethereal line. I mean business, so let some pilgrim of enterprising disposition open the market.”

Bullock couldn’t pull that off, but just imagine Swearengen chewing on it, preferably while waving around a pistol, even if the chivalrous sentiment isn’t quite his department…

Anyways, this is a drawing of Calamity Jane’s outfit, based off of this picture of her scan courtesy of this Calamity Jane site, Calamity Jane gets to show off in this book, putting a bullet through the neck of a bottle midair, but at the moment she’s in mortal peril. I’m not worried, though, Deadwood Dick has a 3 for 3 record of protecting helpless women, so far, and I predict that tomorrow she’ll be out of her predicament and back with him.