The bad news is that we’re going to owe our insurance company $1200.

The good news is that it’s because I found our wedding rings.

We’d lost them about the time we moved into our first house, but I didn’t file a claim until a few months ago. This past week, I’ve been cleaning out and organizing our “store room” (the extra bedroom where we threw unpacked boxes and anything else we didn’t want to deal with for the past 20 months). I had gone through almost everything in the room when I came across this small padded camera case. I think it was some freebie schwag I’d picked up at SXSW one year and had used as a CD holder. I was just going to throw it in the Goodwill pile, but when I picked it up, it made some funny clanking sounds. I thought it was the zippers at first, but when I held them and shook, I still heard the noise. I felt around until I found an inside pocket. My heart skipped a beat when I pulled out the contents and found our engagement rings and wedding bands.

We had stopped wearing them (we’d gained weight and they didn’t fit comfortably any more), but I thought I had put them into their boxes in our lockbox. After we moved to Cedar Park, though, I found the ring boxes, but not the rings. Every other piece of valuable jewelry I had was accounted for. We’d moved with the help of family and friends, none of whom would have stolen anything from us, let alone our bands. We took so long to file the claim because we figured they’d turn up eventually, but after 6 years we finally made the claim. Then a few months later I found them in some random piece of junk that hadn’t been touched in years, a month before our eighth anniversary. (Yes, they’ve been missing for 6 of the 8 years we’ve been married.)

I called the insurance company yesterday to reverse the claim. The wedding bands still don’t fit, but the engagement rings do, so we’re wearing those for the time being. We may never wear the bands again, and we’re still thinking about buying a new pair of rings, but it’s such a relief to have found them.

Every once in a while, I take a look at my referrer logs. It’s not nearly as interesting as it once was due to the sheer amount of spam referrers (I am mighty sick of seeing Texas Hold’em links in my logs) I haven’t yet figured out how to block. Anyway, I hadn’t looked in a while, so I started with June’s logs and worked my way up to September. June through August was typical. September had a big surprise.

September has a week to go, but traffic had already passed the previous month. When I looked at the referrers, the top one was Ana Voog’s Livejournal account. I thought that had to be some referrer weirdness until I looked and saw that she’d linked to my knit Katamari hat post. Her post already accounts for over 15% of the traffic to my site this month.

The next two referrers were surprises as well, including a mention by Whip Up, a communal artist/crafter site.

But the real shocker was finding a link to my hat on Craft: magazine’s blog. Craft: is from the makers of Make: magazine. Both are cool, informative, interesting, and full of nifty projects, so it blows my mind to find my silly hat getting a mention by them. The text accompanying the photo is below:

More Katamari fun! Easily Amused made her sister a Katamari Damacy hat. Scroll down the page for the full tutorial, complete with some tips. I’ve gotten pretty addicted to the game in the last few months and if I made and wore this hat, I’d probably roll myself into any object. (– Natalie Zee)

Granted, not everyone is impressed with the hat. Some of the comments on the Whip Up post include, “…but I can’t be the only one who thinks it looks like a hat of giant boils. Yuck.” and “Amen to that! It’s quite hideous. Do people actually wear these?”

I’ve heard the comparison to boils (or severed tentacles) before and hadn’t thought about that until it was pointed out. Ah well. one person’s hat is another person’s mutilated squid.

Most importantly, though, the intended recipient of the hat, my sister, loves it and enjoys it, and I had fun making it.

Phaedra’s Katamari hat

Originally uploaded by monkeyjunkie.

Nine

Originally uploaded by jonesprimavera.

The creator of this neat mosaic (and others like it) contacted me to let me know he’d used one of the photos. Mine is the fourth photo, fourth row.

A few days ago I discovered a fresh and very painful bruise to the upper left side of my right kneecap. I found it by rolling onto my stomach in bed and wondering why my knee hurt. The bruise was swollen and extremely tender for several days. I thought it was past the sore stage, but last night it started hurting again. Just standing made my knee hurt.

Today I discovered another fresh, nasty bruise, just below the bend of my left knee, on the inside of my leg. Again, I have no clue how I got this bruise. While I was whining to Dale about these bruises, I poked at my right kneecap and realized it wasn’t the first bruise that hurt. I have a NEW bruise right in the center of my kneecap, and that’s the one that’s been hurting since last night.

I constantly bang up my knees on our coffee table. The edge is at just the right height to hit my knees, and I’m really good at finding the corners, but I haven’t done that in a week, and running into the coffee table is painful enough that I know exactly when I’ve done it again. I know I haven’t gotten these bruises from the coffee table. I really have no idea what’s caused thethem, ut you figure I’d know how I’ve managed to bang my legs hard enough to leave such painful marks.

Dale must be beating me with a lead pipe while I sleep.