Whose brilliant idea was red and white stripes?

I have some beautiful shirts. They have red and white stripes on them. When I was first given them (they were gifts), the stripes were a gorgeous, snowy white, and the red was as bright as cherries.

After a single washing, this is no longer the case. How could it possibly be? Everyone knows that red bleeds like mad in the wash, and unfortunately this appears to be true even when I leave the water on the coldest setting the machine provides. So my shirts are now faintly pink with red stripes.

Whose brilliant idea was it to put red and white on the same article of clothing? I really don't know how to avoid this one.

I can actually get these shirts more-or-less acceptable if I wash them by themselves in a large load. This is very wasteful of water, but by having such a high water-to-dissolved-dye ratio, the white ends up mostly white. It still fails utterly to be a crisp, snowy white, unfortunately (already ruined that). It has occurred to me that carefully painting the stripes with bleach would probably fix things, but one tiny mistake and the shirt will look like I was playing with bleach.

I have ordered a new home button and case opening tool for my iPhone. And lo, there shall be a great voiding of the warranty soon. Hopefully this will also make the phone usable for taking pictures again, which might even result in my blog being a little more colorful.

Revival?

I've run out of news reader stuff to read, I don't feel like playing games, and it's a decent hour to be sleeping. My brain hasn't quite shut down yet, so here I am -- blogging, my Absolute Last Resort Of Boredom.

Cav's trying to get me to learn Esperanto, I've started on it before, and already know a few words and structures, so what the heck -- going through flash cards for a few hours ought to get me up to a vaguely conversational level, and the roots are super easy to remember (I know a Slavic, a Germanic, and a Romance language, and all Esperanto roots are drawn from those three categories, so I recognize most of them). I will try to resist the temptation to blog in Esperanto, however.

I've been invited to speak at some kind of high school teacher's convention in Salt Lake City. I'll be talking about demos and multimedia and stuff. It should be a lot of fun. I really need to work on my presentation, but the deadline's still a month away, so my usual get-things-done panic hasn't properly kicked in yet. I have 100 minutes to fill, how hard can it possibly be? :P